Cheapass Games will release the new card game Pairs to trade in September, after wrapping up an extremely successful Kickstarter campaign this week.
 
Designed by James Ernest and Paul Peterson, Pairs is a simple, portable card game, intended to be played anywhere.  It is teachable in seconds, and allows players to join the game or leave at the end of any game (usually five minutes), making it perfect for tavern play.
 
Cards are labeled 1 through 10, with each card in the deck in proportion to its rank (one "1" card, two "2" cards, and so on up to ten "10" cards).  The goal is simple:  avoid getting a pair or lose the round, and get the number of points that appear on the pair.  Players may fold and take the number of points on the lowest card in play.  The loser is the first player to reach the target score (determined by the total number of players).  The game is for 2 – 8 players, and plays in 3 – 5 minutes. 
 
The core deck will feature artwork drawn by Shane Tyree based on The Name of the Wind book by Patrick Rothfuss, will carry an MSRP of $10.00, and is packaged in a tuck box.  Variant art decks featured in the Kickstarter (by Brett Bean, Nate Taylor, Cheyenne Wright, John Kovalic, and Phil & Kaja Foglio among others) will also likely be made available at a tentative MSRP of $12.00.  James Ernest said he will be surveying retailers at GTS next week to gauge interest in which additional art variant decks to bring to trade.
 
While the over $226,000 in pledges is nowhere near to cracking the Top 10 Tabletop Games Kickstarters list (see "Top 10 Tabletop Game Kickstarters"),  that it has garnered pledges from over 5,500 individuals is noteworthy, even considering the  low price point which is the Cheapass trademark.  
 
Ernest credits both author Patrick Rothfuss’s dedicated fan base (as a demonstration of that pull, Name of the Wind playing cards Kicked at nearly $600,000 last summer), and the fact that most backers have purchased multiple copies of the game for the alternate art versions as the reason for the success.  "If you think about it as 12 games kicking at $25k each, it makes a lot more sense," Ernest said.  "In a way, that's what this is, but since the form factor is the same on each game, I can economize and print them all together.  Friends are already telling me that they want to copy that aspect of the campaign."