The Lords of Vegas 10th Anniversary Kickstarter launches today!
In 2010, we published Lords of Vegas, a high energy casino-building game. It cemented itself as one of the best games we’ve ever made, and a favorite of such series as Tabletop, Shut Up & Sit Down, and The Dice Tower. Our 2014 hard-to-find expansion Up! enabled more strategic casino-building and added pieces for more players. But since then, we haven’t been able to bring anything new to the game’s legions of fans.
Until today, that is. Last month, we regained the rights to Lords of Vegas. After five years in the hopper, we’re finally publishing the long-awaited expansion Underworld, filled with mobsters and shady dealers. We’re bringing out a 10th Anniversary Boss Bundle, a lush attache box complete with the poker chips fans have demanded. We’re planning a 15th anniversary edition of our book Dealer’s Choice: The Complete Handbook of Saturday Night Poker, complete with the rules to 200 poker games, many of which we designed. You can get all this plus the classic base set and Up! by backing the Kickstarter here.
Lords of Vegas is a city-building eurogame in which players are casino moguls turning the desert of Nevada into something even nastier. The game starts in 1940, when Las Vegas is merely cheap motels and one-room poker houses. Of course, you bulldoze them. Over the next few decades, you construct glittering meccas of gambling and debauchery. You can build, remodel, reorganize, and sprawl your casinos along the Strip. Should you come up a few million short in your plans for world domination, take those dollars to a competitor’s casino and roll the dice on a gambling spree. Here’s what it looks like in play.
The game comes with a beautiful board of the Vegas Strip, illustrated by the masterful Franz Vohwinkel. It has 45 casino tiles, 55 cards, 40 parking lot tokens, 4 player markers, and loads of paper money—and, oh yeah, 48 dice. Yes, we made a eurogame with 48 dice.
| With the strongly recommended expansion Up!, your casinos build upward, gaining you even more wealth and power. This expands the game from 2-4 players using the base set, to 2-6 players using the base set and Up! The expansion has 45 riser tiles for elevating your casinos, 20 parking lot tokens, 2 player markers, even more money, and 24 more dice, bringing the total to a spine-rattling 72 dice. If you have a copy of the base set but have never gotten your hands on Up!, please take this opportunity to do so. You’ll never play the game the same way again. |
| Here are some nice people saying nice things about Lords of Vegas (click the links for the videos): “Lords of Vegas is the perfect simulation of the reality of gambling in Vegas, only sometimes you win.”—Wil Wheaton, Tabletop “Lords of Vegas is the economic warfare game that we find ourselves recommending the most. The reason that no one should play Monopoly. Ever.”—Shut Up & Sit Down “I have not seen this level of intensity. It goes back and forth fighting over these (casinos). One of the best games of the year.”—Tom Vasel, The Dice Tower (on both Vasel’s and Eric Summerer’s top 10 of 2010) |
| Underworld is the Lords of Vegas expansion we’ve been wanting make for a decade. Ever since the game came out, people have said, “This is great, but where’s the seedy underbelly of Vegas?” We’ve got it for you in Underworld. Faster than you can say “Those are Terry Benedict’s casinos!” you’ll be deep in the muck with mobsters, thieves, grifters, and, worst of all, accountants. This expansion comes with a new Underworld board by Franz. It depicts downtown Las Vegas, the current site of the Fremont Street Experience, north of the main board’s Vegas Strip. It also includes 50 cards, all lovingly illustrated by the talented Nate Taylor. These are all works in progress, and the images are not final. |
Right now, if you own Lords of Vegas, you can help us perfect this expansion. We’ve created a print and play which you can download by going to this page and clicking on the button marked Lords of Vegas Underworld Print and Play. Once you’ve played with it, go to our feedback form and tell us what you think!
Underworld is the expansion we’ve wanted to make for over half a decade. With your help, we can finally introduce the mob to Lords of Vegas.
For diehard Lords of Vegas fans, the 10th Anniversary Boss Bundle is the edition you want. It’s a mobster briefcase box with slots for every single thing in the base game, Up!, and Underworld. Plus, we’ve supplemented the paper money with 100 custom poker chips, which our fans have lobbied for since the game was released. Sorry it took us a decade. We think they’re worth the wait. Check it out. (All of these images are prototypes. Nothing here should be seen as final.)
This thing is kind of a monster. We wanted to make sure that when you pulled this game off your shelf, you felt like a casino magnate. So there’s a felt interior, a rack for the chips, and snug spaces for each player’s components. It’s the box we always wanted Lords of Vegas to be in. (Again, these are very early images, and not final.)
The 10th Anniversary Boss Bundle comes with a copy of the base set, Up!, Underworld, and Dealer’s Choice. Or, if you already own the base set and Up!, you can get it without those at the Boss Bundle (New Stuff Only) level. And if you really want something unique, check out The Big Score Bundle with You In It. That gets you illustrated into one of our promo cards like The Big Score. You or someone you really like will become a Lords of Vegas denizen forever. We’ll send you 10 of your promo card so you can leave your calling card when you next rob the Strip blind.
In 2005, we joined with our buddy Phil Foglio, whom you might know from the Hugo Award-winning graphic novel series Girl Genius, to write and illustrate the definitive book on dealer’s choice poker. We called it Dealer’s Choice: The Complete Handbook of Saturday Night Poker. After it went out of print, we were often begged for copies. So we decided to get the rights to that book back too. We’re excited to offer a brand new 15th anniversary edition of Dealer’s Choice, complete with a new cover. This new edition will be a staple at every poker night you attend.
The Dealer’s Choice softcover contains the rules to 200 poker games, including old favorites like Omaha and Chicago, to bizarre new constructions like Demolition Man, Frankenstein, and Night Baseball of the Living Dead. Plus we’ve added a bunch of additional games courtesy of our columns in Bluff Magazine. The book also features valuable tips for how to host a poker night, how to design your own games, and how to talk like a poker player. Every copy of the book comes with a PDF and an ebook. It’s cool.
This is a strange time to be asking for money for a game. Here’s some things we know.It’s the 10th anniversary of this game, and that only comes around once.We don’t know when things will get better. The economy could rev back up quickly, or things could get worse. We just can’t know.We can’t print the game without help.
So, encouraged by lots of fans on BoardGameGeek, we decided to go ahead with the campaign. Still, most of our opportunities to promote the campaign—conventions, magazines, Twitch play around a table—are not available to us right now. We could use your help. Please share this post as much as you can with people who like games. You can also put this badge on your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Kickstarter icon.
We also want to give back to the Las Vegas community, which was open when we shot our videos. So we’re making a promo card called Vegas Shutdown (named in honor of our other favorite Vegas board game, Henry Stern’s Vegas Showdown). We will be giving funds from this card to the Las Vegas charity Three Square, which feeds people in need. Since it’s a charity thing, and Kickstarter doesn’t do charity campaigns, you can’t buy it in the Kickstarter. But if you pledge for a physical reward in this campaign, you’ll have the first opportunity to get it in our PledgeManager and help Vegas workers in need.
We also want to give back to the Las Vegas community, which was open when we shot our videos. So we’re making a promo card called Vegas Shutdown (named in honor of our other favorite Vegas board game, Henry Stern’s Vegas Showdown). We will be giving funds from this card to the Las Vegas charity Three Square, which feeds people in need. Since it’s a charity thing, and Kickstarter doesn’t do charity campaigns, you can’t buy it in the Kickstarter. But if you pledge for a physical reward in this campaign, you’ll have the first opportunity to get it in our PledgeManager and help Vegas workers in need.
Those are our reasons for doing this now. Once you’re done taking care of your needs for yourself, your family, and your community, if you decide you like the game and would like to contribute, we’d really appreciate it. Thanks, and we hope to see you playing Lords of Vegas around a game table soon.
Cool shows and offers
| Here are a few other things going on with us that might interest you. If you’re stuck at home, here are some listening and viewing options. * Mike recently appeared on two great podcasts: Breaking into Board Games and On Board Games. The latter talks a lot about Lords of Vegas and gambling mechanics. * Mike caught up with old friend Peter Adkison on Gen Con TV’s Fireside, talking about how the history of Dungeons & Dragons and Mike’s life intertwined. * Speaking of Gen Con, Skylar and Mike play a very weird game of Lords of Vegas with Gen Con’s Emma Larkins on Game Night. * You can also listen to Mike’s lecture on game creation from Alaska’s PlatypusCon. Lots of good stuff there. Meanwhile, if you’re up for picking up more games and puzzles, here are some shopping tips. * Our Save Our Sanity offer continues over on our webstore. You can still get copies of Thornwatch, Apocrypha, Sausage Party, Puzzlecraft, and The Ninth World for lower prices during these challenging times. * However, we’ve run out of physical copies of The Maze of Games, The Maze Map, and The Theseus Guide. We’ve begun the process of getting a third printing of the second edition going for the handbook and new printings of the map and guide. (The Keymaster’s Tome still has a few copies left, and of course we never run out of our digital products.) * Speaking of Maze, the iOS app Puzzazz is running a Puzzles With Heart offer for puzzle fans stuck at home. Our solvable ebook of The Maze of Games is 25% off and our ebook of Killer Cryptics is 100% free. Check it out if you have an iDevice. We’re overbrimming with excitement for Lords of Vegas taking flight again. Please check out the Kickstarter and let us know what you think! Your friends at Lone Shark Games |