Board Game Geek

by W. Eric Martin

• A quadrilogy of games set in the United States' "Second City" are coming out in 2024 and 2025, all taking place in different eras of Chicago's past. The game set closest to the present day is Chicago '68, the debut design from Yoni Goldstein, which The Dietz Foundation plans to crowdfund in the middle of 2024.

Placeholder cover
Chicago '68 is labeled as a 1-4 player game, with publisher Jim Dietz saying it would typically be played as a two-player duel:

Chicago '68 pits revolutionary spectacle against civil order at the Democratic National Convention riots of 1968. Players take the role of either the Establishment or the Demonstrators in this fast-paced game of street battles and political maneuvers. Each side plays from two asymmetric decks of action cards. The Establishment positions tactical forces and police platoons to co-ordinate mass arrests while working the convention floor. The Demonstrators, on the other hand, can pivot from direct clashes to radical street theater; their tactics can be reactive and unpredictable, allowing for wild cat-and-mouse chases and mischief-making across the tear-gassed avenues of groovy downtown Chicago.

Prototype components
In more detail, the game is played over five rounds, with two rounds representing a single day (daytime and nighttime). Each side takes turns playing cards from two decks of action cards. The first deck represents the leadership committees. For the Establishment, this is the Mayor's office, and for the Demonstrators, this is the Yippies. These decks are primarily focused on building/activating card splays and manipulating the board state. The Mayor faction can access the policy tableau with the mandate action, which include activating undercover agents, authorizing tear gas, redeploying the National Guard, and more.

Then both sides alternate playing action cards from their rank-and-file decks: The National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE) on one side, and the Chicago Police Department on the other. These actions are largely moving and confronting units on the map and claiming strategic positions. The Demonstrators may build and activate their street theater splay, which is a set of location specific one-time "mini-objectives" with unique, combinatorial powers.

Prototype components
At the end of every round, a delegate commits a vote to either side. Demonstrators grow in number, the mayor is allocated funds, and whoever controls a majority of critical city areas is awarded exposure points.

Chicago '68 supports 1-4 players in solo, competitive, co-operative, and team play modes. Game duration is 45 minutes per player, with the typical two player duel lasting 60-90 mins.

• Chicago Dry is a 2-4 player game from designer Sérgio Halaban and publisher Buró, which has offices in Brazil, Argentina and Spain, and as you might guess from the title, the game is set during the Prohibition era of U.S. history (1920-1933):

For years, Prohibition has poured Americans a tall glass of austerity and condemned the whole country to a life of secret transgressions. In Chicago Dry, players look for a way around Prohibition to bring bottled fun to Chicago's hidden pubs and speakeasies.

In this game, 2-4 players secretly distribute alcohol across city districts as they face off against rivals and fight for territory, achieving higher scores as they occupy the Chicago central area. The player with the most influence points in both phases of the game wins and becomes the most infamous gangster in town!

• Stepping back in time further we come to the 1-5 player game Rebuilding Chicago, a standalone successor to 2021's Rebuilding Seattle from designer Quinn Brander and publisher WizKids:

In Rebuilding Chicago, you're responsible for managing the zoning and expansion of a major neighborhood following the "Great Chicago Fire" of 1871.

Each round, your population grows, then you can either build a new building, expand into a new suburb, activate an event, or build a landmark, after which you earn profit based on your neighborhood's commerce. You'll buy building types from a shared market — looking to find shapes that fit your grid and types that fit your strategy — and construct landmarks on the right tile combinations. Suburb tiles connect to your grid however you like, creating uniquely shaped neighborhoods. Triggering citywide events can change the tide of the game, offering points, money, and expansions for the players ready for it. You can even enact laws to give yourself the advantage!

You earn points for building types, upgrades, landmarks, events, and remaining cash, and at the end of the game, whoever's neighborhood has earned the most points wins.

Rebuilding Chicago also comes with a solo player deck so that you can compete to build the best version of Chicago even with just one player. Enjoy gameplay against a deck designed to simulate the actions of a second player to discover strategies and configurations you can use to improve Chicago.

• And before we can rebuild Chicago, we need to construct it into a form worth rebuilding, something Matt Wolfe is tackling in Raising Chicago, with players re-enacting efforts during the mid-19th century to elevate buildings so that a sewer system could be installed under the new, higher street level. I covered this upcoming Spielworxx title in January 2024, but I felt I would be remiss not to include it in this post.

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by W. Eric Martin

• The Magic: The Gathering card "Form of the Dragon" was an oddball when it debuted in 2003, but the designer's intent was that you, the player, would effectively become a dragon, breathing fire each turn and untouchable in combat unless flying creatures came after you.

Twenty years later, Peter Gousis, Michael D. Kelley, and Escape Velocity Games are trying to do something similar in Flame & Fang, a co-operative game for up to four players in which you grow wings and fight for survival:

In a world where dragons were thought to be extinct, somehow a clutch of eggs survived. Now hatched, the siblings must struggle to thrive in a harsh world that doesn't seem to want them there. Worse yet, they have attracted the attention of an evil presence that has begun to stalk them...

In Flame & Fang, players have to manage the three different aspects of their dragon: the need to fight, the desire for flight, and the thirst for the hunt. Each turn players draw and play cards that let them fly around the board, gather resources, upgrade abilities, battle enemies, and turn new pages to reveal their story.

More generally, players will co-operate to guide a group of dragons through a series of adventures. Players each control their own dragon to navigate the chapters that continue the tale of how the dragons will grow, mature, and overcome obstacles. The game requires deck crafting, hand management, action selection, and co-operative planning to ensure success!

Flame & Fang was crowdfunded in November 2023 and is scheduled to reach backers in Q2 2024.

• Should you care to fight dragons rather than become one, you can check out The Flames of Fafnir, a 1-4 player design from Martino Chiacchiera and Federico Pierlorenzi that Lucky Duck Games plans to crowdfund in English, French, and Polish editions in Q2 2024.


Here's an overview of the game:

Heroes, the mighty and cunning dragon Fafnir — once a mighty nobleman, now transformed into a beast by a cursed treasure — is trying to burn our village to the ground from afar by launching fireballs from his lair in the mountains. You must answer the call and travel with the champion Sigurd through Heathland both to build defenses to protect the village and to collect runes needed to defeat the beast. Fafnir will fall to either Sigurd's sword or one of the heroes' strikes...or will he? While most heroes quest for glory to receive the town's honor, one might seek victory through more nefarious means by joining Fafnir in his destruction of the village!

The fireballs launched from Fafnir's mouth toward the town are represented by marbles that will collide with anything in their path, damaging heroes and destroying defenses. Each round, Fafnir acts by changing his angle of attack, spawning monsters, or building up his fiery breath. Eventually, he will release all his charged fireballs towards the town — and if all the town's walls are destroyed, everyone loses.

While walking the Hearthland, you'll encounter mythological creatures and monsters; slaying them will aid you in your quest as snow trolls, giant spiders, and selkies guard magical sites where ancient runes can be found. Claim these runes and bring them to bear on Fafnir to kill the dragon. You can gather wood, stone, and gold to construct defenses to protect the town. Barricades, watch towers, and trenches will reduce the carnage, and if your structures intercept the fireballs, you'll be rewarded, so plan your defense well. Praying to Gods and raising defenses will reward you with powerful artifacts that allow you to improve your movement, gain more glory, weaken the dreaded Fafnir, and more.

If an opportunistic hero chooses to join Fafnir, her gets to ride the dragon, turning on the other heroes thanks to rider cards while trying to destroy the town yourself!

Ah, yes, once again you can become a dragon of sorts, shooting fireballs by proxy to inflict suffering on humans.

• Another opportunity to fight dragons will presumably arise in Mage Knight: The Apocalypse Dragon, the first major expansion for Vlaada Chvátil's Mage Knight Board Game from WizKids since 2015, with design courtesy of Phil Pettifer, who was the co-designer of that last major expansion, Shades of Tezla.


Here's an overview of this February 2025 release:

In Mage Knight: The Apocalypse Dragon, you'll meet a new playable hero: Coral, who wants revenge on the Apocalypse Cult.You'll also find new enemies to fight, including the four horsemen and the fearsome Apocalypse Dragon. You'll explore new tiles with new locations and challenges. This all comes together in a story-driven campaign mode featuring new scenarios and more.

• And despite the "Dungeons & Dragons" name, many D&D titles feature absolutely zero dragons, such as Dungeons & Dragons: Onslaught – Tendrils of the Lichen Lich Starter Set, another WizKids release, with this Alex Davy, Travis Severance, and Nicholas Yu design being due out in June 2024. An overview:

Dungeons & Dragons: Onslaught is a competitive skirmish game in which each player controls an adventuring party from one of the powerful factions of the Forgotten Realms. Parties delve into dungeons, battle rival adventurers, and confront fearsome monsters on a quest for treasure and glory.

Two new factions join Onslaught with the Tendrils of the Lichen Lich Starter Set: the Lord's Alliance and the Emerald Enclave. Battle for control over the city and forests, which is represented by a new tile system that allows each scenario's map to be unique. Over the course of six scenarios, you'll fight each other as well as more and more powerful monsters, leading up to a final confrontation with the horrifying lichen lich...

Dungeons & Dragons: Onslaught – Tendrils of the Lichen Lich Starter Set is playable on its own, or it can be combined with other Dungeons & Dragons: Onslaught starter sets or expansions, such as the Grasp of the Mind Flayer scenario kit due out before the end of April 2024.

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by W. Eric Martin

• Czech publisher Delicious Games has announced its SPIEL Essen 24 release: Resafa, a 1-4 player game from designer Vladimír Suchý, who co-owns the company with his wife Kateřina.

Non-final cover
Here's an overview of the game:

The game Resafa takes place during the 3rd century AD in the area of today's Middle East. Resafa now lies in ruins in modern-day Syria, but at this time it was a fortified desert outpost that flourished as a stop along important caravan routes.

In the game, players represent merchants who travel on business trips and buy and sell goods in the various cities in the region. Resafa had no local sources of water, so it depended heavily on large cisterns to collect the spring and winter rainwater to make the area habitable. Players build water tanks and canals to distribute that water where it is needed. In the cities, they build workshops to help their businesses grow, which will allow them to collect resources and camels. They also construct gardens between the businesses, generating more resources and also victory points.

Prototype, with the player boards visible at top and bottom
The game is played over six rounds. In each round, a player takes only three actions, playing action cards in this tight and exciting game.

Delicious Games notes that the setting "was inspired by a visit to the city more than twenty years ago during Vladimír and Katka's first holiday together".

• In 2023, Czech publisher Dino Toys published an original Suchý design, the 1-2 player game Aldebaran Duel, and for 2024 it will release League of Six: Complete Edition, a new version of Suchý's first design, which Czech Games Edition released in 2007.

Here's the description for League of Six on BGG's game listing, with a note that it was "Taken from BoardgameNews.com" — hey, that's me from seventeen years ago! As with Suchý, I can put my past efforts to work once again:

The year is 1430, a time of unrest and upheaval in the whole of Europe. Nearly 100 years have passed since the founding of the League of Six – a group of wealthy Lusatian towns that banded together to defend their commercial interests and preserve stability and order in the region.

You have been sent to this embattled land in the role of tax collector. As a young, ambitious aristocrat, you hope to stand out so that you will be given a position in the court of Sigismund.

The tax collector who brings in the most revenue for the king, while simultaneously gaining the support of the estates, has the best chance of finding himself by the side of King Sigismund.

The game consists of six turns representing six years. Each player takes the role of a tax collector visiting one of the six cities. The goods collected are placed in the royal stores or estate stores, thus giving the players influence in the court of King Sigismund. The player who gains the most influence wins.

Suchý has adjusted the gameplay of League of Six to "make it more player-friendly", and the game now accommodates up to six players instead of maxing out at five. The League of Six: Loyal Retinue expansion is included in this new edition, as well as a new expansion that introduces the option to play with any number of automated opponents, thereby allowing for a two-player game as well. As you might expect, Dino Toys has updated the game's graphics.

League of Six: Complete Edition will also be available at SPIEL Essen 24.

The original releases Read more »

by Timothée Decroix

This designer diary was co-written by the three authors — Mathieu Bossu, Thomas Cariate, and Timothée Decroix — and translated from French by Nathan Morse. Originally published in French on TricTrac.

Only Believe What You See Map...

Writing a designer diary is a singular exercise. It's not that easy to recall how events unfolded and to present simply the questions and decisions that led to the published game. However, we will try to take you on a journey with us through the creative process for our game Maps of Misterra, which was released in January 2024 by Sit Down! and which is also playable on Board Game Arena.

Adjust your backpack, and let's go!

Before Setting Out

The project was born out of a simple desire to create a game together. Mathieu and Thomas were already creating prototypes with their four hands. We met regularly with Timothée on social networks and at the Cannes Festival of Games, particularly during the famous "nights off", that is, evenings when game designers can play their prototypes with the public. We were really in a flow when one of the three of us ended up saying the sentence that started it all: "We should make a game together." This was at Cannes in February 2021.

Cannes Festival of Games 2023: After two years of pandemic and entirely remote game development, our heroes — from left, Thomas, Timothée, and Mathieu — finally meet again, where it all began (Image: Clélie)
We needed to find somewhere to start this venture, and as it turns out, all three of us share a fancy for maps. Such fascinating objects, aren't they? Maps are often magnificent, placing an entire world in your field of view. A map promises extraordinary voyages; it's a two-dimensional story box, which looks like it was designed for a board game. True to the theme, it's decided: The game will be about cartography.

Scouting the Land

Cartography, however, is already well represented in board games. Often the map mostly provides support for exploration. In the rarest of games, in which players actually draw a map, they seem to do so with complete freedom, with no need to represent any existing reality. They arguably create a world rather than a map.

And this was the first hurdle we encountered. The first few versions of Maps of Misterra revolved around successive expeditions to discover a new world. In practice, this meant each player moved their expedition on a common board that was gradually constructed from tiles. It was an interesting way to re-transcribe the great scientific and cartographical expeditions of the 17th and 18th centuries — but the result was an exploration game, not a game dedicated to cartography.

All Over the Map

Very quickly, we sought to integrate aspects of cartography into the game mechanisms. One of the fascinating parts of this discipline? Cartographical errors! Whether they arise from the insurmountable imprecision of such an exercise or are motivated by...political interests.

William Blaeu's 1635 map pinpoints El Dorado in the Guiana Plateau, near a legendary "Lake Parime", inspired by Gaspar de Carvajal (public domain) — but what is this immense lake in the middle of the Amazon that we find on most 17th century maps? Read its story here (article in French; sources in English)
We try to preserve this aspect of cartography by allowing players to cover tiles to represent the progressive evolution of knowledge of both the terrain and of the existence of cartographical errors. But this isn't enough. The cartographical theme seems merely a pretext in an exploration game. This version is stagnating, and we are not satisfied with the direction we've taken.

Observation is required. To portray mapping, we need two spaces: a territory (the real one) and its depiction (the map). In Maps of Misterra, we will thus have a central board on which the terrain of the island materializes, and a parchment board on which we draw a map of the island.

This new dimension seems original and innovative enough to us to continue experimenting. We're starting from scratch — or nearly so — but with a stronger concept!

The Truth Is Out There

With each player playing a cartographer, each will need their own parchment board on which they sketch their own map of the island during the game. The centerpiece is a common board on which the terrain of the island — or more precisely, our common understanding of it — is revealed as our expeditions explore it.

Photograph of the prototype, with the island board in the middle and the parchment boards where each player draws their own map
In practice, on your own map, you do whatever you want. The players have domino cards at their disposal that depict two terrain spaces, which they place however they wish on their parchment board, without necessarily having to respect reality. Not all cartographers are competent, and few are honest. You can even superimpose these sketch cards atop each other to revise a previous decision. Seriously, who can say that they've never confused a lagoon with a jungle?

The sketch cards to "draw" your own map on your parchment board, two spaces at a time
When a location has been mapped, we then adjust our common knowledge of the island, showing the newly mapped terrain on the central board.

The parchment board is the player's domain. No one can tell you what to "draw". On the central board, however, it's a different story. There you will have to interact and contend with others.

All three of us have this idea of seeing the cartographer travel around the island to report what's there. We like this idea of depicting ancient scientific expeditions. Each player will therefore have their own pawn that they move each turn, the position of which defines the spaces "within sight" that can be mapped right now.

From there, and from the first playtest, the foundations of the game were laid: This basic concept works and transcribes everything we wanted to say on the theme of cartography...but perhaps this merits a little further explanation.

The Map Is Not the Territory

At the end of a game, everyone's personal maps will be very different and not necessarily representative of the isle of Misterra, even though it's visible to everyone in the middle of the table. This can be surprising or even a little destabilizing.

Yet this is a studied and recognized dimension of cartography. To diagram the geography of a place, a cartographer must make choices about simplification, deciding how best to depict reality. A map is also intended for a particular use: to help with navigation, to prepare for war or a project, to depict a specific scientific or economic dimension, etc. Did we mention that maps are fascinating objects? So, a cartographer will make choices of representation best suited to this desired use. For the same space, there are myriad maps, all different.

The famous saying of the philosopher Alfred Korzybski sums it up: "The map is not the territory." Or to put it another way: Consulting a map gives us only a partial and subjective version of reality. Don't believe everything you are told.

Because in this game, the island has no pre-existing reality, we even further push the concept that cartographers express their own opinion in their maps, and thus influence the public. Because we learn about the location via our map, we are at the mercy of what the cartographers tell us. If a road is drawn here or a border there, we will go here and stop there. Such power!

The central board of Maps of Misterra would be better understood as the current best knowledge of the relief of the island, the result of what the player-cartographers proclaim at this stage. We see a steppe there because several cartographers have reported it so.

What a Relief

We quickly decided to add relief to this basic concept. The cartographers move through a territory composed of different types of terrain. For this isle to have a soul and not simply be a flat array of color swatches, the terrain must have some effects.

Mountain is the first relief that comes to mind...followed by a revelation: "Atop a mountain, one can see further, so one can also map further." Steppes are flat and conducive to movement, a lagoon should let you fish a card from the deck and make the river flow. Jungle — [shudder] — jungle is so dense as to obscure your view and render mapping impossible.

The jungle effect is the only one that is mandatory and negative. This strengthens interaction and forces sacrifices. It is also a way to give a veritable geography to a square of merely 5 spaces by 5 spaces. Moving into a jungle space causes you to lose the crucial mapping action, and thus generally forces you to choose another path — but if you really need to take the shortest path, it is possible to cross it to reach a part of the island not yet explored. You can also weaponize your pen by adding jungles to your map where they will hinder your opponents.

A certain three game designers may be so perverse as to place jungles on the board as soon as the game is set up...

Moving Mountains

In Maps of Misterra, the terrain of the isle is not predefined. The players' actions reveal its relief as the game progresses.

To add a little interaction and indecision, we imagined two states of knowledge about the terrain: the "hazy" phase of terrain tiles revealed with the first observation, and the "confirmed" phase from the second identical observation. But note: If another observation identifies the terrain as something else, we replace the hazy terrain with a hazy version of the new type, and so on.

If one accepts that the central board represents the common knowledge we have of the island, this rule makes it possible to fairly faithfully illustrate the evolution of scientific knowledge in which hypotheses are refuted or confirmed by successive observations.

In play, this provokes an aggressive rush to "observe" the terrain to one's own advantage. This principle also has the advantage of gradually locking down the island board as we approach the end of the game.

"Knowledge dispels the haze of ignorance", excited designers...
During evening playtests, we start catching players having fun contradicting each other's findings: "You clearly didn't get enough sleep: It's not a jungle here; it's a mountain!" and so on. We're onto something.

Points of Interest

"But how do I win?" you're probably asking by now.

To offer heartbreaking choices to the players, we came up with two conflicting sources of prestige points — a classic principle of game design.

On your personal parchment board, you must create patterns according to the hypothesis cards you received at the beginning of the game. Thematically, these are the cartographic objectives your sponsors have imposed upon you and expect you to confirm, even if it means diverging from what you see in the land. This is our representation, in the game, of the varied applications for maps that we discussed before, as well as the rivalries between the scientific societies of the great powers who finance expeditions to verify their theories.

This fascinating book from 2018 recounts the true story of a scientific expedition sent to the equator by France to determine whether, as Newton [rightly] supposed, the earth is bulging at the equator and flattened at the poles, or whether it's flattened at the equator, as Cassini from France then supposed, based on the cosmological theories of Descartes.
These hypotheses need to be respected only on your own parchment board. There is no need to complete them on the main board, and players often mistakenly think this is the case in their first game. The graphic design tries to remind you of this by using a parchment background for the hypothesis cards, and the terrain being depicted as it is on the sketch cards — but we are so accustomed to thinking of maps as faithful representations that a second play is sometimes necessary to get this acceptable disconnect clearly in mind.

The hypothesis cards, or the suppositions made by the sponsors of your expedition before your departure
On the other hand, you must also ensure that your map is not too far from the common understanding of the island's terrain because your reputation as a cartographer is at stake! Thus, you also gain prestige points for the fidelity of your map to the known relief of the island at the end of the game.

It's up to you to pursue your personal objectives without straying too far from the reality of the terrain. For those who want still more recognition for their cartographic efforts, we have included an expert mode that further rewards fidelity of the map to the territory.

Mine!

Each turn, players map and trace and walk the tightrope, choosing their balance between these two sources of point...yet we felt that we were lacking an option for turns that get away from this main action to spice up the adventure a bit and to offer some excitement.

After trial and error, we added a new alternative action and a new source of points: claims. Thematically, planting your expedition's flag atop a previously unsurveyed mountain is amazing! This adds a dose of interaction and requires you to monitor your opponent's movements on the central board a little more closely. It also offers a strategic axis that's complementary to the two main sources of points.

Some people may also note the colonial dimension of grand scientific expeditions and the strongly political aspect of territorial control implied by cartography.

Almost There...

However, there are a few loose ends to tie up.

Sometimes in a first game, players will contradict one another over and over again in the same part of the island. When this happens, the game state doesn't move toward resolution, so we need to encourage game progression and limit the maximum duration.

Rather than encouraging advancing (we three designers are a little twisted), we would prefer to discourage standing still. At the end of the game, you lose prestige points if your personal map is incomplete.

To constrain the game to a reasonable number of turns, we also introduce a third endgame trigger that's more artificial, but necessary: exhausting the sketch card deck. Some clever calculations guarantee that this condition is triggered without any player getting a disadvantage.

You Have Reached Your Destination

From an evening playtest via Tabletop Simulator to a brainstorming session, to cutting out the prototype, to clever calculations — mountain by mountain or steppe by steppe, if you will — it took us a year to arrive at the quasi-final version of Maps of Misterra. We presented it to several publishers, and the game won over the Sit Down! team, who would do a fantastic job (beyond our expectations!) of materially and graphically staging the game, then getting it to your home.

The Maps of Misterra box is full of promise, isn't it?
Also, thanks to the entire team, notably Stanislas Puech for the illustrations, Anthony Moulins for the graphic design, Michaël Derobertmasure for the development, Marie Ooms for the artistic direction, Sophie Troye for the communication, and Didier Delhez for managing the project. You have all made this dream come true.

We thank you, as well, for reading this. Enjoy playing Maps of Misterra, and remember, only believe what you map!

Four cartographers, ready to sink their teeth into an adventure Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Most of the comments I've read about the 2023 train game Arabella ask why a kitten is on the cover when the gameplay focuses on track-building and share-holding. The publisher explains that the kitten is intended to represent how easy the game is to learn, but any cat lover who picks up this title is in for a surprise since the gameplay does not involve kaiju cats demolishing railroads.


Let me instead recommend that fans of felines check out one of the games listed below instead, each of which features cats in their gameplay, starting with Kyoto no Neko, a 2-4 player design from Cédric Millet that French publisher Matagot will release at SPIEL Essen 24:

In Kyoto no Neko, 2 to 4 players are kittens who explore the modern-day city of Kyoto, Japan through a series of independent, replayable scenarios. In each scenario, players must fulfill a variety of missions, from befriending a school boy to fighting an aggressive stray cat, or stealing the food from other player's dinner bowl. Throughout the game, each player will evolve, developing their skills and gaining the ability to explore new parts of the map by climbing on bushes and rooftops.

Using a system of skills, Kyoto no Neko will see each player interact with some of Kyoto's inhabitants, both animal and human. Each turn provides the opportunity to uncover something new about the city as players will reveal elements from little insects to specific objects or denizens of Kyoto. While some of these elements are represented by cardboard tiles, others come as standees, ensuring a stunning visual presence.

In a press release announcing the game, Millet writes, "I wanted to give everyone the chance to embody a kitten in a condensed experience of exploration and skill development, based on a role-playing mechanic in which every dice roll has a positive outcome. (You succeed or you learn!) The game lets you experience the sensations of a kitten's life by performing the full variety of typically feline activities (at least a new one in each scenario); I hope it will delight cat fans of all ages!" Now that sounds like a full feline experience!

• Speaking of "neko", in August 2024 the balancing game Nekojima from David Carmona, Karen Nguyen, and Unfriendly Games will become available in the U.S. courtesy of distributor Hachette Boardgames. An overview of this 1-5 player game:

In Nekojima, "The Island of Cats" in Japan, an electricity network is developing to supply the various lively districts of the island. The installation of electric poles becomes more complex due to the narrowness of the territory and its curious population of cats strolling on the cables.

Nekojima is a wooden game of skill and dexterity in which you have to keep an entire installation in balance. Players take turns placing or stacking denchuu — 電柱, or electrical poles — respecting the locations without any hanging cables touching. Be careful not to be the one to bring down the structure. This game requires reflection, concentration and skill.

David Carmona schools me in a demo at SPIEL Essen 23
—In competition, the player who knocks down the structure loses.
—In co-operation, the goal is to go as far as possible.

• Designer Tobias Hall is crowdfunding the tile-laying game Cat Packs through the end of April 2024, with the goal of debuting the game at SPIEL Essen 24 from his own All Or None Games:

Cat Packs is a fast-paced card game in which you'll cleverly put together the cat gang of your most whimsical dreams! The game includes over one hundred unique illustrated cats by artist Liselotte Eriksson.

On each turn, players draft a new cat from the alley and use resources to play out cards from their hand to add to their cat pack. All cats have different requirements and benefits, but not all cats fit well together, so players must carefully consider their positions. The goal of the game is to earn the most "catshine", which players receive by collecting sets of five cat types, surrounding certain cards with other cards, matching corners of four cards together in a catshine symbol, or winning the power struggle taking place after each round!

Who doesn't want to give a good home to a rough-and-tumble meowboy who needs a blanket to snuggle under?

• Do robotic cats count for this post? Let's say yes so that I can include Cyber Pet Quest, a design by Brendan Kendrick and Bernie Lin of Dead Alive Games that they are crowdfunding in April 2024, with plans for early sales at Gen Con 2024 in August. Here's an overview:

Embark on a thrilling adventure with Jane, a fully bionic cat, and her cybernetically enhanced friends: Clay the dog, Freya the raccoon, and Roman the goose. Join this eclectic team as they set out to find Jane's missing owner, Howard, in the intra-apocalyptic city of San Lazaro. With its diverse and immersive locations and a quirky cast of enemies, this metropolis will keep you on the edge of your seat. As you delve deeper into the city, you'll need to flex your tactical muscles and harness the pets' array of unique abilities and powerful items to succeed in your quest. Will you uncover the truth behind Howard's disappearance and guide Jane to her missing owner? Your choices will determine the outcome.

Designed for 1-4 players, Cyber Pet Quest is played as a multi-chapter campaign. Taking the roles of the four pets, players investigate and interact with the environment, complete chapter objectives, gain power items and charms, and outsmart the enemies who are trying to stop them. The campaign has twelve chapters in a branching format so that players can play the full game multiple times to see the different branching stories.

• Should you care more for big cats, along with many more animals of a non-cat nature, turn your eyes to, um, Nature, a Dominic Crapuchettes design that publisher NorthStar Game Studio plans to release in August 2025 following a 2024 Kickstarter campaign.


Nature is an evolution of Evolution, which the then-named North Star Games released in 2014, with that game being a Crapuchettes co-design with Dmitry Knorre and Sergey Machin, who were responsible for the 2010 title Evolution: The Origin of Species. Over the years, North Star evolved Evolution into the standalone games Evolution: Climate, Evolution: The Beginning, and Oceans, and now it's being transformed once again.

The gameplay of Nature resembles that of earlier games, with players experiencing an ecosystem in which food is scarce and predators are ready to eat you...although sometimes you're the predator looking for that scarce food. You can adapt your species to the environment by playing traits like fast to evade predators, nesting to grow your population, and climbing to reach fruit high above ground.

Nature will have five thematic modules — Jurassic, Flight, Natural Disasters, Arctic Tundra, and Amazon Rainforest — available at launch, and you can use 0-3 of them in a game to modify (or not) its length and complexity. As Crapuchettes writes:

The base game, Nature, is a meaty filler that is can be taught and played in 45 minutes. Each expansion will change core rules to dramatically affect the emotional feel of the game and the strategy:

—Add one expansion for a 60-minute game that's roughly the complexity of Evolution.
—Add two expansions for a 90-minute game that's roughly the complexity of Climate.
—Add three expansions for a 120-minute game that's roughly the complexity of Terraforming Mars

NorthStar is polling to determine which modules to release in 2026, and it welcomes playtesters who want to help see how everything fits together.

Evolution in action Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• The cartoon short "Steamboat Willie" entered the public domain in 2024, along with Tigger, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence.

I'm not sure whether designers will rush to create games out of this material — especially the first item given that Disney still owns everything else related to Mickey Mouse — but over time the public domain pool will only continue to grow, a pool that game designers and publishers will return to repeatedly for a chance to put their own spin on a story or group of characters known around the world, as with the announcement from U.S. publisher Crafty Games of Knights of the Round Table, a design by Jonny Pac that will see release in 2025.


Here's an overview of this 2-4 player game:

In each game of Knights of the Round Table, players choose a cycle of Arthurian myth to play, setting the tone and starting rules. They rally a company of knights and Arthurian personalities, deploying them to construct Camelot, repel invader hordes, and quest for the Holy Grail. Through their choices, players sculpt a unique narrative and unlock new modules until the grail is discovered, and a winner is crowned high king!

The game features dozens of silkscreened wood pieces, a huge game board, and a 3D castle that players build during play. Multiple game modules allow for high variability and replayability across many aspects of Arthurian myth, with the intertwining of themes and mechanisms allowing players to organically create their own spin on these legends.

• "Alice in Wonderland" remains a source of inspiration for game designers given the rich variety of ways to approach this fantastic world.


In 2024, new publisher Borogove Games plans to crowdfund Rolling in Wonderland, a design for 2-4 players from Daniel Alves:

Players become children who, just like Alice, stumble into Wonderland and meet all the famous characters from the works of Lewis Carroll. During play, you use actions to discover cards, make friends, and use your mushrooms to execute powerful combos in a highly strategic action-selection/dice-drafting system — all with the long-term goal of earning points.

• And where Alice starts to walk, Cthulhu follows. A crossover between these IPs is inevitable, but until that happens we'll have to focus on the latest game design to draw on the works of H.P. Lovecraft — Cohors Cthulhu: Tactics, a horror-themed, solitaire/co-operative game from Modiphius Entertainment that's meant as a companion of sorts to the Cohors Cthulhu RPG that Modiphius crowdfunded in 2023 for release in 2024. An overview:

Cohors Cthulhu: Tactics is set in the Cohors Cthulhu universe during the height of Imperial Rome. You begin your heroic journey as one of a handful of survivors of an ambush, desperately trying to escape the Mythos-ridden mists of a Germanic forest. As your heroes grow in experience and power, you will fulfill your destiny, becoming the leader of a powerful legion and facing the avatars of the Outer Gods themselves in full-scale war.

The game is meant to fuse the strategic nuance of tabletop wargames with the immersive narrative of role playing games. Cohors Cthulhu: Tactics will feature a wide range of 28mm miniatures in both resin and 3D print at-home STL files. The miniatures range features Roman Centurions, scoundrels, nobles, hunters, priests, druids, assassins, soldiers, and warriors. Facing them will be the full might of the Outer Gods: The Cult of Mormo with their Priests, Servitors, Ghouls and Overlords of Mormo, Teufel Hounds, Fluttering Fiends, Sheehad, Elder Things, Chosen and Die Draugr.

Modiphius notes that "Kickstarter backers will have an exclusive opportunity to grab one of several powerful Avatars of the Outer Gods in resin such as the Star Spawn of Cthulhu. Stretch Goals will unlock new factions, such as the Deep Ones, Mi-Go, and the corrupt Herjan's Horde, plus more mythos creatures, additional missions, and new gameplay options."

I'm not sure how "exclusive" these might be given that the Outer Gods appear willing to partner with as many publishers as step up...

• Oh, hey, I should have been more optimistic...or pessimistic. Not sure which one is appropriate here, but in any case Steamboat Willie World has announced a Kickstarter for Steamboat Willie playing cards...


...while in May 2024 new publisher Simply Play Games plans to crowdfund the tabletop game Steamboat Willie: Dark Days.


Here's the teaser description:

Take the role of our classic hero, "Steamboat Willie", or one of his pals in this modern return to the Forbidden Seas in this epic 2-4 player board game.

Return to the most dangerous seas to help rescue Caroline the Cow as she tries to get on board his steamboat to safety. In these mysterious seas, there are tales of sea monsters and pirates looking to capture his booty!

Take the role of our hero, Mickey Mouse "Steamboat Willie," or one of his pals — Minnie, Pete, Parrot, or Goat — in this epic 2-4 player table top game.

Given the quality of this promotional image from the upcoming BackerKit campaign, I anticipate this game being a high-quality release that will endure for decades and become a treasure that our descendants will look forward to entering the public domain in the 22nd century so that they can riff on it themselves.

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• Jules Messaud's Akropolis won the 2023 Japan Boardgame Prize issued by Yumoa, a non-profit organization founded in 2003 that annually honors games that are "considered to have contributed the most to the spread of board games".

The other titles nominated for the award were Phil Walker-Harding's Super Mega Lucky Box and Challengers! from designers Johannes Krenner and Markus Slawitscheck. This latter title, which won the 2023 Kennerspiel des Jahres in Germany, won the voting section of the 2023 Japan Boardgame Prize, receiving more than twice as many points as second-place finisher Darwin's Journey from Simone Luciani and Nestore Mangone. Maxime Tardif's Earth had broader support than Darwin's Journey, but at a lower level, landing in third place. (Voters ranked five games, with first place receiving 5 points, second place 4 points, etc.)

• The American Tabletop Awards have announced their 2024 winners for games released in the U.S. in 2023. The winners and their categories are:

—Early gamers: Blob Party, by Pam Walls and WizKids
—Casual games: Sea Salt & Paper, by Bruno Cathala, Théo Rivière, and Bombyx
—Strategy games: Thunder Road: Vendetta, by Dave Chalker, Brett Myers, and Restoration Games
—Complex games: The White Castle, by Isra C., Shei S., and Devir

If you visit the link above, you'll find other ATTA-recommended and -nominated titles in those categories.



• Speaking of awards, as a BGG user you are invited to nominate games released in 2023 for the 18th annual Golden Geek Awards. The nomination phase will end at 11:59 PM CDT on Sunday, April 21, 2023, with voting on the top nominees taking place over the next ten days. BGG owner Scott Alden gives details on the nomination process here.


• Someone on the Saturday Night Live staff must be a fan of Ticket to Ride because while this skit from April 6, 2024 focuses on Jumanji, Alan R. Moon's classic train game also plays a starring role:

Youtube Video
• While Ravensburger publishes games, it's best known as a jigsaw puzzle manufacturer, and a paywalled article in The New York Times from Derrick Bryson Taylor details a long-running legal battle between the German publisher and the Italian government over the rights to reproduce Leonardo da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man" drawing in a jigsaw puzzle. An excerpt:

At the center of the dispute is Italy's cultural heritage and landscape code, which was adopted in 2004 and allows cultural institutions, like museums, to request concession fees and payments for the commercial reproduction of cultural properties, like "Vitruvian Man."

That code is at odds with European Union law, which states that works in the public domain (like "Vitruvian Man") are not subject to copyright.

For more than a decade, Ravensburger sold a 1,000-piece puzzle with the image of the famed drawing. But in 2019, the Italian government and the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, where the famous work and other da Vinci pieces are on display, used the Italian code to demand that Ravensburger stop selling the puzzle and pay a licensing fee.

The article details other instances of the Italian government protesting commercial uses of Italian cultural landmarks, such as a 2023 case in which "a court in Florence ruled against GQ Italia for using an image of the David statue on the cover of one of its magazines in 2020 without permission".

• Since I've already diverged into jigsaw puzzles, we close with a look at a trio of jigsaw puzzles that are a project of BGG advertising manager Chad Krizan, who also runs the company Puzzle Bomb with his wife Caylyn, so I want to highlight their Spring 2024 collection of wooden puzzles. I've watched Chad doodle many times over the years, and it's fascinating to see his work transformed in this way.

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• German publisher KOSMOS has teased games that it will release in the second half of 2024, starting with German editions of Cascadia: Rolling Hills, Cascadia: Rolling Rivers, Linx, and The Gang, the latter of which will debut from KOSMOS in the U.S. in Q3 2024 and which Inka and Markus Brand described on Instagram as a "super good game" that even in March 2024 they can see landing a Spiel des Jahres nomination in 2025. Hmm...


Speaking of the SdJ, Wolfgang Lüdtke's SdJ recommended title Caesar & Cleopatra, which debuted from KOSMOS in 1997, will be released in a new edition.


As previously announced in January 2024, KOSMOS will release the card game Faraway from Johannes Goupy and Corentin Lebrat in German in the second half of 2024.

KOSMOS will also release German editions of three titles from Dutch publisher Identity Games. Battle Royale is a tactical action game for 2-4 players in which "you play cards to position your characters cleverly, then you roll the doom dice...and little by little, the island arena grows smaller and smaller. With skill and luck, you try to keep your figures on the island for as long as possible. Create majorities, push your opponent's figures off the island, and stay away from the explosions. Continue to fight for space until only one player remains."


Medical Mysteries: New York Emergency Room and Medical Mysteries: Miami Flatline (!) are co-operative games in which you encounter patients and need to figure out what's wrong with them. Each box has four patients of varying difficulties waiting for you, along with a tutorial case. No prior medical knowledge is required.



In terms of new titles, Monkey Fun is a game for 1-4 players from Jürgen P. K. Grunau in which you try to claim a connected area as quickly as possible with your gang of monkeys. The cards you play indicate on which square you can place a monkey, but the other monkeys are already waiting to snatch this space from you...

(I will confess that this might not be a new design as I'm not familiar with Grunau's dozens of published games.)

Read more »

by Thomas Dagenais-Lespérance

The story of Word Traveler — which is being released in April 2024 from Office Dog — is both very short and very long. It's a party-ish game — emphasis on the "ish" — and like most games of its kind, it's based around a simple activity in which scoring is relatively secondary. This core activity took shape quickly and didn't change much throughout development, so in a sense "most" of the game was created in a short period of time. However, the devil's in the details as they say, and like Boo in DragonBall Z, the game went through many, many transformations before it would reach its final form.

The premise is simple: Players are traveling around a city, but since they don't know the local language, they must rely on imprecise indications to get around. The idea is translated mechanically by having players want to move around a grid of images to score points based on their personal map card (think Codenames), but they cannot do so themselves, so they must communicate to the other players how they'd like to be moved by creating a sequence made of a combination of direction tokens and communication cards.

In "short", Word Traveler is a co-operative communication programming game. Combining communication and programming was the thing I was the most excited about as it allowed players to create a sentence of sorts, one in which each "word" (move) would inform the overall path you're trying to take.

Instead of going through a lengthy explanation of how the core activity of the game works concretely, I think it's best if I show you an example. Word Traveler is one of those games that's a bit awkward to explain in written form but super easy to teach visually. This photo's from one of the first iterations of the game, back when the game was called "PanoraMag" (short for "Panorama Magazine"...which was a terrible name):


For their first move — as indicated by the row of cards at the bottom of the image — the red player wants to go up to the image that's the most "circle" (probably the tiger's face). For their second move, they want to go up again to the image that's the most "royal" or "regal" (probably the forbidden city). After that, they go right to the image that's the least "city" (when placed on its dark side, a card is meant to be read as "the least"). After that, they go left to the image that's the most "food" (probably the chopsticks), then they use a drone (more on that later), and finally they go down to the image that's the least "music" (probably the containers).

That particular sequence is relatively easy to decode (in my opinion), but in practice players will often want to refer to past and future instructions if they're unsure where to go for a particular move, hence the "sentence" aspect of the communication. For example:


Here the first move is a little bit ambiguous. What's the least "food/plant" image to the right of the red player between a desert, a motorbike, and a plane? This one's tough, but for the second move they tell us to go down to the image that's the most "weapon", which works really well with the policeman in the last column, which could indicate that they're going to the plane for their first move.

As you probably guessed from the above examples, the game used to take place in China and players communicated with icons instead of words. This was back in 2019, and since Decrypto's release was relatively recent, I wanted to avoid doing another word-based game. As for the Chinese theme, I liked the aesthetics of it, but it wasn't kept after the game got signed.

At first, players had access to three different maps, each with its own shape and special power: Beijing (associated with the drone, which allowed you to visit an extra location adjacent to you once per round), Shanghai (associated with the bridge, which you could cross once per round to reach the other half of the map), and China itself (associated with the plane, which allowed you to move non-orthogonally). The maps also featured hotels, and if you ended your turn on one, you would earn one extra card (and point) for the next round.

The maps not taken...
Unfortunately, this version of the game had many problems. Having the direction tokens and the icon cards together was a nice idea to reduce the component count, but it wasn't great for readability and also made it difficult for players to use multiple icons to point to a single destination, which a lot of players were asking for. Having complex maps composed of single images made the game frustratingly long to set up. Hotels were nice, but the extra cards and points tended to advantage players who were already doing well. I won't even go into the whole letter/number system, but suffice to say it was unnecessarily complex as well.

The game was soon changed to feature a single square map, which allowed me to move the images from single cards to 2x3 boards for a much faster set-up.


As for the other problems, they would get fixed only after I signed the game to Repos Production near the end of 2019...

"Wait!", you say, "Repos Production?! But the game's being released by Office Dog!"

Indeed, this game actually got signed to two different publishers, once in 2019 and again in 2022. This was an extremely valuable learning experience as each publisher had a (somewhat) different vision of the game and didn't come to the same conclusions regarding many of its systems.

So, first, Repos. They wanted to integrate the game into their Concept line as both games featured similar icon-based communication. They quickly did away with the Chinese theme and changed it to a more globally relatable theme of traveling the world. They also wanted a more illustrated style compared to the travel photos I had been using thus far. Furthermore, they separated the direction tokens and the icon cards for all the reasons I explained above.


When I first showed Repos the game, each round players would draw a new map card (i.e., the Codenames-like cards that tell each player where they want to go), but they wanted players to keep the map for the entire game so that each round would feel more like a part of a complete experience. The map cards went through a number of different iterations in an effort to accommodate that: first, there were tokens to represent the different locations that players would flip face down when they visited them, then small sheets of paper like you see in roll-and-writes on which players would note their path using a pencil, then dry-erase cards, then small boards that you kept behind a screen and on which you placed cubes to indicate what you had visited.

The map cards themselves also changed quite a bit:


Gone were the letters and the numbers, which had been replaced by small icons. A number of tokens showing these icons would be drawn from a bag at the start of each round, and players would divide them among themselves depending on what was easier for them to visit. Gone also were the hotels; players would earn additional cards and movements automatically to simplify things.

A lot of smaller things changed as well. For example, players used to be able to trade communication cards with one another, but Repos wanted to shorten the game's length, so that idea was scrapped. The special actions like the plane or the drone were also scrapped. A sand timer was used to track time, then it was gone, then one appeared again. A lot of different things were tried, too much for me to list them all.

All in all, I think most of the changes Repos did were a step in the right direction. The game was simplified in some aspects, complexified in others. They worked a lot on it, which is why it came as such a blow when they told me in early 2022 that they wouldn't make the game after all. Their reasoning (at least the one they gave me) was that they wanted the game to cost the same as Concept, but that they didn't see a way to make it work without making drastic (and detrimental) changes to the game. This was the third game of mine to get canceled during the pandemic. I know these things happen relatively frequently, but to have three games canceled in such a short period of time, all of which had all undergone lengthy developments, I almost stopped making games right there and then. It was soul crushing.

Still, I eventually recovered and started to work on my games again, including this one. As luck would have it, Bryan Bornmueller from Office Dog contacted me around that time to see whether I had any prototypes to pitch them. They were a new studio under the Asmodee banner and wanted games from freelance designers such as myself. They really liked "PanoraMag", and after a few tests they decided to start working on it in earnest.

One of the first big changes they did was to switch icons for words on the communication cards. One of the issues with icons, in this case, is that there's sort of two interpretation layers: First you need to figure out what the icon means for the player who used it, then you need to figure out which image they are pointing at. With words, you (mostly) have only the second layer, which makes sequences easier to interpret. They reverted the change that Repos had done regarding drawing only one map card for the whole game and went back to drawing a new map card each round since it was easier to manage and required fewer components. The maps were also simplified, with just 1s and 2s to indicate the number of points gained from visiting a place instead of a more complex system of icons and tokens.

On the thematic side of things, rather than having players travel the whole world using 2x3 boards made of a random assortment of images from around the globe, Office Dog preferred to have players visit more specific locations. They decided to have four different boards, each one a city illustrated by an artist from that place, which I thought was a really cool idea. Finally, the name was changed to Word Traveler, which was miles better than mine.

On display at GAMA Expo 2024
All in all, I'm really quite happy with the work they've done, and development went extremely smoothly! After almost five years, the game is finally seeing the light of day. It was a long road, but hopefully the game is better for it.

Thomas Dagenais-Lespérance

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

In 2014, Alchemists appeared from designer Matúš Kotry and publisher Czech Games Edition. In the intervening decade, Kotry has become a father, and to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the game, he and CGE have come together again to release Little Alchemists. This new design due out in Q3 2024 shares elements with the original release, but is aimed at players aged 7 and up, with these players mixing potions and selling them to customers.


Here's an overview:

Will you surpass your teachers' knowledge and grow up to become the best alchemists in the land? Let's find out! It's time to grab your potion ingredients, sharpen your deduction skills, and get mixing!

Little Alchemists is a family-friendly deduction game that's designed to grow with the curious minds of young players. The game starts with simple concepts and mechanisms; you'll start by gathering and combining ingredients for brewing potions to sell. However, as you collect keys by achieving your potion-making goals, you'll unlock new chapters that gradually add more components, mechanisms, and complexity to the experience.

Not sure how to make potions? No sweat! Potion craft takes mere seconds with the free Little Alchemists companion app. To make a potion, players select two ingredient tiles, then scan them using the companion app loaded onto a tablet or smartphone. This reveals the combined result and lets players acquire and mark the corresponding potion knowledge on their secret player board.

The proud parentWith each potion you make, you'll begin to discover the secrets that lie at the heart of alchemy. Players will have to use clever deductions to figure out the arcane properties of each ingredient, then they can use that knowledge to their advantage throughout the game!

Over the course of seven chapters that unlock over multiple playthroughs, players will learn and master many new facets of the alchemy trade, preparing them for what's to come. Each chapter is designed as a replayable experience that expands on the previous chapter, with new layers of game mechanisms that add more subtle depth and complexity over time. Also, fully exploring the world of Little Alchemists will introduce you to many of the concepts from and better prepare you for the original Alchemists game.

For a hint of what awaits inside the box, note the pyramidal ingredient chart in the lower left of the image below. The initial game has you play with six types of ingredients, but over time you can add a seventh and eighth by attaching new "walls" on the pyramid. The app is designed to teach players the entire game as needed to assist play with youngsters.

Little Alchemists will debut at Gen Con 2024 in August.

Prototype version shown at GAMA Expo 2024 Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• Designer Friedemann Friese of 2F-Spiele is no stranger to trick-taking games, having released Foppen in 1995 (then re-mixing it as Fool! in 2018) and Stich-Meister in 2010.

In Q4 2024, he will release a new twist on the genre in Fischen, which Rio Grande Games will release as Fishing. Here's an overview of this 3-5 player game:

In Fishing, you try to catch as many tricks as possible over eight rounds, with each card you catch being worth 1 point.You then use your caught cards for the next round — and if you didn't catch enough tricks to fill your hand, you'll draw fresh cards from the ocean stack, which will introduce new cards for you fishers to fight over.

In more detail, at the start of each round, you have 8-13 cards in hand, depending on the player count and the round. In the first round, the cards go from 1-10 in four colors. Standard trick-taking rules apply, with players needing to follow the color led and the highest card of the led suit winning the trick.

New cards come into play from the ocean stack in waves, with higher-value cards in the four colors, a green trump suit from 1-16, 0 cards that let you snag a card from the trick, and special-powered buoy cards that can always be played into a trick regardless of what you have in hand. With buoys, you can steal the lead or determine which color must lead the next trick, force players to pass cards or lose points; you can even steal all other cards in a trick, ideally netting yourself huge fish for use next round.

At the end of each round, score 1 point for each card you caught. Whoever lands the most points after eight rounds wins.

It's interesting to see Friese drawing from Fabled Fruit and his Fast Forward series in which more cards are introduced to the game over time. Rand. did something similar in his trick-taking game Tall Tales, but Fishing introduces a trump suit and special-powered cards, in addition to higher numbers, with no one knowing what you're initially drawing other than a card from level one, level two, etc.

What's more, I'm intrigued by the idea of you using the cards you catch in one round as "bait" in the next round. After all, you might be catching junky low numbers, and sure, you score for them at the end of this round, but how well will they serve you next round, assuming you draw them? Maybe they can actually be a boon, allowing you to run a color that no one else has...until the trump cards start showing up. In any case, I'm looking forward to this one.

• Another SPIEL Essen 24 release from 2F-Spiele is Free Ride USA, a spinoff title that features the same gameplay as 2021's Free Ride:

In Free Ride USA, you are one of several people in charge of building railway lines, connecting the cities in the United States, and carrying passengers to those cities. The game board shows 45 cities connected by a network of potential routes, and all railway lines built will be one of three types: lines owned by you, lines owned by fellow players, and state-owned lines. When you travel along railway lines, you pay nothing to travel on your lines and state-owned lines. To travel on a fellow player's line, however, you must pay them 1 coin, which converts their line to state-owned. From then on, traveling on that line is free for all players. As coins are limited, you should carefully balance the building of your lines with the conversion of fellow players' lines to state-owned lines.

Where do you want to build? At the start of play, each player drafts part of a travel route. Multiple travel routes are available for choosing, and each travel route consists of three cards. When you choose a route, you take either the first and second cards or the second and third cards as your starting and ending point (in that order). Return the unchosen card of that route to the box.

Once the third deck is empty, you can either withdraw from the game with uncompleted routes (returning those cards to the box) or keep taking turns until you finish all your routes, at which point you immediately gain 1 coin and withdraw. In either situation, you earn 1 coin (and do nothing else) on each subsequent turn. Once all players have withdrawn, you tally your score, earning 3 points for each coin, 5 points for the first card you have of a city, and 2 points for each other card you have of a city. (Each of the 45 cities appears once in each of the three decks.) Whoever has the most points wins.

For more on the gameplay, you can read or watch me rave about Free Ride here. The 45 cities in Free Ride USA are color-coded in groups of five, ideally making it easier for players to get a sense of how long a route might take to travel with your train.

In addition, instead of nine cities around the perimeter of the game board starting with two coins — with the first player to move their train to such a city collecting those coins — coins are added to the game on a somewhat random basis. Ten cities each are designated as east coast cities or west coast cities, and whenever a potential route has an east-west pairing, say, Philadephia to Salt Lake City, two coins are added to this route from the reserve. If a player claims that route, they collect those coins, which means players have more of an incentive to grab long routes since they can use those coins to purchase rail tokens without needing to spend a turn to do so, while also converting others' routes to state-owned. Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Tokyo Game Market next takes place on April 27-28, 2024, and here's a tiny sampling of new games that will be presented at that show.

• Designer Saashi of Saashi & Saashi will release Bus & Stop, a card game featuring art from Takako Takarai that challenges 2-4 players to be efficient bus drivers:

Bus & Stop is a card game in which you compete as bus drivers to bring passengers to their desired destinations, while avoiding overcrowding.

On a turn, you either pick up or drop off. To pick up, choose all of the passenger cards of one color from the row waiting at the bus stop, then place them in your bus — that is, the area in front of you, which can hold at most ten cards. Senior citizens aren't going far, so you score them immediately instead of placing them on the bus.

To drop off, choose a group of passengers on your bus that match one of the available destination cards — for example, all men, all girls, or one passenger of each color — then remove these passengers from your bus and place them under the card. You score points for each card depending on how many people you delivered at once, so aim for large groups. Whenever a player drops off, everyone else can make one of their matching passengers skedaddle, removing them from the bus and placing them in a personal scoring pile with their senior citizens.

When the bus stop can't be refilled with passengers or only a certain number of destination cards remain, the game ends. Tally your score, earning 1 point for each single card and the listed points for each destination card. If your bus is empty, congratulations! You earn a depot bonus for not stranding passengers on your bus. They will thank you for not doing that...

While Saashi & Saashi will debut Bus & Stop at Game Market, pre-orders will ship at the end of May 2024 with a general retail release in June 2024.

• At the previous Game Market in December 2023, designer Fumiko Shimizu self-published approximately fifty copies of ダイイングメッセージ (Dying Message) under the brand Cinematrick.

Now Oink Games has licensed the design and will release a new edition — solely in Japanese right now — at Game Market in April 2024, with a retail release in early May 2024.


Here's how to play:

You've been murdered! Well, almost, you're not dead yet, so you want to communicate the identity of who the killer is, but you have a limited number of tools to make that happen: a small number of cards with obscure marks on them and...yourself. Yes, your dying body. Maybe you can arrange the cards in some manner to convey information. Maybe your still fingers can point to — or obscure — parts of the cards to increase the clarity of your dying thought.

If the clues are easy to understand, they will be destroyed by the culprit; if they are difficult, they will not be communicated to anyone, and your death will not be avenged, so leave an exquisite dying message.

The other players in Dying Message are detectives, and they make inferences based on the limited information available. Detectives can co-operate or confront one another, and whether the deduction turns out to be good or bad will depend upon their discussion.

Looking at the pic above, I was like, wait, is that a pool of blood on the table? Is that part of the game?! And it turns out that yes, it is, with the designer noting on Twitter that the blood pool on the back of the instruction manual of the first edition is now made of felt, presumably to make your final seconds more comfortable.

[twitter=1775845859671834745]
• Oink has a second licensed title that it plans to debut at Game Market ahead of an early May 2024 retail release: Moving Wild, which designer Chris Priscott originally crowdfunded in 2021 and released in 2022 under the name Zuuli and publishing brand Unfringed.

In Moving Wild, up to six players draft cards, with everyone choosing a card simultaneously, passing what's left, choosing another card, etc. Once all the cards have been selected, players each assemble their own zoo from the enclosures, animals, and upgrades they've collected.


Enclosures have a size limit and can take animals from 1-3 terrains: desert, grass, or water. Animals need to be placed in an enclosure of a matching landscape, and they have a size on them, so you can't just shove them all in the same enclosure. Fierce animals can't be enclosed with friendly ones unless you have an upgrade to do so. Animals are worth points if enclosed, with some enclosures having multipliers for those animals. Some animals have special conditions on them that grant you bonus points if met.

The game lasts three rounds, with everyone scoring after each round, then whoever has the most points wins.

• Happy City designer Toshiki Sato has a new title coming from their own さとーふぁみりあ (Sato Familie) publishing brand: Merchants of Sky Islands.


Merchants of Sky Islands is a 2-4 player game, and each player starts with a random stack of ten hexagonal island tiles, taking two of them in hand. Each tile is a combination of island parts on a background of air — after all, "sky islands". A four-hex starting tile is placed in the middle of the table.

On a turn, add a tile from your hand to the table, matching land and sky on adjacent edges. Gain the appropriate resource (or 1 VP) based on the color of the airship on the tile you placed and all adjacent tiles, then use resources to place buildings on the board, with each building costing one resource in each of the three colors: a trading house goes on an island tile to show your influence; a tower is placed next to one of your trading houses on a towerless island, then you gain points equal to the number of trading houses on that island; and a port goes under one of your portless trading houses, giving you the resource on that tile at the start of each turn. Discard to three resources in hand at turn's end.


After ten turns, the game ends, and you score each of the islands on the board, whether they're only linked (that is, connected) or closed (with the island being completely surrounded by air). Each towered trading house in your color gives you 2 influence, and each other trading house 1 influence. Whoever has the most influence on a linked island scores 1 point per tile, and the player with the secondmost influence gets half that. Scores are doubled for closed islands. Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• U.S. publisher Inside Up Games has announced an expansion for Maxime Tardif's Earth, and as much as I'd like it to be named "Moon", it is not.

Instead it's titled Earth: Abundance, and the only detail at the moment is that it contains "new player interactions and opportunities to curate your hand" and a Kickstarter campaign for this item — as well as add-ons from the initial Earth campaign — will launch on April 22, 2024 to coincide with Earth Day.

• In March 2024, Restoration Games crowdfunded Thunder Road: Vendetta – Carnival of Chaos, an expansion for Dave Chalker and Brett Myers' Thunder Road: Vendetta in which you're not racing to a finish line, but instead competing in an arena with powerful new weapons — or material from the original game and expansions — to collect more scrap than anyone else.

This expansion also includes components to add a fifth player to the game, and it's due to Kickstarter backers in November 2024.


• The second edition of Dominion: Cornucopia & Guilds, which combines Donald X. Vaccarino's two Dominion expansions Guilds and Cornucopia, was released in March 2024 by publisher Rio Grande Games, with this edition featuring eight new kingdom cards.

As with previous updates to the Dominion game line, these new cards will be sold separately as an update pack.


• Rio Grande Games has also updated the release date for Dice Realms: Trade Expansion to "Spring 2024", a.k.a. Q2 2024.

• Devir is taking an interesting approach to its (potential) release of Mille Fiori: The Masterpieces, an expansion for Reiner Knizia's 2021 game Mille Fiori.

Along the lines of GMT Games' P500 pre-order program, Devir has launched Devir 500, writing that "At times we get requests from customers to publish titles, and the Devir 500 Project was created to turn those titles into reality. They can be board games, expansions, or even RPGs. The project started with some Spanish language titles, but has worked well enough that we will now offer it for projects in English and other languages."

Mille Fiori: The Masterpieces is the first such English-language project, although Devir's edition will include rules in Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian as well to match its base game. The Devir 500 project for this title has 454 reservations to date, with no deadline listed for when Devir will pull the plug on this project, although presumably the publisher won't sit around forever waiting for order #500.

• In its monthly newsletter, German publisher Feuerland Spiele has been posting previews of Gaia Project: The Lost Fleet, an expansion for 2017's Gaia Project from designers Jens Drögemüller and Helge Ostertag, and now it's posted the rulebook for this late Q3 2024 release on BGG.

Read more »

by Ellie Dix

During most of 2020, playtesting was all online. With little desire to master the necessary digital skills, I turned my attention to games that could be played over Zoom without using Tabletop Simulator or similar.

I spent much of the year designing roll-and-write games in which playtesters could print out a single sheet of paper and dice rolls could be shared. I produced a series of print-and-play roll-and-writes of varying sizes and complexities, all of which could be played with standard six-sided dice — but I started to wonder what else you could do. I wanted to create something that felt new and different, but that shared the flexibility of the roll-and-write format.

"Roll and _____"

I began to think of other verbs that could replace "write" in the "roll-and-write" genre. What else could be done with paper? "Roll-and-erase"... "roll-and-stick"... "roll-and-fold"... "roll-and-roll" (as in, rolling up the paper — yeah, I know, stupid idea)... "roll-and-cut"...?

Cutting up paper felt instantly interesting. I was immediately drawn to the idea that when you're cutting up a page, you can't erase your decision; once a cut is made, it's made. No takesies-backsies. As you cut up a page, the game physically changes, the paper gets smaller, and the challenge develops.

Initial Design

My initial ideas and early prototypes were entirely mechanically driven; there was no hint of a theme. I decided I wanted a game in which players cut up a grid containing icons in some of the cells with the aim of splitting the paper up so that each icon is on a separate piece of paper. I decided that the roll of the dice should determine the line along which you can cut, and the dice system from that first prototype ended up in the final game: Roll two dice, then choose the color from one die (to determine the color of the line along which you cut) and the number from the other (to determine the length of the cut).

Three regular shapes tessellate perfectly: squares, hexagons, and triangles. The final design uses triangles, but I experimented with both squares and hexagons first. I tried square grids with red and blue lines running vertically and horizontally, as well as grids with different colored lines at different points. Two colors felt too few — you always had too many options of lines to cut along — whereas six was too restrictive and frustrating.


Experiments with a hex grid didn't go well. The bendy lines threw up lots of problems with tracking your cuts and being able to visualize what a specific cut will do. The grid needed different colors in different places, which was messy and confusing. After one solo playtest, this was rapidly abandoned.


But the triangle grid worked like a charm, with three colors of lines running in three different directions. After rolling the dice and deciding which to use for the number and which for the color, you could pick any line in that color — all running parallel — and cut straight along it. The 60º angles at which the lines meet means that cells can be cut out with fewer snips.

Early experiments with a small grid of triangles helped me establish the cutting rules:

• As soon as you cut along a line, the opened edges of this line become edges of the page. You may cut in from any open edge.
• You may cut over a point at the end of a previous cut, but you may not cut over a completely bisected line.
• You may choose any available line of the right color, but you must cut the whole distance. If you are unable to cut the whole distance on the chosen line, you must take a penalty, reducing the (multiplying) value of one of the types of icons.


Exploring Theme

Once the core mechanisms were clear, I started to explore theme. My games often arise from a mechanical concept, but I want the theme to feel integrated. As I was dividing up the paper into sections and carefully removing items on their own, it struck me that there were clear similarities between this activity and archeologists working on a dig site. Artifacts (represented by icons in cells) discovered in a dig would need to be carefully removed, on their own, without damaging other artifacts that may be nearby. The soil which filled the bulk of the site (the empty cells on the grid) were not important. Artifacts could come out with soil or without it. Soil could come out on its own, and it wouldn't matter.

The name quickly followed. It's one of the few games I've designed in which the name has never changed. The game feels a bit like a jigsaw, but with the puzzle asking you to separate the pieces, not put them together. "Dig" relates to the theme and "Saw" to the cutting mechanism. Thus, Digsaw was born.

I leaned into the theme when designing the rest of the mechanisms. All icons in the original, purely mechanical versions of the game were worth the same amount, but now that they were artifacts, it felt like some should be worth more than others, specifically bones, ceramics, and jewels in that order from low to high. Originally I used the same number of each icon, but I wanted to make dig sites where less valuable bones were easier to come by, while the more valuable jewels were rarer.

Playtesting and Development

From the first playtest with other people, it was clear that the game sparked delight. It was exciting to see players puzzling over increasingly crazy-shaped pieces of paper, held together by small sections. The "doh" moments players experienced when making a cut that they hadn't fully thought through were priceless. It felt interesting and different — but I didn't know what else to do with it.


The game was shelved for a while...almost two years. When in-person playtesting started again, we focused on playing all the games we'd designed that we couldn't play online. In fact, it wasn't until I had nothing new to take to my weekly playtest that I pulled Digsaw out again. To be honest, I had sort of forgotten about it, the design having fallen into a Covid time-warp. From the first cut, though, there were squeals of delight. It still felt different, it still felt exciting. With the encouragement of the London playtesters, I was spurred on to develop the game further. It was clear that the playtesters wanted to play again, but they wanted different boards and new challenges.

I started working on different dig sites with varying levels of difficulty. The second dig site was similar to the first, but with the artifacts mostly clumped together in the middle, making extraction more difficult. The third dig site was littered with artifacts, but they were of a lesser initial value. The fourth dig site contained a number of unexploded World War II bombs; these had to be removed with care, or they would cost you points. The fifth dig site was riddled with sections of granite that couldn't be cut through. These remain the five levels in the published version.

I actually created super-advanced versions of each of the five levels with half the dig site printed on one side of the paper and the other half on the back. I enjoyed the challenge of the double-sided sheets, but others found them immensely frustrating, leading to a few angry departures from the game after rogue cuts — and with the gentle encouragement of the lovely folks at Stronghold Games, which had picked up the design, I acquiesced.

It was important to make sure that different players could play different levels simultaneously, that is, that a new player could play Level 1 and an experienced player Level 5, while still competing on scores. I tweaked the sheets so that each level would produce the same maximum score. I did a bunch of solo tests using the same dice rolls to make decisions on multiple sheets of different levels, both single- and double-sided.


Working with Stronghold Games

I pitched Digsaw to Travis Worthington at Stronghold Games at SPIEL '22. He liked the game, but wanted bonuses that could chain, which was a good suggestion. I added small stars that when removed with an artifact of the same color gives a player a bonus cut on any color line. If you set up your sheet in the right way, one bonus cut can lead to another and another. The stars give no penalties, just extra cuts. They gleam — waiting for you to activate them with a swish of your scissors.

Working with Stronghold Games has been terrific. The box art is fabulous, and the production is superb. One of the things I was worried about when I started pitching the game was that the box might include only the pads pf paper, and players would have to use their own scissors — but Stronghold fit six pairs in the box! All those scissors! Fabulous...

Ellie Dix

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Let's look at a few handheld game models — a.k.a., card games — that will be hitting the market in 2024, starting with Kyū, a game for 2-5 players from Michael Palm and Lukas Zach of German publisher 10 Traders:

Kyū, which means "nine" in Japanese, is a tactical card game in which you win by controlling three nobles at the same time. Each noble favors a different arrangement of cards, such as the longest straight, the most cards of the same color, or as many of the same card as possible.

The deck consists of cards numbered 1-9 in either red or black. Each player starts with cards in hand, along with other cards in a face-up display. Gameplay takes place in phases, with players first swapping a card from the display with one from their hand or drawing from the deck, then discarding. After this phase ends, the nobles issue challenges, going to whoever best satisfies them, although they can be won away from you in the future.

Ideally you can build a hand that's flexible enough to satisfy three nobles during a single challenge...

Titles from 10 Traders are distributed to German retailers through distributor Spiel Direkt, while also being available at SPIEL Essen.

• Treesap Games is a new UK publisher, and it plans to debut with the 2-5 player card game Escape the Rat Race, for which it will launch a crowdfunding campaign in May 2024. The game description is fairly minimal, but it's a start for now:

Whether an entrepreneur or a professional, money can't buy you happiness...but it can win you glory.

In Escape the Rat Race, you want to use your hard-earned cash to pay for experiences and race through your 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, sabotaging your opponents and furthering your plans. Is stealing really wrong if it sends you on safari?

In this race to retirement, the first player to collect three experiences from each decade will successfully escape the rat race.

• Designer Adrian Dinu might be best known for Northgard: Uncharted Lands, but he creates tiny games as well, such as the card game Shuppa, which Ludically debuted at the FIJ game fair in February 2024. Here's an overview of this 2-4 player game:

Shuppa is a card-collecting game in which you try to collect as many cards as possible by matching lollipops of the same color, Candy Crush-style.

To set up, each player gets a hand of seven number cards (which come in four colors) and two action cards. Two rows of number cards are laid out, with each row having three cards more than the number of players.

The game lasts seven rounds. In the first round, reveal three number cards from the reserve. Each player then chooses and reveals a card, marking it with their player token, with all cards then being placed in a row above the existing cards. Players then claim any group of at least three cards in the same color if the card they played is part of this group. (Player order is determined at random by the left or right arrow on top of the card deck.) After a group is claimed, drop any cards that have an empty space underneath them, which might possibly create a new group that is claimed by the active player. If a player doesn't claim a group, they take an action card from the deck. Place a number card from the reserve at the bottom of any empty column.

The next six rounds play out similarly: Reveal three number cards; everyone plays a number card, then claims a group, if possible. Now, though, anyone who doesn't claim a group can either draw an action card or play an action card. The action cards let you "eat" a card from the play area to score it, move a card to another column, or swap two cards. Ideally these actions will let you score groups.

After seven rounds, tally your score, with multicolor cards being worth 2 points and every other card 1 point.

• I heard a lot of buzz at SPIEL Essen 23 and afterward for , a trick-taking game that puts a special-powered spin on the traditional Hearts card game. Here's an overview of this 3-6 player game from designers Daniel Byrne, José Gerardo Guerrero, Kevin Peláez, and Tirso Virgós, and Spanish publisher Zombi Paella:

Snow White, The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, and many other fairy tale princesses are celebrating a five-day party. The prince charmings, who have not been invited, will try to infiltrate the ball to propose marriage to the girls. As a princess, you have to avoid marriage proposals and remain single and independent after the celebrations.

Rebel Princess takes place over five rounds, representing the five days of a party, and each round has a special rule that makes each game totally different. The general mechanisms are those of trick-taking games, in which each player plays a numbered card into each trick, following one of the four suits in the game. The player with the highest number of the suit that started the trick takes all the cards of that trick — but that's not necessarily good as players want to avoid taking cards with prince charmings, who each bring one marriage proposal, aside from the enchanted frog who brings five proposals. The player with the fewest marriage proposals after five rounds wins.

Round cards — um, rectangular round cards
Importantly, each player assumes the role of a different fairy tale princess and has a special ability that they can use once per round.

Publisher Bézier Games has announced that it will release Rebel Princess in the U.S., and in addition to the standard game, it will debut Rebel Princess Deluxe Edition at Gen Con 2024 in August, with this blinged package featuring two new princesses and six new round cards, princess tiles instead of cards, tarot-sized round cards that include rules text, and a new "shoot the moon" mechanism in which you subtract 10 points from your score if you collect every marriage proposal in a round. Of course, you can add this rule to the existing game, no deluxification required... Read more »

by Max Seidman

Mary Flanagan and I are long-time collaborators and co-designers at her publisher Resonym. We've worked together on many games in the past, such as Phantom Ink. Avant Carde is our new art-collection deck-builder that debuted in stores on March 20, 2024. We made a lot of interesting discoveries during the design process, so buckle up for a bit of a technical deep dive into designing a deck-building game! —Max Seidman

The Gameplay

Origins
Mary: Avant Carde started with a mechanism, specifically the matching mechanism from games like UNO.

Now, many people don't find UNO very fun, but years ago, Max and I were wondering whether UNO's chaining-card mechanism would be more fun if you were playing by yourself. We playtested the chaining/matching mechanism, and wow — it was instantly a lot more compelling! You weren't at the whims of what other players played. You simply looked at your hand and puzzled out the best way to play it. It felt like we captured the chaining magic of Candy Crush.

But that mechanism didn't turn into a game until December 2022. We were working on creating a core mechanism for a much larger game. We knew that someday we wanted to make a deck-builder, but didn't know what kind. "Wait," we brainstormed, "what if we brought back the solo UNO mechanism?"

It's normal for any first prototype not to be fun. Instead, the good prototypes usually reveal the potential for fun — but our first prototype of what became Avant Carde wasn't like that. It was actually immediately compelling, so compelling that we both knew after one playtest that it was going to become its own whole game, not just a small part of a larger game. And thus Avant Carde was born!

Chain cards like this!
Innovations
We've been huge fans of deck-builders since Dominion, and I've had prototypes for my own deck-builder since 2013, so when we started work on this deck-builder, we had some thoughts on ways we could improve the genre, if just a little bit. I'm very proud of how some of Avant Carde's deck-building tweaks have worked out!

First, we knew we wanted Avant Carde to be approachable to new players. In my experience, exception-based abilities (which are present in nearly every deck-builder) tend to be hard for inexperienced gamers to follow, so we started with number and color matching to make the game simple at its core. Matching gives new players an easy entry point to the game, then we add in abilities later.

Second, since 2011 there have been two common models for buying new cards in deck-builders. The Star Realms model has a market row that gets randomly repopulated from a deck as you buy from the row. Players like this model because it's fast to set up, is interactive (since you can steal other players' top picks), and leads to a dynamic game. The Dominion model presents you with stacks of duplicate cards from which to buy. Players like this model because you're not at the whim of what comes out of the deck; you envision your strategy, then try to enact it.

In Avant Carde, we combined both of these models! Avant Carde has six decks from which to buy in the center of the table: a deck of 2s, a deck of 3s, a deck of 4s, all the way to 7s. At the start of the game, you deal one patron card for each of these numbers, defining the special power for this number in this game. We think this captures the excitement of spotting synergies in the Dominion model. Meanwhile, you can buy only the top card of the stack, which might not be the color you want. Once per turn you can send the top card of the stack to the bottom. In this way, the gallery is always changing and interactive — you can tuck away cards of the colors your opponents probably want.

Of course, setting up and cleaning up stacks of specific cards can be annoying...more on the solution to that later.


Finally, we experimented with all kinds of ways to gain victory points, or as they're known in Avant Carde, awards. We have always loved rewarding players for playing longer and longer combos from their hands. It encourages mastering the core chaining mechanisms in deck-builders, and it just feels like bonus fun — but we didn't want to include a bunch of different victory point cards in this small game. Instead, we struck upon the solution of having only one victory point card, and giving you more of them depending on how much money you made in a turn.

Initially we had players choose whether they wanted to spend their money buying new cards for their deck or buying awards, but playtesters, especially those new to deck-building, didn't enjoy this choice. They wanted both...so we gave them both! You get awards in Avant Carde based on the amount of money you make each turn, then you can spend that money to make your deck better.


Challenges
Years ago, I taught my mother an intro deck-building game and found that she really struggled with one core concept: the "deck-builder shuffle", that is, the concept that you shuffle your discard pile into your deck only when your deck is empty.

Max: When Mary told me about this, I scoffed. There's no way such a simple concept would trip people up, right? But oh boy, was Mary right. The more we playtested, the more we found new players wanting to shuffle all their cards each turn. This practice was pretty surprising given the proliferation of deck-building games out there!

Mary: We experimented with players reshuffling their deck every round, but it disturbed me that there was a chance I would never see the good cards I carefully curated into my collection. We tried the Arnak method of putting your discarded cards on the bottom of your deck; it's a great solution, but it didn't work for Avant Carde. In the end, for better or for worse, we've stuck with the "deck-builder shuffle".

The Engineering

Max: I went to school for mechanical engineering, so I have a flare for ✨ devices ✨. Combine that with Mary's and my hatred for long set-up times, and you get things like Mechanica's rotating shop wheel and play in the box insert.

Image by [user=kalchio]Eric Yurko[/user]
We found it cumbersome to pull each stack of cards (2s, 3s, 4s, etc.) out of the box every time, especially because Avant Carde is so short. The set-up to playtime ratio was all messed up.

Initially, we had the box double as a tray so that you could take out each tray of cards and play. This was nice, but made the box too big. Then one day about a year ago, I looked at a simple folded cardstock divider between decks of cards in another game and wondered: "Could I make that divided unfold and keep the decks in place?" As a result, the first prototype was a kind of accordion divider:


And then I thought, what if I rolled it up in one continuous spiral? Then it was time for some math and arts and crafts, and the roll-out box began to take shape:


We knew we had something when a video of the rollout box in action became my most popular tweet of all time. All it needed was a bit of tweaking, some sides, and a closure mechanism to become what you'll find in the game today!


Open up the Avant Carde box, and you'll see three rollout boxes: one with all the cards you can buy (the gallery), one with all the possible patron powers, and one with the five starter decks. They have a little initial learning curve to unroll, but after that they're a lighting quick set-up, clean-up, and storage solution!

I'd love to see them in more games. Hit me up if you want the design for a game you're making, or if there are other published games that might benefit from a rollout box!


Whew! That got a bit long. Hope that was interesting, and Mary and I would be happy to chat more about the design process in the comments. Just please don't pronounce the game "Avant Cardy"...

—Mary and Max Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• Which games are coming out in 2025? To get a taste of what's on that menu, you can check out crowdfunding projects that will be launched in 2024, such as the one for Tibetana, a two-player game from designers Borja Barinaga, José Céspedes, and Daniel Pons and Spanish publisher Gen-X Games. (Kickstarter link)

In Tibetana, you collect energy from the territories to erect new settlements, react to the effects of the unstable deities, and pressure the adversary to hinder their growth. The goal is to build three five-story pagodas on a hex-shaped board with different territories representing the lands of Tibetan mythology before your opponent can do so.

Your faction is made of channelers, which extract energy from the territories and build new pagoda stories, and sentinels, which protect your channeler and restrict those of the enemy. On your turn, you can perform up to three actions: move your figures, train new ones, relocate magic portals, devote energy to building pagoda stories, and so on. Extracting this energy may wake ancient demons: neutral deities that can influence and be influenced by any of the players once they're woken. However, their rule-bending effects may disrupt your plans, and as the game progresses, they become more and more powerful.

• In early April 2024, Lunar Oak Studio will launch a Kickstarter campaign for Solace, a 1-4 player design from Roberto Pestrin:

Solace is a co-operative science-fiction game set in a world of immortals in which players are agents of a futuristic SWAT called FTO. Players have to accomplish increasingly dangerous missions, which are playable independently or as part of a campaign. In each mission, as a team you raid a building or a palace, with the goal of saving hostages, killing a target, retrieving data, or pursuing other objectives as stated on the mission cards.

Each turn, you have to plan your actions in a co-operative mode to move between palace floors, move inside rooms of the same floor, hack electric elements, fight enemies, and so on. Once you've planned the actions, you execute them and see the feedback of the palace: enemy movement, enemy attacks, new room cards being triggered, etc.

It's interesting to see the publisher get out front of the campaign to state that yes, we've used AI artwork in the promotional materials, but "I decided to invest part of the campaign budget to redraw all the AI art and make it Human Art. This will be possible only after the campaign because we don't have the budget right now, and we must invest in marketing, otherwise the campaign will not fund."

• Publisher Glass Cannon Unplugged specializes in adapting video games to a tabletop experience, and with delivery of Apex Legends: The Board Game scheduled to take place before the end of 2024, it's announced the next title on its crowdfunding schedule — Don't Starve: The Board Game, an adaptation of the survival video game series developed by Klei Entertainment. (Kickstarter link)

Here's an overview of this 1-4 player design from Rafał Pieczyński:

Don't Starve: The Board Game transports 1-4 players into the unrelenting, randomly generated nightmare world of the Constant, a distant and ominous realm in which magic and science intertwine in ways better left unspoken. Pitched against the elements and a grim bestiary of monsters, the players assume the roles of iconic characters from the series, having to work closely together and use their wits to outsmart fate, strive for subsistence, and simply stay alive.

With its mechanisms highlighting player choice, dynamic combat, crafting, and open-world exploration in night and day conditions, Don't Starve: The Board Game features unexplored levels of immersion, with its visual design fully embracing the unique, whimsical art style long cherished by fans of the series.

Explore, fight, and survive — but most importantly...don't starve.

• Sometimes when you're looking to the future, you find yourself staring into the past, as with a new edition of Glenn and Kenneth Rahman's Divine Right from Pungo Games, the Euro/family branch of Worthington Publishing. (Kickstarter link)

Original TSR edition
Divine Right was first released in 1979 from TSR, and here's a summary of what awaits 2-6 players who take on this game:

Divine Right combines combat, diplomacy, and role-playing into 2-6 hours of fast-paced action as each player attempts to build and hold together an alliance of kings long enough to defeat the other players and win the game. The kingdoms of humans, elves, goblins, dwarves and trolls are pawns in the power games that absolute monarchs play. Ambassadors vie for the attention of the kings whose favor they curry. Assassination and backstabbing are popular pastimes, and loyal allies may leave your side in the heat of battle at the drop of a hat — or a die. The magicians, too, get their arcane fingers into things, and the gods intervene as well. It is a situation that demands skill and luck.

Pungo Games notes: "Aged like a fine wine, Divine Right retains the retro 1970s look of the original, while updating the component quality to the highest in the gaming industry." The publisher also promises that the game will be followed by a standalone expansion, Scarlet Empire, which has a BGG listing that dates to 2001, despite it never having been released. Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• I never thought I'd see a board game based on the work of Rob Zombie, but here we are: In Q4 2024, U.S. publisher Trick or Treat Studios plans to release House of 1000 Corpses, a 1-4 player co-operative game from Nick Badagliacca.


Here's an overview of the design:

In House of 1000 Corpses, an officially licensed board game based on the movie of the same name, players take on the roles of the Firefly family. They must scour their house, looking for the people hiding there, and bring them to Dr. Satan before too many rounds pass. They do this using an action system that penalizes the players for doing too many of the same action in a row.

Maybe someone can follow up with a dexterity game based on Ministry's song "Thieves" that recreates the feeling of being in a mosh pit. What else? A party game line based on the oeuvre of Black Flag? Double Nickels on the Dime: The Dice Game?!

• Speaking of corpses, following the 2023 release of Marvel Zombies: A Zombicide Game, publisher CMON ran a crowdfunding campaign for DCeased: A Zombicide Game, collecting more than US$2.5 million for this 2025 release.

Now in another case of DC-come-lately, CMON and co-publisher Spin Master have announced a July 2024 crowdfunding campaign for DC Heroes United, a "fast-paced, family-friendly co-operative game" that features chibi figures in the style of Marvel United, which debuted in 2020.

The third Marvel United crowdfunding campaign, Multiverse, will likely be fulfilled in mid-2024, just in time for everyone to ooh and aah over those figures and imagine combining them with Wonder Woman, Batman, Superman, Joker, and whichever other DC heroes will be included in the multitude of boxes that will undoubtedly be announced.


Given past licensed games such as Villainous, I'd wager that CMON will never state that DC Heroes United and Marvel United can be combined, even if they can be. We'll see!

• In other CMON news, since 2018 it has partnered with Dark Sword Miniatures to release the A Song of Ice & Fire: Tabletop Miniatures Game game line, and in February 2024 the companies crowdfunded the similar-but-different game line: A Song of Ice & Fire: Tactics, with this series starting with the Battle of the Trident skirmish set and a Drogon's Fury expansion that includes a giant honkin' dragon-on-a-castle diorama that dwarfs the individual miniatures.

Here's the short pitch:

In A Song of Ice & Fire: Tactics, you take command of legendary characters from different factions, strategically navigating the battlefield to claim victory. Unleash the power of your chosen champions, master the intricacies of tactical warfare, and immerse yourself in the epic battles and political intrigue that define the world of Westeros.

I skimmed the hour-long introductory video, and from my understanding the Tactics game line is meant to cover battles from various parts of Westeros's history, while including miniatures that can be used in the existing Tabletop Miniatures Game.


• Following ASoIaF: Tactics and ahead of DC Heroes United, CMON will crowdfund God of War: The Board Game, with the campaign launching in April 2024. The game is designed by Leo Almeida, Fábio Cury, Patrick Fernandes, and Alex Olteanu, the latter being co-designer of 2019's God of War: The Card Game, but info about the game is brief at the moment:

God of War: The Board Game is a co-operative dungeon crawler filled with epic fights and puzzles for 1-2 players who will encounter various iconic monsters in the form of highly detailed miniatures.

The game also features a unique combat and leveling system based on the bonding of characters and co-operation. Take on the role of Kratos and Atreus, and follow a series of adventures that imagine scenarios during the years between the 2018 God of War video game and 2022's God of War: Ragnarök when Fimbulwinter descends on Midgard.

To wrap this post, I'll note that the soundtrack for the 2013 God of War: Ascension video game was composed by Tyler Bates, who has also created music for the John Wick movie series, the still delightful Guardians of the Galaxy: Inferno video, and the movies The Devil's Rejects (2005) Halloween (2007), and Halloween II (2009), all of which were directed by...Rob Zombie.

Youtube Video Read more »

by Yohan Goh

About Us

:corn: Yohan: Hello! We are a group of game designers from South Korea

• Gary Kim is the designer of Tales & Games: The Hare & the Tortoise, Koryŏ, and (with Evan Song) Rising 5: Runes of Asteros. He is one of the first designers from Korea and has much experience in game design.

• Hope S. Hwang is known for Guildhall and Ganymede. He is good with logical thinking and balancing numbers.

• Then there's me, Yohan Goh, who has published Fold-it and Kushi Express. I’m a good test player and the one who presents our games to publishers.

We've known each other for ten years and started to work together in 2021. We've found that co-working works well for us because we have different talents and can complement each other.

From left: Gary Kim, Hope S. Hwang, and Yohan Goh
Q: What inspired the concept of Mind Map? How did you come up with the idea of combining wordplay, strategy, and deduction?

:corn: Yohan: I was in the supermarket when I got the first idea. I saw various products in different categories and asked myself, "Why do all these products have to be placed in this way?" For example, I can find fish next to the meat. It makes no sense to find a toothbrush in between fish and meat. Everything in the supermarket is placed in a certain order. I found this concept interesting and thought that it could be an idea for a game.

Weeks later, I made the first prototype and tested it with Gary and Hope.

Prototype in 2021
Q: Can you describe a couple of design challenges or issues you encountered?

:tobacco: Hope: Yohan's initial idea was truly astonishing. Typically, games that compare the characteristics of two objects compare them based on one condition, but Yohan created a system that placed objects on a co-ordinate plane by applying one condition each to the X and Y axes. Both Gary and I thought this idea would make a good game. However, as with most initial ideas, there were many problems to solve, so we put our heads together.

The most important task was to determine the direction of the game. The initial idea was a game that used abstract pictures instead of words. The cluegiver carefully placed these pictures on the axes, then other players deduced the identity of each picture. This meant that the game was about deducing the inspiration and emotions that the cluegiver felt from the picture, and of course, the condition cards that were applied to the X and Y axes were more abstract than they are now.

This was unique and fun enough in itself, but there was a question of whether this was really the best form for this game. That's because it was too difficult. The game we were making at the time was one that communicated through abstraction to challenge you to understand the cluegiver. It may be natural for a game about learning and understanding the differences between people to be difficult, but whether people want such a game is another matter. No one would want a game that ends without getting results of how you understand one another, so we had to decide whether to develop the game into one in which you purely enjoy the process, or into one that strives for good results — and we chose the latter.

It was not an easy decision to abandon the idea of using abstraction. Communicating through abstraction was the core of this game! But it was a necessary decision. No matter how central a system is in a game, if it harms the game, it must be discarded. This was our common perception.

Many candidates were proposed to replace abstraction, and while we tested many things, such as photos and character pictures, in the end, what we settled on was the concept of words. This may have been the simplest solution to begin with, but it was a blind spot that didn't come to mind initially because the project had started with pictures, and we just kept testing other forms of pictures. As soon as we gathered the appropriate words and tested them, words worked very well. Now people can guess the answer more easily and gain a sense of achievement.

Q: What was the most unexpected or amusing playtest experience you had while developing the game?

:corn: Yohan: We developed the game during Covid confinement, so mostly we did internal tests. We showed the idea to some publishers in Korea, but they were not sure whether it would fit in our culture.

A few months later, it became possible to travel across Europe freely, so I came to France to attend a festival called Paris est Ludique! I presented our game to Marine and Manu, who work for, respectively, Funnyfox and Sorry We Are French. They played the game once...and wanted to publish it immediately. I think both of them saw the potential of the idea. It was a rare experience and a good surprise, so we decided to sign with them.

Q: Were there specific design choices made to ensure the game remains engaging and enjoyable for various age groups?

:tobacco: Hope: As I mentioned earlier, Mind Map was originally a game in which the cluegiver and the solver were separated. In a way, it was a game similar to Dixit.

However, Mind Map had a big difference from those games as the cluegiver has far more work to do. In Mind Map, more than five cards are placed on the co-ordinate plane at once, which is by no means a small amount; considering the relationship between cards gives the cluegiver many factors to consider. This wasn't a problem when the designers were testing among themselves because we were familiar with this work. However, in tests targeting general gamers, this became a big problem, so we decided to abandon the classical method of separating the cluegiver and the solver and instead use a modern system.

In Mind Map, the cluegiver and the solver are not separated, and everyone performs both roles at the same time. By doing this, we were able to divide the burden of the cluegiver by the number of players — but the benefits went even further. Players no longer had to wait for the cluegiver to finish preparing, and by experiencing both roles, they were able to gain a richer game experience.

Above all, the biggest achievement was that when players alternately place cards, they communicate with other players through the cards without saying anything. Compared to the one-way communication between the original cluegiver and the player who answers the question, this new communication was two-way. When one player places a new word card on the co-ordinate plane with its back, other players must guess what that card is before placing their card. This is because only then can the correct clue be delivered.

In addition, we put a lot of effort into convenience so that people can get this game experience as completely as possible. We investigated which points players would find uncomfortable, then removed them. The rule of placing one word card when starting the game, the method of deduction using chips, etc. are all the result of these efforts. I hope these efforts will help you enjoy the game more.

Q: How did you approach the creation of the one hundred word cards in the game to ensure a diverse and entertaining mix for players?

:corn: Yohan: We chose simple and easy words when we designed the first prototype. Afterwards, it was the two publishers who worked on finding more interesting and creative words. It became a better game as a result.


Improved prototype at SPIEL '22
Q: What do you hope players take away from the experience of Mind Map?

:indigo: Gary: I want people who play Mind Map together to get to know each other better. There is no discrimination within "the magic circle", the space where the board game is played. Everyone is equal within the rules. People of different generations can communicate within the Mind Map. Rich and poor, left and right, and gender don't stop people from communicating together within this game.

We want Mind Map to be the game that starts the communication. There are many games in which you communicate and understand the intentions of the other players, but what makes Mind Map special is that when you play it, you have to understand the intentions of everyone at the same time. I love Mind Map because of the moments you spend looking into the eyes and facial expressions of the other players. I hope you like this game, too.

The final look Read more »