Board Game Friday: Lookin' Back at Kickstarted Things (Volume 6)

Welcome to the sixth installment of my Lookin' Back at Kickstarted Things series of posts.  The main idea for this series is for me to take stock of the many Kickstarter projects that I've backed - and hopefully learn some lessons along the way to improve my choices moving forward.  As usual, I've got another three projects to discuss today beginning with a game called The Grand Carnival.

The Grand Carnival is a tile laying game where you try to build the best possible carnival.  It's a fun game with quite a bit to think about and plan for without being overwhelming.  The game plays fairly quickly as well which is nice.  I'm a sucker for amusement park themed games to begin with but this one's great regardless of whether or not you like the theme.  As for a score, this one has to be 9/10.  It's good enough that I ended up backing the expansion and the "upgrade kit" in a future Kickstarter!

The next project that I backed was a big box game called Madeira Collector's Edition.  

This particular Kickstarter was for a reprint of the game Madeira with upgraded components and (I think?) a few quality of life upgrades as well.  Unfortunately, there's no nice way to say this other than the entire project has been an unmitigated disaster from start to finish.  I figured a reprint was about as safe of a project as one could back on Kickstarter but the Madeira project has made me rethink that thought.  It's now been years since there's been any hope of the project actually delivering (the original timeline was for the project to ship in March 2020).  In fact, I had given up on the project entirely up until a couple of months ago when there was a surprising flurry of posts and activity stating that the project wasn't dead.  Unfortunately, that energy and goodwill evaporated rather quickly and now it's back to waiting to see if the game ever delivers.  It's a real shame too as the original Madeira game has a 7.6 on BoardGameGeek which is a great score.  

For now, I have to give myself a 0/10 on this project since it hasn't delivered and it is years overdue.  However, if the game ever does show up on my doorstep, I reserve the right to change my grade!

While the Madeira project was a true shame, let's close out today's post with some happier news.  

We'll end today with Godspeed, a space race game from Pandasaurus publishing.

In Godspeed, you control one of several different possible countries in a race to colonize an alien planet.  The game is essentially a worker placement game though it has elements of auctions and negotiation as well.  I've only gotten to play this game once or twice due to the fairly long rules explanation and the fact that the game plays best with 3-5 players.  I did enjoy my plays of the game (and the upgraded components are awesome) but it's been tough to get to the table.  Because of that, I'm going to give this game a 6/10.  

That'll do for today's look back at a few more of my Kickstarter projects.  Writing these posts has been kind of fun for me as it forces me to take a long look back at previous projects I've backed and truly evaluate them.  Happily, of the two games in today's post that actually shipped, I still own both in my collection.  It'll be quite some time before I can teach my son Godspeed, but when I do I think he'll probably enjoy it quite a bit (but first, we'll need to find a third player to really make the game sing)!