I actually have a card/party style game that I’ve been working on and is in the early stages of looking for a publisher/crowdfunding. I wish I could figure out a way to talk a bit about it without powerleveling too much. It‘s been really fun making it, and when I finally got two full production prototypes, it was one of the cooler moments of my life.
absolutely make it solid first, the easiest way to get a publisher is demo it at a con so they can get a feel for it (difficult with corona tho). same for crowdfunding, people want to see the goods first in form of rules and compnents, and unless you can whore it out via minis CMON style people will dissect it hard trying to break it. before that have your friends go over it repeatedly, playtesting is the absolute biggest part of the whole process. helps if you got some who are competitive enough wanting to break it too.
with the boardgame boom there are a lot of games that look nice, play nice but have some degree of jank which ruins the whole thing one way or another, be it the interaction of mechanics, balance, scoring or a combination of - still remember a story where the "official" errata from the author was along the lines "just ignore it, you don't have to use it anyway" - dude if I buy your game I expect that kind of shit to be taken care off, else I can just make anything up myself for free.
otoh if you make sure your stuff is solid that can go a long way since even with cult of the new people tend to go back to the "good" game at some point. every year during gencon/spiel there's a few "hot" new games you don't hear anything about weeks later (heck that can even happen to good games).
As far as not-my-games - I played Imperial Assault for the first time last month with a friend, and we actually agreed to replay the first mission. I think we both went into it expecting it to play a lot like a tactical miniatures game - which it sort of does - but it really seems to be more about managing time & threat pressure, rather than about actually fighting enemies and having Fire Emblem style fun.
it goes all the way back to the doom boardgame which was basically a race to get out before you get fucked by the overlord, that hasn't really changed, even with the coop variant.
if you want proper versus you need to play skirmish, not sure if the rules are included.
never played FE, so couldn't really compare, but are you looking for a more narrative dungeon crawl?
