Mayday Games has partnered with developer Stardock Entertainment to bring their popular pirate-themed press your luck digital card game, Dead Man’s Draw to your tabletop through a new Kickstarter campaign.
A card game for 2-4 players, Dead Man’s Draw is all about balancing risk and reward as you press your luck each turn trying to capture more and more cards. Players take turns drawing pirate-themed cards, each of which has a unique effect. On your turn you can keep pulling cards as long as you like but if you play a card of a suit already seen, then you bust and lose all of the cards that you flipped on that turn. One of the coolest part of the game are the card’s special properties as they allow you to plunder from other players, protect some of your loot, peek at upcoming cards and more.
Before the game begins, each player is given a choice of two unique roles, which dons them with a special ability which changes up the gameplay dynamics each and every time you play. As soon as the draw deck is depleted, all players total up the value of the highest card they’ve banked from each suit and the highest score wins.
What some of you may not know is that even before the iOS game was released, Stardock had a physical version of the game that they used for prototyping. Around the time the iOS version was released last October, they tried to launch a Kickstarter of their own to make a commercial version of the physical game as well, but it narrowly failed. Now that the digital game has garnered a lot of fans and with the help of Mayday’s Kickstarter know-how the two companies are already well on their way to a successful second attempt at bringing us a physical version of this fun game.
The campaign has been live for only about a day and it is already at 79% of its funding goal!
You can back a single copy of the physical game for $20 or get two copies (which can be combined to support up to 8 players) for $35. Mayday is releasing the pledge levels in special 250 copy limited blocks that will be individually stickered and numbered. When one of the levels sells out they will add another one; and will be doing this over 4 levels, the Platinium, Gold, Silver and Bronze reward levels. We’ve been told by the project’s creator that after the first 1,000 numbered copies, then they will offer “a standard box version but probably at a slightly higher $21 or $22 price point instead”.
At the time of this posting, the Platinum level has already sold out and a good dent had already been made in the gold level as well.
There are a number of stretch goals including upgraded card and box quality, a special Kickstarter edition box (limited to the first 2000 backers, additional cards and more.
If you haven’t checked out the iOS version of Dead Man’s Draw yet, I highly recommend you do so as it is quite fun…and FREE. Visit the Kickstarter campaign page for more details and to pledge for your own copy of the game.
Download your copy of Dead Man’s Draw:
