The great promise of crowdfunding was that it would allow people with great ideas but no platform to raise money straight from the public to bring them to life; the reality has been messier, with tiny indie titles competing for space with glossy projects from established publishers using Kickstarter as a pre-order and marketing platform. That makes it a delight to find a project like Scattered Nexus: Solis Wars, an expandable card battler game that its creator has worked on for eight years, and published via the print-on-demand service Game Crafter since 2021. This is a true blue indie, a perfect example of the kind of project that crowdfunding can bring to life.
Scattered Nexus is a head to head card battler with a total of thirty factions, each themed around a different indie comic – the art, graphic design, and rules clarity is very good. Deck construction is similar to Smash-Up: you’ll pick three factions and shuffle them together to make a 39 card deck. Your goal is to beat down your opponent with your heroes – hits that connect make them discard cards from their deck, and an empty deck means game over.
There are plenty of complications, special abilities, and event cards as well – the how-to-play video below explains things pretty well. If you want to test it there’s even a free online client with a tutorial, basic AI, and the ability to play against your friends online.
There are three main tiers in the Kickstarter: a $5 print and play PDF tier; a $20 physical copy of the latest standalone expansion to the game, Solis War, which comes with six factions; and then a $100 Collectors Box with five previous expansions.
At the time of writing there are still early-bird pledges available for the physical tiers, which knock 25% off those prices. The art and design is all completed, and if the Kickstarter reaches its modest goal of $5,000 that will pay for a print run via established board game manufacturer Magicraft.
This is a genuinely indie operation. Creator Eli Beaird ran the first Kickstarter for a Scattered Nexus set in 2020. It only reached 16% of its funding goal, but Beaird kept on trucking with the project, and by October 2021 he’d listed it on Game Crafter for purchase on a Print on Demand basis. He’s released four more expansions since then, and only one of them was paid for by a Kickstarter campaign.
What’s your favorite indie gaming find? Is one the best board games in your collection a niche Kickstarter title no-one else has heard of? Is your favorite RPG a zine game you bought from the author at a convention? Let us know in the Wargamer Discord community!
Source: Wargamer
