Battle with Godzilla and Kong, Get Cats Adopted, and Measure a Yellow-Bellied Marmot | BoardGameGeek News

by W. Eric Martin

▪️ In late 2024, U.S. publisher Restoration Games announced that it would crowdfund the release of Battle Monsters, a new edition of Stephen Baker‘s Battle Masters, which Milton Bradley released in 1992, and now that crowdfunding campaign is live, with the design being packaged as two standalone games — Battle Monsters: Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah and Battle Monsters: Kong vs Mechagodzilla — that can be combined.

The c.f. campaign notes that Battle Monsters will have “limited retail availability”, something that Restoration’s Justin D. Jacobson — one of the games’ co-designers, along with Rob Daviau, Noah Cohen, and Justin Kemppainen — addressed in an April 21, 2025 post about tariffs: “…if the status quo holds, there is a real chance the game will not be available in standard distribution. It’s one thing to have your profit eaten up but quite another to literally lose money on every sale.”

Tariffs on goods from China have dropped since the time of that post, but that drop is only temporary (for now) and who knows what might happen by the time this campaign fulfills in mid-2026. Restoration pledges that it “will never ask for additional funds regardless of changes to tariffs, shipping charges, or any of the other vagaries of making a game”. One way to do this, of course, is to not overprint a game, but to produce enough to cover backers, with only a bit of overage. At worst, you’ll break even, then still be in business to contemplate a reprint in a sunnier retail environment.

As for the gameplay in these two titles, um, monsters battle? In a few more words, each Titan — that is, each title character, which is represented by a 150mm figure — is supported by a unique faction: Monarch, Apex Cybernetics, a horde of superspecies, and a team of skilled mercenaries led by Col. Alan Jonah. Your goal: Use clever positioning, timely card play, and (perhaps) lucky dice rolls to defeat the opposing Titan.

▪️ In June 2022, game table manufacturer Rathskellers teased a new edition of Freidemann Friese‘s 2008 trivia game Fauna, then posted updates every few months looking for feedback on map details and other issues.

In early May 2025, Rathskellers launched a Kickstarter campaign for its (already manufactured) edition of the game, with the stretch goals for the campaign being a lowering of the game’s base price with leftover funds that you pledged going toward shipping — which sounds like a good idea in concept as it might inspire backers to pull in others to lower the price for everyone…but after two days the company cancelled the campaign and relaunched on Gamefound with a lower base price.

As for how to play, each round a player shows a picture of an animal, reads its name, then places one of their colored markers on a defined part of the Earth on the game board or on one of the measuring scales that are broken up into chunks for weight, length/height, and tail length (with metric measurements on one side of the board and imperial on the other). Players take turns placing markers until everyone passes.

The details of this animal’s native locations and measurements are then revealed, and whoever correctly placed a marker in these areas scores points, with markers placed in adjacent areas scoring fewer points. Incorrect markers are set aside, with each player getting back one marker per round (or more so that they have at least three markers).

▪️ Another animal-based game seeing a new crowdfunded edition is Cat Rescue, which designer Ta-Te Wu self-published in 2018 and which is coming out in a second edition from U.S. publisher Dead Alive Games…which might suggest that the “rescue” is a Pet Sematary-style situation, but that’s not the case.

Here’s an overview of how to play:

Cat Rescue is a 1-4 player co-operative card game. On a turn, you take a cat from the street or the rescue home, then slide it into the cat shelter. When three or four cats of the same color are in a row or column, these cat cards in the middle are flipped over and now ready for adoption.

When the flipped-over cats are pushed out of the shelter, they are adopted to their new loving home. The game ends when the deck is depleted or when the rescue home has three cats. Players then receive a “cat rescue” title based on the number of cats they helped get adopted.

The second edition of Cat Rescue being crowdfunded through mid-June 2025 includes a competitive mode in which each player scores individually for cat cards that they flip over and that they push out of the shelter, gaining points for adopted cats and losing points for those moved back into the street.

Thankfully all of the shelters I’ve volunteered at haven’t been this cutthroat!