Tobold's Blog
Thursday, October 22, 2026
 
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.

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Comments:
Nothing wrong with Nostalgia. Its the main driver behind the entire gaming industry at the moment. Speaking of which any plans on dipping your toes into WoW Forever?

My friend group, including many who haven't played any version of WoW in years, are going to try it. I expect most if not all won't make it beyond a couple weeks.
 
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