Tabletop Gaming News Roundup - October 10-16 2011

Kickstarter has proven to be a potentially lucrative fundraising platform for tabletop game publishers. A couple of the recent successes include Carnival, a card and dice game that raised $34,000, and Alien Frontiers: Factions, which raised $76,000 for an expansion to an existing board game. Around 30 tabletop game projects are currently pending on Kickstarter.

The newly released Star Trek: The Next Generation and A Few Acres of Snow are both deck-building card games, but otherwise are very different. The Star Trek licensed game is multiplayer, comes with 300 cards, and offers both competitive and cooperative modes of play. A Few Acres of Snow is a strategic, card-driven, historic, board war game in which the British compete with the French for colonies in North America.

Fantasy Flight Games released Blood Bowl Team Manager based on Games Workshop�s fantasy-themed football game. In this version, players manage teams through a five-game season and championship tournament. Interestingly, managers have the option to cheat during each of the games within the game.

Games Workshop, itself, began shipping Dreadfleet, a naval miniatures war game set in the Warhammer universe. The game includes fleets of pirates and undead.

Among recent ebook RPG releases, two standouts are Agents of Oblivion, an espionage sourcebook for Savage Worlds, and Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition.

Author Bio:

David Miller joins us by special arrangement with Purple Pawn, where he’s an editor and covers board, card, roleplaying, and miniature war games. He loves science fiction games, plays board games with his family every week, and prefers games with luck, so he can blame the dice when he loses.