Lunch, a deck-building game of playground politics from Beta Games, officially launched a new Kickstarter campaign yesterday. At this time, the project is about 50% funded.

In Lunch, factions of third-graders spend a full school year competing for schoolyard domination. Players must recruit and mobilize an army of friends, host elections, negotiate, and control areas. The game supports up to 4 players, and features an elementary school art design.

Beta Games is an LA-based board game company “dedicated to making weird games”. The designers released an official promo trailer for Lunch on YouTube, which includes gameplay in the second half:

Although the Kickstarter campaign page mentions that Lunch will support 2-player gameplay, the BGG page and promo trailer list 3. This may have been an update, but that remains unclear.

Either way, Lunch undoubtedly has a brilliant premise. The juxtaposition of life on the schoolyard and genuine war tactics and is naturally funny. The Kickstarter trailer surprisingly opens with some sketch comedy, so it’s clear that is the intended tone of the game.

The visuals also imitate hand-drawn, imperfect kids’ artwork. It looks very thematic, colorful, and charming. Beta Games’ Jacques Manjarrez mentions illustration experience, and that definitely shines through here.

Even Lunch’s components include amusing little details, such as sticks and pinecone resources. Ideally, the actual gameplay mechanics will be compelling enough to serve the central theme.

The new trailer also mentions interesting goals like deception and trade. So, it may have an appropriately complex system for the shifting balance that war games need.

The designers are already teasing a Nerds vs. Bullies expansion, which sounds like a natural spin. It will even include a narrative campaign booklet, and I’m certainly curious about the kind of storytelling these designers can imagine.

There’s a distinct sincerity in Lunch, which evidently began as an actual middle-school project.

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