If you have ever finished a series and immediately started rewriting it in your head, Showrunner is pointed straight at you. It is a solo-only card game where you run a television show and try to climb the ratings, hooking as many viewers as you can each week. The catch, as the campaign page puts it, is that "you're not the only show on the air, so you'll have to find ways to keep your viewers coming back for more."
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Find events near youThe Gamefound campaign has raised $34,198 from 1,012 backers against a $5,000 goal. It launched on 14 July and cleared that goal in roughly half an hour. Backing closes in the early hours of Saturday 1 August, UK time, so this is a decision for the next few days rather than the next few weeks.
One player, about 30 minutes, ages 14 and up: Showrunner is built for solo play and nothing else. It comes from Gabe Barrett, who runs Best With 1 Games and the Board Game Design Lab, and the campaign sits under a "Solo Game of the Month" banner. If you have been waiting for a small, quick game to keep on the shelf for evenings when nobody else is free, this is aimed squarely at that gap.
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See how it worksWorth flagging: the campaign's public pitch is heavier on premise than on how a turn actually works, so you are backing the concept and Barrett's track record with one-player design rather than a mechanism you can already picture. For a game at this price and length that is a reasonable bet, but go in knowing it.
The theme does a lot of work regardless. Ratings races, rival programming and the constant scramble to hold an audience are things a card game can model neatly without a two-hour rulebook. Whether it grabs you comes down to whether "primetime scheduling war" sounds like a fun half hour or a work meeting.
Sources: Gamefound
