Board Game Geek

by David Gordon

Initial Brainstorm and Early Testing

In early December 2022, TAM and I received an email call for proposals for a game design using LEGO elements. We were fortunate to have been referred to the publisher Dotted Games — an Asmodee studio started by the owners of Bezzerwizzer Studio — by Bryan Bornmeuller of Office Dog (another Asmodee studio), who we had been working with on our game Crafting the Cosmos, which is due to come out in early 2025. Thank you, Bryan!

We were excited to have the opportunity and immediately began brainstorming ideas. TAM came up with an early idea, and he came over to my house to dig through my old bins of LEGO elements.

Jen Gordon, Ben Gordon, and Joshua Hilson tested a lot of early versions
Quickly we recognized a spark in the simple idea of collectively contributing to a central build while competing for points. We tested and iterated several times over the next couple weeks. We worked hard to make sure that our game and PowerPoint presentation touched on and conveyed key points the proposal brief had highlighted and submitted our proposal on January 19, 2023.

Seven-year-old twins enjoyed it!
Signing

Just a few weeks later, on February 6, 2023, Birgitte Bülow, the CEO of Bezzerwizzer Studio and Dotted Games, wrote that they were interested in the joint building of a centerpiece that would grow organically over the course of the game into a grand final structure. We scheduled a video chat and were able to walk her and her team through the design and answer questions.

On March 3, Birgitte informed us that we had made the short list. On April 3, Birgitte wrote us the most wonderful note, telling us that after their thorough review, they had selected our game! We were overjoyed and still to this day are thrilled and amazed to have been chosen.

David and TAM playtest with the wonderful Elizabeth Hargrave
Development

Birgitte let us know that there would be a very tight timeline. They wanted to target SPIEL Essen 24 for a release, but in order to do that, they would need to have all the components in place by the end of June 2023 — which left only three months for development!

Scientists at Rockefeller University
She introduced us to Jonas Resting-Jeppesen, their Head of Development, who we would quickly get to know and love. In April, May, and June, we worked closely, meeting once or twice a week with Jonas, fellow developer Jeppe Sand Christensen, and Jaume Fabregat, Board Games Lead from The LEGO Group, to sharpen the design and ensure it passed The LEGO Group's standards. Jonas' team tested the design several times a day, and it was also tested internally at The LEGO Group.

We worked on the systems, refined the rules, and tweaked the components. Incredibly, by the end of June 2023, Monkey Palace was ready.

David Gordon

A test during the 2024 New York Toy Fair
A big thank you to all the playtesters and the people who went above and beyond in our tests:

Amara Myaing
Amy Meckler
Ashwin, Dhaya, Sahana, and Neela Ramarajan
Betsy Cannon
Caleb Elias Reyes
Chris Backe
Dakota Amar
Elizabeth Hargrave
Forrest Cardamenis
Jacob Michalski
Jen, Benjamin, and Arielle Keiser Gordon
Jennifer Prestor
Jon, Galen, Jamie, and Milo Busky-Sherwin
Jon Lee
Joshua Hilson
Jonathan Gilmour-Long
Josh Gaylord
Kristina, Karl, and Linnea Hedbacker
Maggie Langhorne
Richard Wright
Rob McIntosh
Tun Myaing
Willa Tracy

(There were many additional testers on the publisher and The LEGO Group side.)

Thank you also to all our parents and family, who have been wonderfully supportive!

This document does not contain official text from The LEGO Group.

Dr. Reiner Knizia puts his mark on Monkey Palace at SPIEL Essen 24 Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Wolfgang Warsch's The Quacks of Quedlinburg — which debuted in 2018 from German publisher Schmidt Spiele and won the Kennerspiel des Jahres that same year in Germany — has been released in more than twenty languages and sold more than a million copies worldwide. By almost any measure on the modern game market, Quacks has been a continued success.

And yet U.S. publisher CMYK — which picked up the English-language license in 2021 — thought that it could improve the look, packaging, and components of the game to better suit its market. "We wanted Quacks to look as iconic as its gameplay,” says Alex Hague, CMYK's CEO, so the company reached out to Schmidt Spiele to see whether it would be possible to rebrand the game...and Schmidt Spiele agreed that they could.

What's more, CMYK changed the name of the game to reflect what many call it on a regular basis: Quacks. Yes, Quedlinburg is a real town in Germany, and the look of its buildings is reflected in the Dennis Lohausen artwork on the cover — but "Quedlinburg" doesn't mean anything on the U.S. market, so why not ditch it for a punchier name that will be more suggestive to an audience discovering the game for the first time?

To go with that title, CMYK commissioned a new look from Japanese artist Ryogo Toyoda, who creates 3D claymation-style images. Says Hague, who served as creative director for the redesign, "Ryogo Toyoda's art brings a visual energy that matches the deranged fun of the game. We can't wait for longtime fans and new players to push their luck once again."

Starting on March 20, 2025, CMYK will sell three version of Quacks through its website, with the game reaching retail outlets, hobby shops, and the Target retail chain in Q2/Q3 2025. Those editions are:


Quacks — which is the same as the base game sold previously, but with new art and graphics and a lower US$40 MSRP.


Quacks: Deluxe Edition — which is the Quacks base game upgraded with bakelite-style ingredient tokens and "deluxe potion bags for a more tactile play experience". This edition retails for US$60.


Quacks: All-In Edition — which is Quacks: Deluxe Edition, along with the two previously released expansions: The Witches (which was previously The Herb Witches) and The Alchemists. Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

▪️ In September 2021, Fireside Games announced that it would adapt Ham Helsing — a three-book graphic novel series from writer/artist Rich Moyer that features a monster-fighting pig — for tabletop play, with a "Kickstarter for the project in 2022".

That crowdfunding project did not happen, and more than three years later Ham Helsing: Monster Hunter is now scheduled to debut at Gen Con 2025, with a retail release in September 2025. Here's an overview of this 1-4 player game from Justin De Witt:

In this co-operative, deck-crafting adventure board game, you play as Ham, Ronin, Malcom, and Lobos as they attempt to save the world! Each character has a special ability and their own deck with custom cards that fit their style of play.

On your turn, use the symbols on the cards in your hand to travel to new locations (some of which allow special actions), to defeat minions before they overrun a location (each of which has a limit), and to use Knuckles (the "fearless" mercenary bear) to scare off minions. When battling minions, you need to match their color(s) with the cards you play. Some minions will bite back, so keep an eye on your health as well.

For each minion defeated, you gain skills and money, and with enough skill points, you'll get free attacks. Spend your cash to buy attack cards and special cards at the Rat Market. Attack cards let you do more damage in battle, move, heal, and more. Special cards allow for combos, shared bonuses, and damage boosters. These upgrade cards are transparent, so if a symbol can fit on your card, you can slip that upgrade into the sleeve of a starting card to improve it for the rest of the game.

When you feel strong enough, go after the villain. The game includes four villains, each with a different starting health, special ability, and power-ups; villains power up when a location on the board is lost.

After each round, the villain moves one location closer to Mud Canyon. If you haven't brought the villain's health to 0 by the end of the last player's turn at Mud Canyon, your bacon is burnt.

▪️ In an earlier GAMA Expo 2025 round-up, I mentioned that Pandasaurus Games plans to release a new edition of Wolfgang Kramer's Hacienda in 2025 — and I missed out on including a fourth Kramer title in that post because I didn't realize that he was co-designer on 2003's Gulo Gulo along with Jürgen P. Grunau and Hans Raggan.

I bring that up because Pandasaurus also plans to release a new edition of Gulo Gulo in 2025, with Daryl Andrews now being listed as a co-designer in this game. (Andrews is also a co-designer on two other Kramer titles being refreshed for the current market: Donald Duck in Happy Camper, which was first released as Goldland, and Leylines, which is based on Auf Achse.)


▪️ Other titles coming from Pandasaurus Games in 2025 are:

• Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon, a 1-4 player development game from Fabio Lopiano, Nestore Mangone, and Sorry We Are French that's due out in August and that you can read about in Lopiano's designer diary.

• KADO, a gift-giving card game for 2-5 players from Antoine Bauza and Lumberjacks Studio that I previewed in October 2024 and that is due out in the U.S. in September.

• Paper World, a drafting card game for 2-4 players from Alexandre Aguilar, Benoit Turpin, and Lumberjacks Studio that I also previewed in October 2024 and that is due out in September.


• 365 Adventures: The Dungeon 2026, a solitaire game from Lee Ju-Hwa and SWAF that combines a calendar and an adventure game. Here's an overview of the setting and gameplay:

Whispers of a dark force deep within the dungeon, the master of the undead, spread fear throughout the villagers. That's why Mira, armed with her magic, her bow, and an unshakeable will, sets out into the dungeon. She knows that only by conquering these horrors can she bring peace to her homeland.

Day after day, guide Mira through the dungeon, exploring each floor and confronting the shackled undead and unexpected surprises. Keep track of your monthly score, upgrade your gear with magical items, and unlock new rules as you progress.

You need only five minutes maximum each day to play: Move your hero to the current day, roll your dice up to three times, then choose a monster of the week to fight. At the end of the month, note down your score and move on to the next month, where a new atmosphere text and a new rule await you.

I'll note that copies of the 2025 edition of 365 Adventures: The Dungeon will be among the door prizes that people can take home at BGG.Spring thanks to convention sponsorship by SWAF.

One of the pages from the 2025 dungeon
• Tricky Kids, a trick-taking game from Danielle Reynolds in which you set the values of the seven cards in your hand each round, with those values adding up to 21.


• Beasts, a co-operative card game from Clarence Simpson.

Read more »

by Oink Games Inc.

Editor's note: Here's a history of Oink Games' best-selling title and its spinoff titles, told in the form of a Q&A session. —WEM

Starting from a Second Grader's Idea

Question: We've heard that you based Deep Sea Adventure on inspiration from your son Goro's idea, but could you tell us more about that?

Jun Sasaki: We made Deep Sea Adventure in 2014, when Oink Games had gained independence and was just starting its transition from a focus on contracted work to internally directed development. That was when we started to work on board game development in teams.

We also started internal smartphone game development over the same period and had to prioritize it, so it was quite hectic — and as always, I was struggling to come up with a concept for a board game. Maskmen had come out that same spring. My son was still in second grade then, so I happened to chat with him about ideas when I was getting him to take a bath.

Goro Sasaki: I remember a lot of our conversations, even from that age. My dad always used to talk about not having ideas for games, and he often asked me, "Do you have any good ideas?" when puzzling over that. Then I turned the conversation to what makes a good idea for a game, and he told me how a dilemma is vital for a good game. From there, it turned to what sorts of games have central dilemmas, and how games aren't fun without dilemmas. I remember that process going on for a while. I don't remember the actual idea or inspiration from me at all, though.

Jun: The inspiration at the time was the idea of having to dive to the sea floor for treasure and getting it, but struggling to make it back as you run out of oxygen and get slower. I think the actual source that gave me the inspiration for the concept was a submarine game they had on the Nintendo 3DS at the time, or the submarine outfit and undersea game from Wii Party.

Goro: We hadn't really arrived at the idea of submarines specifically at the time. The idea was more of divers each descending from their own ship instead. We hit on the idea of a submarine when thinking of package designs.

Jun: The submarine idea really came from the concept of a shared oxygen tank that drains over time.

Fine-Tuning the Game's Rules and Mechanisms

Q: How did you fine-tune the original idea for Deep Sea Adventure and its rules? What form did that take?

Jun: The idea Goro was talking about back then was about diving down in the sea and collecting treasure, but not being sure you can make it back due to the treasure's weight. I thought that was a good dilemma. It's easy to tie dice rolls into a story about difficulty on the way home, which gave me the idea for a Sugoroku-type game. Then the idea grew out from the story, and it just sort of naturally took on its current shape. Having the treasure be the board/route fit so well with it, and that idea felt very good to me.

Image: Daniel Thurot
In the early stages, I think the concept was that you would get the treasure, then your oxygen starts to deplete. The rule initially was that your oxygen went down each turn. I think that's partly because the rules and their simplicity are extensions of his original idea.

Then Goro did the illustrations while explaining the game's backstory. At that stage, they represented the game's central dilemma.

The Importance of Simplicity in Game Design

Q: How much emphasis do you place on simplicity?

Jun: It's incredibly important. I work toward simplicity in everything, but in terms of games, I want the gameplay and the way it develops to be more complex. It's quite challenging to design a game with a simple structure that still creates a complex development.

Incredible Ideas Born from Idle Office Chat

Q: I heard that someone at the office had the idea of everyone sharing oxygen. Could you tell me more about how you polished the idea within the company?

Dan: I don't really remember the period that well. I do remember it being completed quite quickly, and I suspect my memory's weak since we finished it without too much testing.

Fumihiro: I traced this back in some internal communication tools, and we had developed the setting for an ocean floor exploration game set in deep-sea ruins and all players having to share oxygen by August 19. It seems like it was finished as of that summer.

Jun: I believe we playtested it that day, then made notes afterward.

Yoshihiro: I don't remember all that well either...but I had the idea for everyone sharing oxygen. My impression of it was that Mr. Sasaki had been talking about not having ideas during the development of Deep Sea Adventure, then Goro gave us the inspiration we needed out of the blue. Then I just sort of spit out the thought that it might be fun if everyone shared the oxygen supply.

Jun: I think we all presented original starting ideas, then Mr. Shindo came out with that idea, then we did a playtest. For the first playtest, we used a pair of dice with only 1s, 2s, and 3s. I think we had it mostly finished from that starting stage.

Dan: I don't remember any trial-and-error at all. I remember trying all sorts of things with Kobayakawa and Maskmen, but I don't remember struggling with Deep Sea Adventure...

Jun: We really didn't struggle with it. Sometimes that results in a game that's more fun than anything else.

A Story Players Imagine for Themselves from a Simple Title

From sea to spaceQ: Where did you get the title Deep Sea Adventure from?

Jun: Well, the Japanese title for Deep Sea Adventure — 海底探険 ("Undersea Exploration") — is a good title for a game, huh? (laughter). It gives me a sense of old-timey adventure stories, like an aged hardcover novel. Something like Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, or Edogawa Ranpo's The Fiend With Twenty Faces or The Transparent Fiend — they're simple stories but grow within children's imaginations.

That's why we went with the title Deep Sea Adventure just as it was. We didn't have any other candidates; the title was an easy decision. We also consciously went with a children's book-style cover font for the text. I typically think up the rules first, then worry over the themes and story later when designing games, but those were set from the start with Deep Sea Adventure. That made the title an easy choice.

Q: The Japanese title emphasizes "adventure", right?

Jun: People often ask about how that's written in Japanese. I felt like the idea of "adventure" and the way we write it — using the characters for "search" and "investigate" — didn't match up well, so I changed the spelling accordingly. The way we write it uses the character for "harsh conditions". It caused more confusion than we expected when we first named it (laughter).

10th Anniversary Impressions

Q: How do you feel now that Deep Sea Adventure is celebrating its tenth anniversary?

Dan: I still see it with the same freshness, uniqueness, and general image it had ten years ago. It's quick, polished, and exciting...and my impression of it being that way hasn't changed. I guess it might be our best work, and I think our value, presence, and strength at Oink Games would all be diminished without Deep Sea Adventure. We'd be a different company without it. It really was that big of a deal.

Yoshihiro: I feel like it all comes down to the phrase "It never gets old." Ten years passed in no time at all, yet it's still selling and being played, even digitally... It's powerful to think of how we had no idea at the time.

Jun: Deep Sea Adventure was the first game that spread the name Oink Games to the world. It was an important release for us in that sense. A single hit keeps you going forever. Just a single breakaway title is enough. You don't have to worry about subsequent hits not measuring up. I might even make a lot of games that won't sell, knowing Deep Sea Adventure will keep earning us money (laughter).

I think it's a beautiful game, but I did have things I wish we had done differently, so I'm glad I got to make adjustments for its tenth birthday. I've played it so much that I'm bored of it, as the creator (laughter), so personally, I almost react with "Really?" when people say they always play it. I'm glad I got to increase the options for dilemmas to give it more longevity. With that and the story of the parent-child teamwork for it, it's basically perfect.

The Enhanced Deep Sea Adventure Boost

Q: The game has evolved into Deep Sea Adventure Boost with its tenth anniversary. Could you tell us about that?

Jun: Well, first, I wanted to remake the game for its tenth anniversary. It was hard to decide how much to change when doing so. The original Deep Sea Adventure wasn't too variable, and it felt like it was relatively light on choice frequency and density, so I saw room for improvement. When finally doing the remake, it was hard to tell how much to remake as new.

We went with backward compatibility with Deep Sea Adventure. As it stands, Deep Sea Adventure Boost is a superior version of Deep Sea Adventure, and I think it will go into circulation, so we've included the original dice to let people play with the same rules as always. We worried over ideas like adding roles, shifting to something like Moon Adventure and coming up with missions and so on with the update, but we didn't want to make big changes.

That's why we decided it had to be played with three dice. I think we settled on a good level of variation. I feel like the rules for boosting were good, too, which we came up with later on. Also, there were ideas for changes to chip layouts, but we settled on just the boost and the dice. The game plays differently with just those. I think even people who have gotten bored of the existing Deep Sea Adventure will enjoy this version. It was already a polished game, so it was hard to change too much with it.

From the Father/Son Design Team

Q: Do you have anything to say to the people that play the game?

Goro: Thank you for playing. I'm glad my ideas caught your interest.

Jun: The game mixes all sorts of influences, including German gaming trends while retaining the traditional air of legendary Sugoroku-type board games, so I hope you have a good time. I'd love it if my games influence anyone to take an interest in the depth of game design and the practice of design itself. A lot of different things come together beautifully in it, making it almost a textbook for game design.

Q: What sort of games would you like to create in the future?

Goro: I'm currently designing games solo, and I want to make games that pose dilemmas and have real depth. The tendency is toward games with optimal solutions, whereas what I want to make is something that requires a lot of thought to play. I've been raised on the idea that it has to have dilemmas to address, ever since I was young (laughter).

Jun: I want to continue making games for a wide range of people as I always have. I want to keep focusing on simplicity in rules and graphics. Like camping gear, I would like to aim for something that is minimally refined, yet highly functional.

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Time to keep marching through the GAMA Expo 2025 halls three weeks on(!) from when it took place. It would be more expedient to embed a camera in my forehead and livestream everything, but then I'd never be able to wear a hat again, so I'll stick with this approach:

▪️ Canadian publisher/distributor Outset Media has licensed Reiner Knizia's Ape Town from Austrian publisher Piatnik and plans to debut the title in Q4 2025, ideally at PAXU 2025.

In February 2025, Outset released Clans and Glory, a Gabriele Bubola and Leo Colovini title that German publisher HUCH! debuted in late 2024.

Outset has picked up other titles over the years that I never noticed previously, such as Don Eskridge's 2019 game Spies & Lies, which I covered at the time and which Outset released in 2021.


▪️ Shadow Ninjas is a one-vs-many game for up to five players from Kedric Winks, with the one player controlling two guard dogs and the other players controlling a set of ninja tokens, most of which show a shadow ninja on its reverse side and one or more of which show a real ninja.

Players take turns rolling dice and moving their tokens — the dog player moving only the dog tokens and the cat player(s) moving any of the ninja tokens. If a dog gets line of sight on one or more cats in the labyrinth, then you reveal those tokens, with real ninjas being eliminated from play and shadow ninjas being returned to the starting area. If the dogs eliminate all four real ninjas before a real ninja steals a koi from a pond in the dog's area, the dog player wins; otherwise the koi thief wins.


▪️ Guildlands is a tile-laying game for 2-6 players due out in Q3 2025 from Ken Boyter and Kedric Winks in which various clans, such as the gardeners, score in particular ways, and you're trying to place, rotate, and move tiles in order to maximize your score.


▪️ Inter-Galactic Plumber is a 2-6 player game along the lines of Hey, That's My Fish! in that players claim space debris over the course of play, ideally stranding opponents where they can no longer collect tiles for points.


▪️ Feed the Kraken is a 5-11 player game from Maikel Cheney, Dr. Hans Joachim Höh, and Tobias Immich that German publisher Funtails released in 2022.

Players secretly take the role of sailors, pirates, or a lone cultist, with the sailors trying to reach land, the pirates the Bermuda Triangle, and the cultist the spot that will raise the Kraken and liberate everyone...from their life. Each round, the captain chooses a lieutenant and a navigator, after which the crew can spend guns to mutiny, with a new captain then being chosen. The captain and lieutenant give their movement orders to the navigator, who doesn't know who gave which cards, but who chooses and carries out one of those orders. The cultist can convert others to the cult as the game progresses.

Outset Media will release Feed the Kraken in North America in May 2025.


▪️ Ravensburger revealed the final cover of Horrified: Dungeons & Dragons just ahead of GAMA Expo 2025, but had nothing on display for this game at the show.



▪️ Also on display was the Burgundy collection and a mock-up of Mycelia: Prisma, an expansion for Daniel Greiner's 2023 title Mycelia that's due out in Germany in September 2025.


▪️ Filippo Landini's Gloomies was one Ravensburger title that was on display. Here's an overview of this 2-4 player game that will appear in Germany in March 2025 and in North America later in 2025:

In the first half, you play cards to strategically place flowers on the board in rows, setting yourself up for good bonuses, then draw new cards. Once that's done, your discarded cards become your deck for the second half of the game. Play cards to strategically harvest flowers from rows, once again trying to set yourself up for good bonuses. In the end, you receive points for your harvested flowers and any Gloomie decoration orders you've completed.

▪️ Finally, here's a look at the components of Disney Villainous Unstoppable!, which was announced in February 2025:

Read more »

by Ron Sierra

I used to hate ladder climbers, that is, card games that have players essentially outbidding each other with increasingly stronger sets of cards. It's a genre that never worked for me and one that I was (and still am) frankly bad at: the lockouts, a merciless must follow structure, the forced passes, unwinnable opening hands — it all felt frustrating.

And that's why on March 23, 2025, we're releasing Takeover: Ladder Climbing Tactics, a card game for 2-4 players, at Game Market West. Why the change of heart? Well, it all started with an embarrassing attempt to dethrone a classic.

Taking on Big 2

My non-gamer friends love Pusoy Dos, a.k.a. Big 2, a Filipino variant of climbing games with Cantonese origin. Pusoy — the San Francisco Bay Area name — is a ladder-climbing game that utilizes poker hands and a standard 52-card deck. It's fast, simple, and deceptively deep, but for reasons listed in the intro, I'd rather play another card game. The fact that Big 2 is a staple with my non-gamer friends did, however, make me think that my design partner and artist, Phillip Du, and I could make a middle ground.

We conducted market research (e.g., looked at the BGG hotness), studied the best ladder climbers (535, anyone?), tapped into our impeccable taste in games, and used that knowledge to create a "better" version of a beloved classic that millions of people have played for decades. Easy, right?


A few months later, we delivered printed copies of "Pusoy Bois" — "bois" is gender neutral in our friend group — exclusively to our friends. The game was designed to make ladder climbing more flexible in two ways:

1. Replace passing with two action cards to let you play cards from a market, swap those cards with cards from hand, or draw four cards, then discard four cards.

2. Break the rigid "must follow with the same type of meld structure", making it so that runs could beat sets and vice versa.

All in all, it's a gambley, swingy, and open-ended take on Pusoy Dos. Reviews among the "bois" were split. One friend said, "You did it. This is a good alternative for players who have played a lot of Pusoy." Nice.

Another said, "You shouldn't have called it Pusoy." Oof.


A year later, what game do you think they're still playing?

While we had achieved some of the flexibility we were aiming for, we'd also created a more convoluted and luck dependent game than Big 2. "Pusoy Bois" also lacked the deduction element, intuitive poker hands, and table reads of the base inspiration. The additional options that replaced pass were welcome, but overly complicated in procedure. Ultimately, "Pusoy Bois" failed to understand the game it was responding to and came short of its impossible ambition to dethrone a classic.

Every one of these lessons eventually made it into Takeover.

The Road to Game Market West 2025

In 2024, board game designer and event organizer Johnny Chin announced submissions for Game Market West. This event was admirably created to replicate the magic of the legendary Tokyo Game Market here in California, offering indie game designers a place to showcase and sell their games.

With "Pusoy Bois" fresh on our minds, we figured creating a spiritual successor would be the best path forward. The goal to create a ladder climber with "outs" remained, along with the flexible follow structure, but we added a new theme, usability improvements, and meld-based powers that let you do things like steal the initiative.

Fast forwarding to testing, "Pusoy Bois 1.5" was underwhelming at best and forgettable at worst. Even with new well-received additions like powers, players didn't seem invested in the action. I decided to write a mock review to figure out why the design wasn't working. Here's an excerpt from, uh, myself:

While the tit-for-tat hierarchy at the game's core allows for major flexibility and regular shedding, it also narrows options for building towards an intentional plan.

Ironically, the game's flexibility resulted in a lack of control. Pair this open-endedness with RNG-heavy actions based on you hoping for a hit, and players ended up feeling like their decisions didn't matter — win or lose.


To boost the control and predictability, we reworked the special card actions that replaced pass to make them more reliable. We added an almost trick-taking game-like structure to make rounds more strategic. Four melds total would be played in a round versus continuing until someone couldn't beat the meld. That just left the meld powers, which were being used almost randomly.

As part of our ongoing research, we played Thomas Lehmann's Chu Han, a sharp and tense two-player ladder climber set in dynastic China. I noticed something here that I saw in Taylor Reiner's ingenious almost-shredder Seers Catalog and Lee Gianou's Bridge City Poker: powers were dedicated to a single card versus a whole meld. Why had all these designers chosen the same solution? Must be something about their games, I told myself so that I wouldn't have to give up our "original" take on powers. That stubbornness held for only about a week.

Throughout our tests, one power that forced only singles out surfaced as a regular player favorite. It added a control and predictability that was inherent to traditional ladder climbers. You could deduce which cards might get played and plan accordingly. Testers wanted more of that.

So what if we tried something wild? What if we went back to forcing players to play the same type of melds against each other? You know, a traditional ladder-climbing structure integrated into the new round and action system. In short, it was time to make a new game.

This pivot brought deduction and predictability back in and as was foreshadowed we moved to a single-card power system, increasing their reliability and impact. All these changes took us from "Pusoy Bois 1.5" to what would become Takeover.


Playing Beyond the Hand You're Dealt

Across all versions of our ladder-climbing designs there had been one constant: a shared market that could be used to better your hand or play melds from. These community cards gave us the flexibility we were looking for, a way for players to play beyond the hand they were dealt.

In Takeover, instead of passing your turn as in traditional ladder climbers, you have two alternative actions: deploy and plan. Deploy lets you discard a specific power card for its effect. Plan lets you draw 1-3 cards from the deck and place those cards into a shared market called The Undercity, after which you make one of two choices:

• Plan A: Use cards in hand with cards in The Undercity to play a viable meld.
• Plan B: Swap or take cards from The Undercity.

These options don't come without risk. The Plan action takes up your whole turn, and when drawing you might hit one of three defect cards that force you to swap out the strongest card in your hand with a potentially weaker one from the market.


These market-related actions are what you could call Takeover's hook, our twist on the genre. These flex actions get around the lockouts, let players improve their hands, and add some depth in the form of baiting plays and opening up long-term hand building. This doesn't give players complete control, though, as the plan and deploy actions give away information, opportunities, and tempo to opponents. All together, players get a decision space rich with pushes for tempo, risky gambits, tense turns, and late game pivots. Wait, is that what ladder climbers were about this whole time?

I Had Ladder Climbers All Wrong

As design wrapped on Takeover, I finally understood that my dislike for ladder climbers and shedders was due in part to a huge misconception. The must-follow-melds "lockout" and the bad hands I saw as flaws in the genre are the critical constraints that make ladder climbing compelling. It's the puzzle of those restrictions in tandem with the bidding battles that generate a story and the sport of the card play.

This all comes down to a cliché you hear in creative writing classes. To break a rule, you must understand the rule — so what did I come to understand? Being forced to follow meld limitations created the need to sequence out your hand, not unlike trick taking, while also providing opportunities for gambits, minor bluffs, clever table reads, and strategic blunders. The rule that seemed to get in the way of the fun was actually making the fun.

The solution for Takeover was never to mess with what works, but to alleviate the more controversial elements of ladder climbers. In doing so, I think we've ended up with a fresh take on the genre and at the very least a newfound appreciation for everything that frustrated me about ladder climbers.

To try or buy Takeover, come out to Game Market West on March 23, 2025 at the Guildhouse in San Jose, CA. It's free and will showcase indie tabletop games from all over. Alternatively, you can get the game directly from the FinalFinal Games website.

Ron Sierra

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by W. Eric Martin

▪️ At GAMA Expo 2025, Douglas Beyers described For All Mankind, which he co-designed Julia Drachman and they released in early 2025 through their Bad Cat Media brand, as "CATAN in space with nukes". The slightly longer description on the BGG page reinforces that blurb:

For All Mankind is a fast-paced game of strategic exploration, clever trades, and diplomatic shenanigans. Build your empire across the ever-changing solar system. (Careful, the planets move!) Gather, trade, and invest your resources — and do whatever it takes to stay ahead of the competition.

Expand: Grow your empire with colonies (more loot!), research (more power!), and espionage (more nukes!).

Scheme: All is fair in interplanetary domination, but you would never double-cross a friend...right?

Profit: Be the first to reach 10 points, and see your name etched in the stars forever!

▪️ Galen McCown debuted in 2024 with Super Snipers, the first release from Galen's Games, and in late 2024 he crowdfunded a "mint tin series" of four games due out in Q3 2025. Those games are:

• Heritage Farms — a 1-2 player game from McCown based on the puzzle of how a farmer gets his fox, chicken, and corn across a river without one of those things eating another. Now two farmers face off to get two sets of items across the river first, with market bonuses allowing one-time actions that help you or confound your opponent, ideally leading to them losing three of their goods and the game.

• Verdant Arizona - a Robin David design for 1-2 players in which you collect cacti and arrange them in a personal garden, with your pick for the round determining what your opponent can grab.


• Dice Clash - a game from McGown, Jonathan Carnehl, and Ryan Sromek with 1-2 players controlling a warrior with a special power and a 3x3 battle grid that you'll assign dice to in order to attack, parry, re-roll, and use your warrior's unique power.

• Mint-Tin Monster Mash-Up - a 1-2 player game from Chris Backe in which you are a mad scientist who mixes the front and back half of various monsters to create that creature's battle stats as well as a unique "if-then" statement from the front "if" and the back "then", e.g., "If you roll <5, then +1 damage" or "If your first roll has a 1 or 2, then flip one of your dice". You then use dice and a rock-paper-scissors-ish system to attack your opponent, trying to be the first to wipe out three monsters.


▪️ Roberto Panetta of Rock, Stone & Dice Games showed off the final look of Gems of Iridescia, which he crowdfunded in Q4 2024 and expects to release in Q3 2025.


▪️ Gnomes & Wizards from Bobby Powell of CavernWire Games went through a nearly identical production cycle, but advanced one year, crowdfunding in Q4 2023 and hitting the market in Q3 2024.

▪️ The next title from Powell and CavernWire Games will be Vine, a 1-5 player tile-placement game that will be crowdfunded in 2025 and that plays as follows:

Grow your beanstalk from the ground up to absorb more light, propagate, and produce green beans ready for harvest. The light engine-building card game Vine leverages an action-point system used by players to compete to develop the highest-yielding garden of pole beans. Cut back your plants to grow more veggies throughout the season, develop additional root systems to absorb more sunlight, and let your vines climb high to produce the most points by the end of the game.

▪️ To show a bit more of the Louisville, Kentucky environment, here's a piece of public art that I dubbed "Detached Fly Wings":


Mmmm, I'm sure you're craving something to eat now... Read more »

by Adrian Yu

Hey! I'm Adrian Yu, co-founder of the independent game company Blabel and co-designer of Blabbi: A Game of Made-Up Words, which my younger sister Olive Yu and I created as our pandemic project.

As a multidisciplinary artist, film director, and creative director, I never imagined I'd create a board game. I'm a big gamer (mainly video games), but growing up, my parents often warned me that while games are a great outlet, they aren't a career. I always disagreed but never seriously considered it as a career path.

However, when a paradigm-shifting event like the pandemic occurs, things can change for the better.

Both Olive and I were new to the board game world, and over a period of twelve months, we learned through trial and error what it takes to create a game from scratch: concept, design, branding, marketing, logistics, and everything in between. We bootstrapped the entire project with help from friends along the way.

It hasn't been smooth sailing the whole journey, but we wanted to share our story to learn from the community and hopefully help others learn from our experiences!

Beginnings

As children of immigrants from Hong Kong, playing games has always been a family tradition, though we often stuck to more casual games due to the language barrier. Olive and I particularly enjoyed Scrabble, but as native English speakers, we had a distinct advantage over our Cantonese-speaking parents.

Our family was also particularly comedic, thanks to our Hong Kong roots and the Cantonese language. Cantonese is a hilarious and incredibly difficult language with its nine intonations. I liken it to singing; you must hit the right note to convey the right word, even if the consonants are the same. This makes Cantonese ripe for double entendres in which words that sound similar have very different literal and figurative meanings. For example, the colloquial word for old person, "Lo Bang", translates to old cookie or cracker but also connotes being musty and dry.

At home, we often spoke Chinglish, mixing Cantonese intonations with English words. This created our unique family language, and we had a blast with it.

Fast forward to November 2019, the entire family was together for our French family friend's wedding in the northeastern woods. After the reception, Olive and I were bored and stumbling around the cabin with the last of the wine. We found an old Scrabble set in the basement and decided to play.

One problem: We were too faded to come up with real words. "Scrabble is so lame. Why don't we just play with made-up words only?" one of us suggested — so we did, using Scrabble pieces to come up with whatever crass and silly words we could muster with the few brain cells we had left. The approach was rudimentary, with only letter tiles and no topic cards or voting, but it ended up being absolutely hilarious.

The next day, we raved about our game to family and friends for about two minutes, then forgot about it. We returned to New York, I resumed my commercial film projects, Olive went back to their studies at NYU, and our game was forgotten.


The Start

In March 2020, Olive and I heard rumors that NYC was going to shut down, so we flew back to our family home in Los Angeles, uncertain about the future. With little to do while quarantining, we returned to our love of playing games. After exhausting the classics, we remembered the made-up word game from the wedding.

Over several months, we refined the game, introducing mechanisms like topic cards and a voting system. Using index cards and Scrabble tiles, we created prototypes. The topic cards added humor and structure, while the voting system made the design more social and engaging. Our parents loved it, and we realized the game's beauty lay in its language agnosticism. Unlike traditional word games, which disadvantaged ESL players like our parents, this game valued humor and wit.


Encouraged by our successful prototype, we decided to produce a small run for our friends. The first step was naming the game. Initially called "Blabel" (a mix of the Biblical tower of Babel and "blah blah blah"), we found a Kickstarter project with the same name. To avoid competition, we renamed the game to something cuter: Blabbi.

Next, we focused on design. As a graphic designer, I found the process straightforward. I collaborated with designer Eric Hu on the logo and word marks, while I handled packaging design, game pieces, and art direction. We aimed for a design-driven approach: something inviting that would look good on both a coffee table and a shelf. We chose Neue Haas Unica as our primary typeface for its simplicity and slightly softer character than Helvetica.


Creating the game pieces was tricky. We wanted a party game that was truly designed to party: non-slip for table knocks, waterproof for spills, and portable without a board. We experimented with magnetic letter tiles but found them difficult to remove without disrupting the set-up. We settled on silicone tiles for their waterproof coating, surface grip, and pleasing texture, like little erasers.

The cards were simpler. We made them smaller and cuter since they didn't need much text. Initially, we used coated cardstock, but newer editions are made of PVC. The cards fit into a snug box, and everything was packaged in a blister box for clear compartmentalization.

The design process took about nine months, involving back-and-forth prototyping with manufacturers in China and the U.S. By 2021, we were ready to launch, but given the ongoing global situation, we paused for a year, waiting for a more opportune and ethical time to release our game.


The Launch

By 2022, the world was gradually returning to normalcy, and people were eager to resume real-life experiences. As a creative, I lacked logistics experience, making it challenging to get our products from China to the U.S. After much trial and error, we partnered with Flexport to handle the shipping.

We prepared for a holiday 2022 launch, selling directly to consumers through our custom website and Shopify. We leveraged social media to generate initial interest. To create high-end product photography and editorial/lifestyle imagery, we organized a two-day photoshoot with photographer Tom Keelan and our friends, aiming for a look akin to fashion magazine spreads. Given the shift in 2020, younger people were now embracing in-person gaming, so we wanted our brand to straddle both gaming and culture/fashion.


The launch made a modest impact, selling a few hundred units during the holiday season. Our grassroots approach helped us reach a new audience of casual gamers, but maintaining momentum proved difficult due to our high costs. After a few months, we reduced our product's MSRP by 40%, sacrificing margins but reviving interest. This move caught the attention of the L.A. Times, leading to a feature story by our writer friend Lina Abascal, which further boosted our visibility.


Getting into Retail

After the article was published, we caught the attention of a buyer at Barnes & Noble. Earlier in 2023, we had sent a sample to a junior buyer at B&N without success. However, following the article, I received an unexpected call from the founder of sales reps Enchanted Moments, informing me that B&N was interested in placing a nationwide order. At first, I was skeptical, but it turned out that someone in B&N's buying department had seen the article and reached out to Enchanted Moments to negotiate the deal.

We were both thrilled and nervous. Securing a spot in one of America's largest book and gift retailers was a dream come true, but the retail environment posed new challenges compared to direct-to-consumer sales. Larger chains have strict regulations, so we embarked on another redesign process to meet these compliance requirements. This involved months of co-ordination between our lawyers, manufacturers, and buyers to finalize the new stock.

After nearly six months of trial and error, we succeeded in getting our game into almost every major Barnes & Noble nationwide. However, our next challenge was figuring out how to attract customers to brick-and-mortar stores.

We started employing a grassroots and social media strategy, commissioning various board game and culture influencers to create content that highlights our game and directs attention to Barnes & Noble. Additionally, we discovered that B&N does not host gaming events at the corporate level, so we need to contact each store individually to organize events with their local events managers. This requires significant effort with our limited resources, but we are hopeful that it will be worthwhile.


Epilogue

So there you have it: a brief history of Blabbi. I hope this bit of rambling helps any independent game designer out there learn more about the industry and what it takes to get a game out into the world. We're eager to learn more from other designers as we continue to ride this wave.

As we enter 2025, we've been focusing our efforts on our core strengths: developing the Blabbi world with new content verticals, merchandise, and digital innovation. We're not career game designers, but creative technologists and visual directors, so putting our heads together on how to innovate in the tabletop gaming space is what keeps us locked in.

Give us a shout at @blabbigames on all social media and find us at Barnes & Noble nationwide if you're keen to try us out! Just make sure you gather all the goofiest friends you have — this game is best with a whole gathering...

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by W. Eric Martin

▪️ In February 2025, Natasha Dangoor of The Wall Street Journal profiled Nigel Richards, a Scrabble world champion in English, French, and Spanish...even though he doesn't speak the latter two languages. An excerpt:

What Richards lacks in linguistic ability he more than makes up for with an encyclopedic memory and an unrivaled ability to decode patterns, according to friends and opponents.

"He memorizes words as soon as he reads them once," said Hector Klie, who has represented the U.S. in Scrabble since 2003 and competes in Spanish. "He doesn't know whether a word is a verb, noun, adjective or any other grammatical form that would typically help native speakers learn words more easily. For him, all words are equal in his memory, and he doesn't need to know their meaning."

And another:

Some of Richards' games have become Scrabble lore. During one English-language match last year in India, Richards had the letters A-C-E-N-O-R-T and, given the words already on the board, could have used all of his tiles (for a bonus 50 points) in four different ways — ENACTOR, COPARENT, SORTANCE and SARCONET — scoring between 70 and 89 points.

Instead, he racked up 92 points by using the P in ERUPTION and the word TED to create PERNOCTATED, with the A sitting atop NON to form ANON. The moves sent much of the Scrabble world into varying degrees of ecstasy.

▪️ On BoardGameWire, Mike Didymus-True reported on March 13, 2025 that "CMON's board issued a profit warning to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange yesterday, estimating its losses for 2024 at between $1.4m and $2.1m – with the final, audited total expected to be revealed in the company's annual report by the end of [March 2025]." He continues:

At the mid-point of that range the 2024 losses would almost completely wipe out CMON's $1.8m profits across the previous three years combined – bringing to an end several years of improving performance as the company recovered from losses of almost $5m in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

▪️ The 2025 CATAN World Championship will take place in Stuttgart, Germany April 5-6. A press release from publisher KOSMOS notes that "[Ninety] players from 60 countries will compete at the Württemberg State Museum to crown the new world champion. The choice of venue is particularly symbolic: In 1995, the world-famous board game CATAN was published by KOSMOS, the long-established games publisher in Stuttgart. To mark its 30th anniversary, the city will now host the World Championship for the first time."

For more details on the event, visit the CATAN.de website.

▪️ Speaking of CATAN, in the 2025 book Careless People, author Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook's former director of global public policy, wrote that Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg "refused to admit that his employees were letting him win at the board game Settlers of Catan, expressed admiration for notorious slavery advocate President Andrew Jackson, and vocalized his desire to have a "tribe" of children", to quote an article by Lydia O'Connor on Huffpost. Obviously the CATAN item is the least concerning of the three listed, but I'm focusing on games here.

A (paywalled) March 11, 2025 article on Business Insider from Lindsay Dodgson says "Wynn-Williams, who worked at the company from 2011 to 2017, wrote that her fellow players never stole from Zuckerberg and failed to block his victory."

On Threads, Dex Hunter-Torrick — the head of executive communications at Facebook until 2016 — denies this story: "[T]hat's not what happened at all. I chose to eliminate the weaker players so I could then go after Zuckerberg, who was the toughest player. The game then ended with something more interesting: Zuckerberg said he was tired and wanted to sleep, and convinced the others to gang up on me so he could win!"

I haven't played much CATAN, but this story doesn't sound right. How does eliminating "the weaker players" in CATAN help you beat the player in the lead? Also, how does Hunter-Torrick's story negate what Wynn-Williams claims? In his own words, the other players ganged up on him so that their boss could win the game.

▪️ To close, here's another round-up of older material I've re-discovered while zapping my social media posts, including dozens on Facebook:

• In January 2015, a Pandemic fan posted LEGO versions of all of the roles that players can choose.


• On Eurogamer, Christian Donlan details "Monopoly's secret war against the Third Reich", that is, how someone created a way to secret maps, files, compasses, and money in Monopoly games distributed to prisoners of war.

• In August 2014, Eric Zimmerman shared one of his lessons from a game design class that challenges players to "[m]odify a 'broken game' into a more meaningful play experience". Writes Zimmerman:

Designers must first understand the core mechanic of their "broken game" and why it is failing to provide meaningful play. Then they need to redesign the core mechanic in order to tease out more meaningful play experiences for players. The idea of meaningful choice is so fundamental to game design that in fact every exercise and assignment in my class addresses it in some way or another.

• In July 2014, Chris Marling warned that in comparison to all the hype created by those using Kickstarter — which was the only such site around back then — "traditional board game publishers seem woefully off the pace in terms of getting their message out and if they don't get with the program, they could be a few years away from trouble."

Part of that prediction relied on Marling seeing an end to the upward spike of board game sales — "...when this growth curve flatlines, which it probably will, traditional board game publishers may get a shock." How does this warning look ten years on? Which non-crowdfunding publishers do a bang-up job of getting the word out about their new and upcoming games?

• I'll end with a non-game item that's too cool not to share. Artist Patrick Hughes creates a type of work dubbed "reverspective". Here's one example:

Youtube Video
And another with the artist briefly talking about his approach — with the viewers of his work kind of putting on a show of their own:

Youtube Video Read more »

by T. Brown

Intro

In the summer of 2007, I was living in Rome on a study abroad program, taking history classes, and spending my free time getting lost among ancient ruins, historic basilicas, and labyrinthine streets.

I came to Rome with the notion of becoming a writer, idolizing the poet John Keats on his deathbed overlooking the Spanish Steps and Bernini's Barcaccia. The romantic allure of Rome — its history, its lifestyle, and its passions — influenced everything in my life. It was there, studying history, that the title 23 Knives burrowed itself into my brain, even though I had no idea it would turn out to be a board game.

A few years later, I entered a master's program in my home state of Wyoming, and I started to get invited to game nights at the university. My friends were playing Catan, Betrayal at the House on the Hill, and Through the Desert. Apart from a lot of Risk and traditional card games and roll-and-move type board games (which I had loved when I was younger), my passion for board games was limited, so these modern board games were a revelation.

Academia and writing was tiresome by the time I graduated, but gaming reinvigorated my creativity. Gaming was mental and intricate and filled with meaning, just like writing. The understanding and guidelines that the structures of games provided also gave me a great amount of solace when I needed it.

In games, you know the rules and the limits of what can and can't happen, whereas life can get complicated and change quickly. It was with this in mind that I started focusing on creating board games as a kind of practice or exercise to deal with the things I couldn't control. I had fiddled with a few games trying to map or work through inner issues — pretty much tantamount to writing poetry as a teenager: It made me feel better, but no one should ever read it.

My first attempt at making a game that I thought other people would enjoy started in 2018. The theme was easy: ancient Rome, because who doesn't like ancient Rome? And I already had the title: 23 Knives.

I was playing a lot of social deduction games at the time, which seemed like a promising foundation. I decided the game needed to end with Caesar living or dying, and his fate had to depend on whether there were more or fewer than 23 knives. The next step was how to make it into a game and discover what kind of game it would be.

The progression from prototypes to reality
First Lessons

23 Knives started as a simple social deduction concept. Some players would have the objective of murdering Caesar, and others would attempt to save him. Throughout the game, they would have to deduce who was and wasn't on their side, while placing knives or warnings into the Campus Martius in order to kill or save Caesar.

My first attempt at social deduction failed. I focused on the social aspect, encouraging table talk, thinking that this was the most important aspect of social deduction.

It's not.

This early iteration of the game allowed players to move to different locations and resolve effects that would eventually allow them to secretly place knives into the Campus. This worked on a mechanical level; players were getting cards and playing them into the Campus, and they were doing what I had intended: trying to save or kill Caesar — but when players moved to locations and placed cards into the Campus, no one knew what anyone else was doing. It was all very secret. My friends were not impressed.

My first lesson: In order for deduction to work, information must be revealed.

Who, me?In Werewolf, you hear the players next to you move around nervously, but that movement is information. It leads to suspicion, and that suspicion allows the deduction aspects of social deduction to happen. In games like The Resistance, everyone knows who was sent on the mission, so if the mission fails, you are 100% certain that at least one of the people that was sent on the mission was responsible. In the next round you narrow that down, and so on. The Resistance is a crisp, clean example of social deduction because it relies heavily on that deduction aspect.

When I reflected on this, I realized that I had created a guessing game. It wasn't fun, but I was learning...

In my next iteration of 23 Knives, I replicated some of the mechanisms in The Resistance. The Campus triggered once a number of cards were present. The cards were shuffled, then revealed, which allowed players to deduce who played the knives and who played the warnings. This still felt wrong — not sure why exactly, but I didn't like it, and it felt disingenuous.

I find that most social deduction games end with almost everyone knowing who is who, which leads to a dull endgame experience. I wanted to create a more climactic and memorable endgame. I wanted all the cards to be revealed one-by-one as a final tense surprise. I didn't want to slowly reveal cards throughout the game, so I decided instead to rely on the locations to help reveal information about players' intentions.

Originally, locations allowed players to gain cards and affect other players. (Spoiler alert: They still do.) The locations were variable, though, and set up randomly each game in a circle around a public area. Players moved clockwise to new locations, and each time they moved, they had to discard a card to the public for each step they took. Thematically, the more players moved around Rome to take actions, the more they had to reveal about themselves by which cards they discarded.

Functionally, the locations haven't changed much since that first iteration, but I had a playtest at BGG.Spring in Dallas where a playtester asked me, "Why are the locations variable for each game?" I didn't have a good answer; more importantly, I didn't really care, so I knew it needed to be removed. I had to wake up to the fact that intentionality should be in every moment of a game (lesson #2).

All the locations I thought should be variable
I started to focus on making the locations distinct and meaningful, and since I realized that variability doesn't create replayability and that giving players five different ways to do the same things was a bad design decision, I made the locations static and allowed players to move around them however they wanted, which allowed players more meaningful choices.

While I was at it, I dug deeper into the thematic elements of the locations and nailed down what would fit better for Rome: The Campus Martius became the Theatrum di Pompeii, and then more specifically, into the final Curia di Pompeo as I did more research; the Public was folded into the Tiber River, Caesar Domus was scrapped entirely in exchange for the Temple (which I'll talk more about later).

The beginnings of a real board with set locations
Now that I had worked out how I needed to create an intentional experience and uncluttered the idea of social deduction, the game slowly revealed itself to me. I didn't want it to be the same as other social deduction games. I always hated the hope of being dealt an exciting role, then getting one I thought was boring, which led to a game I was less invested in. Essentially — and I don't think I am alone here — I hated being a villager when I was so excited with the possibility of being a werewolf, or a hunter, or a smattering of unique characters. I wanted a choice. To work around that, I chose to make the design more about manipulation and less about deduction, and I did this by using sway cards.

One of the big differences between 23 Knives and comparable games like Secret Hitler, Blood on the Clocktower, etc. is that your allegiance can — and most likely will — change. If you start as a Nazi in Secret Hitler, you remain a Nazi, and your responsibility is to make sure fascist policies pass or Hitler becomes Chancellor. In 23 Knives, you may start as a Loyalist wanting to save Caesar, but throughout the game you can affect your own allegiance and work toward becoming a Liberator, while at the same time manipulating others' allegiances.

Each citizen begins with a specific allegiance: You want to kill or save Caesar — or a neutral, in-between role, but this option didn't exist until later in the design when I realized what it obviously should be. The range of each citizen's allegiance starts between one and three and is indicated by how many blood drops or laurels are present on the card. If you have two laurels, then you are essentially a value two Loyalist to Caesar; if you have three blood drops, you are a value three Liberator.

Throughout the game, this allegiance changes and shifts. Other players can place sway cards in your tableau that depict one or two laurels or blood drops, and these icons combine with the laurels and blood drops on your citizen card, with each laurel and blood drop counting against each other. You may not know exactly which side each player is on, but you can certainly try to manipulate them one way or the other. The only game I could think of that had similar aspects to this was Dȗhr: The Lesser Houses, so I knew I was on the right track to create something unique (though later I learned about Homeland, which has a similar mechanism as well).

Originally, the game ended with either the Liberator or Loyalist team winning. All players on the team would win. It was a fine conclusion, but I didn't love it. In ancient Rome during the conspiracy, nobody was safe. Caesar's closest friends turned on him. Nearly everyone was self-obsessed and selfish. I wanted to recreate that around the table. I wanted players to look at their teammates and think, "I know you want to kill Caesar, but I also want to kill him AND I want to win." This added a layer to the game that captures the mood of the conspiracy, as well as the paranoia. Early on, I changed the victory condition so that only the player most dedicated to killing or saving Caesar would win. In case this isn't clear, that means you would try to sway others to your side, but at the same time keep those "teammates" at a distance — then sway them toward the opposite side so that only you would win.

A Small Aside on Aesthetics and Discouragement

At this point in the design (probably much too early), I decided I needed to have real art and real cards. There's definitely a few lessons to be learned here, but the one that sticks with me the most is that for a designer who obsesses over aesthetics, sticker paper is wonderful. Even bad art taken from Google that's thrown together, printed on sticker paper, and stuck to the backs of old Magic cards or cardboard looks much nicer than hand-drawn bits and helps players visualize the story you're trying to tell. This is the game design version of the old writing adage "Show, don't tell".

So many designers rail against spending time making prototypes pretty, but plain white cards stickered with decent art will get much more attention at prototyping events and game nights and help bring the game to life. I also recommend this much more than drawing two hundred mini knives, doves, blood spots, and laurels...

The first version had hundreds of hand-drawn knives, laurels, and doves — not a process I recommend
This leads to my next point in this aside: burnout and discouragement.
Living in Wyoming, I have a tough time finding people to play games with — and even fewer people who are willing to play prototypes. I have a great game group and bless them for playing my prototypes as much as they do, but the small population and tiny gaming community can be tough.

I deal with this discouragement by making things pretty. I find it a similar, but different creative outlet than game design, so when I am depressed and think my games will never get played or I am unable to find playtesters (or simply too anxious to ask), I distract myself and take a bit of pride in making them more presentable for the moments they actually get seen and played.

Not sure if anyone needs to hear this, but there it is: If you get discouraged, finding a parallel way to work on a design you're sad about is a great way to work through those slumps and help reignite some of the initial excitement.

Prufrock, my cat, who is excellent at helping me stay happy and sane with my game designs
Theme and Control

Okay, back to the design.

You might be wondering: If you can manipulate others, how well can players control their own citizen's allegiances? Well, control was and is a particularly tough problem...but I approached it in three ways.

First, the citizens in the game were real people. They lived through this point in history, they walked the streets of Rome, they touched the marble columns that form the foundations of the monuments that still stand today.

Ancient sources list sixty or so conspirators. I started with eight — mostly the ones Shakespeare used to prop up his history — but there needed to be more and they needed to be special; they needed to represent who these people were historically. I wanted the history to really hit people in the face, I wanted it to come alive, because, this is — after all — a historical game.

Each citizen begins with an allegiance that, as closely as I could discover, matches their opinion toward Caesar in 44 BCE. Marc Antony loved Caesar and would follow him anywhere, so he starts with three laurels. Decimus Brutus, one of Caesar's closest friends, begins the game with two laurels. Historically, Decimus led Caesar to his death and was one of the five to stab him during the initial scuffle, while Antony — who was held outside by Trebonius (an Opportunist with no allegiance) — remained loyal to Caesar even after his death, defending him and tracking down many of the conspirators.

The original citizens, without flavor or life
After a few months of playtesting, I realized I needed players to be invested in the figures/characters they were playing. The importance of players being invested in their citizens came from reading Geoff Englestein's book, Achievement Relocked. Now, who knows how well I understood his explanation of the Endowment Effect, but I nevertheless came to the conclusion that players needed this flavor text to understand the background of each historical figure and what made them special. More importantly, they needed abilities. With the background and special abilities, I felt I had a way for players to be invested in their unique and exciting citizens.

Each citizen has an ability that becomes available once it is revealed (a slight nod to Cosmic Encounter). Each ability is based on the citizen's historical personage. For example, Decimus' ability allows them to remain secretive in nearly every sense, so no one really knows their intentions; Antony, while at the Forum, can protect Caesar by limiting how players can add knives to the Curia; Trebonius can force — or help — players remain in their current locations, just like he did to Antony on the Ides of March.

They eventually felt like real people
Each citizen in the game has their ability that they can use to assert control over the game in various ways. Whether that control will be exactly what players wish for during each and every game is not likely, but throughout the shifting allegiances and shifting game state, players must learn how they can use their abilities to assert control as best they can. The control's not perfect and it can be a rough edge, but it traces the historicity of the event and gives players' a sense of agency.

The second way I tried to add control to the game were conspiracies, which eventually became the issues. Now, I also built these as a small biography of Caesar thematically: telling players why they should or shouldn't want to kill Caesar to get them invested in the thematic and historical elements that the citizens were thinking about and feeling in 44 BCE — but I designed these effects primarily to give players an element of control.

The issues took some balancing, but also a lot of letting go of the idea that everything needed to be balanced. I think some of the most interesting games are those with excitable moments in which players are thrilled or frightened by the possibilities. The issues give players a sense of control while they hold the deck, which makes them the Tribune and allows them to break ties. Players vote between two presented issues, which change the game in different ways: some slight and some significant. This process lends itself to the information I mentioned earlier in regards to deduction, but it also lends itself equally to the social aspects. Players get a chance to voice their opinions, call out others, try to get people on your side to choose the desired issue, etc. Depending on the issue, you and your allies assert control by being able to manipulate allegiances, reveal information, give resources, or shut down locations. The control here is more subtle than before and relies on communication and other people.

The third focus to provide control is the Temple, a location in the game where players can go to sway themselves and change their own allegiances. Players must burn a card from their hand, but once they do, they're allowed to play a sway on their own citizen or burn a sway from their own tableau. With the Temple, it doesn't matter which citizen you're dealt at the beginning of the game. You can start as Marc Antony and personally be determined to kill Caesar, so then all you need to do is work toward adding knives to the Curia, then visit the Temple to make sure your allegiance matches your goals. Obviously, this isn't as easy as it sounds, but I have to leave some things up to the experience of the game, right?

Control is hard. Like I said before, games are a way for me to find solace in facing whatever is going on in the real world, providing respite and giving me some illusion of control over moments. 23 Knives, in a way, gives me that same sort of control, but I hope it can also help remind me that I can also let go, change my path, get swept up in history, and still be happy (or at least accept) the experience.

Tyler J. Brown

The final version looks so pretty that I still can't believe it's real Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

I'm still mentally walking the exhibit hall of GAMA Expo 2025 and reliving my past life. Join me for a re-telling of what I experienced.

▪️ Flow is an adaptation of the movie of the same name from writer/director Gints Zilbalodis. Brain Games released the game in Europe in early 2025 and expects it to be available in the U.S. in June-July 2025.

This real-time game from Justina Lapinskienė, Dmitrijus Babičius, Tadas Kastanauskas, and Marijus Lapinskas recreates the spirit of the movie, with players trying to help four animals escape a flood and make it to safety.

The animals start in the corners of the game board, and players will draw and lay tiles from these spaces to create a path for each animal to the island at the game board's center. However, every one minute, you must roll two dice, then remove the tiles from the row and column that match the numbers rolled. You need to keep moving quickly to rescue everyone before the tiles run out.


Old cover...and new▪️ When I first wrote about Ace of Spades in October 2024, people immediately asked whether the cover was "done in collaboration with Motorhead and/or Lemmy Kilmister's estate".

As it turns out, some within Devir had put this together as an homage to Kilmister, but following the reaction from gamers, they reached out to representatives of Motörhead to see whether this could be an official licensed product — but they never heard back. Instead of leaving that uncertain link in the minds of potential players, they have now created the cover above that shows a cowboy magician obliterating evil minions with playing cards, just as you will be trying to do in this game for 1-2 players.

Here's an overview of this Benjamín Amorín design:

Your path of vengeance has led you to Sweet Haven, Arizona. You know that the necromancer who has ruined your life has taken over the cemetery as his base of operations and you are going to finish him off at all costs. You face Lord Overkill, a supernatural being, but your prowess as a gambler goes beyond sleight of hand.

Channel your magic through poker plays to take out Lord Overkill's minions one by one and descend into Hell itself to duel the monster who ruined your life.

Ace of Spades is a single-player game, or a two-player game if you prefer to play it in co-op mode, that uses poker mechanisms to resolve dangerous duels against the worst spawns from Hell.

▪️ In other newness, Devir has licensed two titles from Perro Loko Games for release under its brand: Jorge J. Barroso's Phoenix New Horizon — you can read his designer diary here — and David Bernal's Koinobori, a card game in which players take turns placing Japanese kites on posts, trying to create color majorities on shared posts that they'll score by having the same color on their personal post.

▪️ Red Carpet from Eloi Pujadas, Anna Lucini Canals, and Pau Moré Gómez is Devir's big release for Gen Con 2025.


In the game, you play paparazzi who want to get the attention of movie stars on the red carpet at the Academy Awards so that you can take the best photos. In a round, you draft cards, then use them to move figures on the carpet — advancing them, rotating them, etc. — while moving your photographer into position. Players resolve the cards one by one after which you'll place your actual phone on a stand where your photographer is located, then take a picture and compare shots with others. Did you just catch the back of someone's head? A head-to-toe shot of this season's ingénue?

▪️ Ahead of Red Carpet will come Transgalactica, a 2-5 player game from Daniele Tascini due out in June 2025. This description is the same as what I knew at SPIEL Essen 24, but now it's accompanied by pics of the game board and player components:

The Galactic Senate has launched the "Transgalactica Decree" in order to increase their knowledge and influence beyond the already well-known fringes of the galaxy. Fleets from every planet have been launched to the stars in search of adventure, riches, and (hopefully) an influential seat in the governing spheres that lie beyond the known space.

Transgalactica is a worker-placement and engine-building game with a high level of interaction between the players. In order to thrive in this game, you will travel the far reaches of the galaxy, improve your fleet's influence in all galactic matters, compete with other fleets for technological advancements, build a commercial network, and possibly even send representatives to the Galactic Senate to claim political advantages.

The game is divided into five rounds. In each round, players use their Captains to perform powerful actions in their own operations panel. Then, the other players may follow taking the same action using their crew, but without gaining a bonus. Little by little, players will increase their military power, political influence, or technology level, and earn victory points by exploring, trading, mining or completing missions. May the best spacefarer win!

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by Victor Saumont

Hello! My name is Victor Saumont, and Popcorn is my second published game.

Since I have always enjoyed reading designer diaries, I thought it was my turn to share the creation story of my game, which premiered at the Cannes Festival...for board games — the famous FIJ — in February 2025, seven years after the initial idea.

Discovering Modern Board Games

Although I have been involved in the poker world for ten years, it wasn't until early 2018 that I discovered modern board games thanks to a game of Codenames.

That game was a huge revelation for the creative person I've always been, leading to a new obsession alongside cinema and poker: game design. I started playing as many games as possible, creating my first prototypes (which were often failures), attending board game festivals, and quickly joining a group of French designers (La Ligue Extraordinaire des Auteurs Franciliens, or L.E.A.F.) to test my early creations with other aspiring designers and more experienced ones.


Popcorn: Theme Before Mechanisms

After a few unsuccessful attempts with prototypes — often abandoned after the first crash test — I had the first idea I wanted to pursue further: a board game about cinema.

Cinema was my first passion. At 13, I dreamed of becoming a filmmaker. I made a few short films and documentaries about poker, and wrote some TV series projects, so when I discovered this newfound passion for board games, that was the first theme I wanted to explore.

From the start, my vision was clear: I didn't want players to create a movie during the game, but rather manage a cinema by choosing the right films to screen for the audience.


The Aging of Films

My primary goal for this project was to stick as closely as possible to the theme. I had often heard that a designer starts a project with either a mechanism, a theme, or a specific component. For Popcorn, it was undoubtedly the theme that came first and drove the research for the game's mechanisms.

The first idea that excited me, and the only one at the beginning of the process, was the concept of films aging over time. A movie that has been showing for several weeks attracts fewer viewers and generates less revenue each week. In the early drafts of the design, each film granted victory points, which quickly evolved into bags of popcorn, with values decreasing over time. My initial intent was to reward players who knew how to choose the right moment to change their films and optimize their programming.

I researched whether this aging mechanism had been used in recent games and came across Paper Tales by Masato Uesugi (published by Catch Up Games), which reinforced my idea of an evolving tableau. This encouraged players to seize opportunities as they arose, which resonated with my personal gaming style — more tactical than strategic.


Managing the Audience

Another core idea of this project was to simulate the arrival of an audience in cinema halls and create a game about managing spectators (represented by meeples). My initial vision was that the audience would be drawn from a shared bag each week, with numbers fluctuating based on events, e.g., cinema festivals, bad weather, etc.

I worked extensively on this idea with my friend Elie, a filmmaker (and now a César-winning one in France!) who joined the project for a few months. We tested many approaches, but none were successful. The biggest issue was distributing the meeples effectively.

A blockbuster would attract a certain number of meeples of its color, while the other films shared the rest. Even though we liked the idea of winning by selecting "independent films", we couldn't find a way to make them appealing enough for players.

One idea we particularly liked was customizing the shared bag with regular clients of our cinema. By adding meeples in our color, we ensured some spectators would come directly to us. It sounded great on paper, but in practice, our loyal customers were too diluted in the bag to make a significant impact. Since everyone contributed meeples, it didn't create meaningful differences between players.


Bag-Building

As a fan of the bag-building mechanism, especially in Orléans and The Quacks of Quedlinburg, I had wanted to test this mechanism in Popcorn for months. Instead of a shared bag, what if players managed their own audience?

Each week (i.e., each round), players would draw a certain number of spectators who had decided to visit their cinema. The challenge would then be to offer films that appealed to them — or, at least, to make the best use of the meeples drawn to earn more popcorn.

The good news was that we could imagine the cinema's audience growing over time, creating a sense of progression. This led to the idea of an attendance track, which determined how many spectators visited each cinema each week. Players would try to climb this track to attract more and more visitors.


The "Eureka" Moment

Now that we had meeples to manage, what should players do with them? It's hard to count how many months it took to find the breakthrough idea, but I went through many unsatisfactory iterations before reaching the solution.

The first idea was a worker-placement system: Players would draw meeples and place them on actions available to everyone. After one or two tests, I abandoned it. Not only did it feel thematically off to send spectators onto a central board, but my fellow designers quickly shut it down: "This isn't original — it's just classic worker placement. You need something better!"


Another option I considered was a system similar to Orléans, with a personal board featuring actions like earning money, buying films, increasing attendance, building theaters, and earning popcorn. This worked better, but everyone ended up wanting to do the same things to grow their cinema. Worse, selecting the right films had almost no impact in this version. Frustrated, I put Popcorn on hold and focused on other prototypes, waiting for inspiration.

Months passed without a breakthrough. The prototype sat in a box on top of my wardrobe. Though I often thought about it, I had largely given up...until the moment of revelation.

One evening, while going to the movies, I looked at the film posters and had an epiphany: The key game actions could be tied to the movies themselves. What if I merged the film-aging concept with the actions players needed to take?

The idea was simple: All available game actions would be provided by the movie cards. The thematic concept was that each film would generate different benefits — some would sell more popcorn, others would generate more money (e.g., 3D films), and some would have strong word-of-mouth, attracting new spectators.

Mechanically, the actions players wanted to take would be tied to the films, with four actions available in the first week, three in the second week, and so on.


I remember that this "Eureka moment" unlocked a lot of things. It was also at this moment that I started thinking about the direction to give to the films. The yellow ones would be comedies that increase attendance, the red ones would be action films that bring in popcorn sales, the blue ones would be dramas that allow for contract negotiations, and the green ones would be fantasy films that help build better theaters.

As a side note, we were in the middle of the Covid lockdown, and I needed to imagine a world where we could once again go to the movies...

Filling the Theaters

From the first iterations of the game, I was obsessed with the idea of a full theater. For me, it was the key to unlocking a major bonus. If you fill your theater, you earn a reward depending on the size of the room. The only problem was that if you drew four meeples on your turn and used them to fill a four-seat theater (simulating a 400-person room) to earn, say, 5 popcorn, you hadn't really done much during your turn.

The idea was that every spectator should serve a purpose while still maintaining the notion of a full theater. The solution emerged during a playtest night with my author group (them again!), when one of them suggested that a meeple of the film's color could trigger one of the available actions. This way, thanks to the right meeple you would gain both an action and a reward for filling a theater.


A few days before the Cannes Games Festival in 2022, I had a small revelation after yet another test session, one in which I felt for the first time that the game was actually working. I found a way to make premiering a film valuable (by earning a spectator of the film's color) and, most importantly, improved the theater-building system.

One key element that unlocked a lot of things was the concept of choosing theaters. Choosing to fill a small theater for a bonus or, conversely, opting for a larger one to benefit from a specific Film card effect introduced a simple yet interesting dilemma. The size of the theaters also had an impact on film choices.

After playtesting this version, I decided to pack the prototype in my suitcase with the plan to play a few games during the Off sessions. I brought four or five games that I had scheduled meetings with publishers for, but Popcorn was not the one I intended to showcase — it was a project taking shape but far from finished.


Off the Record

Encouraged by the tests at the Off, where the first full games were played (even though I still didn't have an endgame condition), I started mentioning Popcorn at the end of my author meetings when I felt an editor might be receptive to this kind of thematic proposal: "I also have this, a game about cinema in which you draw meeples and place them on films you're screening to earn popcorn."

The idea intrigued some editors, who asked for a print-and-play or the rulebook. The originality of the theme stood out, and I was thrilled.

Then came the lightning strike from Florent, a project manager at IELLO. The pitch resonated with him, and the game seemed to check all the boxes of what he liked. He asked me to send a prototype. I was ecstatic, even though nothing was guaranteed yet. IELLO is a company I respect. It publishes relatively few French-designed games compared to the numbeKOSMOSr of localizations they do through KOSMOS, Devir, and CGE, but IELLO is also the publisher of Codenames, and that game was my gateway into modern board games four years earlier.

I still had a few adjustments to make before sending the prototype, especially incorporating ideas from the ten or so tests during the Off. I also had to write the rulebook, which I hadn't even considered until then.


The IELLO Deal

A few weeks later, I sent Florent my best-looking prototype, complete with handmade bags made by my wife, a few rule adjustments, and the secret hope that they would like the game beyond just the pitch.

Two weeks later, I received a magical email: Florent announced that they were signing the game. Oh, my god! It's hard to describe the emotions that followed. Surprise, first of all — everything happened so quickly when just six months earlier, I had nearly abandoned the project because it was stalling. Above all, immense joy in seeing this project, so close to my heart, signed by a company I greatly admire. I was aware of my luck, the alignment of the stars, and the decisive meeting with Florent on a beautiful February afternoon at FIJ.


The Beginning of Development

Once the contract details were sorted out, development officially began in July 2022. I was well aware that the game was far from finished. The first encouraging iterations dated back to FIJ, but there was still a lot to do to refine it.

I was a little apprehensive since this was my first time collaborating with a publisher along these lines. The development of Diferencio, my previous game at KYF Edition, had been almost entirely hands-off for the designers because the game was primarily driven by visuals — but with Popcorn, mechanical aspects needed to be improved, in addition to the illustration work that had to be done.


A Handful of Meeples

Early on, I faced an unexpected request from my project manager that I hadn't anticipated: material constraints.

Publishers have production concerns that designers often don't realize, and a game with 130 meeples (as in my prototype) was too costly to produce. My project manager ran some estimates and concluded that the number of meeples had to be reduced, especially since their internal playtests always ended with plenty of unused meeples.


To address this, I came up with a simple yet game-changing idea: Each player would start with nine meeples, five white (neutral spectators) and four colored (with film preferences). Initially, players could gain new white and colored meeples through the "word of mouth" action. Later, we removed the ability to gain white meeples entirely. Instead, when the reserve was empty, performing the action would allow players to take a spectator from an opponent's exit zone.

This thematic tweak fit well, the idea being that your movie could attract people who would have otherwise gone to another cinema.

Player Interaction

This adjustment not only reduced the number of meeples needed, but also introduced more player interaction — without being too harsh. It was well received by my project manager during IELLO's internal playtests. We even later decided to further limit the reserve, so that spectator "stealing" would happen earlier in the game rather than just at the end.

Originally, interaction was also represented by black meeples, which we later removed. Not only did they pose thematic issues, but they were also too punishing. Players could place black meeples into opponents' bags, and once drawn, they would be deadweight for the rest of the game. If multiple players ganged up on someone, it could ruin their experience.


Instead, we replaced this with sending white meeples to opponents. White meeples weren't as problematic since they could still help fill theaters and trigger film card actions. Players also had ways to get rid of them through certain actions.

Balancing the Films

One of the most challenging aspects of development was balancing the film cards. Since the prototype's earliest versions, my author friends had warned me: "Your game is going to be a nightmare to balance!"

They were right. Some actions could be repeated multiple times if players placed multiple meeples of the right color in a theater. We solved this by placing the most powerful actions lower on the cards, limiting their availability.

It took many tests to evaluate the power of each action and compile everything into a massive Excel table, factoring in the action's position on the card and its impact.

Simultaneous Play

The major part of the development, and the reason for the delay that prevented the game from being presented at the Sabliers d'Or in France, was IELLO's desire to make the game playable simultaneously. After the Ancient Knowledge precedent, in which some players complained about the long wait between turns with four players, they worried that turns in Popcorn could also be lengthy. Players would take time to place their meeples in the rooms and complete their actions.


The solution was simple, but not without challenges: make simultaneous play possible. Players receive their new spectators for the week and perform their actions simultaneously, as if they were managing their cinema individually. The main issue with this was managing actions that required a specific turn order, like building new rooms or word-of-mouth actions.

This simultaneous play choice significantly reduced the game time (almost by half). Since building rooms was problematic (both thematically and in terms of timing), we moved this action between turns and removed it from the film cards. As for the word-of-mouth action, it required adding an additional board — the advertising board — to signal that a player would acquire new meeples in the upcoming week.

Building Rooms

Room construction was a key element of the game and a major challenge during development. Notably, there was the introduction of colored seats with IELLO and the idea of starting the game with an unbuilt room. The cost of rooms, the available powers on the seats, and fine-tuning the fact that a filled room triggers an action from the film cards were all repeatedly tested to ensure each room was appealing.

The decision to remove the construction action from the film cards also greatly simplified the timing of the building process — a frequent source of frustration for players during their first playthroughs.


Creating Films

As for the graphic design and illustrations, I'll let illustrator Emilien Rotival describe the various stages of creating the cover, the films, and the game elements — but let me first share a little about the creation of the films themselves.

Starting in 2019, I used the long moments of doubt about the game's mechanisms to create fake films that would feed into the theme. The technique was simple: I took existing movie posters and reworked them by changing the title (and sometimes the tagline) and adding Easter eggs for fun. While this was quite time-consuming and unnecessary at the prototype stage, it was enjoyable, and I think this work helped attract attention to the game — particularly at the Cannes Off.

Once the game was signed, I eagerly anticipated inventing the films that players could choose to showcase. My project manager and I spent a lot of time discussing what type of films to create. We were not allowed to use existing films, and we didn't really want to parody them as in Reiner Knizia's Dream Factory. As a film lover, I had hoped to slip in references to some of my favorite films, often obscure ones. However, IELLO's distribution ambitions meant we had to focus on references that would resonate with a broader audience.

The idea, therefore, was to focus on film genres rather than specific films: rom-coms, horror films, pirate movies... It's up to the players to find connections to existing films — and there are quite a few! In total, we came up with 48 films in four genres: comedy, drama, action, and fantasy/horror. My project manager also had a lot of fun coming up with a few playful titles.


Premiere at Cannes

In the end, three years passed between signing the game and its arrival in stores. Little by little, I delighted in discovering the visuals created for the game — the cover, boards, films — and thought to myself that I was living a dream. Popcorn was finally going to be released!

After a preview presentation at Cannes during the International Games Festival — and what better place for a game about cinema? — the game will be available in French starting March 12 and in English in the second half of 2025. I hope you will enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed every step of its development.

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by W. Eric Martin

▪️ At Gen Con 2024, Ghost Galaxy had a banner for a new edition of Reiner Knizia's Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation, along with an accompanying crowdfunding preview on Gamefound.

The only additional info that I can add to the scant material already out there is that Ghost Galaxy is aiming for a Q4 2025 release. Oh, and here are pics of what Ghost Galaxy showed at GAMA Expo 2025:



Those hoping for a small, plastic-free edition of Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation are out of luck unless an "Ultimate Cardboard Edition" will also be available for backing. Details still to come...


▪️ Have you heard of KeyForge: Discovery? This was new to me, despite Ghost Galaxy having announced it in July 2024 and released it in January 2025.

In the publisher's words, "KeyForge: Discovery is a set of more than 300 classic KeyForge cards chosen for their simplicity, intuitiveness, and fun factor. Every unique deck generated from this set provides an easy introduction to the game, with a focus on core game mechanics and only a minimal use of keywords."

At GAMA Expo 2025, a publisher representative told me that the intent behind KeyForge: Discovery is to keep it in print continually to serve as an introductory point for new players, with them then ideally branching into whichever new set is on the market at that point.

▪️ I covered a couple of Mayfair Games' upcoming titles — Kanal and CO₂: Second Chance — in an earlier post, but it has other titles coming as well, such as Simon Weinberg's ladder-climbing card game Makoto (covered in a Jan. 2025 post about HUCH!'s 2025 releases) and a new edition of Asian Tigers: A Story of Prosperity from designers Nuno Bizarro Sentieiro and Paulo Soledade, which PYTHAGORAS debuted in late 2024. This new edition will feature updated graphics, including new art without AI-generated elements, and it will debut at SPIEL Essen 25.

▪️ Mayfair Games will also be a publication partner in a new PYTHAGORAS title — Oliva — a deck-building game with simultaneous play that fits into its Café and Lata line from designers Costa and Rôla.

▪️ Mayfair has also picked up 18RoyalGorge: The Rails of Fremont County and the Royal Gorge Wars, a 2-4 player game from Kayla Ross and Denman Scofield that new publisher 18Wood crowdfunded in late 2024. Mayfair hopes to have this title available in time for Gen Con 2025. Here's an overview of gameplay:

18RoyalGorge is an 18XX game set in Colorado. The game covers a thirty-year time span from roughly 1870 to 1900. The game features eleven companies, incremental capitalization, a steel mill that provides track for the companies, and a gold market that players can own shares in. The train companies can be used to ship gold along their rails, and steel shares can be purchased by individual players as well.

Only two companies are available to start the game, and only five companies come into play in total. This means that with 3-4 players, some will be forced to play investor strategies initially.

The game also has many historical features, including a war over the rights to the Royal Gorge route, local coal mines, and more than a dozen private assets.

▪️ Another co-publication project for Mayfair Games is 4 Years to Mars, which designer Sharon Goza crowdfunded in October 2024. Goza worked at NASA's Johnson Space Center for more than three decades, designing digital NASA outreach games among other work. Here's an overview of this 1-6 player game that Mayfair hopes to debut at Gen Con 2025:

The space race is heating up once again, and governments have issued their challenge: Develop a viable Mars program in four years. The catch? Your government will supply only a fixed amount of funding per year. The rest of your budget and the success of your mission depend on the success of the projects you fund...but you're not the only one in this race!

4 Years to Mars is card-based, with individual player boards to track mission objective progress. The game can be played solo, co-operatively or competitively.

In the first of four program years in the competitive game, players spend their "space bucks" (Spucks) on funding research in their four space station experiment bays. In the following years, players fund projects to further their mission objectives and provide additional funding for the next program year. Research topics reduce the cost of corresponding projects. In the base game, action cards can be played to help your program as well. After four years, government funding ceases, then the player with the most points wins, with points being awarded for progress in each of the eight mission objectives. A bonus is given to the first and second players to complete the entire objective.

In the co-operative game, all players work together to complete the eight mission objectives before the end of the four program years. In order to advance a mission objective, players must work together to fund projects that create sets of mission objective icons. For example, to advance your rover mission objective once in a five-player game, you must have a set of five cards with mission objective icons. Unlike sets for the competitive game, cards can be used for multiple icon sets.

In the single player game, the goal is also to complete the eight mission objectives before the end of the four program years, but some cards are removed from the market after every round, so you must plan for the next year.

All of the projects in the game are based on real NASA projects and products.

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by Greyfax

I have questions that will be answered soon, but I wanted to follow up on my last column. The original question mentioned folks who were leaving existing games to play something else, and I said players need to commit to playing a game, not leave because the "grass seems greener", so to speak.

However, there are certainly times when it's okay to leave:

• Naturally having a personal or work emergency would qualify, including illness.

• Being misled — whether deliberately or by happenstance — about the length of a game. If the game length is said to be around one hour, and the game is going past two hours, then I think it's okay to bail.

• Being harassed or being significantly uncomfortable playing because of how another player is behaving.

What are other times you've left a game? I would love to hear from folks!

I bring this up because I was at Dice Tower West last week, and I had a chance to learn and play Galactic Cruise. Thing is, I really have trouble learning games at the table, and I shouldn't have joined this game. The game teach started around 8:00 a.m., and by 11:00 a.m. we were (what seemed like) not even halfway through the game. I was struggling mightily to understand the rules, and I was super hungry...so I left. Didn't feel great about it, and again I never should have joined in the first place, but I really wanted to play the game, so I made the wrong choice about whether to sit down or not!

Best,

Ms. Meeple (Jennifer Schlickbernd)

P.S. If there's a situation in your board game group or at a meetup that you would like advice on, please send me a Geekmail with "Ms. Meeple" in the title. Read more »

by Fanny Pastor-Berlie

Hi there, I'm Fanny Pastor-Berlie (a.k.a. Llythium), illustrator of Agent Avenue, a game by Christian and Laura Kudahl that was published in 2024 by Nerdlab Games and coming from IELLO in 2025 in France!

When Dominik Lorenz, a developer at Nerdlab Games, reached out to me, initially it was for Final Titan, a completely different game by Christian Kudahl and Richard Garfield. While working on this first game, he told me about the other one they were working on and how I would be a good fit for. This game was Agent Avenue, which had a different name at the time. He pitched me the game — two players, split and choose, bluff, spies, the suburban American 1950s aesthetic artstyle they wanted — and I was sold at anthropomorphic characters.

Finding References

I would bet that no one saw this coming, but my main reference for almost anything animal related is Blacksad and always will be.

• Blacksad, by Juan Diaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido, is one of my favorite comics ever, so when I read people saying that the game's artwork reminded them of it a bit but in a more colorful way (Penelope Gaming said "Happysad" — I love that), I feel honored. I always find a way to use Blacksad as an inspiration.

• Le Château des Animaux, by Xavier Dorison & Félix Delep – The art is beautiful, and I love how expressive the characters are, especially their eyes.

• Redwall, a book series by Brian Jacques, will always be my reference when I think of a world with animals.

• L.A. Noire, by Rockstar Games, for the atmosphere.

• Zootopia, by Disney.

But also Grease, Desperate Housewives, BNA, Duck Detective: The Secret Salami, etc.


Creating the Characters

I think I never have been as free in my work as on this game. I didn't have to think too much of a specific artstyle since that was why Dominik thought I would be a good fit in the first place. All I had to do was find a few references and determine which species each character should be, which was enough for me. I love creating and drawing characters, giving them some personality. Everything went incredibly smoothly, with their design almost always found on the first try with just a few tweaks.

• Double Agent
Inspired by Bree Van de Kamp (Desperate Housewives). A fox housewife who bakes the most delicious apple pie of the neighborhood. Why suspects the best citizen in town? At some point, she had hair, but her evil twin got them instead. Maybe one of the reasons why they hate each other so much.



• Enforcer
Ninja squirrels. That's it, that's the pitch.



• Daredevil
Mainly inspired by Dinozzo (NCIS) for his attitude and a bit of Seeley Booth (Bones). Efficient but reckless, he doesn't know when to quit, for better or for worse.



• Codebreaker
Inspired by every "nerdy" girl from all the 1990-2000 movies I ever saw, and a bit of Velma (Scooby-Doo).




• Saboteur
Inspired by Danny Zuko and Kenickie (Grease), with a bit of Biff/Griff (Back to the Future). He always was meant to be some ruffian, a thug with gorgeous hair.



• Sentinel
Nobody expects the pigeon inquisition.



• Sidekick
Inspired by Dick Gumshoe from Ace Attorney (but way smarter) and Watson, our sidekick is named Blacky. He was either to be a Doberman or a German Shepherd. We went for the latter.




• Mole
Loosely inspired by Danny Devito but sneakier.



The Black Market Cards for Advanced Mode

• Ceasefire was loosely inspired by old Coca-Cola adverts.
• What do you think Saboteurs are playing at in Distraction Device ?
• Double Trouble was inspired by some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic book covers.
• Drone launcher was just pigeons on a telephone pole, waiting to screw up your new coat.
• Masterplan was inspired by the Justice League (2001 animated series) opening.
• Mind control was inspired by all of those comedic sketches in which someone is following/flying towards some delicious pie. Fun fact: This was the most difficult card to draw, thanks to the intertwined thing from the pie. Is it that obvious that I'm a very bad cook?
• The Super Computer is some Commodore 64 that became a Detective 32.




The Box

Inspired by the Mr. & Mrs. Smith movie poster, the cover was meant to be two character silhouettes either back to back or face to face, with an illustration of the neighborhood. We did several silhouettes, then the illustration, but there was too much stuff going around, so we went for something slightly simpler. At some point, we even thought of a different time of day.



And here's the final box as you know it!


Working on this game was such a great experience, I can't thank Christian, Laura, and Nerdlab enough for their trust. The game itself was so well received, I still can't believe it. I can't wait for more people to play it!

But you know what my biggest achievement is? At some point during the process, we played Agent Avenue twice, and I beat Christian. Twice. I have the high ground!

Anyway, thanks for reading and hope you'll continue to enjoy Agent Avenue!

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by W. Eric Martin

In November 2021, I reviewed Friedeman Friese's Free Ride, a game in which players collectively build a railroad network in Europe so that they can visit different cities and drop off goods of an unknown nature.

In October 2024, Friese released a sequel game through his 2F-Spiele brand: Free Ride USA, with this being essentially the same design as the first game with more player-friendly graphic design and one substantial rule change.

The game is comprised of micro-actions — build track, get track, move your train — that compound over the three acts of the game. In the first act, you can carry only one payload, but the game board starts with no track on it, so everyone is mostly building track, calling dibs on certain parts of the board or claiming a section of track that you know someone else wants so that they'll have to pay you to use it.

So streamlined that even a dog can play
By the second act, the rail network is between half and three-quarters built, so you can focus more on delivery and sniping payloads from the market ahead of others — and thanks to a second payload car for your train, you can now carry two loads, ideally delivering them efficiently as you move across the land.

By the third act, the rail network is effectively finished, with players now having a better engine that travels farther, which means you race through the final payloads and rocket toward retirement, that is, the end of the game. Friese seems to excel at this type of structure in games like Power Grid, Faiyum (which I also covered in 2021), and the two Free Rides. In graphic terms:


These games mirror the ideal arc of a three-act story, with the consequences of your actions escalating over time, with everything building on what's come before to deliver larger effects...until you hit the resolution and count your points, which thankfully is a minimal task in this design.

Score 5 points for each different city you visit, 2 points for a duplicate city, and 3 points per coin
Friese isn't a fan of spreadsheet scoring, whether in his designs or others. As he wrote in 2023:

You cannot imagine how bored I'm with the actual game design where everything is just solved by evaluating everything you can build or make in the game by VPs. There are these objectives (bores me), hidden score possibilties (boring, you know), loooooong end scorings with at least 10 different scorings, with some added majorities. (puuuh)

I feel the same way as a player, so I appreciate his approach as a designer. His focus is on the connected gameplay as a whole, without you being able to tease apart exactly how many points you earned from any particular action. You're floating down a river, adapting to obstacles and opportunities from the environment and other players, and ideally you'll end up traveling farther than anyone else.


After nine plays of the original and four plays of USA (both of which were review copies), I think I've yet to win a game of Free Ride, and I haven't been able to figure out what I'm doing wrong. Maybe I'm spending coins too freely to gain more rail tokens and nationalize other player's tracks, a result that seems right after the winning player ends up with a fat stack of coins...but in the next game I turn miser only to see someone win without holding on to any coins. Am I building too much? Jumping on new payloads too quickly? I have no idea, but I want to play more to figure it all out. I want to become a good Free Ride player so that I can finally play the game for real. Whether that's possible, I have no idea.

For details on how to play, watch the video below. If you're familiar with the original Free Ride, you can jump to 16:09 to learn how this game differs from the original.

Youtube Video Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

In 2020, GAMA launched a new program called the Horizons Fellowship, which it describes as an "eight-month accelerator program for prospective and newly established tabletop game publishers and retail store owners". Those accepted into the program receive membership in GAMA, travel vouchers and booth space at GAMA Expo and the Origins Game Fair, mentorship by an experienced publisher or retailer, and other benefits. Here are the non-RPG 2024 publisher fellows:

▪️ Rick Gardner launched Blue Rondo Games in 2023 with Crabs in a Bucket, a shedding card game in which the deck consists of standard numbered and suited cards, as well as 22 "joker crabs" with special powers. You play onto two discard piles — one for standard cards, the other for jokers — with the first cards being played Mau Mau-style by matching suit or number, and when you play, you can choose to play higher cards in the same suit as well.

In 2024, Gardner released the Crabs in a Bucket: Shrimpocalypse expansion, which adds new joker crabs, a new Seabunnies suit, and the Four Horsemen of the Shrimpocalypse, which can give a player an immediate win when all of them have hit the table.


In 2025, Gardner and Blue Rondo Games will crowdfund Zeit Heist, a time-travel-themed drafting card game in which you want to assemble your team before your opponents can, with opportunities to turn back time to keep others from winning.

That game will be followed by A Totally Normal Game about Frogs, made in co-operation with artist Hannah Comstock, who has a large line of Totally Normal Frogs as pins, stickers, and other doodads.

▪️ Pet Domination: Kittens vs Corgis is the debit title from Justine Coven of Pet Domination, LLC, which sounds like the authoritarian animal training service to turn to when your critters won't take "No" for an answer.

Pet Domination: Kittens vs Corgis is a card game for 2-5 players in which you play pet influencers, that is, influencers who are pets. To channel Peter Steiner's classic 1993 cartoon: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."


On a turn, you play cards — called "posts" — from your hand to gain followers, sabotage opponents, set up traps, steal followers, and so on, with the long-term goal of hitting the follower goal threshold while also having at least 4 million more followers than anyone else. It's not enough to be successful; you have to left others far behind. Alternatively, have the most followers when the deck runs out.

▪️ That's Dope: The Party Game for Strong Opinions is a party game from Ira Blossom of Black King Games for 2-6 players.

That's Dope falls into the category of a "conversation starter" party game in that it challenges you to read others at the table or get to know the folks you're playing with.


Each person has a "DOPE" card and a "NOPE" card. On a turn, the active player reads a topic card, then asks everyone, "Dope or nope?" Each other player places the card of their choice face down, then the active player guesses how many "DOPE"s were played. If they guess correctly, they claim the topic card as a point. Whoever has the most points after five rounds wins.

At BGG.CON 2024 in November, I joined a group playing That's Dope on a somewhat continual basis in that they weren't keeping score, but just going around the table over and over again, talking a lot about each topic and why they thought it merited dopeness or nopeness. Former BGG admin Ace is a huge fan of games along these lines, and he'd up the challenge by stating how each other person voted, often nailing all of the other 5-7 players (as people came and went throughout the evening).

Aside from the base game, Blossom has released smaller editions for 2-4 players that can be played on their own or mixed with the cards of the base game: Family Game Night Edition, Safe For Work Edition Vol. 1, and That's Dope: After Dark Edition Vol. 1. Additionally, That's Dope: Custom Pack includes blank topic cards for use in whatever why seems appropriate.

▪️ Blossom's next project is Sunday Club, a newspaper print publication similar to the puzzle section in a Sunday newspaper, but with nothing other than the games. For more info, you can visit the Sunday Club website or sign up for the forthcoming crowdfunding project.

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by W. Eric Martin

I'm nearing the halfway point(!) for my coverage of GAMA Expo 2025 — or at least I think I am. Hard to tell since I'm zapping pictures from my hard drive and tearing pages out of my notebook as I go to try to keep the road ahead as clear as possible. In any case, onward!

▪️ In the first half of 2025, the North American branch of Pegasus Spiele will release Word Colony, a game from Dorian Sărmășan that Romanian publisher KARPATHIC first released in 2021. Here's an overview of this 2-4 player game:

Word Colony combines the pursuit of trivia with the challenge of a word game thanks to more than 440 trivia questions with multiple choice answers. Each question appears on a card that also displays a letter and its value when scored.

On your turn turn, select a card from your hand and read the question, plus the possible answers, to the table. All other players secretly vote on which answer they believe to be correct, and each player who identifies the correct answer draws a number of cards equal to that card's value. If no one chooses the correct answer, instead you cards equal to that card's value.

Finally, you can score points by spelling words onto the table in front of you with the letter cards in hand. If you have enough cards, you may spell multiple words and score multiple times on you turn; when you spell multiple words, you use the last letter of a previously spelled word as the first letter of the new word. If anyone has only a single word in front of them — instead of a colony of at least two words — another player can steal that word (and its points) by colonizing it with a second word.

Play to a pre-determined point total.

▪️ At the same time, Pegasus Spiele will release Word Colony: Around the World, an expansion that contains 90 letter cards with new trivia questions that focus on distant locales, extraordinary structures, and far-away places. Six "booster" cards are included to add more special powers to gameplay.

Additional Word Colony expansions — Human Body, Fantastic Animals, World Gastronomy, and Inventions & Inventors — are forthcoming.

▪️ Word Colony Kids: My First Words is another Sărmășan/Pegasus Spiele release, with players racing to answer questions to collect letter cards and build words.


▪️ Other titles coming from Pegasus Spiele North America are MESOS, a Cranio Creations publication from Yaniv Kahana and Simone Luciani released in February 2025); Ludonaute's Living Forest Duel from Aske Christiansen, due out sometime in 2025; and three titles from Deep Print Games — Roaring 20s from Leo Colovini, Under the Mango Tree from Karl Lange, and Rival Cities from Andreas Steding — all due out by Q3 2025.


▪️ I covered Chris Solis' Space Lion 2: Leon Strife from Solis Game Studio in a February 2025 post, and you can see above some of the cards in this two-player game in which you play cards into your base for their effect or onto outposts to fight for control. Cards level up over time, and you can compare the three levels of a card above.

Space Lion 2: Leon Strife is being crowdfunded through early April 2025 for release in 2026.

▪️ D. Brad Talton, Jr. of Level 99 Games says that Kickstarter fulfillment for his game Spooktacular is on target for mid-May 2025, with the game reaching retail outlets afterward. Here's an overview of this 1-5 player game:

It's Halloween night, 1986, and the all-night Spooktacular Film Festival is running in full swing in the midst of a wild thunderstorm. Suddenly, lightning strikes, overloading the theater's power circuits and releasing a hundred years of cinematic monsters from the silver screen. As one of those monsters, YOU are now free to wreak havoc. Terrify and devour unsuspecting moviegoers in a race to become the most terrifying monster of all time!

In Spooktacular, play as one of twenty movie monsters, each with their own way of playing the game. Easy to understand rules are the base of the game, and everything else you need to know is right on your monster board. Tons of variability and devious monster abilities to discover will keep you coming back to the theater...

Non-final Wardens cover▪️ A reprinting of Dead by Daylight: The Board Game is underway, so the game should be in stock again before too long.

▪️ In August 2025, Level 99 Games plans to crowdfund Wardens, a 5v5 tabletop miniature-skirmish game from Talton for two players in which the miniatures are not mini at all, but rather three inches tall.

As is often the case for a L99 title, Wardens features characters with a wide range of unique abilities, with attack styles along the lines of Talton's earlier BattleCON and Exceed designs. Players will choose characters, then take their character-specific decks and shuffle them together with non-character specific cards.


Players move the characters within a grid of sorts on their tabletop, with one player taking an action with a character, then the opponent responds with an attack from one of their characters. If you can control progress points — that is, locations — in the playing area, you gain special actions, with the long-term goal being to take out the shields that protect the opposing throne.

Wardens can also be played with teams of two players facing off against one another, with each team fielding three wardens. Preliminary rules are available online, along with a Tabltop Simulator mod.

Talton apologizes for his hasty painting work demonstrated here Read more »

by Randy OConnor

The car races down the road. Words are spoken amongst the crew. Equipment changes hands — then time runs out and the Inertia Corporation is on top of you. You think you know what's about to happen...

Hi, folks! I'm Randy O'Connor, independent game designer and publisher, and creator of Gun It, an action movie on your table for 1-4 players. In this designer diary, I want to run through the tenets I learned to create a highly thematic board game.

What Is Gun It?

Gun It puts you inside one vehicle in the middle of a shootout against the Inertia Corporation. Inspired by thrilling car sequences in films like Ronin, Heat, The Matrix Reloaded, Bullitt, Mad Max, and so many more, you have loaded weapons and must fight off a mega corporation that is trying to stop you.

Whether it's Doyle in The French Connection, Neo in The Matrix, or McCauley in Heat, the beating heart of those action movies is the anticipation of what's about to happen — seeing the shotgun tossed over, loaded, and cocked...but with the trigger yet to be pulled.

I've always loved the idea of being in the backseat of a car in an action scene. Trying to capture this experience was one of my first three board game ideas, and it took years simmering in the back of my head, along with a few rough sketches in notebooks, before I landed on the seed of what I have now.

To bring that fantasy to life involved drilling a bit deeper into the exact moment I wanted to capture:

• Who are the players?
• What are the game pieces?
• What is "the moment"?

At the Table

I design video games by day, and I'm drawn to tabletop games for the social component. If I'm at a table playing a game, I want to interact with people. An early revelation I had was how immediately a rectangular table with four players can feel like being seated in a car. Choose a driver, and you can see the other seats neatly fall into place.


First tenet of a thematic game: I avoided naming the player characters. You are not Mr. Pink, Jackie Brown, or any other made-up name. It's you in that car.

A game can use different ways to tell you who you are: It can ignore any aspect of roleplaying; it can give players imaginary names and portraits in the text; or it can talk to the players, putting them in the situation directly. I find the latter approach to be the most compelling. I want you to see yourself in that seat. Sometimes I name avatars, as in my previous game Roll In One, but I like connecting our games to the world around us more than I want to imagine a world apart. It can be less comfortable to say it's me, myself, and I in the game, but I find that tension more meaningful.

Just by sitting and picturing ourselves in the car, we're 30% of the way to Gun It.

Second tenet: Game actions and pieces should be analogous to actual concepts and in-world objects. The more abstract the game piece or system, the more your theme disappears.

A game can capture only a minuscule portion of an actual thing. There are infinite angles from which to view a car chase. You could model the car rapidly getting damaged by each swerve and impact, and seek to keep it from jumping too many curbs. You could explore the motivations of those who hired the henchmen giving chase. You could be a city manager dealing with the aftermath dealt to the city and its citizens.

To me, the art of game design is figuring out which angles, concepts, and boundaries to put in the box for this particular experience. I may start and explore lots of ideas, but each feature will reinforce or distract from the specific emotional beat, and I want only what makes sense.


We Do Not Need Much to Tell a Story

There's a crew car tile. Place it on the table and rotate it to the same orientation that everyone's seat dictates. Surround the car with vehicle tiles from the evil Inertia Corporation. These vehicles have health and may have orange arrows pointing toward other tiles.

For the crew, randomly hand out three cards to each player: Everyone gets an arrow, a number, and a piece of equipment, most likely a gun. Each crewmember's three cards add up to one action: what they're doing, where that action is directed, and when it happens. For example:

You've got the number one and the shotgun, and you're aiming at the car ahead of us. I'm holding the two, the wheel, and the left, so just after you shoot, I'm gonna swerve the car to the left, changing our position in the scene.

The final piece of the game is that if your gun does enough damage to take out a vehicle, the flaming wreckage may cause collateral damage, which could destroy another hostile...or that damage could be pointed at you. Each vehicle shows clearly with orange arrows what it will damage when you wreck it.

There are additional game elements I don't talk about in this post, such as settings and scenarios, but even more features were culled because they were unrelated to "the moment": people in a car who are planning the ten seconds of action about to happen. There had been larger strategic elements — features like accuracy, personal motivations, more complicated point systems — but I tried to always remember the feeling of those people in the car.

The second of three layers is complete: We have the scene, and we've all got our actions.


"Here, Take the Shotgun" — Tension and Choice

Look at the table, everyone has their cards out. Players may exchange any of the three cards they are holding. Swap arrow cards to point your gun another direction, or number cards to take your action after your crewmate instead of before, or maybe swap guns, or switch who is holding the wheel if the driver has the best shot.

You can see everything that's going to happen if you have the time...but you don't. You're in an action scene, so Gun It is a timed game.

Tension comes not only from the time pressure, but from twelve core cards split amongst the players: four cardinal directions — forward, back, left and right; the numbers one through four; and four core equipment cards: steering wheel, pistol, shotgun, and uzi.

Only one player can act forward, only one to the left, to the right, toward the back. Only one person gets the shotgun, or the wheel, or the pistol. This is your challenge.

The primary tenet of my design philosophy: Be straightforward and build the game around the action or moment you like the most, but give your players good reasons to act counter to what they'd like to do.

From day one, Gun It's design has centered on someone getting to say, "Give ME the shotgun!"

But to make it interesting, that same player must have cause to say the inverse: "Hey, YOU, take the shotgun."

The game must challenge the fun choice. Maybe the shotgun is too much power for what you're trying to do right now; maybe your crewmate has a better line on a hostile vehicle; or maybe you'll shoot your crewmate if you hold onto the shotgun.

Who holds the pistol, and who holds the shotgun? Who is aiming forward, and who is aiming back? As you improve, you will discover how much you can pull off with such a limited set of cards.


In Brian Upton's great book The Aesthetic of Play, he explores how a game can be tense whether or not you're doing anything in a particular moment. It's the anticipation. It's exciting to anticipate a few moves ahead. If a player can anticipate only the next few seconds and no further, the game is confusing. If a player can anticipate the next thirty minutes, the game gets boring.

Your first choice will influence the next, and always the game is bringing you back to that moment of discussion over who has what and why. You're trying to figure out how to knock down the dominoes without knocking yourself down, but you aren't really sure, and time is ticking. Is that helicopter going to be in the right spot? There's an intersection ahead. You might suddenly scramble as you realize you're missing an opportunity. "Give me the pistol, take the shotgun! If you change order with Pam, we can bring the chopper down!"

Thanks for reading, and I hope you found this interesting!

Randy O'Connor
Randy O Games

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