Crowdfunding Catch-Up: Print & Play Edition
Every week I'll post about a few print & play games that you can find on crowdfunding platforms, as I am way behind. Here are the first.
Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie
Collateral (1 player) is a roll & write adventure game. You lead a tribe through the prairie towards a mysterious portal. You roll dice to obtain resources with your workers, then use those resources to grow your tribe or make your explorers stronger. Then you send your explorers on adventures where they have to face enemies, solve puzzles and uncover secrets. When you’re ready to face an end boss, you pick one of the six portals and try to close it.
Collateral is available on Kickstarter for three more days. A prologue expansion is available as well.
Station to Station
In the flip & write Train Trek (1-4 players) you will lay down landscape cards to connect two stations. You can rotate cards and partly cover up previously placed ones, but cards that aren’t covered up may be moved later with special powers. Solo plays the same as multiplayer, but you’ll have less cards (and less competition).
Train Trek is available on Kickstarter for four more days.
A Hard Rain’s A‐Gonna Fall
In map-making roll & write Floodlands (1-6 players) you are a cartographers, trying to create an updated map of a region after severe flooding. On every turn you’ll roll three dice. You will pick two to choose a feature to draw on your map, the remaining one determines the shore lines.
Floodlands is available on Kickstarter for four more days. A “making of” booklet about the design can be added to your pledge.
Blanket of Sorrow
Quiltable: Paper Quilts (1-100 players) is a roll & write in which you try to complete quilt patterns. After rolling the dice, you take actions like selecting patterns, making quilt squares, and placing them your quilt. Whenever you complete a row or column you gain access to a one-time special power for mitigating dice rolls or scoring extra points. In the solo game you’ll play against an opponent that removes patterns, both scoring points for them and making them unavailable for you to pick.
Quiltable is available on Kickstarter for ten more days and there’s a stretch goal for an expansion (Patchwork Planning) that gives you more control over dice results.
Personal opinion: When I started playing solo games as my main hobby, there were lots of free print & play games available on BoardGameGeek. well, there still are, but since a few years P&P files pop up on crowdfunding sites as well. And though I think people should be payed for their creative work, it’s often hard to figure out if a game will be worth it.
“Ah, but it’s just 5 dollars,” you may think and it’s nice if you can throw that away once or twice a month on a gamble. I probably even could, but I shouldn’t, so I won’t. Especially not because most roll and write games fall flat for me, and it looks like that’s exactly what people come up with when they go the crowdfunding route.
That said, out of these four I actually might enjoy Collateral, so that’s my pick of the week.