Board Game Friday: Lookin' Back at Kickstarted Things (Volume 8)

It's been quite some time since I last completed an entry in my ongoing "Lookin' Back at Kickstarted Things" series.  Since I am still semi-active on the Kickstarter website, I figure I better keep working my way through my old catalog of purchases so that I don't end up too far behind!

If you've missed previous entries in this series (or perhaps simply forget what I am doing here), I take three projects that I backed on Kickstarter in the past and give each project a grade based on how I feel about that project today.  Most of the projects I back on Kickstarter are board games, but not all of them (as you'll see today).  I've been doing these posts in groups of three projects each so I'll keep that trend alive today.

We'll start with a big box board game card Apex:  Collected Edition.  

Apex is a deck building game where you play as a particular species of dinosaur and battle against someone else (or you can play solo which I think is where the game seems to play best).  This particular Kickstarter project was a problem for quite some time - my game arrived with a number of cards miscut badly enough to be able to tell, but even worse, many of the cards were physically damaged (it looked like someone had shoved a pencil or other stick-like implement through a whole bunch of cards).  It took forever for me to get replacement cards...and by the time the cards finally arrived (I'm talking an additional year here), I had forgotten all of the rules that I had read for the game.  That's a long-winded way of saying that I've yet to properly play this game...the issues surrounding my copy killed my interest in it and I simply haven't felt compelled to return it to the table to give it a proper chance.  That all being said, I am trying to force myself to get into playing some more solo games and if I manage to do that, Apex is definitely a game I'll have to try out!  This one is a hard one to rate since I've only had bad experiences with it...and yet, the game holds great promise (and seems to be fairly well-reviewed on the internet).  For now, I'm giving this one a 5/10 but I reserve the right to change my score once I've actually played the game a few times.

Next up, another board game:  Frutticola.

Frutticola is a game where you play as a jam maker in a small town.  You pick fruit and use that fruit to make jams, with the trick being you need to time when you buy and sell your goods as the prices are always in flux.  This is a game that intrigued me by it's retro looks and the game play has been solid, if unspectacular.  I have been able to play this game a few times and while I'd happily play it again if someone requested it, I don't think it's a game that I'd personally pick to play all that often.  This one is still in my collection but it is on my "for trade" list over on BoardGameGeek.  That all said, it's a solid game and I'll give it a 7/10.

Finally, we end with a non-board game.  It's an album called The Archer's Parade by one of my favorite groups, Enter the Haggis.  

I bought this as a digital download and I wasn't disappointed.  The album isn't as good as some of their earlier works but I still liked enough songs that I felt my money was well-spent (plus I like being able to support an artist in a much more direct way).  I'll give this one a 9/10 only because the I didn't love every song on the album, but overall, a good experience.

So that's it for that batch of Kickstarter purchases.  Because I'm a numbers guy, here are my rankings thus far for the projects that I've reviewed as part of this ongoing series:

*I should note that I decided to remove my rating for the one project that I bought as a gift for someone else (and that I never opened or had a chance to inspect).  Thus, the above graphic only includes 23 ratings despite me doing eight entries in the series with three items per entry.

Overall, I'd say that Kickstarter has been mostly a success for me, though I would like to see a few more 9s and 10s in the rankings moving forward!  I like to think that it took me a bit of time to figure out how to best use Kickstarter so hopefully as the entries go on I'll have more and more high scores and fewer and fewer scores below 6.