A lot of the reviews are saying “ultimate gateway game” and “family friendly”. It’s certainly simple, but they say it goes to medium depth if you’re a player who wants that.
(But yes, of Cottage Garden / Indian Summer / Spring Meadow, I’m definitely going for Indian Summer)
Or my preference, Isle of Cats. 
Ah no. I mean, you can replace Indian Summer with Cottage Garden or something pretty and family friendly in that question. I just dont see what the KS game is offering.
I have a preview copy of Cascadia myself, and there is a bit more depth to it than you’d initially think. You’re trying to balance the scoring of each animal while trying to max out habitat colours. I don’t know that it quite goes far enough, I’d like to see a little more interaction between the animals. But it’s very easy to learn and teach or bang out a solo round.
Not a Kickstarter, but in the same broad category of “games not yet available in which I’m interested”: Tobago: Volcano. BGG news piece here.
During the game, you can violate the normal rules of card playing by laying down an illegal card, e.g., “not in the mountains” when an “in the mountains” card was played earlier for this treasure, after which you immediately cover this card with one of the four new volcanic clue cards included in this expansion: next to/not next to the volcano and next to/not next to lava. Once this treasure is claimed, the volcanic card is returned to the side of the playing area for subsequent use.
Whenever a player collects an amulet, they add another hex of lava to the game board, whether adjacent to the volcano or lava already in play. This means that the island will transform dynamically throughout the game, possibly moving treasures to locations where no one suspected them previously. After all, the largest forest might not stay the largest if overrun by lava, and the forests themselves might even disappear completely!
Ooh! Tobago was a game that really caught my attention early on, but it was so hard to come by that I wrote it off. Fast forward to this past spring where I managed to pick up a copy from a local BGG auction for a song (with free delivery, no less), only to face a dearth of opponents against to play (my partner is no friend to logic puzzles, so I haven’t even mentioned it to her).
So, Tobago sits unplayed (in a moving box in my basement, for the time being), but this announcement makes me want to at least go find it and read the rules again (and play with the lovely pieces).
I’ll be keeping an eye on this one.
I would PBF it here, but it’s on BGA. I only found out about it a year or so ago, and a significant number of people I meet have played it to death and aren’t really interested any more. (Or are really good at it of course.)
Is it still hard to get? Because here you can just order it directly from the publisher. Also saw several copies on BGG. I haven’t played but It’s good to know it’s in BGA, I really need to introduce some new online boardgames to my group at some point
It is intermittently expensive in the UK.
Ahh, well, the “hard to get” analysis was back before I discovered the secondary market and the fact that used games are usually just as good as new. Additionally, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it on the shelf at my FLGSs.
I do find it a tad unusual that it’s currently available via Amazon here in the US… Rio Grande was the US publisher… so I guess that’s not too unusual for copies to still pop up here and there 10 years after it was printed.
I’d been trying to find Tobago for some time, but a few months ago the online retailer I occasionally use (BoardGameBliss), randomly had a bunch of import copies, and signed for some reason (odd since Bruce Allen never designed anything else). I’ve still not played my copy, but have fond memories of the game. Playing Treasure Island recently, I got frustrated by the ambiguous circle-based logic and started craving the clean hex logic of Tobago, not to mention those chonky components!
I liked Tobago back in the Before Times, though it got buried by the Cult of the New. I’d like to play it again. Unfortunately, this is an expansion rather than a standalone game.
Petersen Games are kickstarting a reprint/set of expansions for Planet Apocalypse, along with a 5E D&D supplement in its setting:
It’s big and expensive, but it’s quite fun and the minis (enormous) are quite nice and gribbly, if that’s your sort of thing.
Have you played it?
My play wasn’t great. It was good to start with but became repetitive really quickly and the boss battle was a massive anticlimax. It removed all positioning and tactical elements and just made you roll many dice with trivial options. No one at the table had a bad time, but now one wanted to play again either. Kind of interested to hear if anyone had a better experience with it.
Yes. I expected it to be pretty lightweight dice-chucking and personally thought it was deeper and more interesting than I ever would have expected (though there are certainly cheaper games that have more depth). Haven’t gotten to do much in the way of replays due to COVID having hit around the time my copy arrived, but my only expected issue with the core box is lack of variety and the expansion packs add loads of other stuff.
Well that’s interesting. I backed the new Set a Watch expansion Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mikegnade/set-watch-swords-of-the-coin?ref=user_menu ) because I’d heard good things about it…and when I was setting up my pledge details, it had the ability to add addons, which for most of a decade now people have had to do in pledge managers or surveys. (There was also a field to pledge extra just as a bonus to the creator.) I don’t know if that will affect how much people use pledge managers - I think they also do some other useful things for project creators that Kickstarter may not have yet. But it’s a big change.
I went and fiddled with a pledge on this project just to check out the add-on system after reading this. What a great feature! If Kickstarter adds a late-pledge option, they’ll definitely give the 3rd party pledge managers a run for their money. It’s very nice to be able to just pledge your add-on fees right then and there (though, it will demand the project creators to front-load that info into KS before launching, rather than waffling on it until after the campaign ends; I wonder how much of a divide that will cause in creator adoption).
Ultimately, as much as the completionist in me strives for expansions, I don’t know if Set a Watch will survive my impending cull. It just feels too much like a math quiz with a fantasy veneer pasted on (don’t get me wrong, I love math quizzes!) Maybe the expansions add some more interesting interaction between abilities?
The merchant thing this one is adding sounds interesting, but I don’t own the game yet having a) missed the original KS and b) a general preference to back on expansions/reprints so I have more to go on. Just figured I’d give it a whirl.
I can’t fault that logic (because it’s logic I use often, myself). Besides, it’s a rather affordable whirl.
I guess it’s getting to be that season:
The followup to 7th Continent, using many of the same systems but with a new theme (post-apocalyptic fantasy) and emphases (building a Citadel and your character, sending emissaries to explore, dialogue; less of a focus on survival and die-try-again gameplay). What I’ve played of 7th Continent is really cool, and everything they’re adding sounds great, while the stuff they’re moving away from was generally what turned people off 7th Continent for those who didn’t love it.