Board Game Friday: Lookin' Back at Kickstarted Things (Volume 5)

Welcome to the fifth installment of my Lookin' Back at Kickstarted Things.  If you missed the previous entry in the series, here's the link.  Now, on to the next batch of projects that I backed!

Dinos Not Assembled

We begin with a game that I bought on Kickstarter with the anticipation of giving it to my son when he was old enough (as luck would have it, the game did arrive right around the time when my son was the perfect age for the game) - you never know with Kickstarter projects, definitely a bit of a risk on my end.  

Dinos Not Assembled is a fairly simple set collection game where you are trying to assemble dinosaur skeletons for a museum.  The game comes with several adorable little dinosaur "meeples" which are probably worth the original cost of the game!

(photo credit to Boardgamegeek)

My son and I enjoyed this game for what it was, though if I'm being honest he outgrew it a bit faster than I was expecting.  To be fair, he's outgrown all kid games at this point (and he's only five) so your mileage may vary for the kids in your life.  

I like to grade myself on my various Kickstarter projects that I've backed so for this one I'm going to go with an 9/10.  A solid (though unspectacular) kids game that we enjoyed for a bit of time - and at a much better price point than a lot of games!  

Next, I backed a huge game called Altar Quest.

This game was backed right before Covid-19 ruined the world (and especially in-person board gaming) and as such, the game got put on a shelf for months and months.  By the time the pandemic had basically ended, my gaming options were much different - and as such, this game still remains unplayed to this day.  That's a shame for many reasons, not the least of which was that this was a rather pricey Kickstarter (at the time I backed this, I was playing cooperative games fairly often so I thought this would have been a good investment...I was wrong)!  

There is a way to play this game solo so maybe I'll give it a spin that way some day but honestly, I doubt it.  Since I haven't played the game yet...and I don't necessarily see myself playing it anytime soon...and it was super expensive, this one has to go down as a "miss" by me (at least for now).  As it stands, I have to give myself a 3/10 on this one (the game and the components do look cool, I'll give it that).

Finally, since I like to highlight three projects in each volume of this particular blog series, let's end with a game that I have played (and enjoyed):  DinoGenics.

Yep, lots of dinosaur themed games, they were all the rage for a point in time and I was there for it!  DinoGenics is basically a worker placement game where you are competing to build the best dinosaur theme park.  This particular Kickstarter project was actually for the follow-up expansion but I grabbed both the expansion and the base game in one go since I hadn't played (and didn't own) either.  As of now, I have played the base game and I definitely enjoyed it.  I haven't had a chance to add in the expansion but I do still hope to someday (maybe when my son starts to read)?!  Even without playing the expansion, I'm still happy with this purchase - and I'm glad to own the game today!   My score:  8/10.  

That's the first 15 projects that I backed on Kickstarter.  Because I'm a numbers guy, I went back through and tallied up all the scores that I've given the various projects - here's what I've done thus far:

As you can hopefully see, my successes have outweighed my failures by a fair bit.  I had one project score a 0 (the very first thing I backed on Kickstarter, in fact) but otherwise the other 14 projects delivered what was promised.  Of those, most of them scored a 7 or higher which is great!  I still have some more projects to discuss in future posts - and hopefully I'll be able to maintain (or even improve) my average score for the projects I've backed (for the record, the average through the first 15 projects is a 6.533).