Each week here at Geek & Sundry we take a look at new and upcoming exciting titles on Kickstarter! This week’s Kickstarter of the week is Gentes Deluxified by Tasty Minstrel Games, which easily surpassed its funding goal of $40,000 and is near $300K as of this writing.
A civilization-building Eurogame, Gentes offers streamlined turns while maintaining a satisfying depth of overall gameplay. Players are responsible for growing their city-states in the Eastern Mediterranean during the first millennium, B.C. It was released to much acclaim at last year’s Essen SPIEL thanks to it being the latest game from designer Stefan Risthaus, who also created the highly regarded Arkwright.
Tasty Minstrel Games decided to use Kickstarter to fund a “deluxified” edition of Gentes featuring upgraded bits and components. According to Lance Myxter, the decision to offer this version was an easy one, after successful deluxified editions of Orleans, Yokohama, and other popular Tasty Minstrel Games titles.
“We like to think we know what gamers want,” Myxter said. “TMG is going to make the decisions that gamers would want us to make.”
Gentes Deluxified will have over 170 wooden bits and meeples, over 80 metal coins, and more. All stretch goals for the campaign have been unlocked and these include six oversized meeples and 24 two-color silkscreen printed meeples, a foam-core insert from Folded Space, and the New Cities expansion.
“We just went in and tried to upgrade each individual piece,” Myxter said. “There were some slight art improvements, but for the most part, our source material, the original version published by Spielworxx, was excellently done – we just built up on top of that base.”
The game is for 2-4 players and will last around 90 minutes. Players will establish and populate significant cities by training priests, soldiers, merchants, artisans, and scholars, while creating monuments that will glorify their greatness to those who see them in the future.
On their turn, players will take an available action tile and add it to their player board. These actions include buying cards from a common display, building monuments via cards, training/educating their people, building/founding cities, and taking money.
After taking an action, players pay the required money or place one or more hourglass tokens on their player board’s time track. These hourglass tokens introduce an interesting time element to game play, since each hourglass token prevents players from taking further actions. If a time track is full, then a player can no longer perform any actions.
At the end of a round, players will remove action tiles and one hourglass token, thus limiting the number of actions they’re able to take in the next round. After six rounds of play, the player with the most victory points is declared the winner.
The Gentes Deluxified Kickstarter campaign ends on February 16th.
Do you have any games with upgraded components? Tell us in the comments!
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Image Credits: Steve Swayne (CC BY-SA 2.0)/Wikimedia, Tasty Minstrel Games
Ruel Gaviola is a writer based in Southern California. He loves board games, books, cooking, traveling, Star Wars, and date nights with his wife. He reviews games and reports news for iSlaytheDragon and his name rhymes with Superman’s Kryptonian name. Follow him on Twitter and read his blog here.