Board Game Geek

by Christophe Le

"Gold is the lifeblood of the war!"

As the Hun horde swept across Europe, the Germanic tribes moved within the borders of the Western Empire, ultimately causing its collapse. In the twilight of antiquity and at the dawn of the Middle Ages, these so-called "barbarian nations" founded kingdoms on former imperial territory.

In Barbarian Kingdoms, an asymmetrical and competitive strategy game, each player controls a nascent kingdom vying for supremacy over Western Europe. The first player to control seven territories or eliminate two opposing kings is declared the winner.

Players can recruit warriors, collect taxes, invade provinces, reposition units, or claim control of provinces. The most original and surprising mechanism of the game is the bribing system used during battles, which balances the battles while adding chaos, bluffing, and a lively atmosphere to the game.

In this developer diary, we delve into the intricacies of the bribing mechanism, exploring its inspirations, the design process, and the refinements that shaped it into a core element of Barbarian Kingdoms. By understanding the evolution of this feature, you'll gain insight into the strategic depth and dynamic gameplay it brings to the table.

Battle Resolution

In Barbarian Kingdoms, battles are resolved by determining the majority of battle points. Players first commit their units to the battle, with kings worth 6 points and warriors worth 3 points each. The player controlling the province in conflict receives an additional 2 points. After this, both players secretly place a portion of their treasure (tremis) into purses, which are then exchanged. Each tremis wagered adds 1 battle point to the player's total. Battle points are calculated by summing the unit values, the province control bonus, and the bribed (i.e., bid) tremis. The player with the most battle points wins the battle. Regardless of the outcome, the money wagered is kept by the opponent, adding a strategic layer in which players must balance immediate gains against future resources.


The Genesis of the Bribing Mechanism

The idea for the bribing mechanism was inspired by Poker, particularly its zero-sum nature in which what one player wins is lost by another, as well as the continuous stack management throughout the game.

I aimed to capture a similar sense of resource management throughout Barbarian Kingdoms. Initially, players had visible stacks of money, and during battles, they would hide their stacks to secretly decide the amount to bet. They would then swap their bets, essentially exchanging the difference from the higher bettor to the lower bettor to balance the outcome.

Originally, this mechanism was themed as paying mercenaries and collecting weapons post-battle. However, this theming wasn't convincing. Early feedback highlighted the fun of the swapping mechanism and the preference for hidden stacks, which was quickly tested and approved.


Refining the Bribing Mechanism

Some early testers felt that being able to bet everything was too harsh, so I experimented with dials and cards to bet discrete values, with players needing only to swap the differences between bets. However, this led to issues with players betting more than they owned, often unintentionally, introducing an unintended bluffing element.

Managing this within the rules became overly complex and punishing for calculation errors, so I reverted to the idea of betting only what players physically owned. This decision was motivated by the fact that, even if the "no limit" betting was not to the taste of some expert players looking for more control, the fun it provided was highly appreciated by the target audience of the game.

The game was developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, influencing the decision to use purses for the money swap, tying into the new theme of paying bribes. This ensured bets were secret, was manageable even with small hands, and prevented betting more than one owned, simplifying the rules and removing unintentional bluffs.


Comparison with Rising Sun

Barbarian Kingdoms' bribing mechanism is often compared to that of Rising Sun, a favorite of mine. Here are the key differences:

• Single Bet: Unlike Rising Sun's four separate bets resolved successively, Barbarian Kingdoms features a single, simpler combat system.
• Zero-Sum: In Rising Sun, the winner gives their bet to the loser, while in Barbarian Kingdoms, each player takes the other's bet, circulating money without changing the total in play.
• Persistent Stack: Players in Barbarian Kingdoms manage their treasury throughout the game, similar to poker, unlike Rising Sun where money resets after each war phase.
• Hidden Information: In Barbarian Kingdoms, players do not know their opponent's total money before betting, adding uncertainty and strategy.


Testing and Final Adjustments

In early designs, stacks were visible, so there was no need to track them. After changing to hidden stacks, some expert players still engaged in counting because all money flows were publicly known.

To discourage this behavior, which wasn't fun and extended playtime, I introduced random placement of secret chests and a unique diamond treasure. These changes added uncertainty and made precise calculation difficult, even for skilled players, emphasizing intuition and strategy over memorization and calculation.


Discussion of a Suggested Variant

While some players have suggested making bets secret and revealing them only between the two players involved, this variant introduces several potential drawbacks. It would add excessive chaos, diminish the strategic depth, and disengage other players from the outcomes of battles.

Moreover, it could make the game less accessible to those with dyscalculia and reduce the overall enjoyment for players who thrive on the balance of strategy and fun.

While players are always free to adapt the game to their preferences, I firmly believe that the existing implementation of the bribing mechanism is the best fit for our target audience, providing an optimal blend of excitement and tactical depth.

Conclusion

The bribing mechanism in Barbarian Kingdoms is a core element that enhances the game's strategic and atmospheric appeal. Its current design brings a unique touch to the game, offering a well-balanced mix of strategy and fun that resonates with casual and intermediate players. By encouraging both bluffing and strategic thinking, it creates a lively and engaging experience that keeps players coming back for more.

Christophe Lebrun

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by W. Eric Martin

At the 2024 Spiel des Jahres ceremony on Sunday, July 21, Daybreak from Matt Leacock, Matteo Menapace, and CMYK won the Kennerspiel award, which is aimed at somewhat experienced game players.

The ceremony was livestreamed in both German and English, and on the German broadcast, some viewers commented on a logo or symbol that was visible on Menapace's shirt.

At a press conference the following day, SdJ chairman Harald Schrapers issued a statement about the Kennerspiel ceremony, with that statement being reprinted on the SdJ website, along with background information to give context to that statement. Here's a Google-assisted translation of the statement and background information:

"The Spiel des Jahres Association has been supporting the 'Spielend für Toleranz' ['Playing for Tolerance'] initiative for years and thus unequivocally positions itself against any form of racism and anti-Semitism. We find it intolerable that a game author we invited wore a symbol on his clothing on stage that must be perceived as anti-Semitic by Jews. With his action, the author also behaved in an extremely uncollegial manner toward the others involved in his game (author, editorial team, publisher)."

A screenshot of Matt Leacock (l) and Matteo Menapace during the ceremony
Background:
An author who received an award from the association wore a sticker in the Palestinian national colors, depicted as a watermelon, on stage. Because the sticker shows the outline of a "Greater Palestine" that denies the existence of the State of Israel, it has exceeded the limits of what must be accepted as a legitimate political expression of opinion. During the stage event, the relatively small sticker attached to the T-shirt did not attract the attention of those involved in the program. Immediately after the event, Harald Schrapers and Christoph Schlewinski [chairman of the Kinderspiel des Jahres jury] asked the author to hand over the sticker to them and prohibited him from showing this symbol in the hall or in the photographs taken there. Matteo Menapace is no longer welcome at events organized by the Spiel des Jahres association.

I contacted Menapace to see whether he had a response to this statement, and he wrote that he was "working on a statement to clarify that my intention was to express solidarity with Palestinians, not to suggest solutions like dissolving Israel (which people extrapolated from the shape of the melon)." On July 26, 2024, he posted the following response on Medium that I'm reprinting in full:

My decision to wear a watermelon sticker on the Spiel des Jahres (SdJ) stage on Sunday was to show solidarity with Palestinian civilians.

The watermelon is a symbol of Palestinian resilience in the face of decades of oppression. I bought the sticker from Wear The Peace, an organisation that donates 100% of their profits to humanitarian aid.

I acknowledge the current and historical context that has led to SdJ as a German institution to respond with heightened sensitivity to allegations of antisemitism. I take those allegations very seriously.

However, debating the shape of the sticker and pushing for an antisemitic interpretation is a distraction. Instead, I want to draw attention to the reality of thousands of Palestinian people who are being wiped off the map, and are in dire need of humanitarian and medical services.

No human being or group of people should be erased because of their ethnicity, religion or nationality. I hope we can all agree on that.

All humans deserve peace and justice. I believe this won’t be possible until the end of what the International Court of Justice has recently defined as unlawful occupation. What we can do as citizens of Western nations is to put pressure on our governments to take responsibility for their historical role in this injustice, and end our complicity with their funding and enabling of war crimes.

These actions and views are entirely my own, and do not necessarily reflect those of anyone else involved with Daybreak / e-Mission.

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by David Carmona

Our First Game

We entered the world of gaming thanks to a dream I had in June 2019. That morning, upon waking, I told Karen about my dream, describing in detail the game's rules and the universe surrounding it. Enthusiastic about the idea, we spent the afternoon in a park writing down the rules in a notebook, giving free rein to our imagination. A few days later, we created the first prototype, which we presented to our friends and family.

Following the enthusiasm and positive feedback, we decided to self-train in the profession of game designer and publishing.

We dedicated countless hours to research, learning game design techniques and understanding the intricacies of publishing. Our passion and determination allowed us to overcome challenges and turn this dream into reality.

Virus War was born, and we were delighted to share this creation with the world.


Nekojima

Nekojima was born one evening in December 2021. It all started during the renovation of our house in the Vercors mountains in France. As we transformed our living space, we had the idea to create an original dexterity game requiring the use of both hands, a concept still largely unexplored.

The initial idea was simple: stack wooden dowels connected by a string. The resulting structure strangely resembled electrical poles, which led us to think more deeply about the theme of the game. Our cultural backgrounds played a role in this reflection. Karen, of Vietnamese origin, and myself (David), having lived in Japan, naturally integrated elements of these cultures into our creation.

The name "Nekojima" naturally imposed itself. These islands, famous for their cat populations, inspired the final concept: cats hanging from electrical cables.



Self-Publishing

Aware that our project required a significant investment, Karen and I decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign to finance the production of Nekojima. We spent the year 2022 presenting the game prototype at various gaming events, generating such enthusiasm that Nekojima received several awards that same year.

We discovered the illustrator, Gilles Warmoes,Gilles Warmoes on the platform Behance. A French artist, Gilles had never worked on a board game before, but he was immediately captivated by the project idea. His geometric lines perfectly matched the structure of Nekojima, adding a unique visual dimension to the game.


At a festival, we met Blackrock Games, which quickly recognized the potential of Nekojima. They invited us to the SPIEL trade fair in Essen, Germany for their team to test the game. Following a unanimous decision, Unfriendly Games, consisting of David Carmona and Karen Nguyen, became a member of the Blackrock family.

After a year of intense communication, the time to launch the campaign finally arrived. Nekojima was supported by more than 3,700 people worldwide, confirming its upcoming release.


David & Karen

Within our team of self-taught individuals, it is often said that David plants the seed and Karen nurtures the tree:

• Karen handles the creation of game mechanisms, artistic direction, layout, social media, video editing, production oversight, and game events.

• David is also responsible for the creation of game mechanisms, 3D modeling, photography, commercial exchanges, logistics, administration, and game events.

Together, we form a complementary and dedicated team at Unfriendly Games, bringing games with original mechanisms and materials to life.

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by W. Eric Martin

• Designer Scott Almes has a fair number of game series — Tiny Epic..., Claim, Boomerang — in his catalog, which makes sense from a designer, publisher, and player perspective: as a designer, you can use the foundation of one game when building another; as a publisher, marketing each new game effectively markets the entire line; and as a player, you get a chance to explore more of what you liked.

In 2022, Almes and publisher LudiCreations released So, You've Been Eaten., a game for 0-2 players: two players can play against one another, one player can compete against a bot in either of the asymmetric roles, or a human can have the two bots play one another, which could be ideal for learning the game's mechanisms.

Now the pair are coming together again for So, You've Been Cursed., which will be crowdfunded in 2024 with release coming in late 2024 or early 2025. Here's the setting:

So, you've been cursed.

It happens in the wizarding business. Occupational hazard. It is also the only logical explanation. At first, it seemed like that feast last night must have caused the headache and the heartburn...but as you were about to brew the third digestive potion of the morning, it dawned on you.

You can't remember how you got home, and what you actually had for dinner. Then, you noticed the sheep bones in the kitchen, the sheep bones on the dinner table, the sheep bones in the washroom, the unidentified bones in the bedroom, the blood stains in...just about everywhere in the house.

It did not help that the town crier passed by your house, announcing the missing sheep from Scott's farm, the gouged-out stonework at the town hall, the missing merchant from across town.

So, there is a monster running around town at night, terrorizing the villagers and what's worse, eating them. Luckily for them, it seems to be a nice, local monster rather than one from out of town, so no worries there, they are safe from outsiders. Unluckily for you, it seems that the monster is, well, you.

But no need to despair! There is a cure! Maybe! You just need a whole lot of ingredients to brew and mix the potions listed in your spell book, and you need to get them by any means necessary before it is too late and your nocturnal form persists in its ravenous pursuit for long enough to permanently transform.

And who knows what the monster inside of you is thinking?

Or, rather, who knows what the monster is eating?

So, You've Been Cursed. is a game for 0 to 2 players: two players can play against one another, one player can compete against a bot in either of the asymmetric roles, or a human can have the two bots play one another, which could be ideal for learning the game's mechanisms.

• Continuing the wave of games getting new two-player versions even though said games already can be played with two players, we have Everdell Duo from James A. Wilson and Clarissa A. Wilson, with Starling Games running a crowdfunding campaign for this title in 2024.

Here's an overview of this 1-2 player game:

In Everdell Duo, you either compete against your single opponent or play co-operatively with another player to earn the most points. You accomplish this by placing workers to gather resources, then use those resources to play cards face up in front of you, creating your own woodland city.

Cards may be played from your hand or from the face-up area on the board called the meadow. However, only cards touching the sun or moon token may be played from the meadow, and players move these tokens each time they perform a turn. Therefore, planning for and timing which cards you play is critical.

Each game you try to achieve various events, the requirements of which differ from game to game, making certain cards and combinations more important to pursue.

The game lasts for four seasons, then players add their scores to determine the winner. If you're playing co-operatively, check the requirements for the chapter you are playing to see whether you have won.

• Still another game line seeing a spinoff title is the long-lived Spot it!, which will be joined on July 26, 2024 by Zygomatic's Spot it!: Connect


As in Spot it!, the game features a deck of cards, in which each card features exactly one object in common with each other card. Each player has their own hand of cards, and at the same time, players race to name what a card in play has in common with a card in their hand, after which they add their card to the table. If you create a row of four cards in your color, you win the round, and if you win a certain number of rounds, you win the game.

• Rolling Realms Redux is a standalone game from Jamey Stegmaier of Stonemaier Games and designer Karel Titeca that's compatible with 2021's Rolling Realms and the dozens of promo packs that have been released.

To play this roll-and-write game, take any three realms and give an erasable board from each realm to each of up to six players. (Redux features twelve realms based on games from other publishers, whereas the original RR features eleven realms and each of the promo packs one realm.)

On a turn, someone rolls two six-sided dice, then everyone writes one die result in an empty space in one realm and the second die result in another realm. Each realm has a puzzle of sorts related to the game being featured, and as you enter numbers, you earn resources (that you can spend for special abilities) and stars. Whoever scores the most stars wins.

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by Ryoko Yabuchi

In this diary, I'd like to introduce The Fashion Game, a fashion-coordination game that was successfully crowdfunded on Kickstarter in 2022. I'll cover:

• An overview of the game
• What makes it interesting
• How it was conceptualized and developed

Excitingly, the game is currently being developed for the U.S. market and continues to evolve, so stay tuned! I'll also share some images of this new edition at the end. I hope you enjoy it.

•••
Hello, I'm Ryoko Yabuchi, a board game creator from Japan. As an indie designer, I handle everything from planning to art, manufacturing orders, and shipping. (By the way, this article was originally written in Japanese and translated by AI. If anything is unclear, please let me know!)

What Kind of Game?

This game involves combining cards shaped like clothing with pattern cards to create fashion coordinates and enjoy them together. It already sounds fun, right? And trust me — it really is fun!


Manga on How to Play the Fashion Coordination Game

Curious about how to play this coordination game? Check out this manga for a rough guide on how to play.


Looks fun, doesn't it? It certainly is! But getting it from initial idea to completion took some time...

When Did I Start Thinking about This Game?

It all started around 2019. While creating Yura Yura Penguin with a home cutting machine, I began to think about this game and experimented with card cutting. Although I found the idea of a fashion-coordination game intriguing, I faced challenges in mass-producing these uniquely shaped cards and determining the number of pattern cards required, so I focused on completing Yura Yura Penguin, my first game with uniquely shaped cards.

However, the allure of fashion coordination persisted in my queue of game ideas. In 2022, I realized I could create die-cut cards and produce them in large quantities. After prototyping and conducting playtests with family and friends, the game received positive feedback, prompting me to move forward with production.

There were trial-and-error phases in refining both the game rules and card production.

Rule Development 1: The Initial Version Was a Huge Hit, But...?

During playtesting with family and friends, ranging from my five-year-old daughter to university students and those in their 40s, 50s, and 70s, we experimented with different playstyles. One version involved appointing an editor-in-chief to set a fashion theme, with others created outfits based on their hand of cards. The editor-in-chief then judged and awarded points for the best coordination. This approach survived as an alternative way to play.


Even my daughter surprised us with her ideas, skillfully layering and expressing herself cutely. We engaged in lively discussions, praising or critiquing each other's coordinations, discussing mismatched patterns, and why they turned out that way. The feedback — "You should definitely make this!" and "I love it!" — encouraged me, but also highlighted some issues...

Rule Development 2: Making It Enjoyable for Those Not Interested in Fashion

One challenge surfaced during family playtests: Men showed less enthusiasm compared to women. Recognizing the need for the game to appeal to mixed groups, I delved into what caused this hesitation.

While creating and expressing ideas through cards appealed to both genders, not everyone felt comfortable presenting final outfits. To address this, I introduced a rule in which players guess the theme of the coordination, which became the primary gameplay rule. This adjustment eliminated the need for explicit fashion discussions.

This change made the game enjoyable for both men and women, even those less interested in fashion — a decision I'm glad I made. We also refined how themes are selected and shape cards are used, a process that took considerable time.

Production 1: Pattern Cards and Theme Cards

The game includes sixty pattern cards.

Creating and selecting pattern cards
With countless patterns worldwide, covering them all is impossible. To balance gameplay and cost, we settled on sixty cards, categorizing general clothing patterns and selecting representative ones, including solids, characteristic fabrics, and fun patterns. Many patterns were created and rejected, honing my knowledge of their origins.

For those needing who want patterns unavailable in the game, I suggest printing or drawing your own! Different paper textures won't affect gameplay, so mix in your favorites. Kickstarter backers received original pattern creation sheets, and a printable PDF allows for custom patterns.



Choosing Themes

To cut costs, theme cards are on the back of pattern cards, their selection proving challenging. I delved into fashion magazines, books, and even bought some, blending serious themes with playful ones like "Meeting an Oil Tycoon", "Horror", and "Isekai Trip". Playfulness is vital — it's a game, after all.


Players explore creative ways to express themes with limited pattern cards through layering, rotating, and peeking. Experimentation is key.




Production 2: How Do You Make Uniquely Shaped Cards?

Learning card mass production for Yura Yura Penguin, I discovered the need for die-cutting dies: Thomson or Bic, depending on region.

Japan hosts various processing firms, with options in Taiwan or China that often requiring minimum orders of 500 to 1,000 units. Opting for a Japanese firm offering die-cutting and combined printing, I prioritized stability despite higher costs, mindful of currency fluctuations and the occasional die-cut printing misalignment.




Using samples, I chose sturdy material to prevent bending. Though cheaper, printing on transparent cards didn't match die-cut cuteness. Cards feature a white back for use in black or white modes, enhancing versatility.

Don't discard the inner die-cut parts because they double as score chips and theme tokens!


The game successfully funded on Kickstarter, so thanks to all supporters! I hope you enjoy it.

The Fashion Game has now been developed for the U.S. market by Wonderful World Board Games as Fashion Police:






Isn't the card shape ingenious? Customization is rising — an exciting prospect!

Look out for the latest version of this design at Gen Con 2024. Thank you for reading this far. I look forward to meeting you again through my board games...

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by W. Eric Martin

Let's take the tracks to see what's been rolling along in the background when I wasn't looking:

• Station to Station is a 2-4 player game from designers Steven Aramini and Jonny Pac that Alley Cat Games will debut at SPIEL Essen 24 in October, but little information about the gameplay has been released so far:

The Steam Age is at its height, and you are an ambitious new train company determined to turn your upstart venture into a booming success. You don't have much to begin with — just a small amount of cash and coal, a train engine, and an iron will.

In Station to Station, a pick-up-and-deliver game that features engine building and set collection, you need to carefully plan your route, hire the right crew, and manage your cargo if you want to have the most legendary locomotive of all time.

• Another 2024 release with similarly minimal information is Train & Railway from designer/artist Zong-Ger(蔥哥) of Good Game Studio. Here's the briefing on this 2-4 player game:

Whoo—whoo! GG Island boasts abundant natural resources, yet suffers from inadequate transportation infrastructure and scarcity of resources among nations. As a developer, how would you satisfy the needs of various countries?

Throughout Train & Railway, players must draw railways, transport goods, or produce manufactured items and deliver them to different nations to earn points. To enhance commercial efficiency, how can you strengthen your own abilities? Take on various missions and become the top railroad tycoon!

Maybe this excerpt from the back of the box adds a thousand words to what's written above:


• Taiwanese publisher Moaideas Game Design crowdfunded Cargo Empire, a 1-5 player game from Alexander Bogdanovsky and Pini Shekhter, in December 2023 and expects to have the game on the market in Q4 2024. Here's what to expect:

Cargo Empire is a pick-up-and-deliver board game with point-to-point network building. Players immerse themselves in a complex world of transportation networks, striving for glory, wealth, and power as leaders of one of the four major families on the continent of Dyorle.

There is only one action in this game, and that is transporting cargo. Players must navigate a changing landscape, weaving between cities and using various transport modes to score points. To dominate, players must plan their network of trading posts meticulously and keep a sharp eye on long-term rewards.

Can you build the mightiest cargo empire? Simple choices derived from an intriguing combination of mechanisms will challenge your skills in resource management and strategic thinking. Only one can become the king of commerce!

• In early July 2024, Days of Wonder teased a late 2024 release to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Alan R. Moon's Ticket to Ride: five new limited-edition collectible train boxes, one for each of the colors in the base game.

Is that a mechagiraffe?! Oh, wait...
• Finally, in addition to the previously announced new editions of John Bohrer's Colorado Midland (released in June 2024) and Southern Pacific and Han Heidema's West Riding Revisited (both now due out in Q3 2024), Rio Grande Games has announced forthcoming editions of three more titles from the Winsome Games catalog, all designed by Bohrer: Prairie Railroads from 1999, Baltimore & Ohio from 2009, and SNCF: France & Germany, a 2010 publication that Queen Games had on the market for a few years as Paris Connection.

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by Phil Gross

I was reading Cole Wehrle's designer diaries for Arcs when a non-sequitur exploded in my mind: There ought to be a social-deduction word game. I dropped my breakfast fork. I prodded at the idea, or perhaps it tackled me. The idea held firm.

In the past, my dabbles in game design had fizzled out. A couple of dusty, stalled-out prototypes languished downstairs. For the first time, I had a recognizable, fully-formed premise — there was something inherently funny about needing to say secret words — and the premise sounded novel, maybe even unique. (Apologies to Ted Alspach as I still haven't played Werewords.)

I knew right away that I wanted players to say multiple secret words repeatedly so that players would be forced to say them sneakily.

As simple as that sounds, ideas have a funny way of needing to be de-synthesized. At first, my brain was too focused on social deduction as a matter of genre. My initial ideas involved hidden roles, with androids hiding secret words and humans being tasked with identifying their robotic peers — like a Blade Runner party game. But the hidden roles didn't survive beyond an alpha prototype. Crucially, my first playtest was with my extended family, who hasn't played The Resistance or Werewolf. I felt instinctively they would not grasp the roles element, so I stripped the roles out of the prototype right before the teach. I had my first taste of the exhilarating kinship between playtesting and improv comedy performances; I changed the rules on the fly, and the game was a hit.

That first playtest with family was a revelation. Everyone was laughing, hard — and not in a nice "Let's appease Philip" sort of way. This was a comedic party game, and glimmers of strategic depth were already showing. I learned a couple of key lessons from the gameplay: first, common words like "shark" were more fun to bluff and smuggle than complicated, seldom-used words like "discombobulate". Second, listing words in the same category was a dominant strategy. Certain domains of words, e.g. foods, made listing easier, so I cut them.

Prototype elements from multiple iterations, including Connie The Word-Sniffing Dog, who you grabbed to make a guess
In that test, the core loop of ContraBanter was established as you still see it today: Players sneak secret words into regular conversation in the form of Q&A rounds; you win by guessing your opponents' words or sneaking your own words past them.

Before the next playtest, another bold idea wrassled me, and I listened. It became the game's unique, playful hook: You're smuggling words, and you can hide words inside one another. To wit, the sound of a word can be nestled within a similar or larger word. A rule was born: As long as I can hear the whole sound of your secret word, it counts. It's my favorite kind of rule: dead simple, while opening up so much expressive play. Homophones, malapropisms...all manner of creative smuggling are legit.

I teach the rule with this example: if your word is "Con", you might say, "I'm in this for the long con", or "That's a contradiction", or, "The best Star Trek movie is...?" And after someone says "KHAN", I let them know I'd also accept First Contact.

When we first playtested with my improv buddy Dan, he snuck the word "Tokyo" right by us with a ridiculously dumb statement: "I was babysitting, and I Tokyo kids to the zoo." He manipulated the pronunciation just right, and the malapropism was so absurd, we couldn't believe what we heard and let it go. After every game there's a natural debrief session ("What were your secret words?"), and we still laugh about Dan's toke-yo over a year later.

Changes and Development

I resisted making ContraBanter a team game for several months. When I tackle something new, my cursed instinct is to reinvent the wheel. I thought, "I don't want to copy Codenames", as if that were at all relevant.

But when I finally made the switch to teams, the advantages were obvious. Introverted players who felt uncomfortable blathering on their own got to focus on listening and guessing, and teammates developed fun strategies, setting up softballs and bluffs within their conversation. Finally, humorously, players sometimes don't hear when their teammate has already said a secret word, and repeat the word unnecessarily — a welcome comedy of errors.

A sample hand of words that you and your teammates will smuggle into a sentence
For over a year, the game operated with a different progression/victory mechanism than you see today. At the end of a round, players who said all of their secret words earned another word card. You could win in one of two ways: by earning a sixth card for a Long Con, or by guessing correctly three times for Confiscation. I loved the absurd comedy of needing to sneak four or even five secret words into a ninety-second round. This was far more challenging than the current system, and it could lead to a snowball victory for a dominant team.

I think the system survived so long because the core loop is enjoyable. Players didn't report on feeling snowballed. When a game is getting great responses and feedback (perhaps especially in a party game), it can be hard to see opportunities for improvement.

It took the wise input of Ben Kepner, Dan Stong, and the rest of the Skybound Tabletop team to turn this ship around. Their insights led to the simpler point system you see today. Skybound also wanted to give players the opportunity to discard words they didn't say, an escape valve in case a word seemed too difficult. I remember the day I tested the new system with total strangers at Flag Con in Ithaca, New York. I was secretly nervous the changes would defang the game. To the contrary, dozens of players showed me time and again the new system was challenging, snappy, and simple — without the old vulnerabilities.

Other changes made in development seem face-palmingly obvious now. It used to be that players could sneak their secret words into any part of the round, including questions and cross-talk. This offered neat strategies, but playtesters were confused about timing and what counted as a round. Now you can use only the timed answer section — simple. I also toyed around with advanced words, which were either harder to say or easier to hide, and both directions ruined the core play. Attaching more points to ill-fitting words didn't magically make them worth playing. The final advanced mode is bonkers, and I hope you try it and let me know what you think.

One of the last big changes was prompted by designer Corey Andalora in a playtest at CuseCon. Originally, making an incorrect guess rewarded your opponent; the accused team got to discard and replace one of their word cards. Corey astutely pointed out he was discouraged from guessing — indeed, would never do it — because that penalty benefited the opponent too much. I never recognized the problem because I was too wrapped up in the positive reaction from players. On further consideration, I realized Corey was right about the imbalance; the guessing system was shooting my design in the foot! Replacing a card rewarded players for bluffing, but in a way that undercut the central promise of saying secret words again and again. Skybound and I went through a few iterations on the guessing resource system you can play with now — a nice, simple source of tension.

Guess cards and optional prompt cards were two of the final pieces added to the game
In Conclusion

I'm a gamer dork who reads Arcs diaries, shops on GameFound, and will try 18XX for the first time soon. I also love party games, playing them often with family, friends, and fresh acquaintances. I love many of the "low input, high output" party games that dominate the market now, but I also believe there's room for party games with a little complexity and teeth. I also believe chatting with friends old or new doesn't have to be "high input".

ContraBanter is a trojan horse design. The secret words and rules are the trojan horse. The real substance is the joy of conversation.

It was liberating to make this game a year after the pandemic shutdowns. I've witnessed and taken part in so many delightful and enriching conversations that never would have happened without this game's provocation. ContraBanter has an agenda. This is a game that dares to claim that despite all of our anxieties, despite all of the ways our technologies and modern lifestyles isolate and separate us, we still fundamentally want to play at talking with each other. For thirty minutes, we can laugh and gab and spin yarns; we can exercise that fundamental human connection to spark joy.

The greatest compliment I've gotten from testing ContraBanter is the same feedback I've heard a dozen times: "I forgot how fun it was to simply talk to one another. That was hilarious."

Enjoy,
Phil Gross

The final game with art by Curt Merlo Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• At BGG.CON 2023, I got to play a fantastic prototype from CMYK, and now I can finally talk about it: Wilmot's Warehouse is a co-operative game for 2-6 players from David King, Richard Hogg, and Ricky Haggett that's based on a video game from Hogg, Haggett, and Finji. Here's an overview:

In Wilmot's Warehouse, your team will work co-operatively to organize the warehouse, using memory, imagination, and silly stories you make up.

Draw product tiles from the stack, discuss what they look like, and place them somewhere you'll remember. After you place each tile, you flip it over and can't look at it again until the end of the game, so your team has to remember where you've placed previous tiles as you decide where to place new ones.

At the end of the game, in a five-minute rush, your team has to match all 35 face-down tiles with customer cards. Consult your performance review to see how well you did!

I've now played Wilmot's Warehouse 2.5 more times on a review copy from CMYK, and the game is a blast. Similar to Link City, which I covered in mid-July 2024, you have a final ranking based on how well you did in the game, but you will likely forget that ranking immediately because the thrill of playing comes from the ridiculous story elements you put together as you're trying to remember how everything links up and what exactly was in each warehouse stall...or sometimes outside of the warehouse as event cards present midgame challenges, as in the game below when we suddenly had to drop a day's worth of goods in a line outside the warehouse:


I'm on the road right now, and this is one of only two games I brought on the plane with me — The Game: Extreme being the other for reasons explained here — because I want to experience this design with as many people as possible, both to see what they make of the challenge and to experience what we create together.

• Co-operative narrative games have been a large part of Italian publisher DV Games' catalog since the Deckscape line debuted in 2017, and it will feature three titles in this category at Gen Con 2024:

— Decktective: Lock Up Sherlock Holmes! from Martino Chiacchiera and Silvano Sorrentino is the seventh title in the Decktective series that challenges players to solve a crime. Here's the pitch for this release:

A mysterious inscription stains the floor of 221B Baker Street. Does it have something to do with the theft at the Royal Palace? Is the arrest of the most famous detective of all time really the right solution?

First, you must discover what has happened to Sherlock himself!

— Until Proven Guilty: The Starry Sky Necklace, a 1-6 player design from Enrico Procacci, fells like the start of a new game series, although it might be challenging to have the Ace Attorney-like protagonist pointing in a unique way on each cover. An overview:

Until Proven Guilty is a narrative co-operative game inspired by court-themed visual novels, television series, and video games.

In the game, you take on the role of Peter, a brilliant lawyer who's still a rookie, yet now involved in complicated criminal trials. Can you help Peter defend his client? Each turn, read the trial card and choose an evidence card to refute it. Enter the evidence number into the web app and read the result: if it's correct, some jurors will side with you, and you can continue in the trial; if it's wrong, some jurors may side with your opponent, and you will have to try again. Depending on the evidence you choose, you may even receive personalized answers!

Using a gavel for the "T" is a nice touch...

— Marco Pranzo's Lost in Adventure: The Labyrinth is another 1-6 player design that launches a new game line, this one inspired by point-and-click graphic adventures:

In the co-operative game Lost in Adventure, you and your fellow players will together explore an unknown world where your every action impacts how the story unfolds. You discover the game scenery as you go, placing cards side by side, talking to characters you meet, collecting clues, and using objects wisely. Your decisions will affect the adventure and lead you to one of the possible endings. Your goal is to fulfill all the prophecies and complete the adventure with as many favors as possible.

In Lost in Adventure: The Labyrinth, you take on the role of a legendary hero who is searching for the mythical minotaur at the heart of a labyrinth as well-known around the world as it is challenging to navigate. The game map reveals itself throughout the game, one scenario card at a time, as you progress in an adventure astride the edge of legend and reality.

Read more »

by Jackie Fox

The Five-Player Problem

Rock Hard: 1977 came about as the result of a common situation for board game groups.

My regular game group had five people. Usually someone wouldn't be available, leaving us at three or four most of the time — but every once in a while, all five of us would show up, then we would all sit and stare at my 100+ game collection trying to find a game that we were all willing to play. One of us strongly preferred heavy Euros but disliked anything involving negotiation or bidding, another preferred lighter games, and almost everyone but me hated area control.

I'll play almost anything, but if there's too much downtime that doesn't involve planning my own move and I'm not engaged in what the other players are doing, I generally won't like the game. I'll start itching to pick up my phone and check email during other people's turns, and for me that defeats the whole purpose of playing board games, which is partly to give myself a break from all those screens.

I wondered why it was so hard to find a game that ticked all the boxes for me: the strategy of a good Euro; the "fun" factor of an American-style game; true integration of theme and mechanisms; quick turns even at full-player count. It was at that moment I decided to design the game I wanted to play.

Are You Ready to Rock?

I am very much a "top-down" designer. For me, while the mechanisms are super important, theme comes first.

I have led an interesting life, to say the least. Perhaps nothing has been more interesting (at least to other people) than my having been the bass player in the "Famous Five" version of the all-female rock band The Runaways.

Worker placement is my favorite game mechanism, and the music industry is a natural fit. Everyone can wrap their heads around what rock musicians do: interviews, gigs, songwriting, making records, etc. These were natural action-selection spaces that would make it easier to learn and remember the game.

And, of course, my game had to accommodate five players with little downtime between turns and a lot of engagement in what the other players were doing.

With all that in mind, Rock Hard sprang into my head almost fully formed. I grabbed a notebook and started writing, keeping in mind the experience I wanted to create for players: what it's like to be a fledgling rock musician trying to break into the big time.

Rock Hard: 1977 – the early days
Why 1977?

1977 was a watershed year in music in which a variety of styles of rock music all co-existed and flourished, from what we now think of as classic rock to glam to funk and early punk and metal. Even disco was still around.

It's also a period people often feel they missed out on. "Cancel culture" was far in the future, and creative people were pushing boundaries in every form of artistic expression. In music, the era would come to be defined as that of "sex, drugs and rock and roll".

From a gameplay perspective, setting the game in the 1970s also eliminated the complications of later technologies such as music videos, Napster (early unpaid music streaming), social media, and YouTube. It streamlined the choices you could make and left those things for later expansions or standalone games.

The Basics

There was still plenty to deal with in 1977. First and foremost, being a musician wasn't cheap, so I knew you'd have to work a "day job" until you could support yourself with your music. I also knew from the start that my game would have day, night and "after hours" phases.

As a musician, your life is defined by the clock. During the day, you rehearse and conduct business. At night, you mostly play gigs. And when the show is over, you hang out, have fun, and meet people, and in the era before home recording was common, you tried to get into a studio to record a demo on the cheap.

Jackie in the studio in the '70s
I spread the jobs out across the various phases, with pay on each averaging $2, but some being swingier and potentially more rewarding (like working on commission) and some being salaried and more reliable. Some had limitations like a demanding boss who could change when you had to work, and some had perks like free studio time if you were a recording engineer. I wanted each job to feel real.

And I knew that a big part of the game would revolve around managing when to blow off work: three strikes, and the boss would tell you to take a hike. Lose your job too soon, and you wouldn't have enough money to hire crew and pay your manager. Keep it too long, however, and someone else would get that record contract first.

At the same time, there would be things that the industry wanted you to do. You'd score fame (how the game tracks points) if you did those things best or first. These bonuses would change from game to game so that no two would play alike.


You'd also have personal goals that only you could score. Sometimes they'd synch up with the public bonuses; sometimes you'd have to choose between them or hire a manager who could help you do both.

I also knew you were going to need a player mat to keep track of things and that it was going to be in the form of an amplifier with knobs you could actually turn to track your stats. More on that later.

The Darker Side of the '70s

While I wanted the game to focus on the sheer fun factor of the late '70s, I also wanted to acknowledge in some small way that the '70s rock scene could be hard for anyone who wasn't straight, white, and male.

As a woman, I faced prejudice that's hard to imagine nowadays. The review of my band's second album in Creem magazine (a huge rock magazine at the time) started with the sentence "These bitches suck" and went downhill from there.

And although David Bowie, Elton John, The Rolling Stones, and The New York Dolls had already gone a long way toward making androgyny acceptable — the word "non-binary" wasn't in common use then — that was mostly because they still read as male. Non-gender-conforming people weren't always treated well. Musicians who people thought "looked gay", whether or not they actually were, often got booed on stage and threatened with violence when off it.

In actuality, in the '70s all types of people played clubs in major cities. I wanted the characters in the game to look more like my friends and less like my period record collection.

The ten characters I created are loosely based on combinations of people I knew or know, though changed to reflect a diversity of characters who play one of five different instruments (drums, bass, guitar, keyboards, or vocals) and are one of three different genders (male, female, or androgynous). Each has a unique ability that gives them a slight edge in certain situations. By the time we emerged from the self-isolation of 2020, I knew these characters better than the people who'd inspired them.

While I was never going to include the rougher edges of the era, gender was definitely going to play a role. It became less important to the game as it evolved, but my thinking about it resulted in one of the more important mechanisms in the game.

Let's Have That Talk About Candy

One of the first gender differences that occurred to me was that women almost never had to pay for drugs in the '70s. Men had a higher tolerance, and androgynous people better situational awareness.

But while drugs were the original inspiration for candy, they quickly morphed into something less specific as I realized that drugs weren't the only thing that got people pumped. It could be sex or gambling or the adoration of ever-bigger crowds. It could be video games or shoplifting or lying and getting away with it. It could be actual candy. (The book "Sugar Blues" had come out in 1975 and made a strong argument that sugar was as addictive as nicotine or heroin.)

So candy became whatever, in the infamous words of The Rolling Stones, gets you through your busy day. It was a thematic way to give players the ability to gain extra actions in a game in which you usually get to do only one thing per turn.


But candy had to carry some risk because with any of these things you're always pushing your luck if you do it too often. You never know when that little switch in your brain is going to get tripped and that thing — whatever it is — becomes something you can no longer live without. It isn't going to happen the first time you do it. If you're careful or lucky, that switch may never get flipped at all.

It's risky behavior, however, and the more of it you do, the greater the risk becomes. I represented this with a stat called "craving", which would increase by one every time you consumed candy. You'd then roll a d6 to see whether you hit at least that number and satisfied your craving. If not, you'd need to spend some time recovering.

Obviously, you couldn't overdo candy the first time you used it, but your odds got worse every time your craving went up. It was a perfect representation of the push-your-luck aspect of the '70s — a small part of it to be sure, but definitely there.

In my first version of the game, candy was hard to get, and if you got a bad roll, you paid for it by having to spend the next round recovering. It was too punishing, especially in the edge case when you drew the one "sugarless" card in the deck and didn't even get any extra actions. After seeing how players reacted, I realized it was okay to sacrifice theme a little in order to minimize negative gameplay experiences.

I did this by putting an extra +1 action card into the "Sugar Rush" deck while reducing the punishment for a bad roll to losing a single action at the beginning of the next round. I also threw in some cards and abilities that could mitigate bad die rolls.

These changes took on additional importance when the game eventually got reduced from twelve rounds to nine, making every action count. Losing an action was still bad, but not so devastating that you couldn't still win. In the end, the mechanism felt quite balanced, yet still thematic.

Making a Prototype

It's said that designers don't need to spend a lot of time and money on their prototypes.

I never got that memo.

I ended up spending a LOT of time on Rock Hard. Part of that was because I had never learned Photoshop; part because I didn't understand that you don't need anything fancy; and part because I was afraid to put my design in front of other people until I was sure it wouldn't "break".

By the time I had a game that wouldn't break and a prototype that looked halfway decent, Covid-19 hit and we went into isolation.

I tried to make the best possible use of my time in self-isolation by playing the game some one hundred times on my own at every different player count and with as many different combinations of characters as I could. Surprisingly, I never got sick of the game.

Part of that was down to the great temporary character art drawn for me by Mona Shafer Edwards, one of the top courtroom artists in Los Angeles. She literally cranked out the characters I had envisioned overnight.

Mona's prototype art for Kimmy Kim
I also entertained myself by using the zombies from Pandemic Legacy as a stand-in for the roadie tokens. That still cracks me up, and I'm sure our former crew can relate.

And finally, designer Geoff Englestein generously gave me tips on using icons instead of text on my game board. That took my board from one with a ton of overwhelming verbiage to something that looked like an actual game board.

An early version of the Rock Hard game board
The game board after the first big overhaul
The final board as re-designed by Devir and Meeple Foundry
But while the board was obviously important, the critical element for me was still the player mats.

The Player Mats

I got the idea of using amplifiers to track stats after playing Dan Blanchett's Abomination: The Heir of Frankenstein. There was something satisfying about the 3D look the spinners gave the player boards and how much they added to the feeling of being a mad scientist. I wanted to take that tactile interaction a step further and give players the satisfaction of cranking their amps to 11.

Only...how do you actually make amps with knobs?

I tried a lot of different things, from water bottle caps to replacement knobs for video game controllers. Nothing worked.

Then one night while putting on lip balm, it hit me: Chapstick caps. Turns out they come in all different colors, and you can buy them in bulk on Etsy for a price that isn't too awful.

While it wasn't a perfect solution — no type of glue works on polyethylene for long — the caps did prove that the idea was feasible and wouldn't be prohibitively expensive...and it was the wow factor that got people's attention.

The prototype player mat in action
The final player mat as designed by Devir and Meeple Foundry
Selling the Game

As I noted above, my Photoshop skills were pretty non-existent when I started designing Rock Hard. A friend found me a template that looked like a '70s concert poster, and while I wasn't crazy about the color scheme at first, the longer I looked at it, the more it grew on me.

I read everything I could find about sell sheet design. The one thing that stuck out was that I needed to answer the question: "What makes this game unique?" I thought about it and realized that a big part of the answer to that question was me.

It felt super awkward selling my game on that basis, but I knew that because of my history, it would grab people's attention.

Once I had a sell sheet I was happy with, I plunked fake coffee stains on the "poster" and stuck it to a digital wall with a pushpin and some tape, slightly ripped and off-kilter. It was a bit rough, but it stood out.


The First Major Changes

Originally I had two "after hours" decks: You could have a backstage encounter, which improved your reputation, or you could hang out and gain a random benefit. Things basically just happened to your character, and the first publishers who looked at the game at Pax Unplugged were adamant that players should have more agency over what their characters do.

I redesigned the "after hours" phase on the flight home from PaxU by making backstage into just one of five different venues where you could hang out, adding an element of set collection. Four of the venues were likely to grant you a particular type of benefit (though the precise benefit wasn't guaranteed — hat tip to Dead of Winter). The fifth gave you no benefit, but could stand in as a "wild" for set-collection purposes.

That Pesky "First Player" Problem

In Rock Hard, going first in a given round is a huge advantage. It means that for an entire round, no spaces are going to be blocked to you unless an event card makes them unavailable.

My initial design had a "Go To Bed Early" space that let you use an "after hours" action to take the first player token for the next round, then play would proceed clockwise from them. Players didn't like this much, especially if they were seated to the right of someone using the space aggressively. Plus, it cost an action to use.

I played around early on with having the first player token rotate clockwise to keep things simple, but it made planning ahead too hard. I then tried mixing up the player order by letting you get in line for the bar or the bathroom to go first (no pun intended) next round and taking your "after hours" actions when you were through. This change got me closer, though it still didn't solve the advantage that went to whoever went first in round 1.

Enter Devir

It was at this point that I brought the game to Devir.

They weren't an obvious choice. Aside from the fact that they usually work with European designers, their "family plus" games are typically language-independent, which Rock Hard is not.

But Devir is known for strong and diverse themes, and those player boards in Lacrimosa just sang to me. I knew Devir would be able to bring my amplifiers to life. It didn't hurt that the Devir team are also die-hard rock-and-rollers and that they thought they could get everything ready in time for Gen Con 2024, which was super-fast.

The tight schedule meant I'd be doing a lot more additional work than I'd planned for, however.

Late Changes to the Game

One of the biggest changes Devir asked for was a game that was both shorter AND more complex. These two things don't normally go together. In my original version of the game, you started with nothing but $1 and a candy token and played for twelve rounds. Working was important, and there was a difficult choice early on as to whether to spend your first paycheck on a demo tape or a manager.

The solution I came up with was to start you several months in. Your base stats would start at 2 instead of 0, you'd already have some notable life experiences, and most importantly, you'd have a manager, which you'd select in reverse player order, thereby balancing out the advantage of going first in round 1 and solving my first-player problem.

Another smart change Devir made was to remove the life experience tokens and place the icons for life experience directly on the "after hours" cards. That saved on production costs, meaning the game could sell for a lower price, something we all considered important.

More Cowbell, er, Cards!

Devir did, however, want more cards – lots of them. I doubled the number of cards so that the "after hours" decks would never run out during the game. Devir also asked for more variety in the bonuses. To do so, I divided the bonuses into three types that correlated roughly to what you were trying to achieve during each during phase and created eight in each category.

While I was at it, I added more personal goals and had people draw three, keep two. This combination of bonuses and goals made every game play out differently and added more tension between the two while still keeping the game shorter.

We also added a spot for random gigs of the type you wouldn't normally play, except that they usually paid better. At first, they might be bar mitzvahs or frat parties, but eventually you might get invited to play at parties in the hills and, after getting better known, on TV and at festival slots. These random gigs would earn fewer points but have greater benefits than you could otherwise get — and unlike regular shows, which would have limited slots, anyone could play a random gig.


There's No Such Thing as Too Much Flavor

The last change we made — and the one that almost gave me a meltdown — was to add flavor text to everything. This was very last minute, so I cribbed from things that had happened to my friends and me over the years I spent in and hanging around the music industry.

I created so much flavor text so fast — I'm talking hundreds of cards in one night — I didn't have time to think about it too much. Without the time to edit, what popped out was much funnier than the few I wrote early on. Hopefully, people will find the sheer absurdity and the knowledge that most of it actually happened amusing.

The One Change That Didn't Make It

Devir had a cool idea at one point. Since the knobs went to 11, one more than on most amps, why not make it harder to push them from 10 to 11?

Thematically, the '70s way to get that last little bit of volume was with an overdrive pedal. I introduced overdrive tokens and required players to discard one whenever they wanted to push any stat from 10 to 11.

It was a great idea, but proved to be a bit too much to pull off in a nine-round game. But who knows? Maybe the overdrive tokens will make an appearance in an expansion someday.

Instead, we decided to reward players with extra cash if they increased a stat that was already maxed out. Thematically this made sense as maxed-out stats would mean you were at the top of your game and therefore making more money...and since money converts to points at game's end, this change worked. You'd still be more incentivized to try to hit other goals, but at least you'd always have something to do at the end of the game that could make a difference.

The Art

This was probably the most challenging part of bringing Rock Hard to life.

We all agreed that the right artist for the characters and cover was Spanish artist Jennifer Giner. I urge people to check out her art on Instagram. She has a lot of followers for a reason.

Jennifer, however, is young. She wasn't even born in the '70s, and she isn't a musician. She had to go through a crash course on '70s style as well as the workings of rock-and-roll instruments, all while she was moving and attending conferences to sell art.

I had only one "conversation" with Jennifer as she doesn't speak English and my high school Spanish is limited. I managed to say "mas grande que la vida" (larger than life) and "sucio" (dirty), but I had no idea how to say things like "In the seventies, we flowed", so I sent a lot of photos of '70s artists to my editor David Esbri at Devir, who ended up being the conduit between us.

The process was frustrating at times, but the results were so worth it. The artwork is stunning. Making it even more amazing is that Jennifer did both the characters and the cover as original works in watercolor.

Seriously, I've watched time-lapse videos of Jennifer painting characters, and I honestly can't imagine her creating images as complex as the ones in the game this way. One serious mistake, and the picture is ruined — and yet she created ten characters (eleven if you count my promo card) and one simply gorgeous box.

Jennifer Giner's final art for Kimmy
The last decision was the color scheme for the board. By 1977, fashion in music was moving toward the aesthetic of punk and metal. Metallic colors were big, as was black and white and bright colors such as red and turquoise.

But people have an idea of what the '70s look like, and even though it tends to be based on the early '70s and late '60s, we took a cue from the band Nazareth's 1976 album "Close Enough for Rock and Roll" and went with the color scheme people associate with the '70s: avocado green, harvest gold, and warm orange/red.

So...Are You Ready to Rock?

I've already gone on too long here, kind of like Tom Petty (RIP, friend) as an opening act. There's so much more I could write about this journey, but now it's your turn to take the spotlight. If you have any questions, pop them into the forums below and I'll try to answer.

In the meantime – long live rock!

Jackie Fox Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Although I'm neck deep in preparations for Gen Con 2024 and an prepping short videos of a few titles that will debut at that show, my attention took a right turn — well, a 180º degree turn — this past week thanks to the arrival of Tether in my mailbox.

Tether is the debut release of designer Mark McGee through his publishing brand How To Steam Broccoli. I backed his crowdfunding campaign for this game in March 2023, my copy arrived last week, and I've already played eleven times, so let's talk about Tether.

The game uses a "mirror deck", a design from Daniel Solis that's used with permission here and that consists of 53 cards, with each card showing the mirror image of a number in its opposite corner. (The cards depict astronauts in space, so "up" and "down" are all relative to them!) A card is 25 held one way and 52 is turned upside down: 43 becomes 34, 10 becomes 01, and 77 stays just the way it is, thank you very much.

The corner indexes show both values on a card
With two players, one player lays down adjacent cards horizontally and the other vertically, but as the game progress, groups of cards can merge.

On a turn, you have two options:

• Play a card from your hand to the table, then tether other cards to it from your hand, from the "adrift" section on the table (which starts with three cards), and from previously played groups. If you can't tether anything to a card, you can't play it.

• Set an astronaut in your hand adrift (rude!), then pick up either another adrift astronaut or the top card of the deck.

To end your turn, draw a card and add it to your hand...unless your hand already has six cards, in which case you don't draw.

The nature of the mirror deck is that when you play adjacent cards vertically (34-35-36), I see them as being 10 apart from one another (63-53-43). If I play, for example, a 64, I can then attach the 63-53-43 group, making a larger group that's three cards tall and two wide. You could then play 47 on top of the 46 that you see, and so on.

A group's size is important because when it contains at least six cards, we score it, with the horizontal player earning points equal to the group's width and the vertical player scores based on its height. A group scores again when it contains at least ten cards, then again at fourteen cards.

Seven teensy groups, no scoring
The game ends after a size 14 group scores, after one player is at least 6 points ahead of the other, or after the deck runs out, with each player getting one final turn.

Anyone who's a fan of gin rummy can see the appeal of this game: You want to run as wide (or as tall) as possible; you want to use cards that your opponent wants in order to block their growth; and you don't want to set astronauts adrift that the opponent can use, but it's challenging to track both the numbers good for you and those good for the opponent.

As you play more, you realize that playing cards willy-nilly can be a terrible idea. Sure, I could add a 54 to the group above — but now the group has six cards and will score, with you earning 4 points and me only 2. I triggered the scoring, but I didn't make the group any wider in the process so that play didn't help me.

How the game above ended
You start assessing groups differently: Hmm, if I combine those groups, the height only goes up by one, but the width increase by three. You track cards that the opponent picks up, trying to figure out whether you might be able to play off of them in the future...but that will depend upon which side is up.

You can also play Tether with two-player teams. Each player gets their own hand, and the active player keeps the scoring marker in front of them. When I play to the table, my teammate can play cards from their hand as well, drawing a card at the end of my turn if they do.

We can't talk about which cards we have in hand — only general things like what to avoid or which play might be good — so the gameplay can be somewhat random, but Tether is a card game, so the gameplay is always going to be somewhat random. Sometimes you luck into a group that's six cards wide and one high, and sometimes you're staring at a card column like it's a stick ready to bop you on the noggin.

Tether is currently available solely through Allplay, which is serving doing fulfillment and distribution for How To Steam Broccoli, but this little design is sharp, so ideally these astronauts will drift to other orbits in the future.

To watch more gameplay examples and see the cards turn head over heels, watch this video:

Youtube Video Read more »

by Ken Jenkins

Turnip began as most good ideas do: a contemplation of the silliest root vegetables while taking a shower.

I was washing my hair and wondering why we ate so many turnip greens in the south but rarely ate the turnips themselves. And wondering about the etymology of the word "turnip". Why did it sound so much like "turn up"?

And that's the moment when I wondered whether I could make a game about planting turnips in which people would shout "turn up" in disbelief and suspicion.

Still wrapped in a towel, I began sketching out basic ideas in a journal. My wife asked whether I was doing okay, and I tried to explain about how "turnip" and "turn up" sound the same, and she smiled and nodded. That's the moment when I wondered whether I had overestimated the hilarity of that shower thought.


I used to love playing Skull but have cooled on it in the last few years, largely because it could feel incredibly arbitrary. I couldn't find any handholds when trying to bluff or call.

With that in mind, I persevered in putting together a simple bluffing game with a standard distribution of cards. Prime numbers are neat, so I figured a deck would consist of ten cards of prime numbers, with more lower-valued cards than high. (By using prime values, you had marked jumps in your bidding capacity.) I fiddled around with ten cards, getting a feel for how betting would work and how many cards would feel like a big commitment. A single face-down card or a pair of cards with one face up? Seemed good.

I needed some way to encourage players to bluff, but also to encourage players to call "Turn UP!", so I added turnip tokens to the game to keep track of whether you got caught lying or not. Honesty and discernment of others' lies would be worth points at the end of each hand. My friend Austin printed custom turnip tokens for me, which immediately made the game feel more real. He sketched them out with his mouse and had to print the body of the turnips most of the way before stopping the print to drop the little stems in. Those tokens are easily the most complex piece of the prototype.


Next, I put together five sets of identical cards, then wrote the word "TURNIP" across each set in different colored Sharpie. This was about as bare bones as it gets, and all of my prototypes start this way. I try not to commit too much emotionally to a game before I've determined whether it works well or not. I can see the theme but I don't need to put it on paper until the fun happens.

I took that prototype with me to PAX Unplugged 2023 and tried it out with the Rose Gauntlet Entertainment team, along with several of our friends. I quickly realized that having identical hands meant that card counting was pretty easy. My friend Nicole had come up from Baltimore and she's definitely not a gamer, so she was did unpredictable things that made me think hard about where the intrigue of the design lived.

Tyler, a burgeoning designer in his own right, was, I believe, the one who suggested stashing a card for its face value. That was just enough uncertainty to create tension, and a cool decision right out of the gate. It stuck.


I kept tinkering with that basic shape, getting mixed results with my local game group. Some games were tense, and some were decided quickly. I realized that this game is very group dependent and everyone needs a round or two to get a feel for the value propositions and how to draw out big cards or hold them back for the right time.

The poker players I introduced to the game loved it right away and enjoyed that the chip pile and cards you were betting were all one pool — but I needed ways to make things a little less opaque for folks who didn't grok the nuances of bluffing high and low.

I continued that way until the Rose Gauntlet Summit at the end of January 2024. Rose Gauntlet's Isaac Vega, Lindsey Rode, and Josh McCurry dug into the game and really tried to stress test it. We ran up against some big margins and started playing around with the math of what things were worth at the end of the game. What if cards in hand were worth more or less? How about more for the turnip tokens? Honesty is important, after all...but lying just enough is even more important, at least when it comes to having the biggest turnip crop.

I honestly can't remember who suggested it, but the idea of having to pay a card after winning a harvest came up during our testing and that worked surprisingly well to pull the scores into a little closer contention. The biggest question at that point was: Who would be collecting taxes on turnip harvests? The answer had to be a turtle because a) alliteration is amazing and b) I like turtles.



The game was pretty much finished from a mechanical standpoint after that week, and the only changes were nuances in how to phrase certain steps of the process.

Now came the shiny part. I got to meet Lyss, the artist for Wild Gardens, when I was hosting a bunch of our friends in Nashville for a weekend. She's a delight, and I had the impression she was a talented artist, but no first-hand appreciation of her talent and speed.

When she responded to the art direction "hugely overblown adoration of turnips" with Renaissance-inspired artworks, I knew we had a winner. She kept sending art, and every piece was cuter and sillier than the last. Isaac was handling the graphic design direction, so I would occasionally get an update with new characters or art pieces with more polish.


The most discussion went on surrounding the turtle tax collector. He's easily my favorite part of the production. I wouldn't mind paying him taxes as he seems like he'd actually put them to community-oriented efforts...or eat them. Either way, he is being compensated fairly for the user experience.

I knew early on that differently colored card backs would make set-up easy and that a player mat would be critical. I hadn't given much thought to those also having characters, so I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the portraits for the player characters. They're so incredibly charming.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you're agog at the cute factor of this art, feel free to gush about it to me, but know that I'm in the same boat. Lyss took my extremely plain game and gave it a tremendous amount of character and playfulness, and it made me appreciate even more how important that is to the process. People, pay your artists!


I kept testing the game up to the point that Isaac told me it was with the printers, and I could move on to the next project.

As far as Turnip being my first published game, this went surprisingly and incredibly well. From inception to first copy, it'll have been only nine months. The secret is to surround yourself with brilliant people who will tell you when what you're doing isn't working with the confidence that you'll come up with a solution.

Also, have fun. Make that the overriding goal of the process. If you can delight in watching your game be played, then there's a good chance someone else will find that same delight with their family and friends — and that's what the whole hobby is for.

Ken Jenkins

Inspiration for the cover art
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by W. Eric Martin

Sky Team from Luc Rémond and Scorpion Masqué (and from KOSMOS in Germany) has won the 2024 Spiel des Jahres — Germany's "game of the year" award — over the other two nominees: Captain Flip (from Remo Conzadori, Paolo Mori, and PlayPunk) and In the Footsteps of Darwin (from Grégory Grard, Matthieu Verdier, and Sorry We Are French).

Looking over the list of previous Spiel des Jahres winners, I think this is the first time that a game strictly for two players has won the award, a restriction that I would have thought took the game out of contention...but clearly I was wrong, just as others were wrong when they thought a card game could never win SdJ before Hanabi did so in 2013.

Interesting side note: Co-operative games have now won the SdJ in four of the past six years: Sky Team, Dorfromantik: The Board Game (2023), MicroMacro: Crime City (2021), and Just One (2019).



Continuing on, the Spiel des Jahres jury chose Daybreak from Matt Leacock, Matteo Menapace, and CMYK (and from Schmidt Spiele in Germany) as the 2024 Kennerspiel des Jahres, beating out The Guild of Merchant Explorers from Matthew Dunstan, Brett J. Gilbert, and AEG (and from Skellig Games in Germany) and Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West from Alan R. Moon, Rob Daviau, Matt Leacock, and Days of Wonder

Yes, Matt Leacock was both winner and runner-up for Kennerspiel des Jahres...


The 2024 Kinderspiel des Jahres (children's game of the year) named Die magischen Schlüssel from Markus Slawitscheck, Arno Steinwender, and Happy Baobab (and from Game Factory in Germany) as the winner. The two other nominees in this category were Große kleine Edelsteine from Wolfgang Warsch and Schmidt Spiele and Taco Kitten Pizza from Dave Campbell, Thierry Denoual, and Blue Orange.


Markus Slawitscheck is (with Johannes Krenner) co-designer of Challengers!, which won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2023, so he's now bagged a "* des Jahres" award in consecutive years, a rare feat that I don't think has happened since Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling won SdJ in 1999 and 2000 for Tikal and Torres — except, as readers have pointed out, Andreas Pelikan and Alexander Pfister winning consecutive Kennerspiel awards for Broom Service in 2015 and Isle of Skye in 2016...and Inka and Markus Brand winning Kennerspiel in 2012 for Village, then Kinderspiel in 2013 for The Enchanted Tower.

Congratulations to all the winning designers and publishers! Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

In addition to the previously covered Let's Hit Each Other with Fake Swords, publisher Exploding Kittens has several other light games and party games due out in July 2024, with the first three below releasing on July 21, the same day as Fake Swords:

• Zombie Burrito, for example, features the core gameplay of Throw Throw Burrito — that is, throwing stuff at one another — but with players now divided into teams of zombies and survivors, with the cards that you're trying to collect through battles often giving an advantage to one team over another.


• You Little Stinker is a dice game for players as young as four, who can shake the doggy-headed shaker to roll out dice in the hope of matching images on picture cards or producing lucky bones.

• When Sip Hits the Fan is a drinking game that includes a spinner, so that will be fun on its own, I'm sure, but the hook of the game is that anyone can stop the spinner, and whoever does so first gets the reward or punishment. Cards will have players challenge one another or set up conditions that you must follow at the risk of sipping. (BGG doesn't include drinking games in the database, and I'm not sure this one has enough "game" going on to avoid that prohibition, so I'm not creating a listing for now.)

• Catchables names both a set of collectible squishy foam toys — Rainbow Ralphing Cat, Lumber Cat, Donut Cat, etc. — and a game played with these toys.


To play, each player starts with their own Catchable and an action card. On a turn, a player throws their Catchable in the air, then performs the stunt on their action card. If they succeed, they place two additional action cards in front of themselves or other players, stacking additional challenges for a more challenging next turn; if they fail, they discard one or more of their cards.

The first player to complete a catch while performing at least five action cards wins.

Catchables, which debuts at Walmart on July 27, 2024, is described as having "12 characters to collect", and I've placed the sets in a single game listing since it's effectively one game spread out over multiple boxes. We'll see whether other admins agree with me...

A story in two game boxes
• A bit earlier in 2024, Exploding Kittens released Why Are You Like This?, a party game in which you try to get your team to guess secret words by talking, drawing, or gesturing, but you don't have a choice of how you're presenting the word. You have the word, then separately you have a card that shows talk/draw/gesture, as well as a requirement for you to do something that hampers your abilities, such as gesturing while spinning in a circle or drawing with your forehead on the table. You know, the usual party stuff... Read more »

by Chris Williams

Origins

In December 2020, I had just finished watching The Queen's Gambit and was inspired to design a two-player abstract strategy game that would be simple enough (both mechanically and visually) to allow players to visualize games in their minds, just like Beth Harmon was able to do with chess on that show.

However, while chess is a classic for a reason, I wanted a game that was easier to excel at, with players being able to understand what's going on by glancing at the board. Getting to that level in chess can seem insurmountable, but with Obelus, I wanted players to feel like they could execute strategic plans and make clever moves after playing only a single game.

Initial Development

For years, I had been making game designs with a circle of cards in place of a board, so I felt comfortable designing in that space. I also love the visual and mechanical aspects of having a continuous loop as a map.

Because I wanted players to have those awe-inspiring moments from The Queen's Gambit when Beth could see the chess pieces moving on the ceiling, this game would need visually striking components with a simplistic shape. Pyramid-shaped four-sided dice — d4s — were perfect for this. Watching them elegantly glide around the circle of cards was exactly the visual I wanted. I would later find that using standard d4s was anything but elegant, but more on that later.

I experimented using different-sized dice, but found that pieces became less usable, the larger their values. In Obelus, players move the dice around the circle of cards equal to their value; however, they can't move through opposing pieces. This meant that the larger the dice value, the more potential spaces another die could be placed to block their path.

This issue also showed me how weak 4-valued dice were and how strong 1-valued dice were. 4s could easily be blocked while 1s couldn't be blocked at all. Because of this issue, I landed on using eight cards and added a rule — the "rule of pairs" — that prevented players from having more than two of the same dice value. This rule was clunky and would later be removed, but the decision to use eight cards was one that I am particularly proud of. Having eight cards makes it so the 4s are the only dice value that can target the same card moving in either direction (clockwise or counter-clockwise). All other values target two different cards, but for the 4s you'd have to block them on both sides to prevent them from reaching their target. While this difference wasn't a huge advantage, it led to clever strategic moments.

The other major mechanism I wanted was a way for players to get their pieces back. In chess, players rarely finish an actual game and instead concede to their opponent once it becomes clear they can't win. This is something I've always hated in games. If the game is clearly over at some point, then the game should be designed to end at that time. Otherwise, players should be able to claw their way back. The ability to reclaim captured pieces, along with the circle of cards, added to the cyclical nature of the game that I had begun to fall in love with.

However, this cyclical gameplay also led to never-ending loops. One player would capture, then the other player would regain the captured piece just for it to be captured again. This was when I added portal tokens, which were placed on the most recent card players summoned their dice to, preventing summoning again on that card. This fixed the issue with most of the loops and forced players to strategize around how to break any of the remaining loops that occurred. At this point, I was happy with where the game was and moved on to the finishing touches.


From Dark Spires to Obelus

Before Obelus was Obelus, it was originally called Dark Spires, which I had released on The Game Crafter via a crowd sale under my self-publishing company Alright Games.

During the sale, I ran an online tournament with a few other designers from the TGC community. I streamed the matches and commentated on the gameplay, analyzing the varied strategies as they unfolded. This was when everything really started to click, and I realized that I wanted Dark Spires to reach a broader audience. The excitement from the players when they made a clever move and the variation in strategies I had never even thought of — that miraculously still didn't break the game — was the motivation I needed to start reaching out to publishers.

One of the first publishers I contacted was Phase Shift Games. As I was browsing the Cardboard Edison Compendium, I remembered they had published another game that had originated on The Game Crafter: Dungeon Drop. I reached out, we chatted about the game, and the rest is history. We worked together to determine what potential pain points Dark Spires had and how we could refine it even more to enhance my original vision of creating an abstract strategy game that anyone could play while still maintaining a depth of strategy.

We decided on a few things to tackle; game length, loops, overpowered/underpowered pieces, and easily forgotten rules. While most Dark Spires games lasted around 15 minutes, they would occasionally go on for much longer due to loops. Making these changes was a hard pill to swallow because some of my favorite moments in Dark Spires were those loops. I loved the challenge of trying to break the loop in a way that favored me over my opponent; however, I also understood this could turn people away as it would lead to a feeling of hopelessness, which was something I wanted to avoid. Luckily, the eventual changes made didn't hinder the gameplay at all and still allowed for similar moments but with much quicker outcomes.

The main change made to fix the loops was to the portal tokens, which coincidentally was also a rule often forgotten. Having only two tokens in play wasn't enough to prevent loops, so we came up with rift tokens that would appear any time a player brought back one of their pieces. These rift tokens would spread across the board and eventually prevent the summoning of new dice. Now, games had a definitive end in sight, making it so they could easily end in under ten minutes.

The next challenge was dealing with the overpowered and underpowered pieces, i.e., the 1s and 4s. 1s were clearly the strongest values to use as they were versatile, couldn't be blocked, and were quick to set up for attacks. On the other side, 4s were weak and useful only in the first couple of turns or under unique circumstances.

We first tackled the 4s, making them invincible except to another 4. We also had to limit each player to a single 4 to avoid shutting the game down as soon as too many 4s were played. We then discovered that because 4s could be attacked only by another 4, they could be used to block 1s, thereby providing players a direct way to counter a 1. Since 1s were no longer as big a threat, we removed the "rule of pairs" mentioned earlier, which was a clunky rule to begin with.

After making all those changes, we found that the rules players tended to forget had resolved themselves. Players no longer had to remember to place a portal every time they summoned a new die, and no "rule of pairs" forced them to track how many of each dice value they had in play. Eliminating the "rule of pairs" even opened up many new strategic possibilities, which was an added bonus.


Making the Game Accessible to Wider Audiences

Now that we had refined the rules, our next step was to make it a game for everyone. I frequently had to remind myself during this time that this was my intention for the game all along.

First, we tackled how new players reacted to the game and found that until they'd finished their first game, many of them struggled with how to use their dice, particularly regarding which values to set them to. Because of this, we came up with "Chaos Mode" as an alternate way to play. Under "Chaos Mode", players rolled their dice during set-up (instead of choosing the values) and any time their dice were brought back into play. This took the decision out of their hands and, surprisingly, made for a unique experience. I was hesitant about adding this alternate mode as I felt rolling dice took away from it being an abstract game, but the more I played, I discovered this mode added a whole new kind of puzzle to solve, and I'm happy to say that I was wrong.

We also played around with the components to make sure they were high quality and felt nice to use. Since Obelus is such a small game, we wanted to make what was there something to be reckoned with. I had already dabbled with other types of d4s, and the shape that worked best was more of a rectangular shape reminiscent of an obelisk. Since obelisks and spires are similar, we could retain that dark and mysterious feeling using these new dice, while also changing to something easier to handle than the d4 caltrops. However, it no longer made sense to call the game Dark Spires if the game has no spires. A friend suggested the name Obelus as its origins relate to obelisks, and it had the right amount of mystery and uniqueness to it.

While amping up the components, we also felt the artwork needed to be redone. I had created the original artwork and liked the minimalistic feel, but hiring an actual artist would bring the game to life, and Asritha Nancharla did such an amazing job. The final art pulls players into this dreary and weird world I always envisioned.


Conclusion

As I recalled all the steps I've taken with this game, it reminded me of how much I love this design. Of all my game ideas, this has been my favorite. Seeing my game out in the wild has been an amazing feeling. While I have self-published a handful of games, Obelus was my first game released by another publisher. (I also have another one coming from a different publisher, but I'll talk about that another time.)

Phase Shift Games has been incredible, as has everyone who brainstormed, helped me playtest, and supported me along the way. A huge shoutout to my wife Kalli Williams, and everyone in The Game Crafter community, in particular Brian LaPorte, Donnie Coleman, and Corey Andalora. They were all hugely instrumental in helping me bring this game to life. Thank you all so much, and I hope to hear everyone's stories about how you clawed your way back from the brink of defeat in Obelus!

Chris Williams

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by Matt Bahntge

The Seed

A spatial economy — that was the seed of the idea in 2018 that would ultimately become Flutter.

I have always been fascinated by different market mechanisms like supply and demand, as well as by the games exploring them. I wanted to create something with the fun of speculation, risk management, and forward planning, without trending toward spreadsheet analysis (as market-heavy games often do). This seed would carry the game, initially titled "Gemcutter", through years of design and refinement until finding its final form, a game in which players are building a colorful meadow through an under-the-hood market of petals and pollen.


The first prototype featured mine shafts producing rough gems that players would exchange for finished stones, but the long rectangular mine shaft tiles felt bland and unoriginal.

In testing with Jeff Siadek, at some point I stumbled on the idea of more uniquely-shaped pieces: rhombuses, trapezoids, and triangles — all connecting with 60º or 120º angles. All of a sudden, the game felt unique, and looking for matches by joining the corners was satisfying in a puzzly sort of way.


The market's inner workings fell into place: supply would be at the corners of the tile, demand would be in the center. You'd match corners to generate rough stones, and surrounding tiles to spend those stones on finished gems (i.e., endgame points) meshed seamlessly, leaving each tile placement feeling weighty and interesting.

These two things produced the unexpected arc that has stayed with the game: the number of choices expands from the first tile placement, then shifts and levels off as tiles are enclosed. You generate more stones at the beginning, and even though it seems like you'll never be able to afford closing off tiles, you find more and more scoring opportunities that open up. This creates an organic introductory arc to the game, but also ensures that your options reach a wide (yet comprehensible) level about halfway through the game.


Growth

I continued to test the design with experienced designers such as John D. Clair and Josh Wood (whose advice I'm very grateful for) and made changes to try to highlight the most fun parts of the game. Enclosing a tile for gems and gaining stones felt great, but enclosing multiple tiles had your opponents envious. It turned out that allowing players to enclose open spaces enabled them to close even more tiles at once, creating pivotal plays and dramatic moments.

The steps involved with each tile placement also had to be looked at: you gain stones from matching corners, pay stones for any corners that don't match, and exchange stones for points if you enclosed tiles. It became clear that gaining stones before you paid anything opened up possibilities, but led to waaay too many (overly mathy) options.

Switching the order of those actions so that you always paid before you gained made the game much simpler to visually parse...and still left you weighing if and when you wanted to pay for non-matching corners.


At this point, I felt the game starting to take full form. I noticed both that players immediately became engrossed in the puzzle of it even when it wasn't their turn, and that experienced players strategized ahead to increasingly impressive plays.


Finding a Home

Pitchspiration had struck, and I had the great fortune of getting the attention of Jason Miceli and Darrin Horbal of Phase Shift Games[company=40136][/company] in mid-2021. Despite having seen the quality of their Kickstarter and publication, I did not expect it to be such an incredible joy to work with these guys. After signing our contract a few months later, they helped me push and prod at the game from every angle of development.

The first element we looked at was the theme, as the use of jewels and stones in "Gemcutter" was meant to appeal to a broad audience in the way that Splendor or Bejeweled do, but the flipside of that approach is that it lacked uniqueness.

Inspired by the familiar-yet-unique thematic approach of games like Azul or Sagrada, we collectively wrote a small novel's worth of discussion over finding a theme that fit both the unique shape of the tiles, and the functional relationship between the elements in the corners and centers of tiles.

The theme of assembling dreamcatchers with their beads and feathers representing the supply and demand of nightmares and good dreams was strongly considered. In a testament to their diligence, Phase Shift contacted several Native American elders and community leaders of the Ojibwe and found enough of a cautionary response that we decided against it.

Crystallizing the Meadow

Back at the drawing board, the proposed theme of a meadow where flowers were built at the corners of tiles for the pollinating critters (which we discovered were many more than just bees) was a perfect connection mechanically, but I couldn't fully get on board until the last remaining piece popped into my head: a low-poly world in which plants and animals alike all existed in an angular geometry.

For me, this was the same "eureka" feeling I had with the fun of using these angular shapes, but from the thematic direction. This was the symbiotic relationship between the two. Phase Shift employed the fantastically talented Steven Tu, who brought this low-poly prototype world to life almost overnight, cementing our direction.


Phase Shift wisely pushed for mechanical development as well, asking if we couldn't find that "little extra", and I'm glad they did.

One element that had needed a little massaging from the beginning was which tiles could be played and when. Until this point, players were dealt one of each tile and the tiles were lined up randomly, allowing a player to use either the rightmost or leftmost tile of their line.

While functional, this approach was also somewhat sterile, caused breaks in play (to deal out new rows of tiles), and felt a little overly balanced since it ensured that every player would play the same shapes. We found that using a rondel system for tile selection — with a sun token circling the sky as it travels around the tile-tracking position on the rondel — not only allowed for almost instantaneous set-up, but also created a whole new layer of interesting tactical decisions and options. You could now pay an increasingly steep price to skip ahead on the rondel, a move that you need to worry about only later in the game and once you have some experience with the system.

Finally, to add a more long-term strategic element (while still keeping with the "no-cards no-text" elegance of the game), each player received a "bee" token. The bee allows players to effectively stake a bet on a tile and pursue a variety of strategies that emerge from this small addition, such as dissuading an opponent from enclosing the tile, or banking on one that they're eyeing...

While all this was happening, Jason (actually a long time monarch-hatcher with his family) started a partnership with the Save Our Monarchs foundation to send proceeds from each sale toward monarch butterfly conservation. Migratory monarchs are not only endangered, they're also fascinating creatures that make multi-generational migrations between central Mexico and the entire United States...with a top speed of 6 mph no less. Crazy.


We're extremely proud of the final product, and I have nothing but thanks for all the help I've gotten along the way in bringing Flutter to life.

Matt Bahntge

Read more »

by Jeb Havens

DrLupo Presents: Streamer Standoff started with an ambitious goal: to capture the chaotic (and sometimes ridiculous) world of streamers and influencers in a simple card game that is quick to learn, is packed with hilarious moments, and has just the right amount of strategic depth.


To pull this off, I worked closely with co-designer Bobby West, publisher Maestro Media, and legendary streamer DrLupo, who is mostly known by his millions of followers for his video gaming and charity work — but he's also a big fan of tabletop games, so he was excited for the "epic collab", as the streamers say.

The initial core concept almost wrote itself: Players would step into the role of budding streamers competing for subscribers. Early on, the phrase "The Race to 20 Million Subs" resonated with the team (and a random sampling of friends), so that became my north star.

DrLupo was on board with the idea and liked that it let us (as well as the players) poke fun at the industry, but in a light-hearted way that never turned mean or disrespectful. We decided that the game should feel social, with some player interaction, while still being strategic. We also needed the game to work well on livestream (for obvious marketing reasons), so it had to be as much fun to watch as it was to play.

Getting Scrappy

As a designer, my process always starts with a lot of scrap paper, quickly prototyping and playtesting as early as possible. It's the fastest way to go from "seemingly-perfect idea in my head" to "fatally flawed idea from which I can learn", and it keeps me from spending too much time on any one concept until I've seen it "in motion" with some real players.


Over the course of a few months, I built, tested, learned from, and iterated on about a dozen different simple prototypes. Each one focused on a core mechanism that could potentially be the foundation of a full design. Some prototypes focused on channel upgrades, some on predicting trending topics, some on the business of streaming, and some on the story arc of a streaming persona. From these simple prototypes and their iterations, I narrowed things down to two I thought were especially promising:

Prototype 1: The first prototype focused on predicting a moving timeline of trending topics. Players revealed their moves simultaneously and jockeyed for position to make sure their channel was the most popular in a topic at the time it went viral (for a big payout in subscribers). The game had a lot of strategy and fun moments — such as a surprising shake-up just before the next hot trend popped — but it came at the cost of being more complex to learn and play, while having a longer playtime overall. Also, the "jockeying" mechanisms really shined only at 4+ players, and we knew we wanted something that could work great for as few as two.

Prototype 2: The other prototype focused more directly on the humor and fiction of the streaming world. Players would see a few ridiculous trends in the middle of the table and take turns combining cards in their hands to make funny "Mad Libs-style" video titles to match one of the trends, claiming it and scoring some subscribers. The gameplay was much simpler to explain and understand, it moved a lot faster, and players were able to jump in and start having fun right away. (Also, it generated a lot of table talk as players joked about the crazy trends and video titles they came up with.)

I presented both prototypes to DrLupo and the Maestro Media team, including Bobby West, one of the Maestro Media developers who then joined me as a co-designer. Everyone agreed the second prototype was a better fit for our audience and DrLupo's brand, and we knew it would play better on livestream.


Putting It to the Test

After the team agreed on the basic structure and feel, Bobby and I began a much more focused playtesting and iteration effort. We ran tests with a variety of gaming groups, and we found that players loved the theme and humor of the game, and they immediately understood the core mechanism of combining cards to make videos that matched available trends to score subscribers.

A lot was working, but the arc of the game still felt a bit flat. We were missing the big "wow" moments, the feeling of building up a channel over time, and the all-important player interaction.

We knew we'd seen some of these things in Prototype 1, so we pulled it out of the proverbial dustbin and raided its mechanisms to see what made sense to salvage. That prototype may have been too complicated, but it had some great spare parts.

Early prototype, with playtesting fuel in the background
Keeping Things on Track

The first idea we brought over was the "trend track". Newly-revealed trends would start out on the left of the track as not very popular (and worth only a few subscribers), but would gradually grow in popularity as they shifted to the right, only to tumble in value once people were "over it".

This reintroduced a sense of timing and urgency to the game. Players had to time their video releases for maximum payoff, but if they waited too long, another player could snag the trend first — or the internet might just decide it's not cool anymore.

This change also simplified the components. Each trend no longer had to specify how many subscribers it would award; that was determined by its position along the track. Plus, testers had a lot of fun with the narrative as trends became "hot", then faded just as quickly ("Sorry, fanny packs, you had your time, but we're on to the next big thing.")


Changing the Channel

We also brought in some "channel development" mechanisms from the other prototype. As a player would capture trends in a given topic, their channel would become known for that type of content, making it faster and easier to capture similar future trends.

So instead of having a flat pace from beginning to end, the scoring accelerated and players felt more powerful as the game progressed — but they also encountered new roadblocks as their channel specialized and got locked out of other trends!

As a side bonus, this gave us an opportunity to add the concept of "collabs". Collaborating with other content creators is a big part of how real streamers grow their audience, so we were happy to find a natural place for it in the game. If a player's channel gained enough cred in the right topics, they could grab one of a limited set of "collab opportunities", giving them a big exciting windfall of new subscribers, which could often put them across the finish line.


Playing Nice

Finally, we had to tackle player interaction. We knew the game needed funny ways that players could mess with each other. Competitive multiplayer gaming and good-natured trash talking are a big part of DrLupo's brand. In early meetings, whenever he talked about the tabletop games that he loved to play with his friends and family, there was always an element of PvP.

Many card games focus on direct player attacks, which can be very entertaining, but they can often devolve into "kingmaker" scenarios in which one player decides which other player wins, making the game feel a bit random and unsatisfying. We wanted the game to feel strategic as well as social, so we opted for a form of player interaction that was less direct, while still being funny and supporting the overall theme.

We liked the jockeying and bluffing elements in the more complex prototype, so we combined some of those mechanisms into a system of influence tokens. One token might let a player swap the position of trends on the track, while another would let them look at someone else's hand and steal a card. During one of our meetings with DrLupo, he made a joke about slapping a video with a DMCA takedown (referring to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that targets copyrighted material online), so we turned that into a token you can play on another player's video to delay its release by a turn.

All the influence tokens are kept secret until played, so you never know exactly what other players could be plotting. Some tokens are even played face down and not revealed until after a trend is scored, allowing players to bluff other players into avoiding a trend they might otherwise try to claim.

With all of these elements in place, Bobby and I finally got the dynamic gameplay arc and fun social moments that we'd been aiming for.

Playtesting at Gen Con 2023
Working with Ben

It's no secret that when someone has millions of followers, there's a possibility they might be difficult to work with. Before originally agreeing to take on this project, I knew I'd need to talk directly with Ben Lupo (the man behind the channel) to see what I might be getting into.

From the first meeting, I was convinced. Ben is a refreshingly sincere and down-to-earth guy, and was fantastic to work with throughout the process. He shared stories about his love of board and card games, and we bonded over playing (and often losing) games as a kid against our older brothers. Ben was genuinely excited to be involved from the ground floor, offering lots of great feedback and ideas, while at the same time putting his trust in the design and publishing team.

We were able to leverage his insider knowledge for references, in-jokes, and a gut-check on what things his audience (and the streaming world) would find funny and authentic. We wanted his fans to love it, while also making sure it would appeal to a larger general mass market.

Ben officially announced the launch of Streamer Standoff in March 2024 on his live birthday stream, playing a digital version of the game with three of his friends. The audience ate it up, loving the hilarious table-talk while also appreciating that this was a "real game" with a lot of strategy, not just a money grab with his name slapped on it. At one point, the chat started counting down in real-time as we quickly sold out of the five hundred advance copies that were available.


Living the Stream

Creating a licensed game is always challenging, and even more so when that "license" is a person. We wanted to capture the essence of DrLupo's brand as a competitive gaming and lifestyle streamer, but also his love of fun accessible tabletop games, his connection with his fans, and his sense of humor about the industry and internet culture.

It took a lot of experimentation and prototyping and testing, and it was a team effort throughout, but I'm really proud of the game we ended up with. There are jokes and references just for the fans, but tons of humor that anyone can relate to. The gameplay is simple enough to learn and start playing within minutes, but with layers of strategy and depth for more competitive players to discover.

If you think you're ready to try your hand at streamer stardom, the remaining copies of DrLupo Presents: Streamer Standoff hit retail in July 2024.

Jeb Havens

Designers cornered: Bobby West (l) and Jeb Havens Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Throughout the 2010s, I visited NY Toy Fair each year to check out the new games being shown in the Jacob Javits Convention Center. In addition to seeing a small hobby game presence that slowly inflated over the decade, I got to sample games being presented to the mainstream market, with one of the regulars in that area being Blue Orange Games. As I wrote in 2018:

If you're familiar with the titles from Blue Orange Games, then you generally know what to expect from them. Aside from a few outliers that make up their family game line (Photosynthesis, New York 1901, Vikings on Board), you know their games are going to be colorful and quick-playing, with instructions that take only a minute or two to learn and gameplay suitable for young players.

Even titles in their family game line match that description, as with 2016's Kingdomino, Blue Lagoon (which I also covered in 2018), and — the focus of this post — Link City from designer Émilien Alquier.

Link City is a city-building game that overcomes the tropes of that genre — the need to keep industry from nature, to place residences near stores — by placing building requirements entirely in the hands of the players, who build the city together according to their whims.

To set up, place City Hall on the table, then place a random building along each edge. All 57 building tiles are double-sided, so you could choose which side to play face up, but I prefer going with whatever randomly comes out, partly to embrace that randomness but mostly to keep things moving.

In each of six rounds, the deputy mayor — sitting left of the mayor — places cones in the town layout to show where new building has been authorized:


Then the mayor draws buildings at random, places them behind a screen, and secretly assigns a cone color to each building. The mayor then reveals the buildings, and everyone else debates which building should go where. For example, where would you place the four buildings in this set-up?


This is the heart of the game, and arguing over which buildings should go where is Codenames-level fun. Some choices are slam dunks — I mean, the business school should absolutely be placed next to the college and printing shop, right? But not all of the choices are obvious: What's the best neighbor for a casino and five-star hotel? The boxing arena for a Vegas atmosphere? The catacombs to create a tourist district? The gated community because this part of town is for the nouveau riche?

Once the non-mayors have locked in their choices, the mayor reveals theirs. If everyone agreed on a building's location, it goes in that spot; if not, the mayor still adds the building to the city...but diagonally touching other tiles, which means you score nothing for that tile as points in the game are determined by the number of trees you complete via adjacent tiles.

So much failure exhibited here...
You can, of course, try to fill those empty spaces in future rounds, but having more buildings around a space doesn't always make it easier to determine what should go in that gap.

If all of the choices match in a round, you add the fourth cone for the rest of the game, giving you four buildings to place in four lots — which means more potential scoring, but potentially more confusion in deciding what goes where.

Additionally, when all of the choices match, you add a bonus tile to town, which likely means you complete more trees, but the colored edge of that bonus tile creates an off-limits area in the entire row projecting from that edge...so the good thing comes with a drawback. Such is life.

The southwest of town is now a dead zone thanks to nuclear-powered cow launchers
After six rounds, you count how many trees you have, compare that number to a chart on the back of the rulebook, then immediately forget the result because it doesn't matter.

As with so many games, the joy in Link City is in the playing and interaction with others, not the final result. The game forces you to talk about the world around you and how you think it should be arranged, which means you're really talking about people and how they live and what you think about how they live. As Bruno Faidutti commented on the video below, "I'm usually very wary of games attempting to create political debates between players, but this one works remarkably well and is incredibly fun."

I didn't even know this game existed until Blue Orange Games sent me a review copy — which I've now played four times, twice each with two and four people — and I'm delighted by the experiences this game has facilitated...although I can imagine Dutch city planners suffering apoplexy from the chaotic nature of this growth.

Link City is an antidote to NIMBYism in the sense that everyone has something in their back yard, and you don't always have a say over what goes where. You live in a large linked world and need to compromise with others because folks are going to live their lives and your needs don't supersede theirs.

For more examples of gameplay, watch this video overview:

Youtube Video Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

The number of titles on the SPIEL Essen 24 Preview has nearly surpassed the number on the Gen Con 2024 Preview, and that's thanks partly to newly announced titles like these:

• German publisher dlp games has revealed its big late 2024 release: Atlantis Exodus, a 1-4 player game from designers George Halkias and Konstantinos Karagiannis. Here's a summary:

The legendary Atlantis is shrouded in so many stories and myths, an island realm that was reputed to have completely drowned in only one night.

Atlantis Exodus presents the player kings with the challenge of rescuing as many citizens as possible before the impending downfall and, by doing so, saving the knowledge they have acquired for a different world and time.

Thanks to an innovative rotation mechanism, 1-4 kings have to face constantly changing conditions and keep adjusting their own strategy to the different action possibilities in order to ultimately become the savior of the achievements of their time.

• In addition to this title and the previously announced Orléans Jubiläumsbox, dlp games will release Evenfall: The Crystal Path, an expansion for Stefano Di Silvio's Evenfall that is co-published with Nanox Games, and Pirates of Maracaibo: Commanders, an expansion for Pirates of Maracaibo from Ralph Bienert, Ryan Hendrickson, Alexander Pfister, and co-publisher Game's Up.

Finally, dlp games and Game's Up will also co-publish Balz, a German edition of Bower from Pierpaolo Paoletti and Cranio Creations.


• Another 1-4 player game gracing the halls of Messe Essen will be Stephens, a design from Costa, Rôla, and Pile Up Games, with Capstone Games releasing the title in North America. Here's an overview of the game:

After the big earthquake of 1755 that tore down Lisbon and most of Portugal's southern coast, it was necessary to rebuild an entire nation. The demand for window glass increased so much that William Stephens, a British businessman, saw the opportunity to expand his business in Portugal by investing in the glass industry.

In Stephens, players compete amongst one another in the role of master glassmakers working at the famous "Stephens" Factory to become the most prestigious figure in town...after Stephens, of course. Through clever and cunning planning, all players will develop their works, invest in new businesses, and promote the creation of jobs. Through a unique action-selection mechanism, on their turn players choose from a variety of options, either by activating the Stephens factory or by activating one of their personal investments.

The game ends when the Napoleonic forces arrive in town, at which time the player with the most prestige wins.

• A much smaller game awaiting at SPIEL Essen 24 will be Kabuki Tricks from designer Geoffrey Chia, founder of Singaporean publisher Good Spirit Games. Here's how to play this 2-5 player game:

It's showtime in Kabuki Tricks, with players becoming producers of Kabuki performances in which the quality of showmanship depends on the number of tricks to be won. The game is played over a number of rounds, with each player having a chance to play as the dealer. Each round plays out as follows:

Box with company mascot
— Each player gets a hand of a joker and seven random cards, which come in four actor suits. The dealer then arranges the separate actor cards in order to determine the rank of the suits, while also determining whether low or high cards are best.

— The dealer leads to the first trick, and all players must follow suit, if possible — except that one non-lead player can play their joker instead of matching suit. When someone plays a joker, they place one of their player cards face down above one of the actor cards; their player card is a bet that they will win 1, 2, or 3 tricks, and the actor they played above is a bet that their final card will be that color. Additionally, they can either flip the High/Low card to affect which numbers are best or swap two adjacent actor cards to change the rank of the suits.

— Whoever played the highest/lowest card in the highest rank wins the trick, then leads to the next trick.

— After seven tricks, players reveal their bets and score: 1 point per trick captured, 1 or 2 points for correctly bidding the number of tricks they won, and 1 point if their final card matches the actor card they chose. Alternatively, if a player's last card is their joker and they won zero tricks, they earn 5 points.

The player with the highest score after adding the scores from each round wins.

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

This is the story of a game that is, in fact, three games...while still being only one when viewed in a certain way.

In 2021, Japanese designer Toshiki Arao released the card game Hachi Train through his brand Ateam, with players representing the heads of railroad companies who are trying to ditch their inventory as quickly as possible. In game terms, here is what's is going on:

In Hachi Train, you want to not be the last player in the round to have cards in hand. When dealt cards, players cannot rearrange the cards in their hand. The starting player leads a card or set of cards with the same value — but they can play multiple cards only if the cards are adjacent to one another in their hand. If cards have been played on the table, to play you must play the same number of cards with a higher value or a larger set of cards, e.g., 2 < 5 < 3,3 < 6,6 < 2,2,2 < 1,1,1,1. When you overplay someone, you pick up the cards you beat and add them to your hand where you wish.

If you cannot or choose not to play, you must pass, drawing a card from a facedown pile and adding it to your hand. These cards have two values on them, e.g., 1/2 or 5/6, and can be played as either number.

If all but one player pass, clear the table, with the player who last played leading to an empty table. When all but one person has emptied their hand, the last player loses one of their two lives. After four rounds or a player losing all of their lives, the game ends, and whoever has the most lives remaining shares victory.

Hachi Train was well-received, both in Japan and elsewhere, and as happens somewhat often with self-published games from Japanese designers, a larger company licensed the design and released a new version. More specifically, in mid-2023 Arclight Games released ナナトリドリ (pronounced "Nanatoridori"), with players now serving as guides at a castle where a bird party has just concluded. You want to help the birds return home as quickly as possible, the "birds" being cards in your hand.


Gameplay in Nanatoridori is mostly the same as in Hachi Train, but it differs in details that will make a difference for some players. The deck has 63 cards — nine each of the numbers 1-7 — instead of having 3-5 copies of the cards 1-8 for games with 3-5 players.

When you overplay in Nanatoridori, you're not forced to add the overplayed cards to your hand, but can discard them instead, giving you the option to build stronger sets or just keep your hand size shrinking.


When you pass, you draw the top card of the deck, which consists of everything that wasn't dealt, so no special dual-use cards await, but you can keep or discard this card as you like.

Nanatoridori was present at SPIEL Essen 23 in a Japanese/English edition, and Arclight Games — which received worldwide rights to the design — has licensed its version to MeepleBR, which released a Portuguese edition in Brazil in 2024, and possibly other companies as well.

However...

At roughly the same time that Arclight Games acquired a worldwide license to Hachi Train, French publisher Cocktail Games had also acquired a worldwide license (excluding Japan) to Hachi Train.

Cocktail spends a lot of time developing designs, as with Antoine Bauza's Hanabi, which debuted in a tiny French production in 2010 and which Cocktail developed into a Spiel des Jahres-winning package that has now sold millions of copies around the world. It did something similar with ピクテル ("Pictel"), a 2015 design from ボドゲイム (Bodogeimu) that it developed into the As d'Or-nominated Imagine in 2016, and most recently Cocktail redeveloped Kaya Miyano's card game ナナ ("nana") as Trio, which won the 2024 As d'Or and was a 2024 SdJ-recommended title.


Cocktail was far along in its development of Toshiki Arao's design when it became aware of Arclight's Nanatoridori, and hmm, well, what to do about this?

All involved parties — Arao, Arclight, Cocktail, andJapon Brand, which had represented the designer in the Cocktail deal — met in Japan during Tokyo Game Market in April 2024 and, as Cocktail representative Julia Klokova writes, "all agreed after this meeting that the games were different enough to co-exist peacefully".

Cocktail's version of Arao's design — Jungo — will debut in January/February 2025 with a simultaneous release of roughly a dozen editions in various languages.

Ready to sit next to Trio on the shelf...
How does Jungo differ from Hachi Train? It uses a deck of 64 cards — eight copies each of cards 1-8 — with the size of the starting hand varying based on the player count.

The dual-use cards — such as the 1/2 and 5/6 — are present, giving players move possible sets when they draw them. As in Nanatoridori, when you overplay cards and when you draw a card after passing, you can choose to discard those cards instead of adding them to your hand. (Interesting to see that change in both designs...)

What's more, if you pass and draw a card that gives you a stronger combination than what's on the table, you can put into practice the "Law of the Jungo" and play that new combination immediately!


Finally, gameplay in Jungo lasts only a single round. Whoever first empties their hand wins.

So are these games — Hachi Train, Nanatoridori, and Jungo — one design or three? How much do these changes matter in the feel of the gameplay? Are you leaning toward trains, birds, or monkeys in the jungle? Or perhaps you'd like to license the design for an edition of your own? Too bad, as I think three editions is all the market can bear...at least for now. Read more »