There’s a battle royale-themed board game on Kickstarter right now

There’s a battle royale-themed board game on Kickstarter right now, and it just so happens to look a lot like Fortnite. From the cartoon characters to the presentation of weapons and equipment to the reliance on bold primary colors, the inspiration seems pretty obvious.

The game is called Last One Standing: The Battle Royale Board Game, and with a modest ask of just over $18,700, it has a good chance of being funded before the all-or-nothing deadline hits. The basic pledge runs $40 and includes all unlocked stretch goals.

Judging from the campaign page, Last One Standing looks pretty straightforward. Two to eight players drop onto the modular game board, gather loot and gun each other down. Character inventories are managed using cards placed on a set of color-coded sideboards. The developer, Brendan McCaskell, says that playtime runs about 10 minutes per player. There are also a few nods to PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, including markers for random artillery strikes.

Epic Games

McCaskell tells Polygon that this is his first production board game. While it’s technically being self-published, manufacturing and fulfillment are being handled by reputable names in the board game business. The prototype was made by the boutique print-on-demand service called The Game Crafter, and the end result looks pretty slick. Of note is the fact that the game will not include plastic miniatures, but rely on cardboard standees instead.

At least one game group in Florida has had their hands on it, and published a video review of the prototype. They seem to have enjoyed their time with it. McCaskell also paid The Dice Tower to put up a preview. The Kickstarter page includes a handy playthrough video. Meanwhile, the campaign page originally misquoted at least one of the other outlets that has covered the game in print. The folks over at Beasts of War said that “hopefully, there is enough variety in the gameplay to make it stand out as something to play repeatedly.” For a time McCaskell used the quote, but without the “hopefully” part. It’s since been corrected.

This is far from the first instance of someone following up the battle royale craze with a game of their own. Epic Games, itself the developer and publisher of Fortnite, drew scorn from the team behind PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds when it announced its own battle royale-style game mode. We’ve reached out to Epic to get its take on this Kickstarter campaign.

As far as tabletop games are concerned, however, this isn’t the first game to raise eyebrows for borrowing heavily from a popular media franchise. Most recently the tabletop role-playing system Kids on Bikes raised more than $93,000 by pretty much taking the plot of Stranger Things and turning it into a game mechanic.

The campaign for Last One Standing runs through May 31.