Now on Kickstarter: _For Science!_

[jducoeur]

Time for a Kickstarter that I've been awaiting for quite a while: the board game For Science!. Design "cures", build them out of colorful blocks, and use the resulting points to navigate your way to victory, all before the clock runs out.

The elevator pitch will strike people as sounding vaguely like Pandemic -- cooperative board games about curing diseases -- but For Science! (which I still think of as Science -- or Die!, which was its working title for a long time) has a totally different tone. It is fast (fifteen minutes), almost impossible to alpha-player, and let's get real: playing with children's blocks is an absolutely fundamental part of the game, and that's just viscerally enjoyable. There's also a lot of quiet humor buried in this game, particularly in the various Roles that you get to play. IMO, it is way, way more fun than Pandemic.

The game is by R. Eric Reuss, a friend who is best known as the author of Spirit Island. This is sort of the palate cleanser to that: whereas Spirit Island is very thinky and will often take 1-2 hours, this is light and fast. There's still a great deal going on, but it's considerably more tactical and fast-paced. It's particularly great for mixed groups that aren't all hardcore gamers, because of that absolutely central building aspect: somebody's got to be playing the construction game, which is mostly about hand-eye coordination and a steady hand. And at the same time, you usually do not want everybody to be doing that part (since there are only so many blocks), so the folks who hate the coordination part have plenty of other things to be focusing on.

(And yes -- it looks a little on-the-nose right at the moment. But I've been playtesting it occasionally for something like seven years, and this Kickstarter has been in the works for a fair while now: the timing is coincidental.)

Highly recommended: this is a great game for medium-sized groups that want something quick, fun and intense to play.