SMOOSH JUICE
Puzzle over a Collection of Dogs, Cats, Sloths, and Beasts | BoardGameGeek News
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Let’s taking a gander at who’s holding out the hat these days for game-related crowdfunding projects:
āŖļø Designer Rebecca Horovitz of Fiat Lucre has reached her funding goal for Collectionomics, a party game played with your own stuff ā whatever you want to show off and brag about to others.
You place objects on the table, whether yours or another player’s or a mixture, then players assign tag cards to objects one after another, possibly telling stories about how a tag ā salty, vibing, cake, benevolent dictator, etc. ā applies to this object. You want people to vote for your tags, but you also want tags in play to match your goal card.
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āŖļø Do you want a collection of (card-based) dogs? Then Good Puppers, Too! is for you, with this being a standalone sequel to Chris Cieslik‘s Good Puppers from Asmadi Games. (KS link)
The game includes nine breeds of pups that you will draft, play, and perform tricks with in order to collect bones, which is how you track points. Rascals are non-dog critters who want to hang with dogs to complete schemes that will boost their value. The two Good Puppers games can be combined so that up to seven players can coo over smol doggos.
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āŖļø To give equal time to cats, I’ll now talk about Catopomp, the first game from David Chow J.S. of Shaggy Games, with this title having been funded in mid-March 2025. Here’s a brief on this 2-4 player game:
The goal of the game is to play all your cards and not be the last player with unplayed cards. Whenever you play cards from your hand, you must also reveal one additional card and place it in front of yourself. Over time, this will form a set of revealed cards that you will need to play as well. To help you with your task, once per round, you can use one or two dice from a shared pool to enhance your playing set. Time the dice well, and use them wisely!
If you choose to pass, the player who played the most recent strongest set of cards can pass one of their revealed cards to you. This means that you will have more cards to clear. Yikes!
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āŖļø Instead of having cats collect souls to guide them, you can take charge of the collecting process by trying to collect a wealth of sloths. Here’s an overview of Surplus of Sloths, a 2-4 player game from Charlie McCarron that Weird Giraffe Games is crowdfunding through early April 2025:
To set up, use as many types of sloths as the number of players, plus one. Each player takes three cards in hand, then discards one card to the “surplus net”. Deal out two rows of cards, with each row having one more card than the number of players. The active player drafts one card from a row, then each other player drafts from the same row, with the final card falling into the surplus net. Add a new row of cards, then the next player clockwise starts the next turn.
When you all the rows have been drafted, with remaining cards falling into the net, players compare their longest run of each sloth type. A type has cards numbered 1-7, along with three Xs, which are wild. Whoever has the longest run of a type, with ties being broken by whoever has the highest numeral in their run, claims all cards in the surplus net of that type. The value of a type equals the sum of the numbers in the net multiplied by 1-4 depending on how many sloths of that type (0-3) are also in the net. Whoever has the most points wins.
You can also play with four baby sloths of value 0 that count as all types. They aren’t worth any points in the surplus net, but they can lengthen all of your runs…assuming they would otherwise start with 1, that is.
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āŖļø A less friendly creature awaits your attention in Hollow Pact, a 1-4 player game from (deep breath) Tyler Exsted, Dylan Farrell, Albin Larsson, Elon Midhall, Aron Midhall, Assar Pettersson, and Rafel Servent that Studio Midhall will crowdfund in 2025 for release in 2026. Here’s an overview:
One player-controlled Beast uses its powers and the aid of spirits to hunt down the scoundrels and recover what they stole. The Beast also has secret goals, and accomplishing them makes thwarting the scoundrels easier.
āŖļø I’ll close with a personal project from BGG’s advertising manager Chad Krizan and his wife Caylyn ā the next trio of Bumfuzzled wooden jigsaw puzzles from their Puzzle Bomb company.
Chad’s been blogging about the design of these puzzles from concept to sketch to (multiple) iterations to the final look, and I admire the work he undergoes to make each design fresh.
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