Our latest trio of tabletop titles looking for crowdfunding love all happen to be offshoots of existing games. We’ve a welcome reboot of an ‘80s favourite in Fireball Island, because everyone loves marbles; a standalone expansion for Heart of Crown, because everyone loves princesses; and a dice-chucking take on Spirits of the Rice Paddy because everybody loves …rice farming? Balinese irrigation systems? Whatever, it does look fun.

FIREBALL ISLAND: THE CURSE OF VUL-KAR

The hot new (sort of!) title on Kickstarter is Restoration Games’ revamped edition of classic 80’s game Fireball Island. The marble-rolling, push-your-luck game sees a group of unlucky tourists trying to escape from Fireball Island, with players attempting to gather lost treasures and make to the helipad before getting caught by one of Vul-Kar’s fireballs. Or having their figure knocked over by a rolling orange marble, if you want to get all prosaic about it.

It’s still very much a family game, but the lightweight rules have been brought bang up-to-date, the new components look lovely and there are four expansions available too.

HEART OF CROWN: FAIRY GARDEN

We’re big fans of Japanese princess-themed, anime-flavoured deckbuilder Heart of Crown, which Japanime Games brought West last year, so colour us interested that follow-up game Heart of Crown: Fairy Garden is getting crowdfunded too. Although Fairy Garden can be combined with the base game, introducing 30 new card types into the market as well as new abilities from the fairy realm, it can also be played as a wholly standalone title. But while many of the cards are new, the overall goal remains the same – build up your lands, supporters, treasury and influence to ensure that your chosen princess is the one who ascends the throne!

RICE DICE

Rice Dice from APE Games is a streamlined dice version of Philip duBarry’s unusually-themed Spirits of the Rice Paddy, a surprisingly combative game of rice farming in Bali that was successfully Kickstarted back in 2015. Catering to 1-5 players and boasting a comparatively snappy 30-45 minute playtime, Rice Dice sees prospective planters rolling a handful of custom dice each turn and selecting from a suite of possible actions in a race to collect the most rice – constructing and flooding paddies, planting rice and keeping it free from weeds, and finally harvesting the hard-won crop… all with a little help from the local spirits.