Every day I check Kickstarter's 'upcoming board games' section in case there's something really worth writing about, and every day I scroll past a half dozen or more different crowdfunding campaigns for 3D printable miniatures of big-busted fantasy women. I'm not scandalized and I'm not even surprised - but I am a little disappointed that with so many people being horny on main, there's very little creativity on show.
Ground zero for horny board game Kickstarter is, to my best estimation, Kingdom Death Monster - which you will absolutely not find on Wargamer's guide to the best sex board games. An early mega success for the crowdfunding platform, KDM is a bizarro blend of boss rush, settlement builder, and art project, with a transgressive art style expressed in genuinely excellent horror miniatures, and an awful lot of cheesecake. By January 2013 the Kickstarter had raised $2 million, no small part of which came from 'Pin-up' add-on miniatures, scantily clad display counterparts to the main game's survivors.
That, of course, is hardly the origin of nude statues. Simplified representations of nude women are among the oldest surviving human artwork: the Venus of Willendorf, and many other forms like it, dates to roughly 30,000 BCE.
Whether these were fertility icons, representations of a mother goddess, self-portraits, or pornography, is unknowable - but humans appear to have made figurines of women with big boobs for as long as there have been humans. (The earliest phallic representation, the Hohle Fels phallus, is about 2,000 years more recent).
The 3D printable nude statues that proliferate on Kickstarter simplify women in a remarkably similar way to those paleolithic forebears, with massive busts and oversized buttocks. But there's a curated cowardice in these contemporary attempts.
In a marked step back from prehistoric art, you won't see anything as challenging as a vulva. The limit is set mostly by obscenity standards on crowdfunding platforms, but it reflects a bloodless insincerity which treats women's bodies as objects of sexual desire, without acknowledging conflicting but equally primal realities - pregnancy, child birth, and the very fine line between life and death that these represent.
An acknowledgement that sex, desire, and blood are tightly connected is one thing that separates the core game of Kingdom Death Monster - which is still very libidinous, in the fantasy tradition of Frazetta and Royo - from its own pin-ups and the wider range of generic nudey minis. The Wet Nurse is one of the most iconic figures to emerge from the company, a monster that I can only describe as being made from sex organs, connected by probing umbilical tentacles to enormously pregnant women.
It is not a delicate attempt to explore transgressive horror themes - the women are greatly sexualised - but the underlying idea challenges passive consumption by reconnecting concepts of sex, reproduction, and trauma that have become disconnected by pop culture. Those themes pervade Kingdom Death Monster's tribal survival gameplay loop. The sex and nudity have an artistic purpose beyond titillation.
Everyone has a right to goon, of course, and I'm no arbiter of what they use for inspiration. There's just something very old-fashioned, unambitious, about the statuettes being sold on Kickstarter.
In 1997 and 1998 Japanese artist Takashi Murakami created a pair of statues, Hiropon and My Lonesome Cowboy, as part of his 'superflat' art project which critiqued the consumer culture of Japan through grotesque mimicry and over-exaggeration. The two statues are styled to look like anime collector's figures, but are actually larger than life; Hiropon depicts a young woman with colossal breasts bursting out of her bikini and spraying streams of breast milk, while My Lonesome Cowboy is a male nude who is gripping a huge erection, circled by a magical lasso of ejaculate. Murakami was satirizing Japan's material culture in the 1990s, but he could equally be sending up Kickstarter pin-up miniatures in 2025.
Given that much of the history of human art has been defined by attempts to circumnavigate the social mores of the day to depict something titillating - take a look at Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in the Santa Maria della Vittoria church in Rome for an example of how even Catholic religious art can be horny on main - I don't think that a wider range of expression is beyond the wit of humankind.
Tools for personal expression are incredibly easy to access, and, for a while longer at least, decency standards in the West permit an extremely wide range of creativity. With all that freedom, can we see some ideas that weren't old before the end of the last millennium?
While I can't say that erotic statuary and sex in board gaming are common topics of conversation in the Wargamer Discord community, all forms of (civil) conversation are welcome. You can also get a roundup of the best articles on Wargamer each week by subscribing to our newsletter.