2014 Kickstarter Game Update: Week 3

[spacealien_vamp]

Games I Viewed:

Japanese: The Game

Status: Funded

This is a card game that attempts to help players learn to speak and read Japanese by printing vocabulary words and example sentences on each card and coding them with the part of speech so that players can arrange them in the grammatically correct order. I wouldn't need it for myself, but I know a number of people are studying Japanese, and this might be a nice tool to make learning more fun than plain flash cards.

Scoville

Status: 67% funded

In this game, players plant hot peppers (colored cubes) on the board and then place pawns in between the peppers to "cross-breed" them and obtain new hybrid peppers. Various color cube combinations can then be submitted for points. As someone who majored in plant breeding, I'm finding the theme of this game hard to resist. I will probably end up backing it.

Shadowrift: Archfiends

Status: Funded

This expansion for the cooperative deckbuilding game Shadowrift adds boss monsters for the various enemies that must be defeated after the shadowrifts are sealed. The aim is to make the game more challenging for players who are constantly beating the base game. Since I haven't yet beaten the base game, I'm hesitating about backing it. I don't know that I will play Shadowrift often enough for the expansion to be necessary.

Honorable Mention:

The Dice Tower Season 10

Status: Funded

This is a group led by Tom Vasel that is prolific in producing board game review videos. This campaign is to raise money so they don't have to put advertisements in their podcasts. I don't listen to the podcasts, so I'm not particularly interested in the campaign, but I do watch the video reviews quite a bit, so I thought I'd mention them.

Comments

[wednesday-10-00.livejournal.com]

the sample cards make it look too simple to teach me anything I don't already know

Yeah, the game is a really neat idea, but the grammar looks very simple. I see that one of the stretch goals is for a conjugation expansion, but I'm having trouble imagining how that would work.

(The sample video made me laugh a lot, though.)

I think the backgrounds make the cards too busy for a serene learning experience

I thought I read somewhere that the art for the cards would be different for the final game. Like, the nouns would have a picture of the thing?

[mangaroo.livejournal.com]

the game is a really neat idea, but the grammar looks very simple.

Also, it's not going to help with idiomatic nuances. 猫s probably do 嗅ぐ, but I don't think an 男 取るs an お風呂.

the nouns would have a picture of the thing

I hope that's true! That would help with passive learning while playing.

[wednesday-10-00.livejournal.com]

Good point. (You 入る an お風呂.) They even said in the game play video that sentences don't have to make sense, so it's sort of unhelpful in that way (if funny for people who know why the sentences are nonsensical).