There’s many interesting items to be found on Kickstarter, but these are the coolest ones this week.

Bluebeard’s Bride
I couldn’t be more excited for this game. Bluebeard was one of my favorite stories as a child, and this RPG focuses on the psyche of his bride in a great horror setting. I love the idea of exploring the castle and building your own story. Plus the art they have so far is stunning. I can’t wait to play this one!

“Bluebeard’s Bride is an investigatory horror tabletop roleplaying game for 3-5 players, written and designed by Whitney “Strix” Beltrán, Marissa Kelly, and Sarah Richardson, and based on the Bluebeard fairy tale. In this game you and your friends explore Bluebeard’s home as the Bride, creating your own beautifully tragic version of the dark fairy tale. Investigate rooms, discover the truth of what happened, experience the nightmarish phantasmagoria of this broken place, and decide whether or not you are a faithful or disloyal bride.

Bluebeard’s Bride is based on the Powered by the Apocalypse system used in Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, Monsterhearts, Masks, and more. It’s a simple system; when your character takes an action that fits a move, the move tells you what happens, or you roll two six-sided dice to find out. Since this is a horror game, we have modified it so that the majority of moves use no dice; this harkens back to telling ghost stories around the fire.”

King in Yellow Christmas Cards
I ordered Studio WonderCabinet’s Cthulhu Christmas cards last year, and I was reluctant to mail any of them out. This year the theme is The King in Yellow, and I put in my pledge as soon as I could. There are four cards that will be shipped by December, with the possibility for more!

“We have 4 cards planned. The card paintings are finished or will be by the time this posts. We have chosen a printer and costed materials. Each of the 5 by 7 inch cards will come with its own King in Yellow Holiday yellow envelope. Heather has been hard at work making the cards beautiful, she’s been highly influenced by J. C. Leyendecker’s advertising art of the 1930’s and 40’s and the cards have a nice classic illustration feel to them. They will be printed on a heavy 15pt (130 lb) velvet cover stock (same as last years cards). Just like last years cards they are meant to seem like “normal” Christmas cards when viewed across the room on the mantle. Its only when you get closer that their true nature becomes apparent.”

Clades: The Evolutionary Card Game
I think a lot of the stances people take against evolution are due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the science. This game helps educate kids and families about Clades, part of the evolutionary tree. I like that this game helps kids learn about science, especially since I know for a fact when I was in the age group this game is intended for I had no clue about even the basics of evolution. Plus matching games are always fun.

“When I was doing research for Grandmother Fish, I learned all about clades. A clade is a complete branch of the evolutionary family tree. That means it’s an ancestral population and every population that descended from it, with no other populations included. Scientists used to classify animals according to their characteristics. Birds were in a separate class from reptiles. Now scientists classify animals according to their evolutionary descent, that is, what clades they are in. Birds, it turns out, are descended from prehistoric reptiles. Reptiles and birds together form a clade called Sauropsida (“lizard faces”).

Players try to spot matches of three cards among the cards that are face-up on the table. Each player also has a personal card that only they can use to make a match. You collect the cards that you match, and whoever has the most cards collected at the end of the game is the winner. You earn extra cards if your match is a “clade match”, such as all mammals, and bonus cards give you an extra boost as well. ”

Ako Polyhedral Dice
I really love the AKO dice I got from a previous kickstarter, and now they’ve made a complete set. They can’t use the same beautiful simplicity of the original dice, counting out twenty lines on a dice is hard enough, fitting them on the side would probably be impossible. But I like the design they went with, and how the lines snake around the dice. They come in a ton of colors, and metal dice are always cool to have.

“Last year we ran a success campaign on Kickstarter, AKO Dice, which received overwhelming support from all over the world. Since then, we have received a lot of requests to make the dice in the Polyhedral design edition. We have been working on this project for about a year with ton of design iterations and countless of hours before coming to this final revision.

For the new design, we have taken great care for the proportion details because we believe every millimeter matters. We are using a sleek and simple idea to create the custom pattern based on each polyhedral shape and face to make them individually unique yet unified as a set.”

 

Still active!

Salt in Wounds
Hudson and Brand
Darwin’s Origin of Species Picture Book
Upwind RPG
Ghost Court
Giant Squishable Foam Dice
The Book of Three Gates
Loot: A Magic Item Deck
Q’Thulu