Which publishers have their plate out looking for donations for an upcoming release? Let's sample some of the titles being crowdfunded at the moment and looking for backers in the near future.
▪️ We'll start with Some Assembly Required, the debut title from designer Leigh Perrott, who helpfully pointed out this game in my recent post about River Valley Jewelcraft, which Allplay is crowdfunding along with Things on Strings and SAR in late April 2026.
Each turn in this game you either draft an assembly card that shows the tiles needed to complete a piece of furniture, draft tiles of one type and place them on assembly cards and your spare parts board, or place spare tiles of one type on assembly cards. Once you have all the tiles for an assembly, you can connect them together, then place the furniture in your apartment. Get the right furniture in the right room, and you can claim an arrangement.
In addition to scoring arrangements, you want to maximum your apartment's fung shui and matching furniture, while not leaving spare parts lying around to cause tripping hazards.
▪️ Fireside Games is crowdfunding a second edition of Justin De Witt's co-operative fire-fighting game Hotshots, which debuted in 2017, along with a new Inferno expansion that features new vehicles, team members, rewards, and civilians who need your help.
▪️ Instead of facing off against fire, you can face off against...nearly everything. Survivalist: The Board Game is a 2-6 player game from Robert Hewitt of Homestead Games New Zealand in which only one person will be alive at game's end. Here's an overview of the game, which currently has only a sign-up page for a future crowdfunding campaign:
Survivalist drops empty-handed players into the brutal wilderness for ten nights. Each day forces a decision: stay warm at the fire, recover in the nearby clearing, or push into the backcountry and gather what's needed to prepare for seven threats — thirst, storms, hunger, illness, wildlife, fatigue, and isolation — while facing limited time, limited backpack capacity, and the constant threat of injury.
On their turn, players take one action. They may gather resources along the ridge, forage for supplies in the valley, or craft items using resource recipes. Choosing an action also means choosing how much risk to accept because each option requires drawing deadly discs from a bag, so should you push deeper into the wild to get what you need, or play it safe and risk being unprepared later? Regular airdrops add more pressure to scramble into the backcountry for an assortment of bonuses and buffs.
After eight rounds of preparation, a ninth round reveals each player's hidden talent, allowing them to spend a unique resource they've gathered to adjust the danger level of the game's threats. Then comes the finale: a tense endgame in which players face the seven threats one by one. Crafted items and remaining health determine who withstands the ordeal and who draws more wound discs than they can fit on their player board. The last player left standing wins.
▪️ In 2026, Evan Katz and Josh Roberts of Very Special Games will be crowdfunding Shakeup Adventure, a game in which you create a new 5x5 dungeon each round by shaking dice in a Boggle-style container, after which each player traces a path through the dungeon on a personal, clear dry-erase board to complete quests, fight monsters, and do other dungeony type stuff.
▪️ U.S. publisher Rock Manor Games will crowdfund English-language editions of two games from designer Martín Oddino originally released in 2021 by Argentinian publisher RunDOS Studio: The Secret Valley and The Lost Island.
In each of three rounds in The Secret Valley, 2-4 players draft cards, then take turns playing some of them one by one into a shared grid, marking each card as they play it. Once the grid is filled, players score each card they played based on how well its scoring condition has been met. Some cards want to be next to differing landscapes, others the same; some cards want to be on the perimeter or wildly present in the grid compared to other landscapes. If you've played a few games, you can probably imagine what scoring conditions might exist.
▪️ Each player in The Lost Island has their own player sheet on which they will record a map of said island...but everyone has different ideas of how the bits on this island are put together.
On a turn, a player rolls three six-sided dice, chooses one type of territory that all players will draw, then takes one of the dice, drawing a territory of that type on their sheet; each other player draws an area of that type in a size matching one of the two remaining dice. You can imagine yourself exploring this island step by step as all land you draw must be connected, both within individual territories drawn on a turn and all territories over the course of play.
What are you trying to do? You can probably guess, yes? Create a map that matches as well as possible the random scoring conditions revealed at the start of play.
