Author: Anthony

Hello there, rhetorical reader. As you know, we’ve spun off our Kicking the Habit segment into its own series of articles, previews, and even a podcast all its own. Since things change all the time in the Kickstarter world, we’re going to post weekly reviews on Saturdays to keep you in the loop. Take a look at what we’ve been talking about, and keep your eyes open for our Kicking the Habit podcast. Campaigns of the Week First up, lets take a look at how our campaigns of the week have been doing. Maha Yodha This strategy card game based on ancient…

Note: The product reviewed is part of an ongoing Kickstarter campaign, and may be incomplete. The project may change before it hits the market, and so this review should not be taken as a comment on the quality of any complete products.  We will do our best to update this review to reflect changes in the product, but we may lag behind.  Introduction Today, we are going to take a closer look at Rive, a hex-based strategy game that was featured as one of our campaigns of the week this Tuesday. Rive is a strategy game where players control one of the…

Note: The products shown here are prototypes. Poses, anatomy, and other aspects of the miniatures may change. Consult ADW’s campaign page for the most recent news regarding this campaign. I gave a prelaunch preview of ADW Games’s promising miniatures campaign not long ago, but the campaign has changed enough that I think it is worth revisiting. Since launch, ADW has been working diligently to improve their campaign, and it shows.  Let’s look at some of the biggest improvements that ADW has made to their campaign. Switch to Hand-Sculpting Probably the single most significant change has been the decision to hand-sculpt the…

Maybe the most shocking thing about Kappa Publishing suspending Games Magazine is the fact that no one the tabletop gaming community seems to know about it. It’s like the old adage, If a journalist reports from a forest, and no one is listening, is it even news? Not for the first time, the industry’s leading independent periodical has been forced to suspend publication due to lackluster circulation and revenues. And this time, no one is mourning. Kappa Publishing, having built their empire on puzzles, will likely be reformatting the magazine for 2015, with even more of an emphasis on the…

I know what kinds of board games teens would play.1 You see, I used to be a teen, long, long ago. And to my experience I can add that of another game-loving teen, my older brother. We were raised in a typical postwar 2-child family. Growing up on the knife’s edge between rural & suburban communities, we had plenty of options for outdoor activity, but at a good bike ride’s distance. When we weren’t playing sandlot baseball, running around with water pistols or playing hide-and-seek at dusk, we were squirreled away in our unfinished basement, trying to gain the upper…

You may have noticed that our campaign of the day segment got a little less daily sometime last week, and that is because we have decided to change up our format a bit. Instead of posting a campaign every weekday, I will give you 3-5 campaigns to follow every Tuesday, and follow up on their progress on Sunday. So let’s see what I have for you this week. Maha Yodha First up this week is Maha Yodha, a strategic card game featuring characters and weapons from ancient Hindu mythology. Maha Yodha features two factions – the Aditya  and the Asura – as…

A card game meant to reflect the modification of species through natural selection, Evolution is played by assembling sets of up to three cards for each species that represents the traits they employ as they compete for the food they need to survive. Direct player interaction is limited – that is, until someone plays the Carnivore trait and starts hunting your species to extinction. With eighteen trait cards and a constantly changing field of play, Evolution promises to be a game with a great deal of flexibility. Evolution is the first strategy game produced by North Star Games, most famous…

Note: The product reviewed is part of an ongoing Kickstarter campaign, and may be incomplete. The project may change before it hits the market, and so this review should not be taken as a comment on the quality of any complete products.  We will do our best to update this review to reflect changes in the product, but we may lag behind.  Introduction The first product review for Kicking the Habit – our spin-off Kickstarter focused article/podcast series– is Dubious Alliance, a fantasy bluffing card game by independent designer Brandon Raasch. We’ve already had a quick look at Dubious Alliance’s ongoing Kickstarter…

Note: This is a look at an ongoing Kickstarter campaign, and I expect that the product will change over the course of the campaign.  Models are prototypes, and the posing and anatomy of the models are constantly being refined. In other words, nothing is set and stone, and expect the models to be continuously refined. All images belong to ADW Games. This Thursday (2014-06-05), ADW Games plans to launch a new Kickstarter campaign – Miniature Ice Age Mammal Adventure Set – to fund high-quality 28mm miniatures of prehistoric creatures like the Wooly Mammoth, the Smilodon (a.k.a. Sabertooth Tiger), and some of their less…

Part of the new Kicking the Habit spin-off, the campaign of the day features one Kickstarter campaign related to tabletop gaming every weekday. These campaigns are ones that I think are worth taking the time to look at, but the campaigns of the day are not full reviews (which I only do once I have had a chance to thoroughly play a copy of the game). Some will be campaigns backed by big companies (like Ares Games’s massively successful ‘Galaxy Defenders – The Earth Strikes Back’), while others – like our first campaign of the day, ‘Dubious Alliance’ – will…