by W. Eric Martin

With January 2026 one tick of the calendar away — depending on when you’re reading this post, of course — thoughts turn to the tsunami of crowdfunding projects that will soon be reaching out for backers. Here’s a handful of what I’ve seen publishers pitching:

▪️ In January 2024, I wrote about new editions of two trick-taking games — Yeon-Min Jung‘s Boast or Nothing and Takashi Sakaue‘s My Favorite Carrera RS Trick Taking Game — that will be coming from Portland Game Collective.

PGC planned to run a crowdfunding campaign for these two editions — now titled, respectively, Best of Neapolitan and Zoom Zoom Vroom — in mid-2025, then put those plans on hold due to unexpected tariffs being imposed on goods coming into the United States from certain countries.

Those tariffs are still in place, but PGC plans to move ahead with a crowdfunding campaign in January 2026, with a third item included in this project: an English-language release of Hiroken‘s TRICKTAKERs: Expansion Set, which first appeared in 2021 from Japan’s Joyple Games.

PGC is also taking pre-orders (as of January 2, 2026) for its edition of Hiroken’s Eternal Decks, a 1-4 player game that works as follows:

Eternal Decks is a co-operative game in which players try to complete the stage objectives before any one player cannot take an action. Players start the game with five cards in their deck, but will quickly look to acquire more cards from the various Eternals (characters within the game) who each have their own unique eight-card deck. On your turn, you must perform one action:

• Play a card (on the field, on the river, or by using an ability)

• Generate a jewel

• Give a card to a teammate

There are restrictions when playing a card. All three rows in the field cannot have cards of the same color or same number next to each other. Additional restrictions are applied to a row based on the stage you are playing. Jewels are used to negate the negative effects brought on by the Eternals.

The game has six stages, and the various stages will have you collect points, survive a ghost town, navigate a labyrinth, defeat a boss, and more to win the game!

▪️ In January 2026, designer Gabriele Porro of Lunar Oak Studio plans to crowdfund a second edition of 2022’s S.H.E.O.L., along with a new Midnight Odyssey expansion for that second edition. (Gamefound)

Porro plans to offer an upgrade kit for those with the first edition of the game while noting that “I’m changing so many things in the game, enhancing usability, quality of life, components layouts, that probably the upgrade set will be all the game components except miniatures, plastic cubes, and some tokens.”

People sometimes wonder why companies don’t offer upgrade kits for new editions of games, and this would be why. If a title has “regular” distribution in retail outlets, an upgrade kit is unlikely to (1) be that much cheaper than the base game on its own and (2) reach the target audience easily, with a complete standalone second edition being the better option so that stores can sell it to anyone who’s interested. For a game available solely through crowdfunding, the upgrade option becomes possible since you’re producing based on orders and won’t end up sitting on inventory.

In a lengthy Google Doc, Porro details changes to the game both large and small.

▪️ Designer Milan Tasevski of Archona Games has released four “Small Empires” games over the past decade, with Small Star Empires debuting in 2016 and Small Railroad Empires from 2021 being the most recent title — and now he’s going for a larger, or at least longer, design in Ancient Empires. (Gamefound)

In this 1-4 player game, each player controls a rising civilization that wants to harvest resources, establish cities, expand its army, and challenge rivals over three ages. In more detail:

▪️ In a Gen Con 2025 report, I previewed Carl Chudyk‘s Chess Joker, and Asmadi Games is now crowdfunding that game for delivery in Q2 2026. (BackerKit)

The gist of the game is that you’re playing chess like normal with the goal of checkmating the opponent’s king, but each player has a unique “joke” card in front of them, and they can do the move dictated by the card in order to score the Elo points on that card.

Maybe you’ll move your king forward one square, then add a pawn behind it, placing your king in a more dangerous position, but earning 200 Elo points for doing so. If you score 800 points, you win, so maybe it’s worth the risk. Or maybe you’ll move a pawn sideways. Doing so scores you only 25 points, but maybe that’s the ideal move at the moment. Whether you use a card or not, it goes away and is replaced by a new one for your next turn.

▪️ In February 2026, Chip Theory Games will launch a Gamefound campaign for Jump Masters, a Manny Trembley design with minimal information available at present. The pitch:

Jump into battle with this incredibly simple to learn, yet hyper-tactical twist on Chinese Checkers.

Don’t let the bright and colorful facade fool you. Jump Masters!* is a game of high confrontation, clever drafting, and squad assembly. You’ll be ruining your opponent’s evening with characters like Pinkbeary in minutes.

It’s cute. It’s cutthroat. It’s the CUTEthroat game you never knew you needed.

True, I have never thought that I needed a cutethroat game…but that’s probably because I already own That’s Life!

The asterisk on the game name in that description leads to a lengthy footnote that is more amusing than informative.