There are a couple of board game projects on Kickstarter now that I wanted to let you know about. Because of the holidays, getting back to school, and an inconveniently-timed cold, I haven't gotten a chance to dig into these in-depth yet, so I'll give you a quick overview. Read on for more about Pivit, BattleCON: Devastation of Indines, Dicecards, and Hegemonic.

Pivit

The first is Pivit, pictured above in its prototype form. Even though what you see above doesn't look like a polished game, I wanted to include the photo because, hey, I gotta give some geek bonus points for a game designer who sends me Lego bricks as a prototype. The actual game pieces (and the primary expense for the Kickstarter campaign) are highly-engineered discs, pictured below:

But what's the game about? Well, it's an abstract strategy game inspired by games like Chess or Go — simple rules that allow for deep strategy — but with a couple of significant differences. First, it works with more than just two players: Pivit handles up to four players at once. Another difference is the game length: instead of hours of play, a game of Pivit goes much more quickly (perhaps half an hour) which puts it more in the realm of casual games than hardcore abstract strategy.

The basic idea is this: you start with a bunch of minions (the white side of the token), which can be promoted to masters (the colored side) if you can reach a corner of the board. All pieces, minions and masters, can only move orthogonally along the directions the arrows are pointing — but every time they move, they pivot 90 degrees, changing the direction. Minions can only move onto different colored squares (an odd number of spaces) but masters can move any number of spaces. You can capture a piece by landing on it, and no pieces can jump over or move past another piece. The game ends when there are no more minions on the board. Whoever has the most masters wins.

That's basically the entire rule set in one paragraph. (The only other information is starting positions for different numbers of players.) But this simple set of rules allows for some really fascinating stuff. For instance, since minions can only move an odd number of spaces, if you're an even number of spaces away you can't be touched — and neither can anything past you. Also, since you have to pivot every time you move, you have to zigzag across the board to get places, and that's easier said than done for a lowly minion. Even becoming a master doesn't solve everything — for one, when you become a master you're stuck in a corner, most likely with other players lined up to get into that corner. If you don't get out into the center of the board quickly enough, you can be captured or even stuck behind your own minions.

If you're curious about the game, you can download the print-and-play version for free and try it out. But don't dawdle! Pivit has less than a week left in its campaign. You can pledge $25 for a PC/Mac version; $50 for the full board game (which also includes the digital version); or $40 for "Pivit Lite," which gets you the pieces and software but omits the board and box. My verdict: The fancy pieces are pretty expensive, but if you like abstract strategy games and beautiful components, this could be a winner. Visit the Kickstarter page for more.

BattleCON: Devastation of Indines

BattleCON was one of the earlier Kickstarter games I covered, back in 2011 — even though its $15k tally seems modest now in comparison to some of these blockbuster campaigns, it ended up with a few extra stretch goal characters. Now, Level 99 Games is back with a stand-alone sequel set in the same universe. BattleCON: Devastation of Indines has 24 characters, 3 bosses, a singleplayer/co-op dungeon mode, 6 bonus characters, and piles of add-ons. What's fun is that the bonus characters are from other creators and projects — notably, Legacy and the Freedom Five from Sentinels of the Multiverse were added as a promotional character, bringing them into the Indines universe.

The game itself is a 2D dueling game — think Street Fighter, but with cards. It does bear some resemblance to Flash Duel, another 2D dueling game, but mostly in terms of the genre rather than actual gameplay. The board is much shorter, for one, forcing you to start battling right away. But also, instead of a hand of five number cards, each player gets five styles and seven bases, which connect to each other to form an attack. The styles and one of the bases are unique to the character; the other six bases are common to everyone, like "burst" or "dash." Connecting a style to a base gives you the range of the attack, the power of the attack, and the priority.

It's a bit more complicated than Flash Duel, and several of the characters have extra tokens that can be used in battle for different effects. Instead of a one-hit round, you have a certain amount of energy and you'll need to reduce your opponent to zero.

I played the prototype of the original back when I first wrote it up, and enjoyed it enough to back the full game. However, I have to admit that it's in the pile of "Kickstarter rewards I haven't gotten to play yet" because of all the review backlog I've had in the past year. This new version looks even bigger than the last, and if you liked the characters and world of Indines, then you'll definitely want to check this one out. I don't have a demo copy of Devastation but it's along the same lines as the last one, with the added solo/co-op rules.

One of the things I'm really excited about in this campaign, though, is another dexterity game! They hit a stretch goal and unlocked Disc Duelers, a stand-alone game featuring the Indines characters in a disc-flicking battle game. Even if you're not interested in the card-based fighting, you might want to check this one out. With 50 (or more?) duelers, each with its own wooden disc and card, you can set up battles (the photo shows Jenga pieces) using a tabletop and whatever other objects you want to throw in there. [UPDATE: There's now a – video of Brad Talton giving a quick overview of the game.] Hey, you know me: I'm always up for flicking wooden bits around the table. (Speaking of flicking wooden bits, there's also this Crokinole project...)

Oh, and one other thing. In case you haven't played BattleCON and you're not entirely sure, there's a free iPad app available of the original game. I've just started tinkering with it — it's not perfect, but it does have a tutorial and you can play against the AI or online multiplayer.

Visit the Kickstarter page for more about Devastation of Indines, Disc Duelers, the Strikers mini-expansion, and a bunch of other stuff.

Dicecards

The Kickstarter page for Dicecards bills it as "The World's Geekiest Dice Bag in a Deck of Cards." Oh, sure, I thought. Everyone claims to be geekiest — and I suppose technically this claim could be true because, hey, how many "dice bags in a deck of cards" are there, anyway? But I clicked over and looked at the project, and I'm pretty convinced. This is definitely one of the geekiest decks of cards I've seen.

I'll admit: I like cards. I started collecting poker decks a long time ago, well before I became a board game fanatic. I just liked seeing cards with different backs, with creative faces, with odd shapes or sizes. At some point I realized I wasn't generally using the cards for anything and my collecting slowed down, but I still have a soft spot for them. Lately, though, I've felt that there are simply too many "deck of cards" projects on Kickstarter, and after backing a few I've tried to ignore the rest. I have enough cards. Really.

But Dicecards are different. They're designed to be a "dice bag" — they're randomizers, but unlike, say, the deck of cards that has two six-sided dice on each card, these have oodles of different combinations. The six-sided die is there, of course, but so are the d4, d8, d10, d12, and d20. There's a coin for coin flips, a compass for direction, letter tiles, a dreidel, and even straws in case you need to pick a short straw. There are well over 30 elements on the cards, and even the way that they're placed and distributed (using computer modeling) is extremely geeky.

With this deck of cards, any time you need to choose a random whatever, you just flip a card. Not every item is on every single card (in order to make the distributions right) so if it's not present, then you flip cards until you get one. Okay, it's probably not as fun as actually rolling dice, which is one of the great pleasures in life, but it's certainly a much more compact way to carry a whole bunch of different types of dice in a single package. (Another one, of course, is the extremely successful Dice Rings project, particularly the d24.)

Even though this project is one from the UK, which can now create Kickstarter projects, I backed it for a deck because it just seems like a really fun idea. At higher levels you can get things like uncut sheets of the cards, large prints, or even completely custom decks of cards. Visit the Kickstarter page, or go to Dicecards.com for more info. There are about three weeks left on the project.

Hegemonic

A few months ago, I thought of 4X games as just another variety of computer game that I never got around to playing. For those of you who aren't familiar with the term, 4X stands for "Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate" and is a type of sci-fi game that is generally quite involved. There's all the sorts of heavy resource management and technology development that a computer seems ideally suited to handle, but would be incredibly tedious to accomplish with little bits and cardboard tiles.

But in the past few months I've played two 4X board games (Empires of the Void and Eclipse) and have learned about a third, Hegemonic. These board-and-bits versions of the 4X game can indeed be fiddly, with lots of things to set up and keep track of, but there's also some great game design that keeps things feasible. For someone like me, who likely will never play a 4X computer game (unless you count Star Control 2), the board game version is something I can get behind.

From what I've seen so far, Hegemonic has some similarities to the others I've played but isn't exactly the same. You do build up military might to fight your opponents, but you can also attack using your industrial strength or political cunning. I've just received a prototype to try out, so I'll try to give this one a more in-depth look before the campaign ends, but I wanted to mention it now to get it on your radar.

Hegemonic has just over 3 weeks left in its campaign — it hit its base goal already, but has a bunch of stretch goals lined up if things go well. Check out the Kickstarter page for gameplay videos, a link to the rules, and more.