Bad Baby Lich Lords relaunches crowdfunding for ‘Saturday morning cartoon’ competitive card game

Lightning-quick card battler Bad Baby Lich Lords has returned to Kickstarter for a second go at crowdfunding a title inspired by Saturday morning cartoons in both its theme and art style.

Published by Heart of the Deernicorn, makers of gorgeous RPG Fall of Magic and BFF! – Best Friends Forever RPG, Bad Baby Lich Lords pits two to four players against each other as children of the titular Lich Lord. While daddy sleeps, his rambunctious kiddos are taking turns reanimating and blasting the denizens of different realms in an attempt to garner his attention.

The publisher initially attempted to crowdfund the title on Kickstarter in October of last year but eventually cancelled, claiming in one update that their expertise didn’t exactly transition from big, sprawling tabletop RPGs to a compact and agile card game.

“We are best known for our ttrpgs and did not follow a traditional route for a board game kickstarter (in terms of building a large email list, advertisements, early prototypes, and working with reviewers and content creators),” Heart of the Deernicorn wrote on the old project’s page. “We followed a kickstarter model that has worked well for our ttrpgs and it's been a big learning curve stepping into the board game market.”

Bad Baby Lich Lords’ appropriate return from the dead accompanies a leaner page that prioritises product shots, exclusive add-ons and other promotional items that have become baseline expectations from crowdfunding backers in the tabletop space. While I’ll refrain from putting a moral judgement on HotD adopting Kickstarter posturing, the actual game seems largely unchanged from a design standpoint - which is a huge bonus considering the gameplay had been tested to a laser focus and delivered an incredibly fun experience.

What has changed is the addition of playmats created by the artisans at the Deernicorn Workshop in Washington state. The hand-crafted and printed aesthetics manage to split the difference between Bad Baby Lich Lord’s cartoonish and zany art style and HotD’s ethereal, painterly inclinations.

The Kickstarter campaign for Bad Baby Lich Lords will run through July 13th in order to create a physical game that the publisher currently estimates will begin shipping to backers in May 2024.