Kemet

July has turned into one of the busiest crowdfunding months of the year. We’ve got a Harry Potter deck-builder that’s pulling numbers more typically seen on dungeon crawlers, a freshly-launched Middle-earth adventure straight from the makers of Ascension, a Kemet expansion for fans hungry for more area control, and two huge campaigns that just wrapped - one of them an absolute freight train. Here’s the full rundown of what’s live, what just ended, and whether any of it deserves your money. ...

There’s a moment in every area control game where you look at the board, count your pieces, count your opponent’s pieces, and realise you’re one move away from either a masterful territorial sweep or a catastrophic overextension. That tension - the knife-edge between dominance and collapse - is why area control has been a cornerstone of board game design for decades. But “area control” is deceptively simple as a label. It covers everything from the elegant medieval politics of El Grande to the asymmetric woodland warfare of Root, from the mythological brawling of Kemet to the Darwinian survival of Dominant Species. What unites them isn’t just “put your stuff on the map” - it’s a deeper design philosophy about shared spaces, visible competition, and the impossibility of defending everything at once. ...