Ports of Call: The Board Game

I started using computers in 1981, now 45 years ago, with a ZX81. After a few ZX computers, somewhere around 1987 I got the first computer that looked like a computer, an Amiga 2000. And while I used that computer for years, and played many games on it, there are only a handful of Amiga games I actually remember. Among those was an economic management game called Ports of Call. It was a logistics game, in which you used ships to transport goods across the world, made money, and bought more and better ships. If was fun, and I played it a lot. Now, nearly 40 years later, Ports of Call: The Board Game is looking for crowdfunding on Kickstarter; I backed it.
I fully admit that my decision to back this game was partially fuelled by nostalgia, which generally isn't a good criterion. On the other hand, from what I can see on the Kickstarter page, this is a medium weight game about pickup and delivery, with some economic elements like fluctuating prices and shares. That is something I would like to play, although of course with a Kickstarter game you never know how good the game actually is before it finally arrives. But then, I only backed the €49 early bird base game pledge, which even with shipping and VAT added will not be too expensive to risk.
This is a smaller Kickstarter campaign for a smaller game, not one of those large board game crowdfunding campaigns for $200 games with lots of marketing. On the other hand, they really thought about the timing: Today is the first day of the Spiel 2026 fair in Essen, the largest board game fair in the world. As people will be able to play a demo of the game there, launching a crowdfunding campaign now is perfect timing. On the other hand, I think they missed an opportunity, at least until now, to hand out a few free prototype copies of their game to YouTube board game channel creators; that tends to be rather effective marketing for a comparatively low cost, and can really boost a crowdfunding campaign.Tobold's Blog