Board Game Geek

by W. Eric Martin

▪️ As it did in 2024, U.S. publisher 25th Century Games has picked up several titles released in other countries for a January "import collection" crowdfunding campaign. Four of the six titles have been revealed to date:

— Geonil's The Yellow House from Mandoo Games (my overview)
— Geoffrey Chia's Kabuki Tricks from Good Spirit Games
— Arthur Hodzhikov's Intent to Kill from Hobby World
— Stan Kordonskiy's The First Tsar: Ivan the Terrible, also from Hobby World

▪️ While walking the halls at SPIEL '19, I spotted a Japanese game that included a tiny set of cups and dishes:

Image: Joseph Summa
That game was Where am I? Alice in a Mad Tea Party, a 2-4 player game from Kazutaka Yanagawa and Gotta2 — and in 2025 Japanime Games will crowdfund a new edition of this game to make it available in more locations. In fact, Japanime is funding two editions of this game that can be combined for play with up to eight at the table. Here's what you'll be doing:

In the game of Where am I?, you are a character who has strayed into Alice's Wonderland. After being invited, you attend a tea party...hiding your identity.

You earn points if you make the party gorgeous by collecting cups and pots in front of your pawn — but if someone else correctly figures out your identity, your points are claimed by that player. Anyone may place cups and pots on the table, with their pawn going on any chair. When you make a move, you should be cautious not to give a hint of your identity to anyone else.

At the end of the game, the highest scorer wins.

▪️ Publisher Grand Gamers Guild is distributing PASS, a 2023 ladder-climbing game from designer Yu Wang and publisher Board Game Rookie, in the United States. Here's an overview of this 2-5 player game:

Each player has a hand of 13 cards, with each card having values on each end. Cards start with the white side up. If you lead a trick, you play a set of cards — single, pair, straight, full house, etc. — and other players can beat this only by playing a higher set. On a turn, they either play a higher set or pass to sit out the rest of the trick and take a PASS token. Play continues until all but one person has passed, then that player leads a new set.

On a future turn, you can spend a PASS token to flip cards being played to their upgraded end or to augment a set so that you can match what someone else has played, e.g., a pair of As, and be considered higher.

Whoever empties their hand first wins a crown, and the player who first claims three crowns wins.

▪️ Japanese publisher SUNNY BIRD is partnering with U.S. publisher Capstone Games for a February 2025 crowdfunding campaign for Kentaro Yazawa's FALLING.


Here's an overview of this 1-4 player game:

One day, a tower fell from the sky, and you are an explorer searching for valuable relics and other items in that crumbling tower. By placing special devices in the tower, you increase the income of certain resources in the game, but as the round progresses, the towers collapse and these devices are returned to the players, granting them an even larger bonus! Additional bonuses can be obtained by converting resources using cards to create combos or by scoring victory points.

During set-up, players choose one of twelve sidekicks that each provide a unique ability.

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

▪️ Square Moon is a new French publisher that will debut in 2025 with the release of Super, a card game for 2-4 players from Johannes Goupy and Jérémy Ducret:

Over a decade ago, the legendary superhero agency "The Guardians" closed its doors, shaken by a political scandal of unparalleled magnitude. To this day, no other superhero group has managed to captivate the masses in the same way and come close to its sixty million followers. The disappearance of The Guardians left a vast void, an empty throne at the pinnacle of superhero glory waiting for the one who can rekindle the flame of universal admiration.

You, the ambitious director of a major Super agency, are determined to change that and inscribe your name and that of your agency in history. The race to surpass the mythical threshold of sixty million followers is on, and you're at the forefront, ready to take on the challenge.

Your arsenal? A collection of Supers with unmatched talents, each proudly displaying the colors of their alliance, demonstrating their power through the number of stars that glitter next to their name, and most importantly, possessing unique powers that, under certain conditions, can turn the tide of a mission. Every recruitment is a step closer to glory, every mission accomplished a chance to gain new followers.

Completed missions allow you to acquire various bonuses and precious resources to strengthen your agency, but the ultimate reward is not measured in material wealth; it's measured in millions of followers. Collect sixty million first, and you win.

▪️ The French game publisher Topla is not new, but in 2024 it launched a "Positive Energy and Mental Agility" line, with one of those titles being the two-player game CATOrCAT from Elodie Dubois and Nicolas Walther:

You're searching for cats in CATOrCAT, but you never know exactly how many cats you'll find, which is a problem since you're trying to collect a precise number of cats each turn.

Both players have objective cards numbered 3-9, and to set up, shuffle the cat cards and lay out five piles of eight cards with the cat images on top.

Sample objectives (at top) and cat cards
On a turn, reveal an objective in your hand, then take a cat card from the top of a pile and reveal the number on its reverse side. That number will match either the number of whole cats on the front of the card or the number of whole and partial cats; each card appears four times, with its two values appearing twice. If the number doesn't exceed your objective, you can draw again. Ideally the sum of the revealed numbers will match your objective, allowing you to score it; otherwise, you discard it.

Once both players have tried to meet all of their objectives, whoever has scored the most wins.

▪️ Another 2024 Topla release from Dubois and Walther is Summer 1960:

In Summer 1960, you want to empty your hand to score as few points as possible.

To set up, lay out the nine flower cards in a 3x3 grid, and deal each player a hand of seven cards. On a turn, play a card onto the matching flower space — but only so long as the number on your card doesn't already appear in that row and column. If you can't play a card, draw from the deck, playing it immediately if possible and otherwise adding it to your hand. If you notice three cards of the same number on the board, whether after you play or on someone else's turn, you can call "Trio" and claim those cards from the board.

When a player's hand is empty, everyone sums the value of cards in their hand, then subtracts 1 for each trio they collected.

For the second round, the only change to gameplay is that when someone collects a trio, you discard those cards, then give the cards in your hand to your left-hand opponent. After two rounds, the player with the lowest score wins.

▪️ Verso is a 2025 release for 1-6 players from Alexis Allard, Joan Dufour, and Gigamic:

Flip your cards in Verso to uncover vibrant landscapes of land, sea, or sky while trying to create sequences and form squares.

To set up, create a deck with 15 cards per player. Each card is double-sided, with a color (blue, green, or orange), a value (1–6 or a joker), and victory points (1 or 3) on one side; the reverse side will have a different color, the other VP value, and an adjacent number (4 or 6 if the front side is a 5) or a joker.

On a turn, either draw a card or bank a sequence. If you draw, take the top card of the deck and either keep it without looking at the back or flip it; add it to your display, keeping each color in its own row. If you would place a card identical to what you already have, discard it instead.

If you have 2-6 cards in sequence in a single color, you can bank them. Take VP tokens from the reserve equal to the sum of the VP on the sequenced cards, then discard the two highest cards in your sequence. Each neighboring player must flip their highest non-joker card in this same color, discarding it if it matches a card they already have and otherwise placing it in the correct row.

If you ever have a 3x3 square of cards — that is, three cards in each of the three colors — you score 7 VP, regardless of whose turn it is. You must bank a sequence before you can score a square again.

When the deck runs out, each player banks one sequence (without causing their neighbors to flip anything), then the player with the most points wins.

You can also play Verso solo, alternating turns with a simulated opponent that may flip one of your highest cards to a different color. Try to top the designers' top score of 64.

▪️ To circle back to where we started, in the first half of 2025 Bombyx will release Legions, a two-player game set in the Abyss universe from Bruno Cathala, Charles Chevallier, and Johannes Goupy(!) in which players compete to reign over the districts of the city and by extension the Throne of the Kingdom.

Sample card art Read more »

by Clarence Simpson

A reprint of A Message From The Stars should be hitting retail shelves just in time for Christmas 2024. How did such an unusual game come to be? Well, it all started because of Zendo.

A Faint Signal

In 2019, I attended my first major board game convention: PAX Unplugged. I had started doing board game design seriously earlier that year and was excited to connect with other designers who I had met online via Twitter.

Twitter link
One evening, one of those designers, Zach Hoekstra, introduced me to a little game called Zendo, which has been around since 2001. I had heard of it and was familiar with the little plastic Looney Labs pyramids that were the main component of the game, but I had never played.

Zach taught us the basic concept in less than a minute. The game consists primarily of lots of square pyramids of various sizes and colors. To start the game, one player becomes the game master and creates a simple rule about the way a set of pyramids can be configured on the table.

Rules could theoretically be anything, but were generally something like "Small pyramids cannot touch the table" or "There must be more red pyramids than blue pyramids" or "Yellow pyramids must be laying on their side". Only the game master knows the rule, but they start by providing two example pyramid configurations: one that satisfies the rule, and one that doesn't.

A Zendo game in progress
After that, it's the goal of the other players to discover the rule through experimentation. Players take turns creating any configuration of pyramids they want, then the game master marks each configuration as satisfying the rule or not.

There's a few other details, but that's the core of the game, and it was absolutely fascinating to me. I had never played anything like it. The play pattern of performing experiments, then slowly learning from the results of those experiments felt like I was uncovering the laws of some minuscule fictional universe.

I started researching Zendo on BoardGameGeek and found that it listed induction, which I had never heard of before, as its core mechanism. In games based on induction, players attempt to discover the rules governing a situation by repeatedly performing experiments and interpreting the often horribly incomplete knowledge gained from those experiments. You can think of it as the gamification of the scientific method.

Induction vs. deduction
It turns out that induction is a type of logic far less common in games than its more famous big brother, deduction. Back in 2019, only a handful of games had ever been published that used it, and I couldn't understand why. Discovering underexplored areas of game design always gets me excited, and I knew then I wanted to design a game that used induction as its core mechanism — but it would take a few years before I pushed forward with a workable idea.

Deciphering the Code

After PAX Unplugged 2019, I decided 2020 was going to be the year I started going to all the major conventions; instead, we all went into pandemic lockdown. I stopped meeting with my weekly design group and started learning Tabletop Simulator. I explored many new designs during this time, but the induction game was never more than a vague long-term goal and took a back seat to other designs.

I also switched from hosting in-person game nights to virtual game nights. This was when I fell in love with The Shipwreck Arcana, a deduction game about guessing the number between 1 and 7 that other players have in their hands. That's an accurate but terrible description of a wonderful game. It became my most played game of 2020 and reminded me how much I enjoy logic games.

The Shipwreck Arcana components
Fast forward to May 2021: After another delightful session of The Shipwreck Arcana, I decide to take a real shot at designing an induction game, but first I need to decide what kind of secret rules and experiments there would be in the game.

At some point in the brainstorming, my thoughts go to word games. They're very divisive, but I've always enjoyed them and wanted to design one someday. Word games are also notoriously difficult to pitch, and many publishers won't touch them at all, so I had long ago shelved my hope to design a word game unless I could come up with something unique and compelling. Maybe this was it? Could I combine word games with induction?

Scrabble letter tiles
It's hard to think of word games without thinking of Scrabble, and one of the core rules of Scrabble is that each letter has a value and the value of a word is the sum of its letter values. What if these values could be the secret rules? Maybe the experiments could be players creating a word, getting a value for that word, then trying to use logic to guess the values of each letter? And maybe the ultimate goal of the game is to create the highest-scoring word possible, given the secret letter values for that particular game session?

Of course, guessing the values of every letter in the alphabet would be too much. It would be more reasonable to guess a handful of letter values, so what if most letters had no value, but a few random letters did?

After more thought, I decided that assigning random numeric values to certain letters would be inelegant, fiddly, and uninteresting. I was sure there was more design space to explore. What if the game has three letter value categories? Maybe some letters are worth 1 point, some double the total score of the word, and some make the word score 0 no matter what else was present? That would create uncertainty about what a particular letter is doing to your word's score, would create strong incentives to find the doubler and zero letters because they affect your final word score the most, and would create tension around trying to carefully craft that final high-scoring word. It sounded like an interesting puzzle to me.

I needed to start writing all of this down.


Letters From the Otherside

I keep a huge Google Doc full of rough game ideas that are each only a paragraph or a handful of bullet points at most. In that file, I typed out rules for a game I initially called "Letter Sleuth". Soon after, I decided to theme it around psychics communicating with a single spirit player and renamed it "Letters From the Otherside", which I really liked for the double meaning of "letters".

A couple days of brainstorming resulted in a rough set of rules that I hadn't yet tested or even made a prototype for, but the overwhelming majority of those rules still remain in the final version of A Message From The Stars.

First set of rules from my board game ideas Google Doc
I created a first playable prototype in Tabletop Simulator, which was awkward for this type of game, but did work. I brought it to online meetings of the Game Designers of North Carolina and Nonepub, the online-only pandemic version of the Unpub playtesting convention. Its first playtests went surprisingly well. Players were engaged, and the puzzle was interesting. I was cautiously optimistic.

First Tabletop Simulator prototype
By July 2021, COVID cases were down and vaccinations were up, so my design group was starting to get together for occasional in-person meetings — which meant I had to figure out how to make "Letters From the Otherside" work as a physical game. It was going to require a lot of writing, and I was a little worried about it being affordable to manufacture.

For my first rough proof-of-concept prototype, I scrounged together a bunch of random stuff to make it work. I printed out Ouija boards on slips of paper. Players could use those to note secret letters they suspected of being in a certain scoring category. I used a clear acrylic sign holder to serve as a large dry-erase board where all the public info would be recorded. I gave the spirit player a board where they could randomly deal out letter cards into different scoring categories. That board was placed out of view behind a game master's screen I had lying around from an old tabletop RPG. It wasn't a pretty set-up, but it actually worked!


First physical prototype
At that point, I was starting to feel confident about the core of the game, but I wanted to refine certain details based on player feedback. One important change that I made around this time was in how the letter cards were distributed to each scoring category. Originally, I imagined that each category would have a minimum threshold of letter frequency. I had hoped that would guarantee that certain categories, such as the 1-point "trust" letters, would naturally appear in words more frequently than the other categories.

In my original prototype, I looked up stats on the frequencies of each letter in the English language, then I assigned each letter a frequency value from 1-5, with 1 being most uncommon. I put those frequency values on each letter card, then I gave each scoring type a frequency threshold. The idea was that, during set-up, you would keep dealing new random cards into each category until that category's threshold was met.

Letter cards with frequencies
As a result, you might have a low number of common letters or a high number of uncommon letters. In my mind, that would give each category a consistent chance of turning up in a random word, while each scoring type would still be tied to random letters.

In practice, this was a terrible idea. The "frequency" jargon was difficult to understand. Players now had to do arithmetic during set-up. The worst part, however, was that in spite of my hope that the frequency system would create consistency across random sessions, it actually did the opposite. Sometimes you had one trust letter, but sometimes you had five, and those games felt very different.

I scrapped that system and came up with a new, simpler method to distribute the letter cards. I opted to divide the alphabet into ten common and sixteen uncommon letters. The game was typically too easy if most letters were common, and too hard if they were mostly uncommon, so I set strict requirements about how many of each letter type could go in each scoring category. These new requirements guaranteed both a diversity of letters in every game and a more consistent experience, and they are the system we use in the final product.

Revamped letter categories
For some of the most uncommon letters, I thought they would be extremely difficult to use in words, but I also wanted them to be a potential challenge players might have to deal with. I marked them as "tough", and you had to tell the players how many tough letters you drew. In the final product, you're capped at a max of one tough letter in the entire set.

I designed those restrictions about which letters could go where specifically to create a more consistent experience — but it also had side effects on the logic puzzle that I wasn't expecting. For example, only one letter can be a common trust letter, which means that if you find one, you can now eliminate all other common letters as possible trust letters. This was an unintended side effect, but I loved this as a new vector for the logic to work in.

Eventually, I found one final, terrible pain point in the game. As the person who knew the game best, I typically played the role of the spirit, especially with first-time players, and rarely made mistakes when giving values to words, but I needed to test other players doing it as well — and in one test, the spirit player made no fewer than four mistakes in calculating word values to give to the psychics. The test was a disaster.

It's relatively common for logic games to fall apart when someone with secret information gives players incorrect information, but I had hoped there was a way to actively prevent that from happening here. This might be a chance to put my software engineering skills to work!

I scraped together a crude web app in which the spirit player could enter the secret letters from their random set-up. Then, they could type in any word, and the app would calculate the value for them. It worked great and calmed all reservations I had about the spirit player making mistakes.

The helper web app
Transmissions Into the Boundless Dark

At this point, I was thinking the game was pitch-ready. It didn’t feel broken anymore and was doing what I wanted it to do pretty consistently, so I spent the rest of 2021 sending out e-mail pitches to publishers where I thought it might be a fit. I racked up a dozen or so rejections in this time. It was mostly just confused reactions to what was admittedly an unusual concept.

Twitter link
The game convention circuit reopened in December 2021 with PAX Unplugged. I updated my physical prototype to use the screen from Mysterium as the new spirit screen. I pitched around in person at the con, but still got a lot of lukewarm responses with no real interest.

But then, a few weeks later, by sheer coincidence, something incredible happened: Wordle.

Twitter link
In December 2021 and January 2022, Wordle had gone completely viral and was dominating social media. Everyone was sharing their scores. Even the most casual gamers were making time to play their five-minute Wordle every single day. Developers and designers were analyzing it and trying to figure out the magic sauce that made it so popular and how to replicate that success.

Most importantly, I thought it suddenly made the idea of a word game combined with a logic puzzle a normal, accessible, everyday thing...and I thought there would certainly be publishers hoping to tap into that success. I had a new angle for pitching the game.

In the following months, I pitched to another dozen or so publishers. They ultimately led nowhere, but I could tell that the pitch didn't seem as crazy anymore. Some publishers actually spent time playtesting the game before rejecting it.

Twitter link
Then, in May 2022, at the Unpub convention in Baltimore, I met Joe Wiggins, the new COO of BoardGameTables.com, which would soon after rebrand as Allplay. He quickly fell in love with two of my prototypes: "Letters From the Otherside" and "Dino Dinner Time", which would later become Chomp.

Within a week of Unpub, I had an offer for both games. They were good offers and were with a company that I saw as having an upward trajectory and big dreams, with the resources to pull it off, so I signed the contract and became part of the Allplay family!

Mutual Understanding

Soon after signing with Allplay, Joe and I started discussing what needed to be done to make the game fit in the Allplay catalog. He was already largely happy with the core gameplay as is, but some tweaks and details still needed to be worked out, so Joe pulled in Brieger Creative to develop the game.

One of the first orders of business was to settle on a theme and a title because the spooky spirit theme wasn't going to be a good fit for Allplay. We briefly toyed with doing a pulpy espionage theme, but quickly pivoted to the current theme of receiving and deciphering messages from space aliens. The game also received its final name: A Message From The Stars. I loved how evocative the name was and began to get excited about what the game could become.


Alien screen and box back cover
We also had a big decision to make in the overall structure of the game. We all knew the core mechanisms of logic and message passing were solid — but the game could still take on many different forms with those same mechanisms.

Originally, the game had one alien player and everyone else was a scientist competing individually to get the highest score. That worked, but wasn't quite as friendly or accessible to players who aren't huge fans of logic puzzles and word games.

Later, I tried a team vs. team mode in which teams of scientists competed against each other. That provided a nice new layer of collaboration to the puzzle. Finally, I tried a purely co-op mode, with one alien and a team of scientists. That worked, too, and had the advantage of supporting just two players.

In the end, we settled on the co-op mode as the default, but also included an alternate team vs. team mode for people who wanted more competition and support for up to eight players, though I consider the player count to be unlimited in a way. I could imagine it being played by a classroom full of people with words and values being written up on the whiteboard. If anyone tries that, please take pictures and let me know!


One other important structural update was made to the role of the alien player. In my original prototype, the alien player was more of a game master role, knowing all the information and assigning values to the scientists' words, similar to how Zendo works. It was a passive role with a lot of downtime, which I didn't love. Personally, I didn't mind playing the alien, and I knew others also enjoyed watching the scientists figure out the puzzle, but some players would bounce hard off that role if they had no agency in the game.

Joe suggested we try letting the alien send half of the messages. That had never occurred to me and sounded crazy at first. After all, the alien already knows everything! Won't it be too easy? Well, it turns out that as long as you give the alien the same secondary goal of getting the scientists to guess their own set of secret words, that word association requirement keeps it from becoming trivial.

This change did a few things: It made the whole game feel like a conversation, like messages were actually getting passed back and forth; it gave the alien player something to do and their own little puzzle to solve about how to get information to the scientists efficiently; and it meant the alien player now felt like part of the team rather than a game master.

But it also made the game significantly easier.

Prior to the change, when the alien was just a game master, the scientists rarely figured out all the secret letters and messages. Every piece of information discovered felt like an accomplishment. After the change, there was a high tendency toward many groups getting high scores, missing only a point or two.

The alien was powerful and could help their group considerably. It felt great to be presented with a seemingly impossible task, then accomplish most, if not all of it, but some players complained that the game was now too easy, especially if they got a perfect score on their first try.

The rulebook has an official hard mode, but I proposed another variant on the BoardGameGeek forums to add difficulty to the game by weakening the alien: The alien can never use the suspicious letter. That felt thematic since it's the one letter the alien doesn't like, but it also gave the scientists a challenge in which they were completely on their own in completing it. I knew that it was still possible because in most of my playtests, the alien was a game master that couldn't help the scientists, so that variant feels like a slight return to the more challenging roots of the design.

Endgame with final contact words "Ninjas" and "Abandonments"
Next, we had to tackle the endgame. The core play patterns were fun, but what was the ultimate goal of the game and how would we score it? Prior to signing with Allplay, my design goal was always that the players would first learn the secret rules, then demonstrate their knowledge by using and applying them in practice.

Mechanically, the way that used to work was that after all the normal message passing rounds, there would be a "final contact" phase of the game. In final contact, each team of scientists would work together to create a single final word with the highest word value. Whichever team got the highest word value in final contact won.

Thus, you wanted lots of amplify letters to double your word score and absolutely wanted to avoid suspicious letters that made your word score negative. Sometimes players would write clever words with incredibly high values. Also, since the game was harder back then, players often didn't know everything and had to make educated guesses about letters. It made for a fun moment and reveal of how their word scored.

I even thought that final contact could have a fun tie-in with the new theme. You would write your final word on a spaceship-shaped dry erase board, hand it to the alien, then they would add a number to it and hand it back. Doing that, you could conceivably end up with stuff like "Apollo 13". Thematically, you were naming your spaceship that would travel to meet the alien, and you didn't want to name it something that would offend the alien.

Ultimately, though, after deeper playtesting, we realized final contact wasn't working well. It slowed down the game considerably, and we were targeting a shorter playtime. The big reveal was also a bit convoluted and sometimes hard to understand. What's more, the phase was heavily focused on testing your vocabulary rather than testing your logic like the rest of the game.

We scrapped it and went with the much simpler "1 point per secret letter, 1 point per secret word" scoring that's in the final product. I was sad that we had to give up on letting players use what they learned, but it made for a much smoother and quicker endgame.

Message cards and the deluxe dice stands
Finally, my favorite change during development was the message cards. My prototype had lots of cards, each with six words on them, and you randomly dealt out three of them to each team. Full credit to Joe and the development team for turning those boring word cards into space Mad Libs.

They decided each team would get a single card with three sets of six words on it, along with a sentence with three blank spaces. During set-up, the alien randomly picked a word from each list to fill in those blanks, and that's what the alien wants their teammates to guess at the end of the game.

Mechanically, this is identical to my original word cards, but I love how the theme comes through in the message cards. Now there's lots of classic sci-fi cliches and ridiculous sentences that could arise, giving a bit of levity to what is otherwise a fairly serious theme.

After that, in October 2023, Allplay launched a successful Kickstarter for the game, bundling it with a new version of Reiner Knizia's classic Through the Desert, which was an honor. The Kickstarter fulfilled in June 2024. After a successful 2024 con season, the first print run sold out, and a reprint is on the way.

That brings us to now, almost five years after the first tiny spark of wondering whether I could make a game like A Message From The Stars. The design and development process was a pretty smooth one, all things considered, and I'm proud of the final product that our team created. Thanks for reading about its story, and I hope to see it on your table soon!

Clarence Simpson Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

I wrote a bit about Australis — a 2-4 player game from Leo Colovini, Alessandro Zucchini, and KOSMOS — in mid-November 2024 after playing it once at BGG.CON 2024 on a review copy:

I'm not sure what to think at this point.

You're in the East Australia Current (EAC) trying to grow coral, feed a school of fish, and get your sea turtle some travel time, with players drafting dice to take actions, build an engine of sorts in which you get bonus actions based on what you draft, and compete in a roll-off at round's end for one of two bonuses. More plays needed...

I've now played Australis five times — twice each with two and four players, and once with three — and I'm still not sure what to think. The game is part area control, a smidge of set collection, optionally an engine builder, a little bit country, and 0% rock and roll, all wrapped within a dice-drafting framework.


In each of five rounds, players take turns drafting one die and carrying out its action, doing this four times:

▪️ White dice let you draft cards that give you one immediate bonus or a bonus each time you draft a specific-colored die in the future. Additionally, you can draft cards that give you an advantage in the end-round dice battle.

▪️ Yellow dice give you 2-5 fish, but to score fish you will need food, which leads to...

▪️ Blue dice advance your sea turtle in the EAC, which can get you fish food, give you a tie-breaking advantage, earn more points at the end of each round, and place coral in deeper beds.

▪️ Purple dice have you place coral in a bed of a matching number or lower, with each bed giving the player with the most coral in it an end-of-round bonus (and some beds giving a bonus to whoever has the secondmost coral).

▪️ The lone red die lets you draft first in the next round and (possibly) give you an edge in the dice battle.

You use as many non-red dice as the number of players in the game, so you're unlikely to draft more than two dice of one color.

At round's end, you score for coral bed presence, the number of fish you feed, and where your sea turtle is located, then players have a dice battle...which is bizarre in the context of this undersea setting given that the EAC would carry your dice far away, rotating slowly as they drift along toward New Zealand.

At game's end, with orange's margin of victory being nearly fifty points!
In any case, all players roll their blue, purple, and red dice simultaneously, then call out their lowest number. Whatever this number is, all players discard all dice with this number, then everyone rolls again, continuing this process until you have a winner and a runner-up. (Ties are broken based on turtle placement on the EAC.)

Blue dice are valued 2-7, purple dice 3-8, and the red die 4-9, so in general the red die gives you the best odds of winning, but you know how dice work. Odds are no guarantee. The winner chooses one of two tiles available that round, with the runner-up getting the one not chosen; tiles give points and fish food, or points, so even if you're not moving your turtle along the EAC and scooping up new food, you can still collect it in battle.

Putting all of this together, Australis seems like a highly tactical game in which you need to adjust constantly to what's available. You can't commit to a "coral" strategy and try to dominate the coral beds because high numbers might never be rolled on the purple dice, which means no one will place in high-value beds until (1) they move their sea turtle far along the EAC and (2) they acquire cards that let them place coral when they draft certain dice. The same goes for fish: In one game, we never rolled more than three fish on a die, so our schools were small and getting more food became less important. Players have won while taking only one card (and thereby ignoring engine-building) and players have won while taking eight cards (which means you get nothing the turn you take a white die, but pump up future die actions).

I find the game puzzling and fascinating, despite still having no clue as to how to be good at playing it. For more thoughts on the game and demonstrations of play, watch this video. Oh, and an English-language edition of Australis will be released in the U.S. in mid-2025 and in the UK in 2025.

Youtube Video Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

How many card games do you like to play? One intensely over all others? A few? All of them?! If you fall in the latter category, then you'll want to learn about everything covered below. Otherwise, sample as you wish.

▪️ U.S. publisher New Mill Industries is testing one's ability to keep up on all things cardy. After debuting owner Daniel Newman's Agency and Gachapon Trick at PAXU 2024 during the Indie Games Night Market, in February 2025 it will open pre-orders for the following four titles:

— Lepidoptery, a two-player shedding and connection design by David Karesh and Srinivas Vasudevan in which you play card combinations and place tokens in matching spaces to either create four-in-a-row or shed your hand first.

— Greasy Spoon, a ladder-climbing, shedding game from Sean Ross in which you serve up menu items and menu combos to a diner filled with customers.

— Dickory, a shedding game from Ross and Hanibal Sonderegger in which cards have no suits and the order of ranks (singles, pairs, etc.) shifts during gameplay.


— Dino Trix: Tarot Adventures, featured three trick-taking games by Daniel Kenel that you play with a tarot deck, with this coming from New Mill's Little Dog Games imprint.

▪️ In Q1 2025, Italian publisher Cranio Creations will release 13 Leaves, a card game by Masato Uesugi for 3-6 players:

In 13 Leaves, players can play one or more cards of the same value that align with the sequence on the table. The cards must be of a value equal to or lower than the lowest card in the sequence, or of a value equal to or higher than the highest card in the sequence.

The game consists of several rounds. Each round is divided into turns that proceed clockwise. On their turn, the active player, if they can and if they want, plays one or more cards of the same value from their hand. Multiple cards of the same value are stacked on top of each other to show how many cards of that value are present on the table. Cards of different values are placed in numerical order forming a sequence on the table.

The first player to play all the cards in their hand wins. At the end of the rules, you'll find the expert variant, which consists of playing multiple games in a row with a scoring at the end of each game.

James Nathan passed along background info about this design, noting that it debuted at Game Market in early 2024 as a printout under the name ふつうのゴーアウト, which translates as "Normal Go Out", but which was labeled in the English rules "Just a Shedding Game". In August, ふつうのゴーアウト received an honorable mention in the 2024 Arclight Game Awards, which are meant to help commercialize these independent releases.

▪️ Beach Day will be the debut title from CakePie Games, started by designers Joshua Bowman and Brennan Smith. Here's an overview of this 1-4 player game:

As you breathe in the cool salty air that gently brushes across your face, the sound of crashing waves fills your ears. The gentle heat of the sun warms your skin while the grit of the warm sand tingles your feet. On the ground, seashells and sandcastles are scattered about among puddles of ocean water making a beautiful tapestry in the sand. It's time for your beach day!

In Beach Day, players draft cards to create a beach that is decorated with shells, sandcastles, water, and much more. After taking cards, you place them as tiles to arrange these objects in optimal formations based on modular scoring cards. The player with the best decorated beach wins!

Read more »

by Andrea La Rosa

This is the diary of my first game: Don Quixote: The Ingenious Hidalgo, which I have designed, illustrated, and published.

In January 2024, I found myself unemployed, which on the upside gave me some free time to focus on game design. Until then, I had been methodically focused on developing only one game: Behemoth: Rise of Shadow.

Any idea for a new game I would force myself to write down in a "book of game ideas" without dwelling on it too much.

Having spent a few years doing this, I thought it could be good to see what I could learn by changing my approach. Working on a small-box game could be a great way to see the whole design/development/publish process end to end, at lower risk and cost compared to a bigger game.

Looking at the book of game ideas I had put together, one key element I noticed was that I was fascinated by the idea of bringing stories from books to life — so why not lean into that and start turning books into games!

I settled on Don Quixote as my focus as it felt like a perfect metaphor of me chasing a dream of creating a game. (I also had scribbled down an idea for "a reverse roll and move", which I eventually ditched, but which at the time I thought was brilliant...)

Design goals

As part of my design, I wanted to capture the spirit of the novel, possibly even more so than telling the actual story of the book. Board games being the amazing medium they are, for me this meant trying to have players live certain experiences and feel certain emotions that could well represent the book.

After some research on the book, I decided those would be:

• A dash of chaos: The book essentially features a series of many hectic adventures, some culminating in moments of absolute mayhem as when Don Quixote sees some puppet knights and — thinking they are real — attacks and destroys the stage of a puppet play while the show is under way.

• Bold decisions: This is another constant in the book. Don Quixote and Sancho make a series of bold sudden decisions to help anyone in need they encounter.

• Room for strategies that get in one another's way: Many characters in the novel have personal agendas that they pursue through a series of tricks they play on poor Don Quixote.

On top of that, I wanted to try to create a game that can be enjoyed by both casual players and heavy gamers. (This is quite difficult to do well, and I don't think it's needed to create a good game.)

Game design

Back to the mechanisms: The starting point was the idea of a reverse roll-and-move game. This was a play on the fact that roll-and-move is usually associated with pure randomness, which at some point I realized to be a fallacy. I imagine this association relies on some shared priming bias, likely derived from how the roll-and-move mechanism is implemented in Monopoly.

So I thought I could create a roll-and-move game which players eventually realize can be played strategically. This contrast of reality versus expectation would be a great representation of Don Quixote's delusional journey in which expectations are rarely met with reality.

Also, the mechanism could fit well with the narrative itself. You would roll dice to determine what kind of troubles DQ would get into, and the game would be about how prepared you are to deal with that randomness and help DQ get out of trouble.

First Design

I created a prototype of the game and tested it with my fantastic local playtesting group in Croydon, UK — the South London Playtest Group.


1. The active player would roll a die, then move the DQ token in a circle to a new adventure, which had a color (representing either glory or delusion) and a number.

2. Players would play a card simultaneously to determine the outcome of the adventure. (All players had the same cards, and they were never discarded.)

3. If the adventure succeeded, anyone who had voted this way increased their corresponding tracker (represented by a colored die) for that attribute by one. DQ's corresponding attribute would increase by as many numbers as indicated on the adventure card. If the adventure failed, anyone who had voted this way would increase their black die by one, and so would Don Quixote.

4. At the end of the game, players score points by multiplying their dice values by DQ's dice. They would also score bonus points depending on their secret objective.

If you have played the final version of the game, you can surely notice a lot of similarities with this first prototype.

Iterating on the Initial Design

From playtesting, it was clear that a few things worked well:

• Simultaneous card play led to fast turns, which meant that a lot of people could play together. Early on, I was testing with up to eight players!

• The dynamic set scoring felt interesting.

• The secret objectives added a layer of deduction as you tried to anticipate how other players would vote.

There were, of course, a few things that needed ironing out, and interestingly one mechanism that did not click with playtesters was the "reverse roll and move".

I was particularly affectionate about that idea, which made it hard for me to assess the feedback properly. To get a better sense of things, I thought I would ask more people, and feedback from the "Board Game Revolution Community" Facebook group was very clear! "Roll and move" evoked certain concepts in people's minds, and I faced a big obstacle in convincing people to take a closer look at the game.


From playtesting, I saw that the mechanism could work, but would need a good amount of development. It was also clear that the core fun element of the game was elsewhere, specifically in the dynamic set collection and the simultaneous voting. What convinced me to ditch it was noticing that on the upside, nobody seemed to care for the "cleverness" of my observation about randomness in a roll-and-move game. Doh.

I am now very happy that I ditched that.

Game Development

From then on, it was a matter of polishing and balancing the game.

Card play
• I put more focus on card play as that would allow interesting hand management decisions. The idea of having characters popping up was a perfect fit for the book. Using cards for scoring meant I was able to ditch dice.

• I went down a rabbit hole of special set-scoring abilities in cards, similar to what you have in Sushi Go! This didn't work well, and I limited it to Don Diego's cards.

• One bit that gave me headaches was the card drawing. I tried a number of variants, including a public display from which you could choose cards, some drafting, some ongoing card drawing, etc. I wanted the game to stay speedy, and most implementations of card drawing significantly slowed down gameplay. I wanted players to have some choice in which cards to play, and I had to balance how many cards I could put in the box. I eventually settled on a simple mechanism in which cards available to you can be a consideration in terms of strategy to follow, but can also be somewhat ignored if you are playing more casually.


Item tokens
After removing extra set-scoring abilities, I tried adding diamond tokens that could earn you a few extra points. Those worked well, and I expanded that idea to add extra tokens that can give you a bit more control in the game or just add extra spice.
  
Mini board
• I created a dedicated board for DQ's attributes. This meant players could strategize more, and this change better supported having four DQ attributes, which were needed to create interesting and varied secret objectives.

• River shortcuts on the board reflect what happens in the book. Specifically, the second part of the book is more hectic, and it's the first time DQ and Sancho don't travel by horse or foot. This created a nice opportunity for a sudden change of pace, a concept I experienced and loved in Clank! and Sea Salt & Paper.

Publishing considerations
• I had to decide what player count to support. This involved considerations from both a gameplay and a component perspective. I had played the game fine even in eight players, although the more players you had, the more hectic the game became. On the other end, if I went down to four players, I could save a good amount of money on cards required and box size.

I eventually settled on six as the maximum player count, using the player experience as a key driving factor. I found the ceiling of six to be the sweet spot in which you could still have some control over the game.

• I tried an interesting team variant in which you don't know who your teammates are. This worked quite well, but I felt you needed to know the game to enjoy it, so it didn't make the final cut.

• An interesting part of the work involved studying the novel to create good representations in the game as well as engaging summaries for the online story background database.

• Finally, as you can imagine, there was a good bit of work around the illustrations, the graphics, working out good materials for the game, dealing with manufacturers, etc.


All in all, I'm extremely happy with how the game turned out. Seeing others enjoying it fills me with such happiness, and I feel like I learned so much from the process.

Thank you so much for reading this diary!

Best,
Andrea La Rosa
Llamascape Games

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

▪️ Designer Tomáš Holek debuted at SPIEL Essen 24 with three games — SETI, Tea Garden, and Galileo Galilei — that all went over well with players, and in Q3 2025 he and publisher Pink Troubadour will release a game unlike any of the previous three. Here's an overview of the 2-4 player card game Pondscape:

Players create their own vibrant pond by carefully placing cards featuring various frog species and pond environments while collecting different insect types.

The core mechanisms involve grid building and card management, with pond construction as a spatial puzzle. In each round, players choose cards from a shared display and add one card to their pond, aiming to fulfill specific conditions set by different frog species to earn points, with larger groups of the same frog type yielding even greater rewards.

Sample cards
A unique shared mechanism revolves around the "jumper frog", a central figure that hunts insects and other food. All players influence the jumper frog's actions and compete to gather insects that can provide bonus points during the final scoring. Careful planning and resourceful play will lead to the most balanced and flourishing pond!

▪️ At Tokyo Game Market in November 2024, SYNKA Games released Crazy Corgi, a 2-4 player card game from Noa Vassalli in which you get to look at many cute dogs while playing:

Your goal is to score points by placing cards in your three "kennels", creating sets of five cards that are worth different points depending on the combinations.

At the beginning of each turn, you draw 2-4 cards from the deck, hoping not to reveal two with the same number. If you succeed, you add those cards to your kennels; otherwise, the cards are given to another player, who will place them in their kennels.

However, if you can't add a card to a kennel without creating an invalid combination, you must discard one of your kennels to start a new one. The player who scores 5 points first wins.

▪️ Guillaume Desportes' card game Super Miaou debuted in France in 2023 from publisher Space Cow, and in January 2025 it will be released in English as Super Meow.

I've always loved learning animal sounds in languages other than English, partly because it's a shorthand for how vowel sounds are represented differently and partly because they're sometimes unexpected. In German, for example, this game is Super Miau — okay, understandable — while in Ukranian it's Суперняв, which would be pronounced "Supernyav", with "nyav" sounding more like the cat is licking its fur, not vocalizing in general. Maybe cats do things differently in Ukraine...

In any case, here's an overview of this 2-4 player game:

Super Meow is a deck-building game with a static market. Players start with a four-card deck of money cards from which they draw two cards to play every turn. You can use the money to gain more money, to get a rat that lets you steal cards from others, to acquire cat food that you can later use to get the cat (Miaou), or to acquire the cape that the cat can wear as their superhero costume. You can also trash cards, with the exception of one of the starting money cards that also can't be stolen.

The game ends when a player manages to draw both the cat and the cape on the same turn.

▪️ Should you not be content handling animals one species at a time, you can try 13 Animals, a Daryl Chow design for 2-5 players from Origame that mimics mahjong/gin rummy gameplay with more appealing subject matter:

To set up 13 Animals, deal each player a hand of ten cards, then turn three cards face up to start three discard piles; split the remaining deck into two piles. Cards in the deck show five types of mammals, three types of birds, and five types of legendary creatures, each with their color front and back: green, blue, and yellow.

On a turn, draw a card from the top of a discard pile or either deck, then discard a card. Each card depicts one or more scoring sets; three peacocks, for example, is worth 5 stars, while one bird of each type is worth 3 stars. As soon as each of your cards is part of a scoring set, whether before or after you discard, you can reveal your hand and end the round. Each player scores 1 point for every 5 stars in their scoring sets.

Image: Savannah Wigmans
Alternatively, if a player has eleven different animals in hand, they can end the round, scoring 5 points; everyone else earns points based on the stars in their sets. In either case, the player who ends the round receives 1-3 points depending on the round number just completed. After three rounds, the player with the most points wins.

Read more »

by Stéphane Escapa

When Sébastien from Catch Up Games showed me what was to become Castle Combo (and which was codenamed "Arcanes" at that time), the 78 characters of the game were already pictured with art that kind of fit my "style", or, more accurately, what I could do. The publisher wanted to go in that direction, and those factors made the visual language of the game rather easy to find. I just had to do my usual thing! However, racking my brain wouldn't hurt...would it?

Finding a Style

I started with a few different styles that I sent the publisher:

• Cartoony: classical, easy to do, with a lot of detail.


• Geometric characters, with simplified shapes, with characters that can fit in a given shape.


• What I call "big nose comic book style", bordering on caricature, very dynamic, but with more curves.


• Anthropomorphic characters, an approach I rooted for since I love drawing animals.


• Anthropomorphic geometric characters.


• Chibi, with small characters with a big and very cute head.


All of that research led us to adopt a blend of those rather than a single approach, even if we left animals out as they didn't fit for this game. We'll see for another one!

I started revamping four characters: the Baron, His Majesty, Her Majesty The Queen, and the Princess.


We kept refining this base, with the fun idea of having oversized heads, like Guignol puppets. I made new versions of the Baron and Her Majesty the Queen (whom I find extremely endearing, with their posh haughty pout), but also of the Executioner and Mother Superior (also because I like to draw old people). Then I designed a character for each "faction".



With this step complete, the graphical style of characters was set in stone!

Drawing the Cast

For each of the 78 characters, I tried to find an identity, a stance, a posture, that I drew from existing or fictitious characters...or I just made it up to match their faction and ability.

For famous characters (kings and queens, scientific or religious characters), finding reference and inspiration was fairly easy, but for the rest of the cast (bumpkins and other lowborns), that was way more difficult — especially for women, and I had, at times, to adapt male clothing for them since we wanted to promote and represent diversity. (Hello, Bridgerton...)

For historical figures, I relied on lots of paintings and imaginary portraits. Here are a few examples:

• His Majesty (both noble and clergy) is inspired by Robert the Pious, son of Hugues Capet (imaginary portrait of Robert II by Merry-Joseph Blondel, 1837). His signature scepter and crown can be found there, as well as the mantle and tunic, and I added his soft, dreamy gaze that reminds me of French actor Alain Chabat...


• Her Majesty The Queen blends Elizabeth of Hungary (for her garb, seen in The Charity of St Elizabeth of Hungary by Edmund Leighton, 1837) and Cersei Lannister (for her haughty attitude).


• The Queen Mother is inspired by Louise of Lorraine (Portrait of Louise of Lorraine-Vaudémont, by François Clouet, 16th century). She seems to be on her Sunday best with her attire and hairdo!


• The Baron is a blend of Claude of Lorraine for his vest (Claude of Lorraine, Duke of Chevreuse by Frans Pourbus the Younger) and of Gilles de Laval, sire of Rais (imaginary portrait by Éloi Firmin Féron, 1835). I dig his hairdo, and I even used it for other characters!


• The Patron is inspired by René d’Anjou and from a sketch for one of the first ever wheelchairs.


• The Inventor is inspired by Leonardo da Vinci. Obviously.

History is great, but I also drew some inspiration from pop culture!

• The Highwayman oddly looks like Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride. (Someone killed his father!)


• The General is Brienne of Tarth.


• The Shepherd is more or less inspired by Toy Story's Bo Peep.


• More personal and much more niche, the Inkeeper is inspired by the character from Le Chaudron Magique (The Magic Cauldron), a magazine in which I had my first comics printed!

• And, sometimes, inspiration is much more random, like for the Steward. He is inspired by Elie Semoun's character in the Kaamelott TV series.


There are many other references — try to find them all!

There was a lot of research: documents and articles I haphazardly read and, during this process, I discovered a lot of things, but to add cohesiveness and legibility to the cast, I had to find a color code for the characters in each faction, so that in one glance you could recognize who's who:

• Blue, white, and gold for nobles
• Purple, pink, and white for the clergy
• Green, apple-green, and dark grey for the scholars
• Red, black, and metal grey for the military
• Orange, warm brown, and beige for artisans
• Yellow, brown, and warm grey for peasants

All this prep work and documentation helped because once everything got defined, each character was quick to draw — and almost nothing required touching up!

Small Icons, Big Work

To be frank, I didn't imagine work on iconography would be so complex and labor intensive, but that was the case — and in the end, that's what took me the longest on this project.

We really thought everything through: the drapery, the flags and scrolls, and many other symbols! Sébastien from Catch Up Games was the grand master of card legibility and kept working to ensure abilities could be read by everyone until we had an almost perfect version of all of these icons — at least, a version that we thought worked for us, and that was already something...

The discount pictogram is a good example of this lengthy process as we had to do it over and over until we found the best version. We needed it to be easily spotted in one's tableau since these are the only cards with an ongoing ability, and they should be easy to distinguish at a glance.

At the same time, this icon should indicate the amount of the discount (at that stage of development, the game still had -2 discounts!), as well as whether it applied to characters in the top or bottom row, or both. The symbol was intended to refer to the card cost without alluding to other card elements, such as the scroll for the endgame scoring (which was also important during the game), the clean and rich castle aesthetic, the more rustic aesthetic from the village, or any of the six character factions!

Here are a few iterations of it!







A Back-Drape

We actually started the iconography by working on the draperies behind the characters, that is, the background of the cards. That background was also a redundant way of identifying the faction of a character, while subtly implying where it comes from: village or castle. And all of that without being too visible, so that the character in the foreground could shine as the main subject of the card...

I quickly thought about draperies and about the medieval standards with their four partitions.



Just for that backdrop drapery, we had seven milestones until we arrived at the result you now see on the cards!

• The base: the color of the faction(s) as a backdrop.
• The color of the flag was now only behind the character as the real background was grey or brown (from the upper town or lower town, at that stage of development!), echoing the banner on which the character's name is written. We also added a motif, first a castle, then a symbol for the faction, and we settled for keys and coins.
• Added a texture to reinforce the impression of the background being a drapery.
• We tested contrast and colors: Did we need a pastel light background, or something darker? We went for a lighter card!
• We refined the blazons, we gave them more detail and contour, tuned the colors.
• Added a white outline to make the character stand out. We were almost there, but something was missing, wasn't it?
• We perfected the formula, adding a wooden or stony texture so that the backdrop was less of a flat surface. Finally! We were good!







All of this iconography has been thought and thought again, tested time and time again, drawn many times, and I think even I can't fathom how much work all of that is...

All About Michel

As I wrote above, making the characters was stunningly fast — and I must confess I'm even better when it comes to characters and animals — and designing the iconography was slower...and for the cover art, that's a whole other story!


We can't discuss the cover without telling you about the messenger pawn (whom French people call Albert because of a kids TV show, Albert the Fifth Musketeer, whereas Seb named him Michel!), as both the cover and the pawn are tightly linked. What's also to note is that the final title was long overdue. We still called the design by its codename "Arcanes", and we couldn't find a title: The Guild of Nine, Château 9, Nine Folks, and many others. I couldn't imagine what story to tell without a final title!

So...where to go? A wall with nine portraits was a good basis, and the final title could wait. What was to become the messenger pawn was, at the time, a minstrel, a character who had a good reason for being in both the upper and lower town, and he was not already in the game. I sent three versions of him and five ideas for a cover composition.




For a moment, we put a shadow councilor instead of the minstrel, then one idea led to another, and I had an illustration like a puppet theater, with the councilor in the background, inspired – albeit loosely – by the Cardinal of Richelieu and by Machiavelli, and from Sir Henry Wyatt's ridiculous soft hat.



As you imagine (especially since you know the final art!), the minstrel and the puppeteer were not kept, but as with the characters, everything was more or less useful to the end result. We retained the idea of a main character in the foreground, he became a messenger (sending a more positive message than a scheming courtier), smaller characters went into the background drawn in a "cardboard" fashion, depicting both the upper and lower town. Hey, but couldn't we use those on the card backs?!


All that remained was the facial features and expression of our messenger, and we got awfully close to the end result. We're reaching the end, so I'm going to spare all the details: we got a final title, we removed the standards that bordered the cover art, we simplified the title logo, we adjusted the background and the size of characters, we changed the lighting...and there we were!





But the question that remains in the head of all French-speaking people who have grown up in the 1990s is "Is the messenger inspired by Albert the Fifth Musketeer?" I would say no! The feathered hat is a legacy from the minstrel, while the goatee comes from the malevolent councilor, but maybe, unconsciously...maybe.

Stéphane Escapa

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

▪️ Wharf Rat Games is a new U.S. publisher run by designer Ryan Heilman that plans to debut in 2025 with A Forlorn Hope, a 1-3 player game from Hermann Luttmann:

A Forlorn Hope is an abstract simulation wargame of a typical trench assault, modeling those attacks that were conducted during the First World War (1914-1918). The player represents an attacking regiment of troops consisting of three battalions, with each battalion made up of two or three assault companies (depending on the number of players).

The game uses a "press-your-luck" design philosophy that will challenge you with tough decision-making and risk-taking throughout the game. The goal is for the player(s) to drive their forces across No Man's Land in the quickest and most efficient manner possible to achieve the best level of victory.

A Forlorn Hope is designed both for solitaire and multiplayer co-operative play. Numerous scenarios are included, starting with a basic assault scenario (which is ideal for learning the intricacies of the game system), then adding multiple historically-based scenarios simulating actual battles from World War I that offer a slightly more complex and layered gaming experience. Each scenario features singular aspects of the historical battle it is simulating, and each will therefore be a unique gaming experience.

▪️ Button Shy has announced more than thirty titles for release in 2025, and amongst the many expansions are several solitaire designs, such as Hyperstar Run, the next title in Scott Almes' "Simply Solo" series:

You grab the well-worn controller and load your latest save. This is it: the final level. With only four runs left to escape the Hyperstar spacebase and beat the game, you better get moving.

To play, select your difficulty and deal an appropriate number of random cards to create a level row with your hero card showing "1" above the leftmost level card. Create your starting hand of three level cards and two equipment cards. Flip the leftmost card in the row to start play.

Advance through each successive level card by using buttons in your hand to defeat enemies. Buttons can be used by discarding cards from hand or from "pressing" buttons on previously-passed level cards by moving them down from the row. Beat either of the card's enemies to move on to the next card.

Each level card has an ability that can be used once while it's active. Many cards also have combo lines that can connect across multiple cards, allowing you to keep moving with only a single button usage per card.

Should you fail a level card, tick off one of your hero's runs and start again. Reset your hand by taking back your discards and unpress any buttons in the level row, then draw the first card in the row into your hand. Complete all the level cards in the row without failing four runs to win the game!

▪️ Embers is a solitaire design from Steven Aramini and Button Shy with a straightforward pitch:

Stoke the fire or suffer the consequences. As the campfire dies down, horrific threats appear out of the woods. The only way to keep your camp safe is with constant vigilance: a feat easier said than done.

▪️ Roshni Patel's Glass Garden presents you with threat on a far smaller scale:

Caring for a terrarium takes time and energy, even without a pesky critter chewing on your hard work! Take care of your freshly-planted succulents by moving them around to develop the resources they need. As the critter advances, it wreaks havoc on your miniature garden. Limit its damage while still growing your plants as high as you can manage to earn the title of Master Gardener!

In Glass Garden, your garden consists of eight plant cards (and one of four possible critter cards) bounded by glass cards to create a 3x9 grid of spaces. On each turn, you can move up to two plants vertically and/or horizontally to form bundles of resources in fertile zones, the areas where two rows meet. Each plant needs a different set of resources to grow out of the soil, but once those needs are met, they can be flipped to their grown side to provide additional resources, while also immediately triggering a useful ability. Plants grown along one of the edges also flip the neighboring glass card to its sunlight side, granting the player additional moves at game's end.

Lastly, the critter moves one space to the right, then damages specific plants in your garden, lowering them by one row. Once the critter reaches the far wall, the game ends. Take any sunlight moves available, then score points for each grown plant's height to find out whether your terrarium is a dirty dud or a thriving masterpiece.

▪️ Aramini, Danny Devine, and Paul Kluka are behind Casinopolis, a standalone game for 1-4 players that features gameplay similar to their 2018 title Sprawlopolis:

Casinopolis has 18 double-sided cards. One side shows the blocks that players use to expand their map, while the other shows unique scoring conditions. Three of these are randomly dealt at the start of the game to establish the 1-, 2-, and 3-chip bets; the higher the bet, the more points that goal is worth at game's end.

Players take turns adding a single card to the map. Cards must be added in a horizontal alignment. They can be placed next to or overlapping a previously-placed card. Each card features four blocks split among the three casino colors. Adjacent blocks that share a color form larger casinos.

Blocks can include up to two roads on them. Each road costs points at game's end, though their impact can be lessened by connecting segments across multiple blocks to form a single road. The longest road at the end of play is the Strip, where the most important casinos can be found. Roads may also include one or more of the six lucky symbols, which can pay off substantially at the end if lined up properly.

Once all fifteen cards have been played, the game ends and points are scored. Players gain 1 point per block from the largest casino of each type that is adjacent to the Strip, then lose 1 point for each road. Each scoring goal is evaluated in order, with each instance of the condition adding 1, 2, or 3 points to the total based on the goal's placement at set-up. Next, jackpots are scored: For each run of three or more matching lucky symbols that are adjacent on a shared road, score 1 point per icon.

Finally, compare the total to the target number, that is, the sum of the three numbers listed on each goal card. Score higher than the target number to win the game!

Read more »

by Greyfax

Here is the discussion for this week:

What are your best ideas for creating and maintaining a game night where we play heavier board games? There seems to be a tendency to slip into lighter games over time because some players prefer them. I prefer to play heavy games with the game night since I can play lighter games with other people more easily at other times.

One of the biggest differences between heavy games and light games is the time they take to play. You mention a game "night". Many heavy games can go three-plus hours, especially with four or more players and a teach. Perhaps your players don't want to take that much time to play a single game in an evening when they have to get up and go to work in the morning. Given that, I'd suggest you find games that are challenging for you, but where you can keep the time played to what works for your group.

What you can do is use BoardGameGeek's advanced search option and search for games with, let's say, 10,000 ratings (so that you get games your players may have heard of) and decide on a complexity rating. I'd suggest 3.25-3.75. See which ones you might like, then ask on their associated forum about how long the game might take the play. Return to your group, and suggest games that would fit in their comfort level for time. Hopefully you and the group can come to agree that perhaps every third or fourth meeting the group could play one of those games.

One of the most important attributes of the host of a board game meet-up is to accommodate what the players want to play. If they actually do not want to play heavy games, then you risk losing them if you insist. Maybe you can find others to play with so that you can play the heavy games you want if my advice doesn't work or can't be followed.

Personally, I love super heavy games, but I would not suggest them for a game night unless everyone was on board with the idea.

Best,

Ms. Meeple (Jennifer Schlickbernd) Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

I'm a fan of many number-and-color card games, games in which the subject matter is nothing more than you playing a game and trying to outdo other players — or co-operating with them, should that be the goal. I don't easily picture myself in the world of a game, but rather view it from on high, with the thematic elements sometimes being a distraction that I have to overlook in order to figure out what I'm doing.

Publishers smartly recognize that I'm not the typical game player, so in most number-and-color card games they dress up the design in...something. For the early 2024 release Pixies from Johannes Goupy, French publisher Bombyx turned to artist Sylvain Trabut, who creates miniature sculptures and dioramas from natural elements.

Image from Sylvain Trabut's website
What does the artwork have to do with the gameplay? Nothing perhaps, although you could turn to Trabut's bio to manufacture a connection: "Trabut creates his characters and settings with elements he collects on his walks. After meticulously composing and photographing his scenes, he takes his creations home with him."

In Pixies, you, the player, will walk through the woods, collecting elements you find along the way and composing them...into a strict 3x3 grid based on the numbers artificially assigned to each character.

In more detail, on each turn you reveal as many cards from the deck as the number of players (with four cards being revealed in a two-player game), then each player chooses a card and adds it to their 3x3 tableau in the proper place. (In a two-player game, you alternate picks.) Whoever chooses last starts the next turn.

Over time, you build up a grid that (ideally) looks like this:


The first time you take a number, you place it in its location. The second time you take that same number, you decide which of those two numbered cards goes face up, turning the other face down; this number is now validated. The third time, you place that card face down in an empty location; should you later draft the number card that belongs in that location, you place that new card on top of the face-down one, thereby validating it.

When a player has a card in all nine slots, the round ends at the end of the current turn, then everyone sums their points. Score 1 point for each swirl on a face-up card, then lose 1 point for each X. The 3 and 5 above show that you score 1 point for each green card visible in your tableau. For each validated number, score points equal to its numerical value. Finally, score 2/3/4 points for each card in your largest color group depending on whether you're in the first, second, or third round.

After three rounds, the player with the most points wins.

Promotional image from licensee Pandasaurus Games
Pixies has straightforward goals for players — validate cards, create a color block, and collect swirls — and the open drafting works better in this game than in others I've dismissed because the card market isn't refilled after each pick. I prefer this approach over the ever-full market because instead of being concerned about only what's good for me, when I choose a card in Pixies, I'm condemning others to pick from what I've left behind — and ideally I can leave you useless "choices" while taking something good for myself.

(Yes, others will try to leave me terrible cards as well, but I appreciate the challenge of dealing with chance elements and trying to overcome "bad luck". That's part of why I love card games: you get random stuff, then try to make the best of it.)

The card deck has a bell curve — twelve copies of 5s, ten each of 4s and 6s, and so on down to five copies of 1s and 9s — so you can take those card quantities into consideration when deciding what to draft and where to place face-down cards, e.g., how hard will it be to validate an 8 compared to a 6? If you tracked everything, you could account for how many cards of each color remain in the deck to determine the odds of adding to a color group, but I can't imagine doing that myself.

Interestingly, 2024 has seen multiple 3x3 grid games released: this one, Castle Combo (which I covered in Sept. 2024), YRO, and Snowcrest. (Thanks to Dale Yu for that observation. Are we missing others? Rauha was a 2023 release in this vein.) I can understand the appeal of this set-up for a designer. You're putting the player in a tight box, and they have a limited amount of time to get things done before that box fills.

For more thoughts on Pixies and a demonstration of grid-building and scoring, watch this video:

Youtube Video Read more »

by Chris Wray

The author, hiding, is the sixth person from the right
On Saturday, December 7, 2024, about five hundred gamers wound through the first-ever Indie Games Night Market at PAX Unplugged. IGNM featured eighteen booths, each with an indie game designer selling a small-batch game or two. The types of games sold ran the gamut — everything from dice games, to card games, to abstract strategy — but they were all produced in small quantities, with many of the designs being handmade.

I attended as a seller, and IGNM was my second such indie game event, having also attended Game Market West in the San Francisco Bay area in October 2024. These two events feel like the start of a trend, one long overdue here in the United States. Japan has had Game Market in Tokyo and elsewhere for more than a decade, and it has proven to be a place where game designers can take a design — often with just a few copies — and sell it to the gaming public. Many of the wildly popular games these past couple of years got their start at TGM. While sales never felt like the point, they came naturally for many of the games, which flourish given their fresh mechanisms.


Hosted by Daniel Newman and his indie publishing house, New Mill Industries, PAX Unplugged's event was free for both designers and attendees. After an application process this summer, twenty designers were selected, each receiving a table to sell their games. Designers had to try to bring at least twenty copies of their game, though most brought more, and a couple of the more complex games could not get that many made in time. As with Tokyo Game Market, some designers asked for reservations, while others just waited for buyers to arrive at the event.

Going into IGNM, there was some uncertainty around how many people would attend. A few of the designers were joking that it could be a few dozen participants...or a few hundred. The latter happened, and the atmosphere was electric. The line started forming more than an hour before the event, and hundreds had gathered when the market opened at 7:00 p.m. PAX Unplugged managed the crowd, letting about sixty people enter at a time. Most of the games sold out, some in just a few minutes, but nearly all were available for at least the first half hour or hour. IGNM didn't have a set end time, but with most of the games in the hands of participants, the event came to a natural conclusion around 9:00.

Talking to many of the attendees at IGNM, this was an exciting shopping adventure, a chance to buy something unique or small batch. From the designer's perspective, this was a chance to release a game in a low-risk way, particularly in an industry where an initial print run of thousands of copies can seem like the norm, but which is a threshold that isn't feasible for some games.

As I alluded to above, a variety of games made their debut at IGNM. By my count, more than three dozen games were sold there. I can't cover them all, but I did want to give a flavor of what was on offer.

One of the stars of the show — and a game that, to me, perfectly captures the spirit of the event — was Marceline Leiman's High Tide, a strategic stacking game that came with hand-painted and stamped pieces. Each copy was individually-assembled and numbered, with stamping that made it unique.


Perhaps the most eye-popping was a collection of games organized by Manny Dominguez which fit entirely within PEZ dispensers. The collection included Match Match (Jon Baron), DUBO (Manny Dominguez), Shoofly Pie (Marceline Leiman), Menthe Assez (Niko Lepka), Rez Trio (Ryan McSwain), Candy Exchange (Conrad Ratchford), and Polar Opposites (David Spalinski). The games fit entirely within a PEZ dispenser, and Manny's table had dozens of PEZ figurines at the start of the night.


Some designers made games specifically for the show, but others used it as a venue to release games they had long been contemplating. A good example of the latter is Jonathan Cox's Mutation, a dice-stacking game that he started designing in 2010. He said that when IGNM was announced, he became motivated to finish and release the game.

Some of the games took considerable time to assemble. Jai Manacsa's The Hotel at the End of the Universe is a game in which players use a dice-based roll and move-esque action system to build their hotel on a shared board. The game had more than three thousand cardboard bits among the twenty copies, taking days to assemble.

Max Seidman and Mary Flanagan's Skyline is a combination of both categories. They had designed it initially in 2014, but decided to release it at IGNM a decade later. They spent more than a hundred hours cutting, laser engraving, and painting the blocks for the seven sets they had at IGNM.

Many of the games used all-new mechanisms. In Chris Lawrence's Propaganda, players take photos of dice they've rolled onto the board and use those photos — and even manipulate the photos — to try to convince the Judge (a third player) that they're the one who is losing and needs the most help. In Rand Lemley's Remember, one player traces over a photograph in layers, with a second player slowly unfolding and unwraping it to gain perspective on the other player's memory.


A number of the designs were card games, with trick-taking games being the most prevalent sub-genre. The event's host, Daniel Newman, sold two of his designs: Gachapon Trick, a set-collection trick-taking game, and Agency, a game in which players share their cards with their opponents. Rand Lemley released the first of his concert-themed trick-taking games, Beychella, a game themed on Beyonce's appearance at Coachella. Taylor Reiner had a surprise release named Work Life Balance in which players play two cards to each trick: one for its suit, and the other for the number. Amelie Le-Roche sold Circus Corgis, a trick-taking game in which you can feed your corgis treats so they have a higher value. Jon Simantov released Draught Trick, in which players have a fixed bid, but draft their cards to meet it. But among the trick-taking games, the big, buzziest hit was seemingly David Spalinski's Torchlit, in which after each trick, one player uses the cards that were played to increase the point value of taking a specific amount of tricks by the end of the round.

As I said, I can give only a flavor of the dozens of games released at IGNM, which had numerous other titles, including flip-and-writes, a bag-building game, a pen-and-paper game, and several others.


One of the most surprising aspects of the event — which was remarked on by many of the designers afterwards — was how supportive many of the attendees were. Many designers (myself included) expected pushback when they sold out of a game, but instead we were often met with a hearty "Congratulations!" from the potential buyer. Many attendees (and maybe even most attendees) wanted to hear pitches even after the games sold out to see what the designers came up with.

Everybody I spoke to afterwards considered IGNM a tremendous success, one far exceeding expectations. On a personal note, I hope it is a part of a broader trend. I was thrilled to see this dedicated, small group of game creators who embraced small-batch publishing and tried something out-of-the-box. A big thanks to Daniel Newman and PAX Unplugged for hosting IGNM, to the designers who released their games, and to the attendees who supported the event.

Chris Wray Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

▪️ In Q1 2025, German publisher Deep Print Games will release Rival Cities, a two-player game from Andreas Steding, a designer who releases titles infrequently — only three standalone games since 2014's The Staufer Dynasty — but who will always merit a look thanks to the legacy of Hansa Teutonica.


Deep Print Games plans to publish the rules ahead of the game's release, but for now we have only this short description:

In the 16th century, the small fishing village of Altona was founded in Northern Germany, initially posing no threat to its long-established neighbor, Hamburg. However, as Altona rapidly grew, a fierce rivalry emerged between the two cities, each constantly trying to outdo the other.

In Rival Cities, you face off in an enthralling city duel. Outmaneuver your opponent to achieve an instant victory — but beware as either of you can pull this off in many ways. Only by combining foresight with the art of deflection will you lead your city to victory. The suspenseful back and forth between the players makes it a very confrontational gaming experience full of weighty decisions.

▪️ Another two-player design that (sort of) gives you the opportunity to re-visit the past is Gatsby from Bruno Cathala, Ludovic Maublanc, and Catch Up Games. Here's an overview of this Q2 2025 release:

Welcome to the Roaring Twenties! In Gatsby, you take on the role of either Dorothy Williams or James Miller, competing to spread their influence and draw the attention of the great Jay Gatsby.

On the board are three locations, each offering different opportunities to get character tiles: the cabaret, the finance center, and the racetrack. To claim these characters, each player will take turns moving the action marker on one of the four action spaces — but not the one just taken by the opponent — then activating it.

These actions let you place two influence tokens on one or two locations, allowing you to claim characters in different ways, depending on the location. In the cabaret, your tokens must form a continuous line from one side of the board to the opposite side or cover the four-star icons at the same time. In the finance center, influence lets you climb up the track. In the racetrack, your tokens are placed in races, trying to be the player with the most tokens on that race line when it's filled.

On all three locations, some special spaces on the board grant bonuses when you place a token on them: swapping two tokens on the board, forcing your opponent to take a specific action, or gaining a special action tile!

A player wins immediately if they control three characters of the same color or one character of each of the five colors. If all character tiles from a single location have been claimed before one of these conditions is met, the player with the most stars on their characters wins.

▪️ In February May 2025, Repos Production will release Toy Battle, a quick-playing, two-player design by Paolo Mori and Alessandro Zucchini:

On land, on sea, in clouds, and even in space, battles are breaking out between toys. Your troops need your tactical talent to lead them to victory. Your mission? Be the first to reach the enemy headquarters or control more territories than your opponent.

On your turn in Toy Battle, you either draw two toy troops or place a troop on the board and apply its effect. When a place a troop, you can place it on an empty base, a base that you control, a base that the enemy controls with a lower-valued troop than the one you're placing, or the enemy's headquarters; however, in all cases you must place on a location that has a continuous path to your own headquarters through bases that you occupy, that is, that have your troop on top. If you occupy bases that form a continuous path around a region, you claim the medals within this region. (You don't lose these medals if the enemy later occupies one of these bases.)

The game ends as soon as you occupy your opponent's headquarters or win the required number of medals based on the current game board. If a player cannot draw or place a troop, the game ends, and whoever has the most medals wins.

▪️ Space Cowboys has two new entries in its two-player game line, with The Shadow Theater: The Legend of the Monkey King debuting in January 2025 from designers Cédric Lefebvre and Florian Sirieix:

The curtain rises. A monkey hatches from a stone egg. He becomes known as the Monkey King Sun Wukong and travels west in search of the secret of immortality.

The Shadow Theater is a fast and exciting two-player family-friendly competitive game. Deploy your monkeys, harvest the sweet fruits of eternal life, hoard jade stones, and become a legend! To win, you have to play tactically and seize your chance. To help you, you can gain some advantages with the powerful dragon weapons. Are you ready to dive into an ancient legend?

That description tells us little about what we're doing, but perhaps we can "read" a bit more of the gameplay from this image:


Okay, perhaps not.

▪️ An equally short description awaits on Ki Mansell's Garden Rush, which is also due out from Space Cowboys in 2025:

Garden Rush is a tile-placement battle game in a vegetable garden, all contained in a playable compact box — a two-player game in which players race to grow vegetables in their garden and fill their basket before their neighbor.

Careful planning is needed to plant each vegetable in its unique pattern for future harvesting, while keeping an eye on the conveyor belt shared between the gardens.

Again, that's not much to go on, but from the publisher pics, you can see that the game board wraps around the box, as with many releases by Korean publisher Playte:


Read more »

by Matthew Kambic

License to Krill marks the debut of my first published game and the launch of my new publishing company, MaKa Games, LLC. This journey has been a fantastic learning experience, and there's still so much to discover. Here's a look back at how License to Krill evolved from the seed of an idea to a full-fledged Kickstarter project.

The Spawn of an Idea

Growing up, my family was all about classic board games, and about four years ago, my younger brother casually mentioned the idea of creating his own board game. I had never thought of designing a game before, but the idea intrigued me. The more I considered it, the more it felt like a perfect blend of engineering and art — two passions of mine.

By late 2020, I was fully immersed in my first game design project. I made plenty of beginner mistakes, such as purchasing artwork too early, but each misstep was a valuable lesson. Due to COVID, all playtesting moved online, and during that time, I stumbled upon an online board game design class organized through a local library. Eager to learn more, I signed up.

The instructor spun a wheel that randomly selected game mechanisms; whatever the wheel landed on, we had to incorporate into a new game idea. The game name had to be a pun, so I jotted down "License to Krill", and a new game was born! Here are notes from that session, along with other information:


Experimenting with Ideas

The original concept and the final version of License to Krill may be oceans apart, but some core ideas held strong from the start. I knew from the beginning that a whale had to be at the heart of the action, posing a constant threat to the krill. Through countless iterations with mechanisms like push-your-luck, bluffing, and dice, the game evolved — then after about fifty playtests, the idea of using a plushie whale surfaced. Another fifty playtests later, it became clear that the plushie needed a mouth to "eat" the cards. Looking back, it feels so obvious now, but it was a journey to get there!

The playtesters gave great feedback and many of their ideas made it into the final game. I took License to Krill on a tour of conventions, including PAX Unplugged, TantrumCon, Unpub Prime, and Gen Con. These provided invaluable insight into gameplay and audience reception. I also have two weekly online playtesting groups of board game designers who are an amazing support resource as well. A designer can get the game only so far without the help of playtesters.


Designing Pun First

I approached the design of License to Krill with a "pun-first" philosophy. I'd start by brainstorming a new krill-themed pun, often by exploring random sites or finding inspiration on Pinterest. (Yes, even T-shirt slogans helped!) My most creative puns came from experimenting with word structures and playing with sounds — swapping in "krill" for "kill" or similar transformations.

Once I had a pun, I'd look for a fun fact about krill that fit the wordplay, using this as a creative constraint to fuel the design. For example, the pun "Ocean Road Krill" sparked ideas about ocean shipping lanes and the unfortunate truth of ship strikes on whales. This layer of factual grounding added depth to the humor and kept the theme cohesive.

Finally, I'd work out a scoring mechanism or action that connected both the pun and the fun fact. Take the "Tenta-krill" card, for instance. I imagined an octopus extending its tentacles mischievously, leading to an ability in which you steal a card from another player — but with a twist! The card comes with a -2 VP penalty, reflecting the double-edged nature of meddling. This process was a blend of creativity, humor, and ocean lore, which made crafting each card a delightful journey.


Kelp to the Rescue

During the game, players select cards for an ocean market. I needed a way to create tension while still leaving a player in control, so I combined the choice of the market card with the whale's next action. Now players could balance the choice of whale risk with their desire to pick the optimal card from the market. Choices were now more interesting.

However, in early versions, the resolution of your choice seemed chaotic. Players wanted to be able to see that their choice make some impact in a positive way. Otherwise, they would feel like their choices did not matter, and it was all just random chance.

Another issue was that sometimes a single player would get punished by the whale too much. My wife is very supportive, but she did not like this version of the game. Players needed something that would give them a brief break from the whale's anger if it visited them late in the game or too often, a sort of "Get Out of Whale Free" — and so the kelp card was born!

Each player receives a kelp card at the start of play as a means of endowment. When the whale visits a player, they can choose to feed a regular krill card or their kelp; if they feed a krill card, they are awarded with another kelp card. This matters because whoever ends up with the most kelp gets 3 extra points. In other words, the player picked on by the whale the most would probably have the most kelp, which would boost their score.


Pitching the Game

I pitched License to Krill to every publisher that I could find. There were a few nibbles (pun intended), but no one ultimately took the bait. I'm still open to the idea of a publishing partner, but I realized I had too much fun with this game not to bring it to life myself, so I decided to create my own company and make License to Krill a reality.

While I have a few other unpublished board game projects, License to Krill felt like the perfect debut: It has broad appeal, a straightforward card-based design that simplifies manufacturing, and well, the timing felt right. This quirky, oceanic adventure was meant to swim its way into the world, and I'm thrilled to be the one to make it happen.

Kickstarter Is Not for the Light-Hearted

I dedicated about six months to researching and preparing for the Kickstarter campaign. There are some fantastic resources out there, like Joe Slack's e-book. Balancing this project with a full-time job and family life was challenging, effectively turning the Kickstarter into a part-time job. Some nights I felt too overwhelmed to push forward and needed a break from my own game.

Now, with the campaign complete and the games produced, we're almost at the finish line — the games will be shipping to backers soon! Navigating the shipping process has been the trickiest and most stressful part of the journey so far. Shipping errors are not only costly but also time-consuming, so I'm doing everything I can to ensure smooth sailing from here on out...

Matthew Kambic

Read more »

by Shadi Torbey

Introduction

People sometimes ask me which of the games I have designed is my favorite — which is an impossible question to answer! Firstly, because each game has its own story, but also because it's not really up to us as designers to rank our own creations.

So while I wouldn't say that I love Urbion more than my other games, it does hold a special place in my heart as the second design I got published and, more importantly, the one that left me feeling like an actual game designer.

Step 1: Be ambitious

The first game I tried to design was one about opera...but not just any game about opera: THE ultimate opera game, one that would reproduce all the excitement of preparing for a show, confronting the players with hard decisions and strategic dilemmas before making them fall in love with this noble art form.

I worked on it for more than two years, making every mistake a wannabe designer could ever make: I jumped to conclusions too quickly, printed brand new prototypes as soon as the tiniest detail was modified, changed almost all the parameters in one go, and dropped promising ideas (one of my first drafts was a deck-building game – in 2005!) in favor of hackneyed ones, eventually settling for an auction mechanism...in 2007!

The end result was a watered-down version of Reiner Knizia's Dream Factory (already seven years old by then), a game I discovered a couple of months after having stabilized a halfway playable version of my opera game.

Step 2: Do something totally different

This debacle was followed by a hiatus of some months when I played a lot of traditional patience games and ended up disappointed by almost all of them. They were not on par with the amazing multiplayer games that were available. For a solo player, the choices were somewhat limited back then...

Until one evening in Berlin, I bought and played Al Cabohne, the solo/two-player version of Uwe Rosenberg's Bohnanza. I enjoyed it immensely and was immediately disappointed that the whole series of Bohnanza games was not solitaire suitable.

And there it was: I decided I should remedy that by creating my own series of solitaire games. Two ideas popped into my head: (1) a labyrinth with enchanted dwellings and a lurking danger, and (2) a conclave of good and evil creatures that have to reach a balance in their powers.

I went for the first idea: the labyrinth. This time, I was much more efficient in how I worked. No more printing tons of cards! I simply bought a stash of MtG cards and retrofitted them with stickers. Similarly, no more giant upheavals each time something was a little off; instead I carefully changed one parameter at a time, reaching a balanced version at what seemed like lightning speed.

Finally, and maybe most importantly: NO MORE PRESSURE! I let go of designing the ultimate tribute to an art form I loved wholeheartedly and was halfway familiar with. (In fact, I was probably too passionate about it; it's worth mentioning I am an opera singer by trade.) Now, I was just trying to make a fun little solo card game...and everything clicked. In one week, I had a playable, fun prototype, and almost everyone who played it liked it — even if some found it a bit weird: "A solo game? Really?!"

Onirim's first prototype, made with MtG cards
Step 3: Succeed

The prototype worked.

The tests were positive.

I started working with Élise Plessis on the art (more on this below in the Afterword).

I presented the game to Zev Shlasinger at SPIEL in 2009.

It got picked up by Z-Man Games for worldwide distribution and licensing.


Step 4: Never doubt yourself

With Onirim officially going to print, it was time to turn to the other idea I had on this fateful evening in Berlin: the conclave whose result must be a balancing of positive and negative powers.

The general concept was to have a line of four locations — those locations would become the City cards, so let's call them this from here on — that had to be "conquered", as in Knizia's Battle Line, but with one big difference: here the forces of all the Dream cards on both sides of a City card had to balance each other out instead of one side dominating the other.

Now the real challenge was finding an interesting system for how to play the Dream cards: an open system (play any card anywhere you want) turned out (quite unsurprisingly) to be boring; a "flash" system in which you had to place the cards as soon as they were drawn (and trigger their related effect: swap cards, score City cards, etc.) fared a little better but was way too chaotic. (It eventually found its place in one of the game's expansions.)

Designing the opera game had been a claustrophobic nightmare in which nothing worked at all; designing Onirim felt like a breath of fresh air, with everything falling into place.

But was Onirim nothing more than a sheer stroke of luck? Was I destined to become a "one-hit wonder" whose cheesy summer song people remember some thirty years later but nobody knows who wrote it? As the brilliant tagline of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 states: "Anyone can save the galaxy once".

Step 5: Find the solution

If it was still a bit of a struggle at times, the feeling was nothing like the one I had experienced while attempting to design the opera game. Back then, it had felt like bashing my head against a dead-end wall while stumbling in the dark; here, it was more like trying to remember the name of an actor, knowing that it is somewhere in your brain. I knew that a game was in there — it just had to come out!

Eventually, the solution for how to play the Dream cards came by not focusing on the Dream cards. Instead, by adding symbols on the City cards and allowing only Dream cards with a specific symbol to be played next to a City card, the game became what I had hoped it would become. As with Onirim, after this everything fell into place quickly. I soon had the second game in the series in hand – and it was signed right away by Z-Man/Filosofia.

Urbion's first prototype of the final version, also made with MtG cards
Step 6: See the end of the tunnel and gather immortal fame, fortune, and glory

Okay, the fame, fortune, and glory might be an exaggeration — as might be certain titles of the other steps, for that matter... — but having "cracked" this problem and having been able to give form to a game idea I had in mind for the second time in a row restored some self-confidence, so I went on working on the next Oniverse games: Sylvion, Castellion, and Aerion.

Afterword

A word about working with Élise Plessis and on the differences between the two editions of Urbion: I first came across Élise's work while scouting for an illustrator for my opera game. (Yes, another rookie error: thinking about illustrations before your game is even done.) I absolutely loved what she did and kept a reference just in case. I remember thinking: "If I ever make a children's game..."

When Onirim's prototype turned out to actually be a playable game, I started thinking about an artist, and instead of going for the pseudo-realistic fantasy setting that was prevalent back in the day (and to some extent still is), I decided to ask the artist whose a-bit-childlike-but-yet-weirdly-indescribable drawings had caught my eye. We started working together, and collaboration went so well on Onirim that it seemed natural to ask her to do the second game. Somehow, the re-theme (good and bad dreams having to live together in a city) seemed even more fitting than the original theme (good and bad beings having to make peace). The Oniverse as a series was born!

Over the past fifteen years, it has been incredible to work with Élise and to see her assert her style, yet evolve: I feel her drawing and her sense of color are even stronger today than they were at the beginning of our collaboration. That's why when the time came to finally make a second edition of Urbion, it was obvious that neither of us wanted to keep any drawings from the first edition. All of the creatures are still the same, yes, but re-created for this edition — which allows for fun one-on-one comparisons, see Zee's video:

Youtube Video
The base game of Urbion's second edition is exactly the same rule-wise (except for a small tweak in the two-player version), as are the two expansions "The Book of Powers" and "Arch-Places and Metas" that were included in the first edition. Five brand-new expansions complete this edition; some were created back then – but the box was too small to fit them in – while others were designed over the years with this edition in mind.

Shadi Torbey
inPatience Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

▪️ Pocket Fox Games is a new UK publisher formed by designers Johann Chipol of Charming Rogue Games and Paul Allen of Anarchy54 Games, and it's debuting with a 500-copy edition of Game Chest, a set of three tiny two-player games.

Luchamania consists of an 18-card deck, with numbered cards in three colors. Each player receives a hand of four cards and a reserve of five.

For each match, after looking at the top card of their reserve, each player simultaneously reveals a three-card hand. Whoever plays the best combination — ranking from straight-flush down to a pair — wins the match. The losing player chooses a card from the winner's combination and places it aside as a point card, then they discard a card from their own combination.

Players return the remaining combination cards to their hand, draw a card from their reserve, then play a new match. Whoever first scores 4 points claims a victory, and the first player to claim two victories wins the game.


In Showdown, two players engage in a shootout until only one remains standing. Each player starts with 7 life points and a hand of six cards, with the remaining four cards forming a face-down reserve. Each player simultaneously reveals a card — quick draw, aimed shot, swift dodge, etc. — then determine who gets hit, which can be both players! If you play a lucky coin, you draw a random card from the reserve for your turn.

After you shoot all the cards in your six-shooter, you shuffle all sixteen cards, then deal out new hands and a new reserve. Keep playing until someone's life hits zero, with the winner burying them in an unmarked grave.


In Heraldry, each of the two players has a hand of cards numbered 1-9, with some cards having a golden chalice and others a silver acorn.

The round's start player chooses any card to play as the starting base. Players then take turns until someone is unable to play. On a turn, you either play a higher card than the current base, play a card exactly 1 lower than the current base, or play two cards that add up to the current base; in all cases, the most recently played card becomes the new base, and in the latter case, the previous base card is banished and placed in front of its owner.

If you play a 3 on its own, you can immediately follow it with a golden chalice card from your hand; similarly, you can follow a lone 6 with a silver acorn card.

When the round ends, sum the cards still in your hand with any of your cards that were banished. The player with the lower total wins the round. Whoever first wins three rounds wins the game.


▪️ To highlight another small card game, let's look at Micro Hero: Hercules, a game for 1-2 players from Léandre Proust that publisher Grammes Edition will crowdfund at the beginning of January 2025:

Step into the mythological and humorous world of Micro Hero: Hercules, a minimalist solo deck-building card game inspired by the 12 Labors of Hercules. As the legendary hero, you'll embark on an epic adventure, revisiting his mythical feats with a fresh, humorous twist.

Each game consists of twelve rounds, each representing one of Hercules' Labors. Using your deck of technique cards, you'll gather experience points (EXP) to improve your abilities, upgrade your cards, and overcome mythological foes. Master the balance between offensive and defensive stances, strategically chaining your card plays to unleash powerful combinations while minimizing the damage you take.

Your goal is to complete all 12 Labors of Hercules without succumbing to the burden of wound cards. To triumph in each round, you must reduce the Labor's health to zero by dealing enough damage while defending yourself from its attacks. Defeated Labors transform into blessing cards, which can be added to your arsenal for future rounds. Victory is achieved by completing all 12 Labors consecutively, while the game is lost if your deck becomes overwhelmed by wounds.

Read more »

by Daniel Karp

Hi, I'm Daniel, the web applications developer here at BoardGameGeek.

BoardGameGeek has been around since 2000 and has accepted support payments since 2004 — but I've never been that comfortable with the term "support payments". We are a for-profit company, and to me, "support" makes it feel almost like a charity.

While I don't like the language of "support", there aren't a lot of terms for how to refer to our payment model — except for one I've seen a few other places: pay-what-you-want. You can think of BoardGameGeek as a pay-what-you-want website in which you can choose to pay whatever the site is worth to you. We've toyed with changing the official messaging around support toward "pay-what-you-want" and are still unsure exactly where to go with that...but you don't have to wait to start thinking about this differently:

Imagine you were presented with a form in which you had to choose how much to pay us this year for the services we provided. You can put US$0 in the form, and if you use BGG only occasionally, that may well be what it is worth — but if you are reading this, my guess is that BGG is worth more than that to you.

Do you look up information, rules, images, ratings, reviews, etc. to learn about games? Do you download files? Do you track your ratings, collections, or plays on BGG? Do you read or post to forums, blogs, or GeekLists? Do you use the trade system? Do you use our subscriptions? Do you enjoy the work of our media team: BoardGameGeek News, GameNight!, Cardboard Creations, our podcast, etc.?

Now, how much do you typically spend on one game? How many games a year do you buy? Think about how much value BGG adds to your enjoyment of the boardgaming hobby: Is it comparable to one new game a year? Less? More? Now, what amount do you put in that form?

(We sometimes mention that we appreciate all support, monetary and otherwise, and there are those of you whose non-monetary contributions — reviews, blog posts, files, images — are as significant as the monetary support of our patrons. If you are one of those contributors, thank you very much for your contributions.)

It doesn't cost anything to use BoardGameGeek, but it costs more money each year to run the site, and our support payments have not been keeping pace. Our support levels — US$15 for a support badge, US$25 for ad block — haven't increased since 2005, while our expenses have increased substantially since then. While support payments aren't our only source of revenue — as you can see by the ads on this page — they are important to us.

There are not a lot of comparable sites on the internet; mostly you'll find sites that are either run by big corporations or heavily funded by venture capital money. BoardGameGeek is neither — we've never taken outside funding, and we are completely independent. We do it, in part, by keeping expenses low. I challenge you to find a website that does as much with as small a team as we have.

(For the record, on the technical side, the website is built and maintained by one full-time developer (myself); Aldie, who is usually busy doing everything else related to running a small business; and one part-time UX designer who codes. As a programmer, I'm unfairly biased to think of the technical team first, but we have more people on staff devoted to content on the site (and elsewhere): our community manager, the entire media team, and others. In any case, the site runs, of necessity, very lean.)

I've been programming for BGG since 2008, and I wouldn't want to do anything else. I'm sure we all want BoardGameGeek to stick around for a long time, but this isn't only about ensuring that we survive; it is about compensating us for the value we provide. Please help us ensure that we can continue to do what we do by going to our support pay-what-you-want page, and paying what it's worth to you. Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

War of the Ring from Roberto Di Meglio, Marco Maggi, Francesco Nepitello, and Ares Games debuted in 2004 and has since been released in a few editions, including a Collector's Edition that now sells for an astounding amount of money.


To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the game, Ares Games is selling War of the Ring: The Two Decades Limited Edition, which features painted figures, a giant board, and a slipcase with rules and strategy guide in a "Two Decades" box, as well as special editions of the Warriors of Middle-earth, Lords of Middle-earth, and Kings of Middle-earth expansions — and those sets are on sale...as of now, Wednesday, Dec. 11 at 10:00 a.m. EST.

In a press release for these items, Di Meglio writes, "These editions will be limited to a maximum of 2,500 copies of the base game and 1,200 copies of each expansion and accessory. We warrant that these editions will never be reprinted, so this is a one-off chance to acquire these works."

For details on prices, head to the Ares Games website.

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

▪️ In 2025, U.S. publisher Restoration Games will crowdfund the release of Battle Monsters, a new edition of Stephen Baker's Battle Masters, which Milton Bradley released in 1992.

Restoration notes that this restoration is "[o]fficially licensed with the Titans of the Monsterverse: Godzilla, King Ghidorah, Kong, and Mechagodzilla!"

I worked in a game store in the early 1990s and know we sold Battle Masters, but I've never played, so I'm curious what the appeal of the design is. Which elements must Restoration include to keep the same feel of the original game? What needs updating when viewed from a distance of thirty years?

The OG design
▪️ In 2015, Portuguese publisher What's Your Game? released Nippon from designers Nuno Bizarro Sentieiro and Paulo Soledade, and in the spirit of a decade being the life cycle of a game in the marketplace — an unofficial metric, to be sure — U.S. publisher CrowD Games plans to release a new edition of the design in 2025.

Here's an overview of Nippon: Zaibatsu, which will be for 1-4 players instead of 2-4 as in the original release:

Nippon: Zaibatsu is a fast-paced, area-majority economic game in which players control "zaibatsu": massive conglomerates of interconnected companies driving Japan's economy in the Industrial Revolution era.

During the game, players invest in new industries, build factories and railroads, and produce goods to saturate local markets and fulfill contracts — all to grow their influence and power and to become rulers of the new modernized country.

Players are free to choose their playstyle and winning strategy: They choose what they score victory points for, control the game's pace with income turns, and race each other to get the most beneficial factories, markets, and bonuses.

All the core mechanisms of the original Nippon are present, but the components, art, and design are upgraded, and many gameplay features are reworked to get the game in line with modern trends. Nippon: Zaibatsu features new resource types, ships are heavily revised with new Iwakura mission rules, factories are much more variable, consolidation turns provide players with new rewards, and much more. Also, the game now has an automa-driven solo mode.

▪️ In April 2020, I covered more than a dozen forthcoming titles from Bruno Cathala, including a possible new edition of Shadows over Camelot created with original co-designer Serge Laget.

Laget passed away in 2023, but Cathala has still been working on this design, posting this teaser image at the start of December 2024:


Hmm, a Bombyx logo on the box? And the setting remains the same as before, with Cathala writing, "Let's...try to bring order back to camelot #knightsoftheroundtable v2.0 - Morgane puts sticks in our wheels." I presume we'll learn more once the FIJ convention takes place in late February 2025.

▪️ Following the release of Great Western Trail: New Zealand in 2023, Asmodee dissolved the eggertspiele brand, putting Lookout Games in charge of that company's catalog.

To be more specific, Lookout is now responsible for Camel Up, Village, and the Great Western Trail game line. In November 2024, a Lookout representative told me that the first reprint of Camel Up with the Lookout logo was being rolled out, and the GWT titles are scheduled for reprint and will be available "soon".


On top of that, Lookout has announced that on April 21, 2025 it will release Great Western Trail: El Paso, a scaled-down GWT design from Johannes Krenner and Alexander Pfister for 1-4 players that can be played in roughly half the time.

Here's an overview:

El Paso at the end of the 19th century: Five railroad companies have connected the Sun City to their network and made it a major hub for the cattle trade. Ranchers from the surrounding parts of Texas and Mexico drive their cattle into the city to send them on their long journey to the north, east, and west of the United States.

In Great Western Trail: El Paso, you take on the role of the ranchers of that time and bring your best cattle to El Paso to earn money and victory points. Hire more cowboys, builders, and engineers to get closer to your goals:

— Buy cattle to increase the value of your herd!
— Construct buildings to unlock more actions!
— Participate in the expansion of the railroad and secure the most attractive contracts!

Candice Harris got a peek at Great Western Trail: El Paso at PAXU 2024, and she gives an overview of the game in her PAXU 2024 video round-up starting at 7:53:

Youtube Video Read more »