Funded by Kickstarter and released by IDW Games, we open up our copy of Kill Shakespeare the board game! Based on the comic book Kill Shakespeare from IDW Publishing, players pick one of Shakespeare’s greatest heroes and battle his villains in this semi-cooperative board game.
We open up the box and show off what you can expect!
IDW Games launched in a big way with recently announced games like Kill Shakespeare and 30 Days of Night. To help bolster a board game line already hotly anticipated by fans around the world, IDW is growing its games division by expanding its partnership with Pandasaurus Games.
This partnership includes bringing Pandasaurus’ vault of popular games into print, many of which are sold out. The first title in this partnership is Tammany Hall, launching in June, in which the players “take power, rule New York.” Other titles to follow are Rattus Cartus, the sold-out hit that pits players against each other and the Black Plague, and Yedo, Pandasaurus’ first game, which is a samurai-themed worker placement game from the designers of the upcoming Kill Shakespeare game, Wolf Plancke and Thomas Vande Ginste. It also means that moving forward, IDW Games and Pandasaurus will be co-developing engaging board games that will excite existing fans of the genre and surely make new ones.
The future looks very bright for board game fans with the return of some favorites and the release of new and exciting ones! This year, IDW Games and Pandasaurus invite you to get in the game!
Today, IDW Games in cooperation with Pandasaurus Games launched a Kickstarter campaign for their first joint venture, Kill Shakespeare. The campaign’s goal is $25,000, and there will be a series of stretch goals in place that will make incremental improvements to the game for each milestone hit. With an amazing creative team in place and two world-class artists delivering the box and game art, this campaign is poised to be a huge success!
The first 250 people to back the Kill Shakespeare campaign will secure copies of the game at the deepest discount available. No matter when fans pledge during the campaign, the game will be offered $10 under suggested retail price, with free or discounted shipping around the globe!
This campaign offers fans the chance to pick up additional content ranging from comics to lithographs to a set of custom dice. Stretch goals are in place to improve the quality of the game components as well as expanding game content to include more characters and quests.
Why I Like It: I’ve loved the Kill Shakespeare comics, so to be able to play a game in that world is more than fine with me. Here’s hoping we get even more… can you say RPG?
Best Pledge: $40 gets you a copy of the game at a deep discount for the first 250 people. I pledged at this amount and kicked in some extra money for the dice game too.
Risk: LOW – The artwork for the game is complete and the only things left to do are the Kickstarter specific items. Add that on top of the fact that an established company like IDW is behind it, and I’m not too worried. I think at most the issue might be delays in the ship date due to production issues.
IDW Games has selected game designers Thomas Vande Ginste and Wolf Plancke as the creative team that will bring Kill Shakespeare to tabletops in 2014. The design team, best known for the sold-out critically acclaimed Yedo, will deliver a co-operative board game that pits several of the Bard’s most popular characters together in a struggle to protect the land from King Richard and Lady Macbeth.
Designed to be a “semi-cooperative”-style board game, players will unite to battle against evil forces controlled by board mechanics, while still jockeying to come out as the individual leader on the scoreboard. The design and content of the game will pull heavily from source material created by the Kill Shakespeare graphic-novel team. However, those unfamiliar with the works shouldn’t feel left out, as the board game will act as the perfect entry point to those unfamiliar with Kill Shakespeare.
With a 2014 summer release planned, IDW Games looks to be putting their best foot forward with this title. The previously announced art team of Dave Dorman and J.K. Woodward should give Kill Shakespeare a firm advantage in the art department, and this new addition of a high-quality design team loudly delivers the message that the publisher is here not just to play, but to win.
Today, IDW Games announced it had signed J.K. Woodward and Dave Dorman to be the art team for their launch title, Kill Shakespeare. Woodward’s work has been a mainstay at IDW since 2005, where he helped relaunch Fallen Angel before moving on to various Star Trek series, including last-year’s best-selling Star Trek: The Next Generation/Doctor Who maxi-series. Dave Dorman is an Eisner Award-winning artist known for his extensive work in the fantasy genre, including Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and much more.
Woodward has been brought on to create the art that will be featured on the playing cards for the game while Dorman will paint an original piece for the Kill Shakespeare box’s art. This debut title has a planned release date of June 2014.
With a release date of next summer, the news is starting to heat up for IDW Games. Fans can go to www.idwgames.com and subscribe to a newsletter that will keep them up to date on all the latest announcements and developments.
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