One wouldn’t imagine the frantic slicing action of Halfbrick Studios’ breakout mobile hit Fruit Ninja would translate well in the tabletop gaming space. Well surprise: In just under four hours, Lucky Duck Games has successfully raised $10,500 to create not one but three different physical Fruit Ninja games.
Decidedly less messy and dangerous than just buying a bunch of fruit and a couple of swords, Lucky Duck’s three Fruit Ninja tabletop games utilize cards, dice and the odd prop to simulate the murder of defenseless produce. The company contacted more than 50 game designers from around the world, asking them to submit prototypes for review. Of the 20 prototypes submitted, Lucky Duck narrowed the group down to three.
Fruit Ninja : Slice & Dice is a cleverly-titled dice-based game. Players roll dice to generate fruits, then use their cards to claim combos based on which fruits are available after rolling. It sounds sort of like a multiplayer Yahtzee, where everybody rolls and then scrabbles over a collective dice pool to form the best hand.
Fruit Ninja: Card Master is a fast-paced deck-building game in which players use cards to simulate fruit destruction. It’s a little dense, so Lucky Duck commissioned YouTube’s Man Vs. Meeple to show people how to play.
And finally there is Fruit Ninja: Combo Party, which comes with a cool little board and a stick. Once again players are using cards to create combos, but this time if two players have the same fruit they can attempt to grab the stick thing in order to score a bonus. That’s how punching happens. I approve.
The three games are currently the subject of Kickstarter campaign, which launched earlier today and achieved its goal of $10,500 in under four hours, ruining my initial kneejerk “No one is going to want this” reaction. Apparently people want this, and they’re willing to wait until August of 2018 to get it. Fruit Ninja tabletop games. Who knew?