May 21, 2017: Crowdfunding Focus: Button Men

Our pals at Cheapass Games have a solid track record at bringing back older games in new, shiny editions via Kickstarter. Their latest crowdfunding campaign is for a new edition of one of my favorite games: Button Men.

In Button Men, each player has a character with a "recipe" of several polyhedral dice (usually five dice, although a few have had more or fewer). You engage another player in a one-on-one battle to see who can score the most points. Often, this is the player who captures all of her opponent's dice . . . but not always! Keeping track of the score is vital to success in Button Men. It's one of my favorite games from Cheapass, because so much depends on a savvy selection of character and dice, but there's still plenty of randomness because dice are involved.

Button Men was originally published in the early 2000s as a series of characters on pinback buttons – hence the name. This version uses trading cards instead, and is fully compatible with characters from the earlier edition. You can get a complete game including a bunch of dice, or a lower-cost version that just sends the character cards, for people who have deluded themselves into thinking they have enough dice. Or, if you feel like dropping some extra Gold Pieces, you can have an artist draw you as a Button Men character . . . and lead Munchkin illustrator John Kovalic is one of the people whose art you can select!

-- Andrew Hackard