by W. Eric Martin

▪️ In March 2025, UK illustrator and author Owen Davey crowdfunded Fame & Fable, with copies currently anticipated to reach backers in Q2 2026 and presumably available elsewhere after that.

The publisher’s game overview is minimal:

In April 2025, Ross Connell interviewed Davey about his illustration background and the challenge of creating more than 150 images for this project. Here’s an excerpt:

The game’s lore centres on a realm overrun by monsters wreaking havoc across the land. Your mission is to gather allies and items to confront these threats head-on. In solo mode, the game introduces six key locations, each delving into classic terrains often explored in fantasy works.

Prototype (image: Ilya Ushakov)

Fame and Fable aims to strike a balance between something familiar and new, offering a fresh perspective on beloved fantasy tropes while remaining rooted in the joy of storytelling.

▪️ Another game crowdfunded in 2025 and hitting the market in 2026 is Movers & Shakers, a 1-4 player game from the design team of Nuno Bizarro Sentieiro and Paulo Soledade (Madeira, Nippon) and publisher Quined Games:

The game is available on Board Game Arena should you care to give it a go there.

▪️ A 2027 release — yes, we’re already moving into next year — heading to crowdfunding is Pack & Paddle from the design team of Matthew O’Malley and Ben Rosset, who have previously partnered on The Search for Planet X and Fromage.

Here’s an overview of this 30-45 minute game for 2-5 players from publisher KTBG:

▪️ Designer Luís Brueh and publisher Vesuvius Media are partnering once again, and given their history on the Dwar7s game series, you should not be surprised to learn that Flame & Forge features dwarfs. (Kickstarter)

Flame & Forge can be co-operatively, with all players trying to bring down the red dragon before the town goes up in flames, or competitively, with players comparing points once the dragon falls.

Each turn, you place a dwarf figure on the leftmost spot of a city tile, then take all actions to the right of where you placed: gaining gems, forging weapons, fighting monsters, healing damage, gain knowledge, and so on. However, you must place your initial figure on the tile row farthest away from the dragon, with your next figure going on a tile in the subsequent row adjacent to your first one, and so on. Thus, your initial placement determines which later options are available, but once all your figures have been placed, you retrieve them, then start from the bottom once again.

You want to upgrade the cards in your deck with new weapons and defeated monsters to deal more damage on attacks, but the damage you take during an attack is also based on what’s in your deck, so you’ll want to gauge what remains to be flipped before rushing blindly into a challenge.