Explore Pocketopia to Discover Otters, Body Parts, Pastry, and Asymmetric Frogs | BoardGameGeek News

by W. Eric Martin

In late March 2025, I included Surplus of Sloths in a crowdfunding round-up, and as it turns out that game is part of Pocketopia, a BackerKit project highlighting tiny tabletop games that ends, um, less than 24 hours from when this post goes live, a.k.a., April 3, 2025 at 20:00 GMT. Ah, well, I can’t always help when I learn about things…

In any case, here’s a sampling of the 60+ titles being funded during Pocketopia:

▪️ Pond: A Froggy Board Game is, in the words of BGG’s Candice Harris, a “Root-like” game from MingYang Lu and Brother Ming Games. Up to four players each control an asymmetric frog faction that you use to build your own deck while trying to gain control of parts of a pond. (BK link)

▪️ In December 2024, I covered Léandre Proust‘s Micro Hero: Hercules, a 1-2 player game in which you play through the twelve labors of Hercules, and now Tyler J. Brown and Envy Born Games are offering Hercules and the 12 Labors, a solitaire card and dice game in which you strive to complete the twelve labors and ascend to godhood. (BK link)

To stay on theme, we need ten other games on this topic. Which game designers will undertake this labor?

Mock-up on display at GAMA Expo 2025

▪️ Another solitaire game being funded is Cat’s Gambit from Ta-Te Wu of Sunrise Tornado Game Studio. This design challenges you to place chess-style cards one by one into a 4×4 grid, using your five special-powered pawns to protect your cat queen from attacks. If your queen is struck twice by cat-kens — ahem, cat krakens — then you lose. (BK link)

▪️ Argumentation is a storytelling card game from Jason Walters of High Rock Press that lasts 2-4 hours in which 3-6 players “take on the role of underpaid instructors at a poorly funded liberal arts college, drinking burnt coffee in the faculty lounge and arguing about the nature of history between classes. They pose a series of great historical questions to one another, some counterfactual, others more abstract, which are answered using a selection of framing cards representing theories about the nature and function of the historical process. These include historical materialism, classical realism, dialectic idealism, Whig historiography, great man theory, paradigm shift, the fourth turning, negative conquest theory, and many others.”

▪️ Bluff Pastry is a game for two chefs from Simon Birks, Marielle Bouleau, and Blue Fox Games in which each of you is trying to get needed ingredients into your pie while possibly lying about what you’re adding. (BK link)

▪️ Mat Lorre‘s SHIFTED from terrorbox.co is a 4-7 player social deduction game along the lines of Among Us, with some players trying to complete jobs aboard a spaceship, one player trying to make jobs fail, and one player trying to convert others to their kind. (BK link)

▪️ Bolted is a 2-4 player card game from David Malki !, creator of the Wondermark comic, in which you attempt to assemble a friend from various body parts. (BK link)

▪️ Greeting Games from TTRPGkids consists of greeting cards and postcards that feature mini-games that you can complete yourself or mail to others. (BK link)

▪️ Otter is a 2-4 player card game from Dylan Coyle of Charming Games Collective in which you’re trying to shed all the cards in your hand to win a round.

On a turn, you play a card on one of the three otter discard piles, matching one of the two rules for that pile, either the number rule or the suit rule. Match both rules, however, and you can play again. You can swap or flip rules at the cost of drawing a card from the deck. When someone empties their hand, they win the round, and all other players keep their hands, then draw up to ten cards, so even if you’re not going out now, maybe you can craft your hand to plan for the future. (BK link)