Mascot based card games are pretty common projects in Kickstarter “tabletop” category. After some huge successes, like a certain kitten game, the platform exploded with various card games filled with cute animals doing cute (or violent) things. Majority of these projects fail to impress and attract backers, but there were some notable exceptions. One of them was Unstable Unicorns, which had a campaign a bit over a year ago. $1,865,140 pledged by 33,720 backers can for sure be considered a great success.
After a year long break, the game is back on Kickstarter with even more rainbow (and blood) colored goodness.
One Man Stable
You can’t talk about Unstable Unicorns without mentioning the author. Having worked both on the visuals and the rules, Ramy Badie is a true one man band, or a human swiss army knife. His artistic career began by sharing his own art on Deviantart. Ramy specializes in lighthearted, cartoony pictures, and most of his works have gallons of charm.
In 2012 he launched Teeturtle, a company making shirts, accessories and underwear with cute pictures. After clothing, the artist proceeded to use his art for a completely different industry: tabletop games. In 2017 he launched Unstable Unicorns as his team’s debut Kickstarter project. As you already know: it was a good decision.
Building Your Horned Army
Unstable Unicorns has a simple goal. You have to recruit a small unicorn army with 7 four-hooved soldiers. The first player to do so wins and can bask in sparkling glory.
Up to 8 people can play at once. The game encourages tons of negative interaction. It boasts about being one of the most effective ways to lose all your friends in less than 45 minutes (I managed to pull it off with Mario Kart in less than 20 but 45 is still pretty impressive!).
You begin with a single baby unicorn and a hand of 5 cards. Remaining babies are put on a pile called “the Nursery”. Each turn you draw a new card and perform one action from any card in your hand. Actions range from upgrading your own stables, damaging stables owned by your opponents, casting magic spells to recruiting 3 types of unicorns: baby, basic and magical. There are also some “instant cards”, that can be played outside of the regular turn order.
Even More Hooves to Recruit
As you can see, the rules are really simple, but the expansions make the gameplay tad more complicated. The first campaign had the NSFW Pack, Dragon Pack, Rainbow Sprinkles, and the Apocalypse Expansion. New KS campaign brings even more additions to the game. Backers can pick between two completely new decks. Both of them contain 30 new cards, and both have 158 cards total.
The Chaos Deck adds unicorns themed after monsters, undead and all sorts of villains. New cards allow to reuse things discarded during the game and might feel slightly similar to black Magic the Gathering cards. There’s also a holographic Nightmare Unicorn Included.
The Control Deck features angelic unicorns representing the forces of good. Cards from this set focus on protection and manipulating the main deck.
As of now, the campaign is sitting on $792,323 and keeps doing well. Instead of stretch goals, creators decided to draw one backer inspired unicorn for every 10,000 dollars pledged. Some drawing sessions are also live streamed to keep people excited and involved in the project.
Geeknson Board Game Table | QUESTOWER Ads Sytsem
