Board Game Friday: Lookin' Back at Kickstarted Things (Volume 2)

Welcome to the second installment of my "Lookin' Back at Kickstarted Things."  If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'd invite you to first check out Volume 1 where I explain what I'm doing with this series and how things sort of came to be.

Last time around, I highlighted the first three projects that I backed on Kickstarter which included one failed project, one resounding success project, and one project that was successful in a technical sense but that didn't end up interesting me once it arrived.  That's a relatively poor success rate overall but luckily things improved moving forward with my Kickstarter choices (as you'll see in a moment).

We begin our successes with the next game that I backed which was called Gentes (Deluxified Edition).  

This particular game has an interesting action selection payment mechanism where you can basically do more stuff on one turn but then you handcuff yourself a bit on your options for a subsequent turn.  As you can imagine, there's definitely an element of pacing as to when you should (and shouldn't) push the envelope so to speak.  

I ended up playing Gentes a few times and I enjoyed each play.  The real claim-to-fame for this game though for me personally was that this was my first exposure to a deluxe game.  The components, the board, heck, even the included storage system were all so much more better than any game I had owned up until this point.  In many ways, it's Gentes that is to blame for my love of nice board games!

While I don't have an itch to play Gentes a lot anymore, it's still living in my collection!  For that, coupled with the amazing production value of the game itself, I have to give this one a 9/10.

Next, I backed a game called Dinosaur Island along with it's expansion Dinosaur Island:  Totally Liquid and a two-player "spin-off" called Duelosaur Island.

Loyal blog readers will already know that I love dinosaurs in general so having my first board game be dedicated to dinos...and with amazing dino meeples no less...yeah this one was right up my alley!  Even better for me, not only does the game look good (assuming you think a 90's aesthetic looks good), the game plays well too.  Sure, it's a table hog but once you get into it things flow quite smoothly.  I can't wait to start playing this one with my son, an easy 10/10 Kickstarter project!  

Oh yeah, the expansion is great for this Dinosaur Island as well.  I find a lot of times that expansion end up disappointing but in this case I'd almost say that Totally Liquid is necessary for more engaging game play!  Finally, even the two player game is good - in fact, you can easily make the case that Duelosaur Island is the way to play Dinosaur Island if you only have two people at the table.

Finally, we'll end today's post with a Kickstarter project that I've gone almost 180 degrees on from when I first got it.  The project was for a card game called Fleet and a dice game appropriately titled Fleet:  The Dice Game.

When this project first arrived, I sat down and played Fleet (the card game) and kind of hated the game.  In fact, I disliked it so much based on that first play that I set the game on my shelf and didn't touch it again until earlier this month!  A few weeks ago, I was gathering games up to sell/trade and I picked up Fleet thinking I'd add it to my stack.  However, since it had been so long since I played the game I decided to give it a second chance.

Well, as you might have guessed, the second time was the charm!  I ended up enjoying my play of Fleet so much that the game is no longer in peril of leaving my collection.  

As for Fleet:  The Dice Game, it's perfectly fine.  It's a roll-and-write game that's probably towards the more complicated end of the spectrum for that genre but it's perfectly fine.  Not overly exciting but also good enough that it hasn't left my collection yet.  If I had to issue a grade for this Kickstarter project a year or two ago, it'd probably have been no higher than a 5 out of 10 but now I can comfortably give this one a 7/10 which is a good score!

And that's a closer look at the next three Kickstarter projects that I backed.  As you can see, I had a nice run of successes there which helped to embolden me on backing more Kickstarter stuff in the future.  Unfortunately, not every project was a winner but more on that in a future post!