Kickstarter Games: Batting three out of four

I rediscovered Kickstarter when the Veronica Mars folks were trying to fund their movie. I now peruse the games section regularly and put some money behind a new game every once in a while. In the past year, I’ve received four games that I’ve backed – Evolution, [redacted], Exploding Kittens, and Galaxy of Trian. I’m happy to say that three of them turned out to be pretty fun. Here is a quick review of each of them.

Evolution

Evolution came about a year ago, and we’ve played it at our game nights a couple times. The game mechanics are fairly simple, and easy to remember once you play through a couple of rounds. In each round, you draw cards, then play one to the watering hole — these will be revealed later, but determine how much food is available to the herbivores. Then everyone plays at once (they recommend this for the 6-player game, but it speeds things up, so we do it for all games), playing as many cards as they want to do a variety of tasks: add a new species, add a trait to a species, grow the population a species, grow the size of a species. Then the food is revealed, and the players feed their species, going around the table starting with the start player. Herbivores eat from the watering hole, and carnivores attack other species as they can. The food is swept into a bag, and then the next round starts.

I liked this one enough to support the expansion Kickstarter this past spring – Evolution Flight. We haven’t played with the expansion, but will likely do that at our next game night this month.

Exploding Kittens

Exploding Kittens is a simple card game which caught my attention because one of the co-creators is the guy behind The Oatmeal. It’s easy to learn and quick to play. The art is a lot of fun (as expected).

Game play is simple, play some cards, then draw a card and hope it isn’t an exploding kitten. If it is an exploding kitten, hopefully you have way to defuse it, otherwise you are out of the game. The last unexploded player wins.

Since it’s fairly quick and easy to explain to newcomers, this is a great game to play on game night while waiting for another table to finish their game.

[redacted]

[redacted] came on Kickstarter shortly after Evolution, and it looked like fun, so I backed it. I received the game late last year (December, maybe?). After reading the rulebook, I had no clue how the game play worked – it felt like the rules needed another go-through by people unfamiliar with the game and maybe some reorganization. So, the game sat on our shelves for a while.

One of my game night regulars kept asking when we would try it out, but I hesitated to play it at a normal game night, because it would take a lot of start-up to figure out the rules. We decided to try it out with just four of us last week at a small game night.

I re-read the rules ahead of time, as did my husband. The game play itself sounds relatively simple – each player is a spy working with another player, but they don’t know who their partner is until they discover each other through interrogations. Each player moves through an ambassador’s house with a specific objective in mind, depending on the scenario being played. In our game, we were two teams of trainee spies trying to activate a computer virus, requiring one of us to find the right floppy disk and discard it in the computer room while another player is in the control room. Players take turns moving through the board, stopping when they reach a room they want to use or when they encounter another agent.

Each room has a different function or ability – from the storage rooms where agents can pick up new items to the X-ray room where an agent can look at other players’ items as they pass through X-ray-enabled doors.

However, the mechanics of the player encounters was confusing, game start-up was not well explained in the rule book, and it wasn’t clear when items were to be discarded. We had to consult the rules during every player’s turn, and often couldn’t find what we were looking for.

Expect we could watch the hours of online videos about the game to figure out the answers to our questions, but the game should be completely contained in the box. I shouldn’t have to have an outside source available to determine the rules. I don’t expect to try it again.

Galaxy of Trian

Galaxy of Trian was another that came on Kickstarter shortly after Evolution, but the game itself took a bit longer than the creators projected, so I only just got it about a week ago. However, I appreciate that they took the time to get the game right – the components are well-made and the rules are clear and well-written.

The game itself is a bit reminiscent of Carcassonne in that you play tiles with the goals of closing nebulae, connecting planets, walling off empty space, and preventing your opponents from doing the same. You have the option of playing an emissary on a tile as it is played, and those emissaries can occupy a nebula (and extract minerals once its closed) or a system of planets. The trick is that you have to have the most emissaries in a region when it is closed to occupy it. And, if the non-controlling player closes a region, your emissaries are stuck there for the rest of the game…unless they are in a position where you can play a teleport or exmitter on an adjacent tile AND you haven’t upgraded them to aa research station yet.

Andrew and I played a couple times. It will be interesting to see how it plays with additional players. The Kickstarter version I bought also came with a number of expansions, however, I want to try the base game a few more times before introducing those.