Board Game Geek

by W. Eric Martin

The name of Laurent Escoffier's game 27 identifies what you will discover when you open the box: 27 game components, specifically 27 discs in four colors.

What does the name tell you about gameplay? Nothing, but that's true for most abstract strategy games, so let me step in here:

To set up 27, place the seven gray discs in a row, sandwich them with the two red discs, then stack the nine white discs on one end and the nine black discs on the other end.

On a turn, choose a stack you control — that is, a stack with your color on it — then pick up any number of discs from this stack and move them toward your opponent's starting space exactly as many spaces as the number of stacks you control at the start of your turn. You can't move past the final disc.

Take turns moving, skipping your turn if necessary, until no one can move. Whoever has the highest stack on their opponent's starting space wins.

27 is reminiscent of other games, with the overlapping movement of discs being similar to Backgammon — except that no spaces are off limits, which means you can land on an opponent's pieces, then carry them back toward their starting space on a subsequent turn. The more you can capture, the taller your potential stack at game's end...maybe.

Not the best angle for a photo
The movement restriction is 27's hook, sort of a mirror image of Sid Sackson's Focus and Kris Burm's DVONN. In those two games, you move a stack you control exactly as many spaces as the number of pieces in that stack, which creates fascinating play possibilities given the variety of stack sizes on the board.

In 27, movement is streamlined into one dimension instead of two, and all of your stacks move the same distance — which creates a different type of decision tree to ponder. With every move you make, you know how many spaces your opponent can move to counter you, which may in turn determine how many spaces you can move.

What's more, your move might cover one of their stacks, which affects their possible response — and you often have the choice to split one of your stacks to boost how far you can move.

Yes, I brought 27 to a café a few times...
The funny thing is that this option, normally a no-brainer in games since more movement is almost always good, can kill you in the end. Again, you can't move past the final disc on the track, and you must move exactly as many spaces as the number of stacks you have, so if you're not careful, you can strand discs forever.

In that image above, for example, you can reconstruct the game so far — I'll leave this as a challenge to the reader — but take note of the white disc between the two black stacks. It's pinned an opposing piece, so yay, but it can't move further at the moment...and since black can't cover it, it will continue to contribute to white's movement for many turns to come.

(I'll note that it's black's turn in the game above. What does black need to do?)

I've now played 27 seven times on a copy from the BGG Store — yes, we have copies for sale, along with a few other titles from German publisher Steffen Spiele — and have found it highly engaging so far. I can glance a bit down the decision tree, but the opponent's ability to split a stack complicates their second turn to come since you don't know how far they'll be able to move and what they'll have in the way of ammunition. (Frequently you want to engage in a tit-for-tat attack, but if the opponent outnumbers you in their attacking stack, then you'll lose all of those discs.)

For more examples of gameplay, as well as details on variants once you've mastered the basics, watch this video:

Youtube Video Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• Aside from The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth, which has been a runaway hit since its October 2024 release, Belgian publisher Repos Production released a trio of lighter titles in 2024: Pikit, Little Tavern, and Fairy Ring (which I enjoyed).

For 2025, Repos seems to be starting the year the same way, with Maxime Rambourg's For a Crown scheduled to debut in January 2025. Here's an overview of this 3-5 player game:

Coming from noble families, you are ready to do anything to accede to the throne...except that the competition between the pretenders is fierce!

For a Crown is a single-deck, deck-building game. Players recruit new characters, such as mercenaries, then place these cards within a sleeve of their own color. All cards — individual player cards and common event cards — are shuffled into a single deck, which is then drawn card by card, with the relevant player resolving the effect of their card when it's revealed.

After four rounds, the player with the most rubies wins.

Okay, minimal details for now, but I think the concept is clear. Player collectively build an auto-battler of sorts, with you deciding which cards you want under your control, but with the timing of their actions being out of your hands. We'll see!

• Repos will follow this title in March 2025 with Mythicals, a two-player game from Alexis Allard and Joan Dufour.


As above, we have a fairly short introduction to this game:

Mythicals is a tactical, risk-taking card-collecting game for two players. In this universe, each celestial creature holds the mastery of an element: water, air, earth, or fire. Study these creatures before the sun rises and learn all their secrets because the player with the greatest mastery of the elements at the end of the game wins!

On your turn, collect cards representing the same elements by drawing three cards from the pile (and placing the reminding ones into the market) or by picking them from the market. If you can, discard a collection corresponding to a favor token (same elements + flush, different elements, same value...) and take the token.

• To swing away from a well-known publisher, let's look at Heredity: Le Livre de Swan (The Book of Swan), the debut title from French publisher Darucat, which released this game in France in October 2023.

This is the debut design from Jerome Cance and Laurent Kobel, and publisher David Bertolo notes that Asmodee will distribute the game in the U.S. in 2025. Here's an overview of this 1-4 player game:

Heredity: The Book of Swan is a co-operative, narrative game in which you play a family in a post-apocalyptic world in a campaign structured in five chapters, for a total playing time of 12-15 hours. You can take any number of references as your starting point: Mad Max, Last of Us, The Walking Dead, etc. All will be revealed as you play!

The five chapters of the campaign are grouped into five adventure packs including everything you need to play: terrain that forms the game board, characters to interact with, objects, narrative cards, etc. Some cards describe what is seen, found, and met; symbols indicate how each card is used. Depending on your actions and events in the scenario, you can turn over these cards and change the playing field, situation, objects, and characters as you advance through the story in your adventure.

No matter the player count, four player characters are controlled by the players, while Swan, the youngest member of the family, is a non-playable character. Each character has three action tokens, and you collectively decide in which order to use them to make your characters act out the story you're telling. (Some actions may or must be done by multiple characters at once for maximum effect.) By using the tokens on your character's cards (head, torso, legs), you can talk to other characters, look around, move, fight, or get better items. Each card can also be combined with equipment cards, whose location is indicated using a system of matching symbols. Equipment gives you additional actions or helps you do things. You can switch equipment between games or create new items to use. If your character gets hurt, they can't perform certain actions.

A "karma" deck is used during checks and combat and can potentially change the outcome of your actions. During the campaign, this deck transforms to match your choices and will influence your morale, actions, story evolution, and ending of the game.

The game has no fixed order of moves. Instead players follow the "time line" of cards that controls the game's events. The scenarios are written, but your actions lead to cards moving along the timeline as you explore one part of a scenario or another. This makes it possible to create a deeply narrative game without the need for an app.

Heredity: Souvenirs ("Memories") is a two-chapter prequel set ten years before the events of the main story that features slightly shorter scenarios than the base game. Souvenirs will debut in France in mid-December 2024.

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by Dani Garcia

In 2022, I had a meeting with David Esbrí, who is responsible for Devir's original releases. He wanted me to work on a new game for the Kemushi Saga. I was given a lot of liberty to decide how the game should work, but a few key elements were required:

1. It should be set in a steampunk world, and players would have to build a city.

2. The future of the saga after this game was Sand, which means players had to destroy the environment so that the previously green world would become the wasteland portrayed in Sand.

3. As part of the Kemushi Saga, the Yokai should be present, although in a secondary way as the game should focus on the humans.

4. David asked me to add a zeppelin, if possible.

With all of that in mind, I got to work.

The City

For some reason, I immediately envisioned the city as a circle. I imagined a rondel in which you would move and send your workers to do actions on the several spots of each sector. This first idea focused on the workers and depended on players expanding the city to increase the number of worker-placement spots. The starting sectors had weak versions of each action, and only when you started to improve the city would those actions become more powerful. As usual, the first idea had many problems, but after several tests, it was obvious that the basic structure was not working.

Players were not expanding the city, and when they did, the new combinations of actions in a sector were not working well together. The game felt slow, and it was taking way too long for the actions to improve, so players were constantly doing weak and unsatisfying actions. What's more, the worker-placement aspect was confusing as each color of worker had a special power that would interact with the action they performed, so the number of possible combinations and specific rules to make it work was a problem.

It took me several iterations to find the correct structure for the game, and also to simplify it as much as possible as there were too many icons and special rules players had to keep in mind. But most importantly, I had to scratch the original idea of workers carrying all the weight of the game.


I came up with a simple structure, a series of steps that players would follow every turn that would work the same no matter which district they visited, while at the same time pushing players in different directions to create interesting decisions. I came up with these steps:

1. When visiting a district, players could place workers of the color of that district. The more you had of that color, the more rewards you could get, so this encouraged players to visit the districts based on the colors of the workers they had. This simplified the version with each worker having a special power...but in a way, they still had a special power, which was the ability to work on that specific district.

2. Then, players had to exploit the land shown on the district, and that could cause them problems if they accumulated too many of the same type of land hex, but it also rewarded players with more workers of different colors, which could condition their next moves. This also solved a problem I had with the original version when players refused to take those tiles as much as possible; now it was mandatory, which helped me control the length of the game as those tiles act as the timer.

3. Finally, players could do the action of the district, which depended on having enough of its related resource. With enough of them, you could do the powerful versions of the actions from the beginning of the game rather than having to wait for the powerful versions of those actions to be built.

Always the same structure — with four colors of workers, four types of lands to exploit, and four actions that require four resources — and to get the most of it, you needed to have the right color of workers, to be able to deal with the land you got, and to have enough of the resource needed to perform the action, all at the same time. You have only one decision — which district to move your magnate to — but many consequences from that single decision, some positive and some negative, which would also affect your future turns.

This structure required players to plan ahead, but I usually like some tactical elements in my games, usually coming in the form of positive interaction between players, the idea of having a new opportunity because of something another player did. This could happen on the main board when players build or electrify districts on the city, add or improve the existing worker placement spots that you then may use, or move the mega-machine to a new district that may now look more beneficial to you, but the main source of this kind of interaction happened on the player boards.


The Environment and the Factories

The main reason to exploit the land of this steampunk world that will eventually lead to Sand is to gain steam. Steam is easily gained in this game, but it's also easily spent, and one of the main ways to do it is in your factories. This part of the game was pretty much the same from beginning to end: You have three factories on your player board that you can fill with inventions so that when you produce and spend steam, you can get all kind of resources, rewards, and victory points.

I wanted a powerful engine-building aspect in this game, and this system was mostly working well from the beginning. Whenever somebody needed resources, they could run their engines instead of playing a normal turn, giving them resources and improving their engine for future activations. I was quite happy with the system, but one small and simple change suggested during a playtest greatly improved this mechanism: Whenever you decide to produce, everybody produces.


Turns that previously happened only on your player board and that had no effect on others were now a huge moment for everybody at the table, becoming a source of positive interaction and allowing you to generate resources you were not expecting when somebody else decided to produce. To balance this and to avoid the producing player feeling like they wasted their turn, I increased the rewards for this player — not only to make the action more worth it, but also to allow different strategies, making it viable both to produce a lot during the game and to wait for others to do it.

The basic structure was working. This could have been enough for a steampunk game about building a city, but this one is set in the Kemushi Saga, and there was another aspect missing, one that took me the most time to get right.


The Yokai Are Not Happy

Daitoshi is not a game about building a city; it's a game about the consequences of a city being built — and those consequences had to be felt both at the end of the game and during the game, which was a huge challenge.

I don't like to punish players in my games. I'm much more comfortable rewarding them while playing, but this was a key part of the story this game is telling, with Sand following it chronologically. The Yokai, the protectors of the land, had to fight back once you started destroying the environment, and it had to be something players would notice and try to avoid as much as possible — while also being something from which they could recover. Players had to succeed in this fight against the Yokai, so the game would follow the story of the Kemushi Saga.

After discarding a few ideas, I came up with the core elements of the current version. Each one of the Yokai would affect you negatively in one area of the game, like the number of workers you could hold or the amount of steam you had to spend to activate your factories. They would be linked to the environment tiles you were destroying in order to produce steam, and their effects would start affecting you once you had two hexes of the same type — and those effects and would disappear once you reduced that number to at most one.

The idea was solid, but getting them balanced was a nightmare.

I was constantly swinging from one extreme to the other, either making them barely noticeable or making them destroy any chances players had to win. Any tiny change on them made them swing! This was, for sure, the part that took me the most to get right, and it involved a lot of playtesting and balancing, changing their effects and the options for players to get rid of them, and creating systems to give players under their effects options to succeed. They had to be an important part of the game, but getting rid of all of them should not be a mandatory strategy.

This was the hardest part of the game to balance, but also one of the key elements that made this game feel special. The tension they create as players know every turn they take on the city they must take at least one of those, combined with the relief of keeping them under control — and even the feeling of success when you manage to score a lot of endgame points based on your ability to get rid of them — makes all the frustrating moments I had when I was trying to get them right worth it.


The Mega-Machine

I was requested a zeppelin. Frequently in steampunk worlds, huge machines are built, and I didn't want to lose the opportunity to do so in this game, but the way to do it should feel special.

The game has four main actions, and they all work the same: You have to go to a specific district to perform them, you have to spend one specific resource (and the more you have, the more powerful the action), and you can perform any of those actions from the beginning of the game.


The mega-machine action is the opposite: it's not on a specific district as it moves during the game, it's the only action that needs different resources, and you can't perform it until mid-game as you also need a sufficiently developed invention. It's also the only piece in the game that moves in a counter-clockwise direction, and there are several versions of it, so it's different every time you play. I wanted to make it feel special in every way as I wanted it to be seen as one of the goals of the game — not only giving players great rewards, but also causing unique effects, such as changing the inventions in your factories (and the strategies they may enable) through the game, or creating a mobile worker-placement spot that becomes more powerful as the game progresses.

This idea was there since the beginning, and while I did some balancing changes through the development process, it's one of those rare cases in which the starting idea stayed pretty much the same, which is a refreshing change since more often than not, these kind of strange ideas end up being discarded once it becomes obvious they will never work.


Conclusion

My goal with every game I do is to try new things, to make them different from my previous games, and hopefully, from any other game. This one was tough to design due to its thematic restrictions, but also rewarding as I think I was able to incorporate original ideas, while keeping it true to its theme and to the story being told.

It's a game in which you will probably need one or two plays in order to discover how everything interacts and the many strategies you can follow, but that will hopefully make the journey enjoyable.

In any case, I hope you like it and that you found this diary interesting!

Dani Garcia

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by W. Eric Martin

• On January 9, 2025, French publisher BLAM ! will release Celestia: Big Box, which collects the Celestia base game from Aaron Weissblum, the two expansions — A Little Help and A Little Initiative — all past promo items, and 3D elements to customize your airship.


For those not familiar with the game, Celestia — which was first published as Cloud 9 in 1999 — is a press-your-luck game in which players take turns being captain of the ship and rolling dice to determine which challenges they must overcome, after which passengers decide whether they think the captain can indeed overcome such challenges thanks to cards in hand. If passengers bail, they score based on the height of the ship, but if the captain does overcome the challenges, the ship rises and players can score more next turn.

Of course if the captain can't overcome these challenges, the ship crashes and passengers still on board don't score. The game lasts multiple rounds until a player crosses a point threshold.

• While Celestia carries a 2-6 player count, the highest-rated player counts on the BGG game page are 5 and 6...which is possibly why BLAM ! will release Celestia Duo in 2025 from master two-player game designer Bruno Cathala.

No details for now other than this game's impending existence, which will still happen even though yes, some of you are tired of two-player-only editions of existing games. Feel free to move on to the next item since any complaints about same will be ignored by pretty much everyone in existence.

• Following the Q2 2024 release of Cartaventura: Les Trois Mousquetaires – Au nom du Roi and
Cartaventura: D-Day, BLAM ! has continued this "choose your own adventure"-style co-operative card game line with the November 15, 2024 release of Cartaventura: Cosmologia from designers Pierre Buty and Thomas Dupont.


In this release, you are one of the disciples of Galileo in 1633 in Padua, Italy. Galileo has called for your help because he is about to be tried in Rome for heresy, and you are challenged to "gather enough elements to convince the actors in this trial to change their minds", to help them understand that the Earth rotates around the sun and not the other way round, similar to me trying to convince people that the number of two-player-only games will continue to expand on the market despite their protestations.

• Buty is also the designer of Sierra, a BLAM ! title released in Q3 2024 for 1-8 players:

In Sierra, players travel in groups of two or three on the trails of the Andes — but not everyone wants to see the same things!

Over the course of eight or nine rounds, players compose the landscape they discover. The aim is to score the most points by following your objectives, while respecting those of your fellow walkers. Will you win alone or as a team? Unless, for you, the journey is more important than the destination...

In slightly more detail, the game is preferably played with at least four people in teams. Each team will have a destination card that gives them a collective goal, with each team member also drawing travel diary cards that they score individually...assuming they score them at all.


During the game, each team builds a shared landscape with mountain cards in four colors with funky cuts across the top. These cards feature six symbols on them, and players have a choice of what to play in their landscape to work toward scoring travel diary cards.

• To round out coverage of BLAM !, in March 2024 the company released Rêvelune, a 3-6 player game from Frédéric Dorne and Christophe Raimbault about which I'd heard nothing until I started working on this post. Even after all these years, I'm still astounded by how many games are quietly released, then fade away.


An overview:

Rêvelune is a co-operative game of storytelling and deduction. As guides, you take turns imagining the adventures of your teammate, trapped in their dream. Turn by turn, they must deduce the hidden meaning behind each intervention. Will you succeed in freeing your teammate by guiding them wisely to the end of their dream?

In more detail, the game is played over several chapters. During a chapter, the guides take turns inventing the adventures encountered by the Dreamer, respecting the narrative constraints of their guide card, e.g., a simple description, an obstacle, a cute moment, etc. The Dreamer, meanwhile, listens attentively to the story, then — once all the guides have spoken — must find the hidden meaning behind each intervention, with the help of their Dreamer cards, which are identical to the guide cards in play. A certain number of successful associations enables the Dreamer to move on to a new chapter, with changing constraints. Conversely, each failure draws the Dreamer deeper into their dream at the risk of not being able to get out...

If the players all reach the end of the dream together, the Dreamer is freed and they win the game.

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by W. Eric Martin

• Jun Sasaki and Taiki Shinzawa's Maskmen from Oink Games celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2024, and to celebrate — or in a case of complete coincidence — Oink has released Disney Villains / Unknown Order, a Japan-only release that features six Disney villains in roles formerly occupied by lucha libre wrestlers.

In Maskmen, players have cards in six suits, and while playing a round of the game, players determine the rank of these suits dynamically. Someone starts by playing a single card, then someone can follow by playing two of a card of a different suit, which locks in that suit above the first one. Over time, most of the suits will be ranked compared to one another, with players trying to empty their hand before others.


• Similarly, Oink Games has released a Toy Story-themed version of Sasaki's 2022 game Order Overload: Cafe, which itself has been released in multiple versions already featuring burgers, insects, and games at SPIEL Essen 23.


As in the other Overload games, Toy Story: おもちゃの多すぎるゲーム (which the publisher translates as Toy Story: Toy Overload) is a co-operative memory challenge in which players see all of the items that they're trying to remember, then those items are distributed to players' hands, with you trying to name something held by others. The game includes seven levels of play, and like Disney Villains / Unknown Order, this title is available solely in Japan.


• At Tokyo Game Market, which took place on Nov. 16-17, 2024, Oink snuck out a new Sasaki design that still isn't posted on the company website: TRND, a 3-5 player card-shedding game. I've asked Oink for more details, but maybe they want to be super mysterious about this release. We'll see!

(Image: Little Al) Read more »

by Paolo Mori

From the Ashes of Pocket Battles

As with my previous designer diary on these pages, today I'm talking about a game that has its roots in an earlier one. Battalion: War of the Ancients, which debuted in November 2024 from Osprey Games, has arisen from the ashes of Pocket Battles, the wargame series that I co-designed with Francesco Sirocchi and that Z-Man Games released in four titles from 2009 to 2014.

However, despite their connection, Battalion cannot be considered just a "new edition" of Pocket Battles.

After our publishing contract for Pocket Battles expired, Francesco and I knew the game's life wasn't over. We enjoyed playing it too much (despite its many "flaws") to not imagine it returning in some form, so we decided to start working on it again, aiming to find a new publisher or even to try the crowdfunding route.

The complete Pocket Battles series
Meanwhile, Osprey Games had launched David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin's Undaunted, a game we immediately fell in love with for its blend of wargame and Eurogame mechanisms, production standard, and aesthetic quality. In our minds, it was clear we wanted to publish this game with Osprey — to the point that the working title for the new project became "Men at Arms", after Osprey Publishing's successful military history book series.

The Quest for Tabletop "Army Building"

We were well aware that Pocket Battles had flaws — flaws we had learned to love but flaws nonetheless. The first was undoubtedly the set-up time for army building and deployment, which often risked exceeding the actual gameplay time! We started thinking of ways to simplify army building as much as possible, while keeping it an integral part of the game (i.e., not relying solely on scenarios to dictate what the armies would be).

We eventually found a convincing solution: Armies would be made up of units, and players would agree on the number of units they will use. Each unit can be composed only of "ranks" of the same type: light infantry, heavy infantry, cavalry, elephants, chariots. This approach also resolved a quirk of the predecessor in which different types could be mixed within the same unit, creating unrealistic combinations. The game would still not be a simulation — we repeat, it is not a simulation! — but at least the formations on the table would be a touch more plausible.


Typical Italian gestures for the battlefield, meaning: "Charge with the elephants!"
Breaking Free from an (Admittedly Effective) Constraint

The search for a compromise between variety in army creation and simplicity of process led us to another tough call: abandoning Pocket Battles' original but extremely restrictive damage-resolution system in favor of a more streamlined but versatile system, with thresholds to overcome using eight-sided dice.

We also wanted to make Battalion feel modern in another way, with further replayability coming not just from the construction of armies but also a second aspect of variability: the possibility of surprises and unexpected elements. What better than a deck of tactic cards to use when needed?



Two Birds with One Stone: The Cards

This new asset also opened up other possibilities. (It's always a great moment in game design when you realize one feature improves multiple aspects of the game.

First, we could better customize individual armies with a specific deck for each faction. Second, the cards could serve as an excellent tracker for victory conditions in the game. How? Each time a player loses a unit, they draw a tactic card, thereby reinforcing themselves. The same happens each time a player decides to rally their troops, which renews their precious pool of order markers. However, if a player has to draw a card and can't, then they immediately lose the battle. Thrilling!


Aiming Straight for Osprey

After nearly two years of development, we were ready to propose the game to Osprey — and not to Osprey and others. Just Osprey.

As we hoped, the game was right for their catalog, and soon we received a contract proposal. End of story? Of course not! Osprey's publication pipeline is notoriously long — we knew we would have to wait three years for the release — and along with the contract draft came some requests: Could we think of two more armies to add to the Romans and Carthaginians? Could we think of a mode for four players? Sure, why not?

Development continued, and until the last moment we debated: should we add a die here or remove one there, how can we better define a slinger's special ability, is that war chariot overpowered or too weak. But what happened in one battle completely differed from the next. Each game was unique and full of choices, but also had the violence and unpredictability of an ancient battlefield.



To Caesar (and Roland) What Is Caesar's

Meanwhile, Osprey chose the best illustrator we could have hoped for: Roland MacDonald (who seemed to have seen into our minds how we envisioned the game), while also renewing their editorial ranks. After Anthony and Filip, we worked with Jordan Wheeler and Rhys, and finally with Luke Evison.

We want to thank all of these people for making Battalion: War of the Ancients the game it is today: certainly no longer "pocket" like its ancestor, but undoubtedly beautiful to look at and — we hope — also to play!

Paolo Mori

Roland at SPIEL Essen 24
Me being photobombed at SPIEL Essen 24 Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

At SPIEL Essen 24, I met with Bert Calis from 999 Games for an overview of current and future releases. This Dutch publisher lacks a booth at that convention, but Calis is there to make deals with publishers, so I took advantage of his time, something I do with other publishers in the same situation.

(Note to publishers: Feel free to reach out to me in advance for such meetings. I can't guarantee a meeting, but if I don't know you're on site, then we definitely can't meet!)

After showing me Reiner Knizia's Pick a Pen: Hackers (which AMIGO has picked up for Germany), revealing a U.S. licensing deal for Peter Jürgensen's The Brain (still to be announced), and flashing new Dutch editions of Stefan Dorra's Turn the Tide and Günter Burkhardt's Ziegen Kriegen, Calis brought out Leo Colovini's What The Fog?!, the title of which is surely meant to be shouted in astonishment whenever possible.

I'm a huge Colovini connoisseur, so I appreciated the game overview — then Calis offered the copy on hand, and I was happy to help him regain luggage space in exchange for a chance to play this design.

What The Fog?! is a 2-5 player game in which players take turns placing weather tiles on quadrants of a day, after which they compare their strength on the various days. Weather comes in six types, and each player has a hand of weather cards; to determine your strength in a day, multiply each tile on a day by the number of cards of that type in your hand, then sum those values.

This might sound complicated, but is easy in practice. An example:


The player on the left scores 4 points (2 for sun, 2 for water) whereas the player on the right scores 5 points (2 each for clouds and water, 1 for sun), so in a two-player game, the player on the right wins the day. (Ties are possible.)

But...

The game doesn't challenge you to win more days than other players; instead it challenges you to predict how many days you will win. If you win the number that you predict, then you score points equal to your prediction, plus the number of the round being played. (The game lasts four rounds.) If you win more or fewer days than you predicted, you lose points equal to the difference between the two.

Thus, it's more important to nail your prediction than it is to win more days. To help you do this, the game gives you bits of control:

• You place one of three weather tiles on display on the leftmost open space of the day of your choice.
• You each reveal 2-4 cards at various points during a round.
• You might get to discard a card, then draw a new one...but at most three such actions take place in a round.
• Before the final strength tallying, you each discard a card.

Playing at BGG.CON 2024
I've now played What The Fog?! four times with 3-5 players, and it's an archetypal Colovini design — think Clans and Familienbande, KuZOOka and Castello Methoni — in that players have both public and private information and must navigate a shared space that they create one turn at a time.

If I place snow next to fog, I must have both of those cards in hand, right? Maybe even multiple copies?

Or do I? Again, I don't have to win days to score — only predict how many days I will win. I mean, yes, if I have a choice, I want to predict a higher number when being right since I'll score more points, but more than anything else, I want to be right...so I might want to set up days that I won't win.

What's more, maybe after seeing multiple opponents reveal snow and fog, I want to partner snow and fog on certain days to make it more challenging for them to assess whether they'll end up on top. In one game, a player bid zero in the third round but engineered days that led to three of us missing our predictions, so they scored 3 points and we each lost at least 1 point. Making others lose is how you can win.

Not the most photogenic game on the market...
As the game progresses, you have more days in a round — going from four to seven — and more cards in hand — from five to eight — which boosts the challenge since you now have a wider range of possible strengths for a day, as well as more chances to make mistakes.

Having more players in a game gives you less control since the number of tiles being placed in a round doesn't change and you have more competitors, but I love the tug-of-war feel of trying to land in just the right spot with my prediction.

How this works is that when the final quadrant of a day is filled, you get to raise your prediction by 1 or stay where you are. In the first round, for example, your prediction can be 0-4, but after one day is filled, you'll be locked into a prediction of either 1-4 (if you raise your prediction) or 0-3 (if you don't). Then you'll be locked in to 2-4, 1-3, or 0-2. The walls close in, but you decide where they stop.

The identities of these weather forecasters must remain a mystery
For more details on gameplay and an explanation of why the game's setting doesn't work for me, watch this video:

Youtube Video Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• On November 19, 2024, Embracer Group announced that it intends to "contribute EUR 400 million to Asmodee through an equity investment upon the closing of the divestment" of mobile game developer Easybrain. From the press release: "Asmodee is expected to use EUR 300 million of this equity investment to repay gross debt and the remaining EUR 100 million to further strengthen its balance sheet ahead of the listing [of Asmodee as a separate entity following Embracer's April 2024 decision to split its holdings into three companies] and allow it to resume its value accretive M&A strategy." Translation of that last line: Buy more stuff.

Mike Didymus-True covers this development on BoardGameWire, noting that "New CEO Thomas Koegler said the company has a pipeline of more than 20 acquisition opportunities, mirroring the heavy expansion the business undertook after being bought by private equity firm Eurazeo in 2014."

• In April 2024, media conglomerate KADOKAWA purchased Arclight Games, which publishes games and game-related magazines, owns retail game stores, and manages game conventions in Japan, including Game Market.

As of mid-November 2024, Sony is reportedly in talks to acquire KADOKAWA. As Oli Welsh writes on Polygon, KADOKAWA owns a 70% stake in Elden Ring developer FromSoftware (with Sony currently owning 14% of that developer), but more than that:

Kadokawa's holdings extend far beyond FromSoftware, and Sony may have other motivations for the acquisition. Kadokawa is a dominant manga publisher and a major player in anime; it owns properties like Re:Zero and Delicious in Dungeon. Sony Pictures acquired anime streaming service Crunchyroll in 2021, making it a dominant anime distributor outside of Japan. Buying Kadokawa would be a major step toward consolidation of the anime industry as it explodes in global popularity.

• Will incoming U.S. President Trump's proposed tariffs pass GO? MSNBC reports that Hasbro has been "negotiating with suppliers and considering design changes ahead of potential new levies". Two excerpts:

"We've been preparing for many months for any contingency," Chris Cocks, Hasbro's chief executive, said in an interview.

The threat of new taxes on toy imports comes amid a long-term shift in the industry away from China, spurred by rising labor costs in that country. Hasbro, Barbie maker Mattel and others have spent years trying to make fewer toys and games in China by relocating to factories in other countries, including Vietnam and India.

Hasbro's current target is for roughly 20% of its U.S. sales to come from China-made products within four years, down from about 40% today. The challenges the company has faced in achieving a long-held goal underline the pressure facing toy makers.

Cocks, who became CEO in 2022, is taking up Hasbro's decadelong goal of reducing the company’s reliance on China.

• For his final project at Central Saint Martins, a college within the University of the Arts London, French designer Louis Le Joly Senoville has created a wearable chess set — which dubs Ha Mat and which consists of a scarf, ring pieces, and a watch that converts into a pair of timers.


• The film Family Pack, which Netflix released in October 2024, is written by game designers Hervé Marly and Philippe des Pallières that adapts their game The Werewolves of Miller's Hollow, which debuted in 2001 from Lui-même and is currently available via Asmodee.

In The Guardian, Phil Hoad gives the film three-out-of-five stars, describing it as "a perfectly accurate board-game adaptation insofar as it's well-packaged, undemanding fun".

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

To follow up on the recent KOSMOS and AMIGO teasers, here's a peek at games that German publisher Ravensburger plans to release in early 2025.

• On the heels of Cascadia Junior, German publisher Ravensburger has revealed that Ulrich Blum's Minecraft: Builders & Biomes – Junior will be released in mid-January 2025. Here's an overview of this 2-4 player game:

Build a farm together in Minecraft: Builders & Biomes – Junior and give the animals a nice home.

Use the pickaxe and shovel to skillfully collect blocks to build stables for the animals, while ensuring that no blocks fall into the lava. Monsters will try to get in your way, so finish building your farm before too many monsters reach you. To do so, fill all the empty spaces on the farm game board with animal cards.

It felt like junior editions of adult games vanished for a while, but perhaps I was just being unobservant...

Not this• Speaking of game adaptations for young players, in Q1 2025 Ravensburger plans to release Die Sandburgen von Burgund from Stefan and Susanne Feld. As with the title above, this game is for 2-4 players, aged 5 and up:

Queen Crab is coming to visit Burgundy, and you want to decorate your village for her royal beach party. Find the right decorations and collect points. The animals of the royal guild will help you when you have finished decorating their shops...but can you find the animals before the others?

In Die Sandburgen von Burgund, you collect points by finding the right decorations, so can you remember under which sand castle the animals of the royal guild are hiding? Roll your two dice at the same time, then you can use them to either look for decorations in sand castles, putting them in your warehouse if you find one, or transport previously collected decorations to your village with your cart. If you have collected two decorations of one color, you can look for the matching animal of the royal guild.

As soon as a player reaches Queen Crab's beach party, the dice round ends. Whoever has collected the most points wins!

Ravensburger demoed Die Sandburgen von Burgund at SPIEL Essen 24 and asked people not to take photos, but some did anyway...

Image: brettspielpoesie
• March 2025 will see Ravensburger release of Keksekästchen, a roll-and-write game about cookie boxes:

Everybody plays at the same time, using the dice rolls and number chips to determine where to draw walls on their individual player board. If you enclose a biscuit, you can tick it off, and you want to mark off all types of a biscuit first so that you earn more points for it than others. Whoever scores enough points first wins.

Keksekästchen includes double-sided laminated game boards.

• Gloomies is a 2-4 player game for ages 10 and up from Filippo Landini that's also due out in March 2025:

In the magical world of Gloomies, everything revolves around sowing and harvesting the most magnificent flowers. The playing field is first covered with flowers, then harvested again. If you are clever in playing your own cards and have a bit of luck, you will secure the most valuable flowers and win.

• Finally, we come to yet another Labyrinth spinoff in the Ravensburger catalog, but this isn't a licensed version of the original Max J. Kobbert design, but rather Labyrinth Go!, a new game co-designed by Brett J. Gilbert for 1-4 players:

Each round in Labyrinth Go!, the four labyrinth dice reveal which treasures must be collected. Using your own path tiles, you try to connect the treasures shown on the dice with the center of your game board. Whoever does this most quickly earns the most points.

Read more »

by Poon Jon

I'm Jon from Malaysia, and Furmation of Rome is my first published game under my own company, nPips Games. Before you stop reading because cats+Rome doesn't mix, give me a chance to justify myself through the one-year journey I am about to share with you.

The Conception

In 2023, after getting my own booth at an event to demo my games that were in various stages of development, I came to realize that I wanted to sell a product, not just demo them. The week after that, I had set a goal for myself to attend the event again next year with my first published game for sale.

I gathered a few mechanisms that I enjoy playing and that at the same time are easy for the non-hobby gamer crowd to understand, specifically area majority and set collection. These mechanisms are easy to teach and give you a sense of gratification when you look at your own side of the table at game's end. They also give players a sense of fighting over something, yet at the same time they don't turn off players who dislike take-that games.

Taking inspiration from games such as Hanamikoji and Startups, I made a two-player game that utilizes the familiar area-control feel but with added card abilities. It took me a week to knock up an idea, research, create twenty-ish card abilities, and a prototype.

Alpha Stage

Your goal is to have the majority of each class at game's end, with the game having five classes. On your turn, you can either play a card in front of you or use the ability of a card in hand, then discard it. After playing a card, you draw a card from the open market; this gives your opponent an idea of which cards you have in hand if they are tracking such things.

With a hand of three cards, you can ideally avoid analysis paralysis while retaining a good number of options from which to choose. The open market also has three face-up cards available for the choosing, with no option to draw from the top of the deck to keep the market flowing.

The design was a low complexity game, and having one action per turn keeps the game snappy, with the unique card effects giving the game tactical depth.

Alpha prototype, two players
After the first playtest, I found that the card abilities were not balanced; some cards were weaker than others, with nothing game-breaking yet — just underwhelming.

Following the mantra from my friend — "If everything is overpowered, nothing is overpowered" — I buffed the card abilities and removed conditional abilities such as those with "ifs" to make them easier to use.

The game became more swingy, but the card abilities were being used more — which serves the intended purpose of giving players the dilemma of either using card abilities or scoring area majority.

After many more playtests and card ability adjustments, I was ready to expand the game to three and four players.

Alpha prototype, four players
I had a brilliant idea to make the three- and four-player gameplay feel a little different. In a three-player game, monuments are included, and they score you an additional 1 point at the end of the game if you fulfill the requirements stated on the card. This is a mini set-collection side quest, an alternative way to score points.

This was primarily done to decrease the likelihood of ties occurring. It is easy to tie in a three-player game since two players are likely to hold the majority of two classes, leaving the third player with only a one-class majority. Adding this scoring mechanism will disrupt the 5 point game structure; ties will still happen, but are less likely.

In a four-player game, a new class was added to the mix, bringing the game to a total of six classes and eight monuments. It is debatable whether the idea of having two-, three-, and four-player counts playing differently from each other was a good idea. I see it as a way to keep the game fresh when you are playing it at different player counts.

Beta Stage

After a lot more playtesting, something was brought to my attention: Securing the rank 1 class was a no-brainer move.

Here's a bit of context on the rank 1 class. Each class has their own rank: Patrician is rank 1, Clergy is rank 2, Legionary is rank 3, and so on. This was important because when there was a tie at the end of the game, whoever has the majority of the highest-ranking class wins, which has led to Patricians being a no-brainer choice.

This caused the game to be slightly imbalanced, which to me was fine because the Patricians have stronger card abilities with fewer copies in the game. However, the bigger problem was players always drafting the Patricians from the market first because that was the obvious move — not to mention an emerging strategy to tie the game after securing the Patrician majority.

I had to find a way to keep the card abilities balanced as they were, while making the higher-ranked cards not be the obvious choice when drawing from the market.

Beta prototype, two players
Turning to Hanamikoji and Startups again, I studied how they keep each "faction" relevant. Both games have a varied number of cards in each faction and a token to represent who got the majority of a certain faction first. That token was the key to stopping card ties from occurring at the end of the game, which was the strategy experienced players were using.

I added tokens to the game. The player who has a clear majority of the class will gain control of the token; the player who has the most tokens wins. This added weight to the lower-ranked classes, while keeping the card abilities the same. In some cases, giving up the higher-ranked tokens to use their abilities to secure multiple lower-ranked tokens became a viable strategy.

One more thing that changed in a four-player game was the Brigands. They can be played only onto an opponent's area, and its token is worth -1 point at game's end. This slight take-that mechanism helps reduce the chances of ending in a tie, and it also increases player interaction on the table.

The game was quite robust after the changes, being easy to teach and fast to play. You had access to card abilities to get out of a sticky situation, as well as card abilities to gain a massive turn. This made the game a little swingy if all players are at an equal footing.

Expansions?

My initial plan was to have a two-player game with a 3-4 player expansion to give players a cheaper option for my game in the hope that it would be easier to drive sales.

However, I was convinced by my fellow friends to not do this. Players would prefer to buy one complete game instead of having to pay for two games. It was also cheaper to manufacture one thousand copies of a 2-4 player game than one thousand copies of a streamlined base game and five hundred copies of the expansion.

Art Direction

Now to address the question from before: Why cats? Does it have anything to do with the theme? The answer is no. From the mechanisms of the game down to the price point, everything was deliberate and taken into account, even the cats.

Furmation of Rome production version
I decided to first try the Malaysian market before venturing out to the wider international audience. With that said, cats were the safest bet. A cartoon bald philosopher will not attract the attention of the public over here, but a cat in a toga might.

The cute and friendly art appeals to the wider public; it reflects the low-complexity gameplay, while the seriousness from the Roman theme hints that you will be fighting over something. The name "Furmation of Rome" was intentionally named similar to the game Foundations of Rome as a nod from me to board gamers who happen to come across my game.

The Present Day

You can find the game only in Malaysia for now, except for the few review copies I sent overseas. The 2024 Asian Board Game Festival that takes place November 22-24 in Singapore will be the first time I'm demoing the game outside of my home country. If you happen to be there, please drop by and say hi.

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• German publisher AMIGO has teased its early 2025 releases by releasing cover images and bare bones data. The titles are:

— 6 nimmt! Baron Oxx: AMIGO describes this 2-10 player Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling design as "the slightly different 6 nimmt!". Hmm. More details to come for this and all other releases in January 2025.
— Pim Pam Pum: A dice-rolling memory game for 2-5 players aged 4 and up originally released by Argentinian publisher Maldón.
— Pick a Pen: Hacker: The newest title in Reiner Knizia's "draft a pencil and draw stuff" series from Dutch publisher 999 Games.
— Schatz des Phönix: A 2-6 player card game from Knizia in which you want to collect the phoenix's treasures.
— Fischfutter: In this Michael Modler card game for 2-5 players, you must escape the piranhas or become fish food.


• In mid-November 2024, I covered KOSMOS' line-up for the first half of 2025 — at last I thought I did, but the publisher has announced a few other titles in the meantime, starting with a German edition of Cascadia Junior from Randy Flynn, Fertessa Allyse, and Flatout Games.

Another title seeing a German-language edition is Jon Mietling's Palm Laboratory, which KOSMOS will release at Palm Lab. As with Mietling's 2018 game Palm Island, Palm Lab is a solitaire game played with a deck of cards that never leaves your hand:

Creating unique monsters, powerful devices, and fantastic potions is a dangerous business. As you gain power and succeed in your experiments, you must also maintain your laboratory to prevent catastrophe. Take on the many challenges of Palm Laboratory anywhere you go with this handheld resource management game.

Palm Laboratory uses a small deck of four-sided cards and deck-transforming mechanisms to flip and rotate cards. As you improve each card, each will increase your resource production, gain more points, or make progress on the goal of your current game — a goal that you choose and that defines the rules for victory or defeat. Some goals add additional cards to generate new resources or other goal-specific objectives.

Each turn, you review the top two cards of your deck and take an action listed on the top section of either card — or you discard the top card by placing it at the back of the deck. When you take a card action, you do so by paying any required cost, then following the action type: rotating it 180º, flipping it over, or storing the card by rotating it 90º so that it sticks out from the other cards. After manipulating the card during an action, you place it in the back of the deck; stored cards provide resources you can use on future actions.

• KOSMOS' other titles (so far) are Murder Mystery Party: Cocktail Mortale and Adventure Puzzle: In den Tiefen des Vulkans ("In the Depths of the Volcano"), with the latter title being a Dave Neale design that challenges you to build a puzzle, then work your way through an adventure book to complete tasks and resume the flow of lava. Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Designer Kory Heath took his own life on November 18, 2024, after "enduring years of chronic pain and depression", in the words of John Cooper, who co-designed The Gang with Kory.

More from Cooper: "He was a genius, also funny, kind, patient. I'm so grateful we could spend so many years, laughs, and tears together, and that he knew he was deeply loved by all of his friends."

Kory was best known for his game Zendo, a game of inductive logic in which the master exhibits two "koans" — one following a secret rule created by the master, one violating this rule — and students create koans of their own in order to determine what this rule is.

If you have any interest in designing games, read Kory's design history of Zendo, which is the deepest, most comprehensive designer diary I've ever seen. You might be taken aback by the length of this diary given that Zendo is so simple, but from all that I saw, read, and heard, "deep thought in the desire for simplicity" was Kory's guiding principle.

I first met Kory in late 2004 at PowWow, a game design retreat hosted by Stephen Glenn. I had been playing modern games only a few years at that point, but I was curious about what design entailed, so I drove from Massachusetts to Virginia to attend. Two decades later, only two incidents from that retreat stand out: Alan R. Moon showing us a mock-up of Ticket to Ride: Europe, and hours spent playing and discussing a design by Kory that would later be published in 2007 as Uptown, then again in 2010 as Blockers!.

The core of the design was simple: Each player had a hand of tiles, with each tile showing a letter, a number, or a symbol. On a turn, play a tile onto a 9x9 game board that resembles a Sudoku board with letters on one axis, numbers on the perpendicular axis, and 3x3 blocks of symbols. To end your turn, draw a tile. Your goal: Form as few groups as possible.

While simple, those rules are incomplete because they lack the one detail that will drive all of your choices and the interaction of all players: How do you score?

Uptown's game board
As game designers will point out, a game's scoring system is the game. The knowledge that you score in a particular manner will affect every choice you make, assuming you're a reasonable person who is trying to win the game — an assumption the designer has to make because otherwise why are the players playing? Here's how Kory describes this retreat from his Blockers! design history:

Alan Moon, Stephen Glenn, and a few other folks were hanging out at table chatting, so I joined them. I figured I was going to have to wait a while before I got a chance to pull out my game, but, amazingly, when we discussed what we should do next, no one else seemed to have any particular agenda. So I mentioned that I had something we could try, and before I knew it, we were playing.

Things went even better than I'd hoped. The game moved along at a terrific pace, and everyone was smiling and having fun. Because the game was so quick, we were able to play it a couple of times in a row. Stephen loved it, and Alan said that he enjoyed it in spite of his usual dislike of abstract games. Over the course of the weekend, they and many others were generous enough to spend extra time working on the game with me.

Despite its positive reception, it was still clear that the game had some problems...

I don't remember the details of all that we tried, but I recall that we played Kory's game, then discussed options, then played again with one changed rule, then discussed, then played again, etc.

Let's pick up the story from an Uptown preview I published on BoardgameNews.com on July 31, 2007, a preview for which I interviewed Kory for background on the game:

I played a prototype of Uptown back in 2004 and again in 2005, and while I enjoyed the game greatly both times, Heath was focused more on this beauty's defects. "I believe that my unflinching perfectionism is by far my strongest trait as a designer", he says. "I don't have any magical ability to come up with great ideas and mechanisms — but I do eventually come up with them because I'm so ruthless about rejecting the ones that are 'just okay'. My perfectionism actually functions as an engine of creativity because it forces me to more fully explore the design-space around the ruleset I'm working on. And it makes creativity easier because I have a direction. I'm not just sitting around trying to come up with brilliant mechanisms out of nowhere. I'm trying to solve specific design problems and that helps me sniff out promising trails in design-space. Without problems driving me, that design-space just seems overwhelmingly vast."

"So let's talk about Uptown in this context," Heath continues. "When we first played it at PowWow in 2004, it was hardly more than a week old. I was already sure that it would turn out to be a good game. I felt a deep sense of 'rightness' about the basic mechanism. However, it was also clear to me that the game wasn't quite working yet. There were several problems, but to me the biggest one was that as the board began to fill up, players' hands became more and more clogged with unplayable tiles. We did a lot of brainstorming that weekend, and of course we tried many of the 'obvious' solutions, like discarding and replacing unplayable tiles from your hand, and so on. But — and here comes my perfectionism! — those solutions felt like they were attacking the symptoms of the problem rather than the root cause."

As Heath suggests, many games of the Uptown prototype were played at PowWow, and everyone who played it threw out all sorts of suggestions for how to score, how to handle discards, how many tiles to start with, and so on. The basic elements of the game in terms of tiles that match rows, columns and blocks were in place, as was the concept of scoring groups, but the details weren't yet set. All of the suggestions offered were possible solutions, and I think we all played Kory's prototype far more often than any other design at PowWow that year. We all saw something and wanted to help him set it in concrete, but after each play with a rules alteration, Kory would screw up his face and say, "Yeah, well, I don't know..." before launching into what he did know: the offered solution didn't work or pushed down the problem only to cause a new one to spring up elsewhere.

Heath continues the story: "After thinking about it for many weeks, I finally decided that the root cause was the static nature of the tile-play. Once a tile was placed, that space was locked up forever, which caused other tiles to eventually become unplayable. Therefore, we began experimenting with different ways to allow pieces to be removed from the board. Again, we did a lot of brainstorming and tried a bunch of different ideas. The one we finally hit on was that you could replace an opponent's tile with your own, as long as you didn't split a group into multiple groups. That fixed the 'hand clogging' problem — but as an unforeseen bonus, it also made the game itself much more dynamic and interesting. I've found that this almost always happens when you attack problems at their root rather than patching the symptoms."

"Anyway, this should give you a general idea of what I mean by 'aiming for perfection' in game design", he says. "It entails ruthlessly acknowledging anything that's not quite right about a ruleset, stubbornly rejecting inelegant solutions that don't strike at the root of the problem, and continuing that process until there's nothing left to fix."

I loved the simplicity of Uptown, but more than that I was entranced by Kory's drive to find the Platonic ideal of this design. In 2004, I had already been a full-time writer for seven years, and Kory's on-the-spot work of "editing" the game design reminded me of editing texts. Ideally every word has a purpose; it carries weight for whatever goal you have, whether it's delivering information, making an argument, creating an atmosphere, etc. The same should also be true for rules in a game design, with exceptions eliminated from the ruleset before a player would ever need to confront them in the middle of a game.

And for as much as I appreciated Uptown, I thoroughly loved Kory's Blockhouse, an iOS app that he released in 2009 and that I lost at some point during phone upgrades and that is no longer available. Such is the way of our digital life, which mirrors our physical life in uncomfortable ways. Everything goes at some point.


Blockhouse is a set of one hundred sliding-block puzzles, all of which present you with a starting situation, various obstacles, and the final spots where you must move one or more blocks in order to solve the puzzle. Let me quote Andrew Plotkin's 2009 review of Blockhouse:

I'm sure you've already recognized this screenshot as the "block slides until it hits something, then you slide it again" variety of puzzle. And that's what Blockhouse is. But seriously. In buckets. In spades. Buckets and buckets of spades.

See, you play through a few of these levels, and the little block goes zipping around, and you figure you're done with Blockhouse. Except then you hit the level with two blocks. Then you hit the level with two L-shaped blocks. And they're getting harder. The blocks are turning into zig-zag polyominoes and getting stuck on each other. Occasionally blocks contain other blocks.

And then you realize that there are one hundred of these levels, and none of them suck. No filler. One simple game mechanic, in a frankly astonishing spread of variations: wide-open levels, divided levels, levels where you have to get the blocks wedged together, levels where you have to get the blocks knocked apart...

Blockhouse is a beautiful, clean design. The app didn't have a menu or tutorial because it didn't need one. You clicked on level 1, and the screen had an arrow showing you where to move the block. You tilted the phone, and —zip!— you solved level 1, returning to the puzzle level page to choose the next one. I went through these puzzles so many times! You never got stuck because the blocks could always slide; you could reset a level to reboot your mental state, to help you mentally restart your way through an incredibly constrained and challenging maze. I wish you could play Blockhouse as well.

While I'm looking back, here's a profile of Kory that I published on BoardgameNews.com that same day in July 2007. As I wrote to him at the time, "I'm posting a preview of Uptown and a review of Criminals as well, so July 31st is hereby dubbed Kory Heath Coverage Day":

Kory Heath's list of published games is an eclectic one: the party game Why Did The Chicken...?, in which players create punchlines for randomly generated situations; the inductive logic game Zendo, in which players try to determine rules for constructing figures; the bluffing game Criminals; and the abstract game Uptown.

Perhaps it's no surprise then that Heath's gaming background is similarly spotty. "I almost don't consider myself a boardgamer, in the past or now", he says. "Of course, I played the standards as a kid: Monopoly, Battleship, Hungry Hungry Hippos — you know the drill." His parents taught him various Rummy games, trick-taking games, and push-your-luck dice games, while high school brought experience in chess.

"I've never played Risk or Axis & Allies (and probably never will). Somehow I even managed to miss D&D and Magic", says Heath. "I did, however, play tons of computer games. One of my favorites was (and still is) M.U.L.E., a strategy game about settling a colony on a new planet. And one day I saw this game called Settlers of Catan on the shelf of a hobby store, and I thought to myself, 'That looks like a board game version of M.U.L.E.!' That's how I discovered Eurogames."

Heath remains a Eurogame fan, although he says that some of the games he likes are harder to categorize. "Mostly I'm looking for games that are easy to learn, don't take too long to play, but present lots of juicy decisions", he says.

Heath's favorite game these days? "Although I know it's trendy, I have to rank No Limit Texas Hold'em as my favorite game", he says. "It has so many elements that I like: analysis, intrigue, excitement, and wild swings of fortune. But poker is kind of a world unto itself, and in some ways it's difficult to compare it to other games. In the realm of 'normal' games, it's hard to pick a favorite. For some reason, a game that's coming to mind at the moment is Kramer's Daytona 500. It has the perfect level of 'juiciness' for my taste. Every time I play it, I immediately want to play again."

Hold on to that notion of juiciness because we'll come back to it later...

Player to Creator

As with many gamers, Heath's discovery soon led him down the path of creation: "Whenever I find something I like, I always have this urge to create more instances of it. When I read books as a kid, I wanted to write them. When I played computer games, I wanted to design them. When I heard music, I wanted to compose it. So when I got into board games in the late 1990s, I immediately wanted to design my own."

As for his range in game design, Heath says that results from his attempts to work within a pre-existing genre. "For instance, Zendo was an attempt to create an induction game that was more to my taste than the classic Eleusis", he says. "RAMBots was an attempt to create a robot-programming game for the Icehouse pieces which focuses more on player interaction than RoboRally does. Why Did the Chicken...? was an attempt to create a Balderdash-like game in which funny answers win. And Criminals was an attempt to create a Werewolf-style game that could be played with just a handful of people and no moderator."

"Stylistically, they're all over the map", he acknowledges. "In hindsight, I find that pleasing, but it certainly wasn't intentional."

RAMBots is one of three games that Heath created using the Icehouse game system from Looney Labs; Zagami and Zendo are the other two. Says Heath, "Icehouse has the same appeal that a deck of playing cards has: a simple set of components with so many possibilities. It gives you a framework within which to design, which can be more inspiring than a blank canvas. And the Icehouse pieces are so pretty and tactile."

A simple set of components with many possibilities — that's a decent summary of game design à la Heath, who says that his style is influenced by "the simplicity and elegance I find in some of the games designed by Sid Sackson, Alex Randolph, Reiner Knizia, et. al. Of my own published designs, Zagami, RAMBots, and even Criminals turned out a bit too complex for my taste. Zendo, WDtC, and Uptown fully exemplify the kind of simplicity I'm shooting for."

Mining for Gold

"I want to create a game that has roughly the same level of simplicity and elegance as Cartagena or TransAmerica, but also has that extra level of juiciness that makes it truly great", Heath says. "That's not easy to do when you're working in such a rarefied domain."

In a column about Heath, designer Andy Looney noted that "I've created many of my best games in very short order, overnight in some cases, in days or weeks in others. On the other hand, Kory designs games very slowly, like a slow methodical craftsman, tinkering away in his workshop for months or years before finishing something (an analogy Kory once used to describe himself, as I recall, describing me, by comparison, as a 'bolt-from-the-blue' style inventor)."

As Heath elaborates, "Although some may view this as hubris, I actually do aim for a kind of 'perfection' in my designs. There's probably no such thing as a truly perfect game, but I do have a strong internal sense of when a rule or a design-solution is deeply 'right'. Basically, I refuse to stop working on a game until there's absolutely nothing about the ruleset that bugs me — and I'm very easily bugged!"

And I'm amused by Kory's mention in 2007 of No Limit Texas Hold'em as his favorite game given that 2024 saw the release of The Gang, a co-operative version of Texas Hold'em in which players try to rank their hands relative to one another solely by taking star-bearing poker chips over four rounds as cards enter play bit by bit.

This design by Heath and Cooper is a delightfully challenging game in which the rules are vanishingly small, giving you the ability to focus on your fellow players and try to determine what's the best way forward for all of you, although in the end we each must walk our own path, playing the cards we're dealt...

Last hand...? Read more »

by Greyfax

Are board game rules the same as laws? Here's the question:

As all game groups do, sometimes we find we are playing a rule wrong. Sometimes we discover it at the end of the game, but sometimes in the middle.

We have one player who insists we then play the rule correctly for the remaining turns, even if doing so negatively impacts some players more than others.

To keep the peace, I generally just let it go and focus on enjoying the rest of the game. Have you ever had this happen?

Your friend needs to understand that making arbitrary decisions — yes, following a newly found rule is arbitrary; the group doesn't have to do that — is not fun in board gaming.

Our group generally keeps going with the original ruling unless it's so minor it doesn't matter. Having your position destroyed in the middle of the game because of something you had no control over doesn't feel good. Hopefully you can gently explain that the rule will certainly be followed the next time your group plays the game, but for now let the group continue with the original rules for play that they were using.

The other way to approach this situation is to say that for this session the original way you were playing this rule is a temporary house rule. Then it can stay a rule in their mind while allowing players to continue with their plans.

Thanks for the question, and I hope my answer is helpful. Also, folks reading along, more questions via GeekMail are much welcomed!

Ms. Meeple (Jennifer Schlickbernd) Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Over the past couple of years, the game industry has been thick with two-player spinoffs of existing games, but Randy Flynn and Flatout Games have taken a different route with their spinoffs of the Spiel des Jahres-winning Cascadia.

After releasing a pair of flip-and-roll-and-write games in 2024 — Cascadia: Rolling Rivers and Cascadia: Rolling Hills — Flynn has got together with designer Fertessa Allyse to create Cascadia Junior, a game for 2-4 players, aged 6 and up:

In Cascadia Junior, players take turns drafting habitat tiles and adding them to their environment. They must try to match the same habitats to grow their habitat corridors and score more points while creating groups of three wildlife icons on connected tiles. Once they make matches, they earn wildlife and habitat sighting tokens that they can add to their panorama board, where they will make their own personal picture of the Cascadian wilderness!

At the end of the game, all players flip over their sighting tokens to discover the conifer cones they have collected. The player with the most cones wins!

Cascadia Junior is a stepping stone game that will allow children to learn the basics of pattern matching. Over time, they can use the included wildlife scoring cards with the advanced mode, which requires more complex shapes for each wildlife group. Once children gain familiarity with that mode, they can try out the family mode of the base Cascadia game and eventually the full Cascadia experience!

Cascadia Junior will be available for demo games at PAX Unplugged 2024 in early December. Flatout Games and U.S. distributor Alderac Entertainment Group have announced a release date of March 14, 2025.

Read more »

by Duncan Molloy

Tired of endlessly shuttling the kids from soccer practice to dance recitals to God-knows-what? Inching your three-ton fortress into tiny parking spaces on the school run because you wanted the kids to be protected, and now they won't even put on their seat belt without a fight? This machine can do so much more. You can do so much more. Don't you ever want to cut loose?

Joyride: Survival of the Fastest is a loud, fast, high-interaction racing game with big open boards, variable track layouts, and the ability to push other cars into a wall. I'm Duncan Molloy, founder of Rebellion Unplugged, here with my co-designer Pete Ward to give some insight into how Joyride came to be.

Gearing Up

In 2021, Rebellion Unplugged was growing. We had recently hired Pete Ward as the third member of our team to run Unplugged's marketing, but pandemic-related friction meant we had to delay Sniper Elite's retail release shortly afterwards.

I'd worked with Pete for many years while I was running the board game line at Osprey Games. I knew he had a good brain for games, but more importantly, his games brain worked differently to mine. He had very different influences, interests, and approaches within tabletop games, even as we often loved the same titles. I sought out tactics, optimization puzzles, atmosphere, and emotion, while Pete loved dramatic moments, thematic mechanisms, and games that tell a story, so I decided to look at Pete's availability as an opportunity to develop a title entirely in-house.

We both loved racing games, but neither of us had a racing game that we loved. It was a popular genre that seemed to have few standout releases. The decision was made: we were at the races.

The Starting Line

Having decided we wanted to take on racing as a genre, we set out the design goals we wanted to achieve and the racing experiences that served those needs well.

We immersed ourselves in the genre, refamiliarizing ourselves with games like Formula D, Powerboats, Dark Future, Gaslands, and Cubitos, as well as video games such as Mario Kart, Burnout, Micro Machines Turbo Tournament, POD Gold, and Wreckfest. Pete deep-dived into Formula 1, NASCAR, demolition derbies, and even monster truck racing, while I started thinking about racing more abstractly. Snakes and Ladders is a race game. Is tag is a race game?

Out of all of that, we came up with a few core principles that would guide the design of Joyride:

Joyride Core Principles wrote:

1. It had to be fast: fast to learn, fast to play, fast to get to the table. Maybe not tag fast, but there shouldn't be a sense of waiting around.
2. High player interaction in a way that genuinely plays out on the board.
3. Players should be able to recover, adapt their plans, and get back into the race if they fall behind.
4. A sense of momentum, with less focus on raw speed and more on turning and control. In practice this meant more driving lanes – too many crashes in Gran Turismo had taught me that finding your lane is as important as managing your speed.
5. As much variety in the races as possible, and ideally customizability, too.
6. It should work at two players.
7. Make it as sustainable and accessible as possible.
8. It had to feel playful. Almost every home has had a Hot Wheel vehicle in it as some point, so we wanted it to be something you played with as much as something you played.

That final point was the real kicker. We wanted your car to feel weighty, but a big car means a big track. A straight 15-spaces long, where each space is roughly the size of a toy car, is not going to fit on anyone's table.

Design on a system that works with the other points was already well underway, but we were still left with a board that would cover the best part of a medieval banquet table and a game that felt a bit...bland? We were having fun with it, but we weren't getting excited.

It was after a weekend spent alternating between playing Wreckfest (a demolition derby style video game) and playing around on the prototype with his collection of converted Gaslands matchbox cars that Pete had an idea: Why not have the cars take up two hexes instead of one?


This single suggestion instantly unlocked the design. Previously we had cars in a single hex, and a collision would push it a space and deal a point of damage. This worked fine, but it wasn't capturing the visceral, metal-on-metal action we were after.

With the cars taking up two hexes, suddenly we had options. Sideswipe a car and spin it round. Rear end it, and you'll push it along. Smash headfirst into it – well, that's gonna be a bad time.


Crucially the two-space system opened up these new options without hurting any of the mechanisms we had in place for shifting gears, movement, and steering. Like a real front-wheel drive vehicle, your car moves from the front, and the tail follows it everywhere it goes.

The game would still have tons of table presence, but it would actually fit on a table. (I pulled average table sizes from both the Ikea website and my furniture-store-owning dad, then tweaked the hex and dashboard sizes to make sure. We spent a lot of time on hex sizes.)

"Cars are two hexes long" was the first of two major turning points for what Joyride would become. The second was my realization that Pye Parr really loves cars.

Trading Paint

I'd adored Pye's comic art since I was first introduced to it in 2000 AD's Intestinauts, and he had proven his graphic design strengths with Adventure Presents: Tartarus Gate, as well as a number of smaller contributions to other projects.

I hired Pye to begin concept art and layout work long before we had the systems fully locked, and his designs and playfulness played an enormous role in helping us find the tone of the game, somewhere between the tongue-in-cheek spikiness of the late 1970s/early 1980s Games Workshop and 2000 AD and the bright colors of a Saturday morning cartoon.

It's fair to say he over-delivered.


Pye pitched the idea to foreground the rear-view mirrors on the dashboards so that we could get a glimpse of the drivers, which massively ramped up the personality of each car. That in turn prompted us to make the cars even more diverse, making the unique abilities as much a part of their drivers' personalities as the vehicles' capabilities.

Pye Parr wrote:

A brief detour into the path from concept to final design, as viewed through the muscle car (as seen on the box cover and the banner above) and its driver Bad Bob.

Early character designs

Figuring out how to lay out the dashboards

The final art

Pye also, unprompted, produced pin-up art for each of the initial four cars. "They can fill a bit of space in the rulebook", he told me. This is the type of thing he intended as space filler:


The desire to showcase these pieces was a big part of the inspiration to split the rules in two, with the core rules covered in a 16-page, example-filled Racing Rules & Regulations book and a separate Race Guide showcasing Pye's art (and the unique abilities of the cars and items in each set) in all its glory.

A spread from the Race Guide showcasing the Off-Roader and the Junker
As the game expanded, the act of creating new cars was a pretty equal back and forth of me pitching him abilities and him pitching me fun vehicle concepts, each for the other to design cars around. Having that level of input and enthusiasm from such an incredible talent was a gift I don't take lightly.

Kicking the Tyres

We'd now hit 2022, and Rebellion Unplugged welcomed Filip Hartelius onto the team, fresh off the back of him sending Undaunted: Stalingrad to print.

At this point, Pete and I had a game that worked and that met our key design goals. The interaction was there through the collision mechanisms. Our tracks were entirely customizable, and players could recover by taking alternate routes and greater risks.

The game was in good shape – we had tracks designed, items for players to pick up as they went round the track, driver abilities that gave cars a unique feel while doubling as a catch-up mechanism – but we had a niggling problem: damage.

As you drive around the track in Joyride, you're going to take damage, but we were struggling with making it work in an interesting way. Do you just have a threshold you can hit, after which you're knocked out? Do you draw cards that make your car do something? Nothing was quite working for us.

We'd played around with damage that affected your dashboard after accruing a certain amount, and Filip immediately (and correctly) identified that as the fun bit. He proposed we have damage not as something adjacent to hit points, but purely as something applied to the dashboard, covering up the bits you're depending on. You cover a gear, locked dice slot, or item slot with a damage token and lose it for the rest of the race. Importantly, you get to choose where that damage goes, allowing you to decide which options you need to prioritize.

This transformed damage from bookkeeping to something that was less frequent but always exciting and that always prompted a quick but engaging decision. We mostly removed damage from hitting other cars (since knocking them off their line is punishing enough) but kept the danger of hitting walls and the fear of explosives: always a threat, never a slog, and if you can't shift up to fourth gear on the final turn because you wanted to keep both item slots undamaged, you've got only yourself to blame.

We took the damage revamp as an opportunity to re-evaluate the systems we had added to the game and judge them on a ratio of added fun to added rules-overhead. We'd considered tiled boards, but they added more set-up faff than track flexibility; moveable checkpoints and a few key obstacles do the same thing more cleanly. The initiative track added lots of tension and the opportunity for dramatic tactical swings at the cost of little extra rules – it stays in.

Tuning the Engine

I had enough confidence in Joyride at this point that for the first time since signing Undaunted: Normandy I decided to develop multiple games within a system concurrently, allowing us to showcase the flexibility of the system without it coming at the cost of approachability.

All the chaos and cheers and tactical flexibility of the core systems have been piled into Joyride: Survival of the Fastest, and we have done our damndest to make that box feel as generous as possible, from team-based variants, four unique cars plus standard abilities that allow for a symmetrical race, and twelve tracks showcasing every player count and skill level.

We've distilled that box to the best possible racing experience, but we haven't done away with our other ideas. Joyride Duel: Next Gen narrows the focus to a tense tactical experience with a smaller footprint. (This is coming in February 2025 as a standalone two-player release with new cars and maps.) There are more twists in the road for anyone who wants them, from mutant beasts to active volcanos, and we've taken a leaf from Restoration Games' Unmatched system by making every car, map, item, and extra addition compatible with everything else. Don't get confused about it, though. Joyride: Survival of the Fastest is the experience we have been working on for years now. Everything else is the fun we had while doing so overflowing in as many directions as possible.


Taking It for a Test Drive

Developing more than one title concurrently allowed us additional time to give every aspect of Joyride more playtesting and polish. In truth, the heart of the game has changed little since our first public playtests at shows in 2022, but the level of iteration it has had has been immense.

The game has had a full accessibility pass from the in-house accessibility team that work across Rebellion's video games, with high-contrast versions of the dashboards and accessibility recommendations throughout the rulebook. Production manager Alysa Thomas and accessibility consultant Cari Watterton both deserve credit for the work they put in here.

The high-contrast version of the hot rod dashboard
We also refined an awful lot during playtesting, listening to what got players excited...even if it was a bad idea in-game. The strongest example is that many (most) early races featured at least one player who wanted to immediately drive into another player head-on. This meant both cars smashed, dropping to gear zero, taking damage, and significantly impacting their game. It was fun, it was thematic, it was enthusiastically asked about mid-rules explanation on a consistent basis — and it felt awful to be on the receiving end of.

We repeatedly tried to tweak the rule to make it more obviously a bad idea (largely ignored) or remove it entirely (unthematic, less enthusiasm).

The resistance I was coming up against forced me to reconsider which problem I was trying to solve: player behavior, or game design. The active player's fun was coming at another player's expense. The solution was not to reduce the active player's fun; it was to increase the other player's fun. Once my thinking changed, a simple solution presented itself: consent.

When a player is hit head-on by another car, they have a choice: either both cars smash (as originally intended), or they get pushed backwards (in the same manner as if they were hit from behind). Crucially, the active player must commit to their move before knowing which decision the other player will make. The theme remains, the bitterness has been removed, and if anything the tension involved in this type of collision has been ramped up.

Fun, Then Clever

This lead to a final core principle that Joyride has given to me as a designer, rather than the other way around:

Duncan core principles wrote:

If someone is having fun, reward it.

I love party games as much as I love brain-melting tactical puzzles. I play an awful lot of games in which there is a huge amount of fun, but not much opportunity for players to showcase their tactical smarts. Equally I've enjoyed (and had a hand in creating) no shortage of titles in which the fun to be had from the systems is somewhat gated behind identifying clever plays and executing them.

I truly believe Joyride has found a sweet spot, giving players the opportunity to make satisfying crunchy tactical decisions, while remaining big and noisy and approachable and joyful regardless. Joyride is fun and clever, in that order, and I am incredibly proud of that. Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

The game industry is like any other in that it has a front-facing aspect of buyers and sellers, with thousands behind the scenes who do largely invisible work that make the front part possible.

Amber Cook, who passed away on October 25, 2024, largely fit into the latter category. I met her in the early 2010s when she was director of sales and marketing at Looney Labs, and she later had a similar role with Asmodee Digital and Roll20, while also working as an independent marketing and sales consultant. (I've seen much praise for branding projects that she led.) She was a co-founder of The American Tabletop Awards and started The 100 Games Project in the mid-2010s.

I saw Amber at various conventions over the years, and she was always competent and cheery in our interactions. She also provided excellent, discreet advice in a work situation, something I've heard many in the game industry note after her passing.


Amber had a six-year-old son, James, and her partner Paul Alexander Butler — who runs the Games and Stuff retail store in Maryland, a store that was one of her re-branding projects — along with Amber's longtime friends Jayme Boucher and Nicole Hoye have started a GoFundMe project to ensure support for James in the years ahead.

•••
Ben Baldanza, who passed away on November 5, 2024, was known to the public as the CEO, then chief executive of Spirit Airlines from 2005 to 2016. As The New York Times notes in its obituary for Ben:

The airline had lost $79 million the year before , and Mr. Baldanza, an industry veteran with a reputation for finding clever ways to cut costs, was given carte blanche to slash away.

Rather than trim at the edges, he took a radical approach: what he called the "bare fare".

Passengers would pay a basic price for the flight and then shell out for virtually everything else, from printed boarding passes ($10) to water bottles ($3) and carry-on bags ($35 if the tag was printed at home, $50 at the airport)...

Fliers flocked to Spirit, even as it regularly ranked worst among airlines in customer satisfaction.

Mr. Baldanza refused to back down. Instead, he ran a "Hug the Haters" campaign, offering 8,000 frequent-flier miles to people who submitted their rants against the airline to its website.

"No one goes to Chick-fil-A and complains they can't get a burger. And people shouldn't come to Spirit if they want lots of legroom", he told The Wall Street Journal in 2015. "Judge us for who we are."

While I knew about his job, for me Ben was just a fellow gamer. (The NYT obituary mentions that he had about 1,700 games.) I saw him at conventions, he paid for membership at BoardgameNews.com in the first decade of the 2000s when I ran that site, and I bought games from him on eBay.

Ben's son Enzo was a couple of years older than my son, and after my first purchase from Ben, he'd reach out to me about once a year with subject lines like "More Kids Games?" He asked me to pay for shipping, along with a token fee, as long as I promised to do the same with the games in the future. (Many of those children's games later migrated to BGG advertising manager Chad Krizan.)

Baldanza was a member of the International Gamers Awards jury, and he wrote regularly for Counter magazine and other game-related publications.

Baldanza in 2014 (Image: Alan Diaz/Associated Press) Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

My time at BGG.CON 2024 is nearly at an end, and as is true for nearly all aspects of life, I did some stuff, but not nearly as much as I would have liked to.

I'm grateful to have seen many members of the BGG team, who I otherwise see only as tiny avatars on Slack, and I played games with several of them as the BGG events are pretty much a non-work environment when compared to SPIEL and Gen Con. Short takes on these games:

• Fishing (purchased copy): I've already written about this Friedemann Friese trick-taking game (twice), so in theory I should be "done" with this game and playing something else that I can cover on BGG News later — but I'm still burning with excitement for it and played eight times at the show.

I'm getting a better feel for the rhythm of the game's arc and how to approach a "good" or "bad" opening hand so that ideally you can peak near game's end so that you land a hand of winners. I also played with three players for the first time, and unsurprisingly the game hits differently since you're bouncing the same cards more frequently.

Publisher 2F-Spiele tells me that copies should be available in the U.S. from Rio Grande Games in early December 2024 given where the shipment is on the water, but of course customs, weather, and kraken attacks could disrupt that schedule.

• Einfach Genial 3D (review copy): If you have played Reiner Knizia's Ingenious from KOSMOS, then you are 96% of the way to knowing how to play this game — but 3D feels like a leveled-up version of that design since the colors kaleidoscope in and out as the tiles pile up on one another and you can sometimes find it difficult to cut someone from a color when they can play on top of other tiles to get what they need.

My second winning board of the night
• Fromage (library copy): Three people told me that I had to try this game from Matthew O'Malley, Ben Rosset, and Road To Infamy Games, including BGG owner Scott Alden — and when your boss is pushing a game on you, it seems like a good idea to try it. (Also, Aldie knows my taste in games, so he'll enjoy, say, Stationfall without inviting me in, but get me to the table for other designs.)

Fromage is somewhat solitaire-ish compared to what I prefer, but I can understand the appeal. Each round you take actions in only one quarter of the board, which then rotates. You have three tokens with which to do stuff — the white, yellow, and blue colors being required to "construct" certain cheeses.

The game's graphic design is a triumph, with your pieces being forcibly angled in a certain direction based on the action you chose and them becoming available to you again only when the board has rotated enough that they face you at the start of your turn. Clever as all get-out.


• Australis (review copy): I played this Leo Colovini, Alessandro Zucchini, and KOSMOS design only once, and I'm not sure what to think at this point.

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


• What The Fog?! (review copy): I'm a fan of most Colovini designs, and this title from 999 Games hits just right, featuring his hallmark approach of players creating an entangled space in which everyone's actions affect possible outcomes, with your action often creating a cloud of possibilities rather than leading to the direct result you want.

Players are weather forecasters, and you aren't concerned about predicting the weather as much as you are about predicting how well you can predict the weather. That one-removed aspect provides an interesting twist, with players "creating" the weather that takes place on each day. (I'm not yet settled into how exactly to explain the role that players take.) I played twice at BGG.CON 2024 and have now played four times overall. Ideally I'll post a video in the near future after a few more plays.

Not a helpful picture in terms of conveying the game's appeal
I played other stuff as well and will get to that in a later post, but it's time to board for the flight home. Hope your weekend has gone well... Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• Trickadee is the second title from Rob Newton through his Coin Flip Games brand, and this 3-5 player trick-taking game due out in mid-2025 challenges you to collect high-scoring flocks. (Kickstarter link)

In each round, you start with a hand of cards and with a flock of one card on the table in the role of your "spark bird", the term birders use to refer to the bird that got them birding.

To start each trick, the lead player lays down a card in one of the five suits, then everyone else must follow any suit previously played in the trick. The highest trump wins, with non-trump suits being ranked by the number of cards played and tied suits being ranked by their sum. Each player in order claims one card from the trick, assigning that card to an existing flock or a new flock.

The lowest-ranked player in a trick earns two sunflower seeds and everyone else but the winner earns one, with sunflower seeds allowing you to use ability cards to move cards between flocks, swap a hand card with a flock card, etc.

Once all the cards have been played, you score your flocks. If all cards in a flock are the same suit, species, or rank, or they form a sequence, you earn points per card, and a flock can meet more than one of these qualities. After three rounds, the player with the most points wins.

• I missed out on Taylor Reiner's crowdfunding campaign for Zoo and More, due out in mid-2025 from his own Gotcha Gotcha Games. Ideally he'll have extra copies to sell down the road...or at least send out a press release when he does a reprint.

Zoo and More includes Reiner's previously published Short Zoot Suit, a trick-taking game in which you're trying not to be short-suited too often, along with:

— Hodge Podge Dodgeball, co-designed by Reiner and Daniel Kenel: In teams of two, players cannot play the same suit as others in a trick, and the trick "winner" must bench a card from their hand, make their hand smaller. If you can't play a card because you're out of cards or you must follow, your team loses the round.


— Chai Tea Jazz, co-designed by Reiner, Chris Cepil, and Sean Ross: At the start of a round, players can claim a contract that they want to complete (e.g., naming the trump, or making low numbers better than high ones, etc.) or outbid another player's contract. Everyone will end up taking all of the contracts once, then you score points based on how well you do in each contract compared to the other players.

— Bug House Millionaire, designed by Reiner: Teams of two players sit side-by-side, each player participates in a real-time climbing game with the player opposite them. You can play singles, pairs, and suited runs, and when you win a trick, you must give your teammate a card from the completed trick before you lead to the next trick. You can talk all you want, but each game has a chess clock recording each team's time. If you run out of time, you lose; if either teammate sheds all their cards, they win!

— Through the Zoo, designed by Mason Sokol: In this meta game, each player has their own deck from which they draw thirteen cards, discarding up to thirteen cards in the process, then they play a round of hearts, spades, etc., scoring points based on how they finish compared to others. After four rounds, you've run through your entire deck, and whoever has the most points wins.

• Charlie Bink's Verhext! from Swiss publisher Game Factory seems like a refined version of his self-published trick-taking game Pups from 2016.

Each round, a player gets seven cards in hand from a deck that contains cards numbered 1-9 in four colors and magic potion cards labeled +1, +2, and +3. Players each predict how many tricks they'll take in the round, with seven choices: 0-3, 1+, 2+, and 3+. This means you can predict you'll take exactly three tricks or at least three tricks, with the former being worth more points than the latter.

When you play a card to a trick, you can add magic potions to increase its value...which means you're playing more than one card in a trick, and the round ends when someone has no cards in hand. Winning three of seven tricks might be hard if the round ends sooner than you expected!

Complete seven rounds or end the game when one of the prediction piles is empty.

• Trickadee has bird species on cards that fall across multiple ranks, and TRICQ SHOT does something similar, with this billiards-themed trick-taking game from T親方 (Master T) and PaixGuild featuring cards with both a letter and a rank: As are 1-5, Bs are 2-6, etc.

In a round, each player first secretly "pockets" a card from their hand to indicate whether they're stripes or solids, then the round's lead player announces whether cards are better in ascending or descending order.

In a trick, the lead player lays down a card, then the next player must follow with a card of the same letter or rank, if possible. As more cards are played, you can imagine balls ricocheting on the table, with the possibilities for which cards can be played increasing. The round ends when the 8-ball hits the table, then you score 1 point for the cards that match your pocket card and lose 1 point for other cards. When someone has at least 8 points, the game ends.

TRICQ SHOT debuts at Tokyo Game Market in mid-November 2024.

Read more »

by Nick Bentley

A creator shouldn't try to please everyone, right?

Obviously. It's impossible.

In fact for most arts, the standard advice is to please only yourself. Don't try to predict others' feelings. People are too complicated.


However, there are devils lurking in the details of each art. Board game design differs from other arts, and I believe the difference complicates things.

What's the Difference?

Here it is: If you want to play a multiplayer game, you have to convince someone to play it with you.

If I want to listen to The Beastie Boys, I can put on my headphones and do it, even though my wife can't stand their songs.


But on many nights, if I want to play a multiplayer game, my wife has to agree to it. It won't be a game she dislikes.

In other words, it's more important to satisfy multiple tastes for games than for other arts — and tastes vary. Just glance at the ratings distribution for any game:


It takes just one veto from someone in your group to keep you from playing a game...or one anticipated veto to keep you from buying it. Can an unplayed game be said to be good? Can it even be said to be a game at all?

Games are experiences, after all. Unused boxes of cardboard are cardboard. If you want to be generous about it, they're aspiring games that failed to do their most basic job: get on the table.

We (Underdog Games) make games hobbyists use to entice their families into playing. To do that job, they have to be fun for hobbyists AND for their families. Opinions about games vary more among families than in game groups, making the problem above nastier. It's our hardest design challenge.

I'm also a customer here: I want to play games with my family, but I rarely enjoy the games they do.


I think our previous games have tended to be better for families than they are interesting to hobbyists.

We've made progress, though: for example, BGGers rate our most recent game, Trekking Through History, higher than the previous ones (7.6, high for a game with a weight of 1.7). It's one of a tiny handful of games my wife, my non-gamer friends, and I all like to play. It even got a Spiel des Jahres mention:


The making of Trekking Through History changed our understanding of the problem and how to solve it, but you don't really know what you've learned until you put it to the test. Our test would be Trekking the World: Second Edition.


Our Approach

I mentioned how diverse experiences of a game are. Here are the BGG ratings distribution for Trekking the World's first edition:


This captures why game design is so hit-or-miss: when you change a game, you affect many dimensions of many experiences for many people. I've spent much time thinking about how to contend with this, and it led me to this approach:

Before I began to design Second Edition, I closely read, then analyzed, every online comment I could find about the first edition. Thousands. I categorized them, coded them, looked for underlying causes, re-read them, discussed them with others, and did a dozen other things to understand and internalize the experiences behind them.

I studied them like a mad historian poring over manuscripts — squinting at each line, obsessing over every footnote, wondering whether I was losing my mind.


From this, I slowly crystallized lists of dimensions I wanted to change, and others to preserve. The lists were long. For example, here's the core change-list:

:star: Streamline the rules
:star: Make it more intuitive
:star: Make it more thematic
:star: Reduce the set-up time
:star: Boost turn-to-turn variety
:star: Kill first player advantage
:star: Boost game-to-game variety
:star: Make it less boring (big topic)
:star: Don't let players feel stranded
:star: Boost turn-to-turn reward variety
:star: Improve it at two and five players
:star: Give players more physical rewards
:star: Create a greater sense of escalation
:star: Deluxify the suitcases: double layers
:star: Get players to use the journey cards
:star: Don't make players flip cards to read
:star: Better integrate content and gameplay
:star: Cut turns where the best move is obvious
:star: Make big turns bigger, but without imbalance

A Dramatic Turn

The great thing about my study: when I started changing the mechanisms, I could reflect on each change's impact on dozens of dimensions of experience — but it also led to absurd analysis paralysis. I tried change after change. Each would improve a few dimensions of experience, degrade others, and leave the rest untouched.

I couldn't see how to get everything I wanted without making an abomination of the rules, which would be unacceptable for a game families are supposed to like. Before I knew it, there was a week left until our yearly company retreat, where I'd be expected to show my "progress".

I thought I'd be fired, but then in a moment hallucinogenic desperation, I thought of something:

In first edition, you draft cards into your hand, with cards acting as a currency you can spend in different ways:


These cards don't mean much thematically. They're just an abstract currency with which you buy everything.

I had the idea of removing those and replacing them with itineraries. You'd draft an itinerary, and it would just tell you what to do on your turn:


This was more intuitive, more thematic, and I could see it offered a chance to improve along many dimensions. Critically, it allowed us to import a trick from Trekking Through History we thought central to its success: drafting a card with multiple effects on it. Cards with multiple effects can create turn-variety, but remain balanced because you can balance the effects against one another.

BUT. I'd be replacing the core mechanism, which required overhauling most of the others. Scary.

With three days until the retreat — and a very deep breath — I decided to eject the core.


I hammered out a prototype and got a playtest together. It was janky and unbalanced, but despite this and to my indescribable relief, the response from playtesters palpably improved.

I took it to the retreat, and to my even greater relief, my colleagues loved it. Especially precious to me was the response of Charlie Bink, designer of the first edition. Charlie has high standards and doesn't pull punches. I'd just gutted his game — which had sold 130,000 copies by the way — and he'd responded enthusiastically to the gutting.


If he hadn't liked it, it would have broken my heart, but it was the opposite. I had to leave the building to punch the air victoriously until my arms were tired.

Back to the Original Question

Of the opportunities I thought I saw in the new mechanism, one was it would allow us to streamline the rules and make them more intuitive. When the card you draft tells you what to do, you don't need as many rules in the rulebook since now they're on the table.

Potentially, by shrinking the cognitive burden of learning the game, we might be able to include richer tactics and strategy for hobbyists, without affecting the overall cognitive burden for their families.

This is what we tried to do, as I'll explain below.


Shooting for Fewer Rules and Cooler Decisions

Indeed the final rules have 40% fewer words and by all accounts they're more intuitive and easier to understand. Here are two unsolicited comments we found about them, one from the great and holy Stegmaier!



That wasn't easy, but it wasn't the hardest part. This was:

Creating a New Decision Space

Here are the five most common hobbyist criticisms among BGG comments, and how we tried to ensure Second Edition doesn't suffer from them.

1. "It's Boring"
"Boring" can mean many things. Many who have this criticism probably also have some of the other criticisms below. Nonetheless, the opposite of boring is exciting and surprising, so we tried to build more excitement and surprise into Second Edition:

☑️ Raise the variety of things that can happen on a turn.

☑️ Build in more comebacks/turnarounds that hinge on those effects.

☑️ Build in more big "windfall" turns due to combos and other effects.

☑️ Ensure the game emulates the feeling of a "variable reward schedule".

2. "It's Not Replayable"
Replayability is affected by:

• How different it feels play-to-play
• How different it feels turn-to-turn
• Depth of strategy and tactics

...so we tried to improve the game in these dimensions. You can read about how we shaped play-to-play variety and turn-to-turn variety here. Our attempts to improve depth of strategy and tactics also addressed the next two criticisms, so I'll cover both at once:

3. "It's Too Light"
4. "The Decisions are Too Obvious"
Here's what I call the "conversion diagram" of TTW first edition:


This diagram shows the ways resources can affect each other's abundance, as well as the points earned. If an arrow points from one box to another, the resource in the first box can affect the abundance of the resource in the second. Notice that some "arrows of influence" are solid, and some are are dotted. The dotted ones represent mechanisms that change from game-to-game, which are supposed to create game-to-game variety.

However, we've learned of a problem in first edition: many players never trigger the dotted arrows, or barely do. They're effectively playing this simpler game:


Now compare the above diagrams to that of Second Edition:


Despite the simpler rules, Second Edition has more arrows of influence. This is no guarantee of tactical and strategic richness, but it creates more space for them. We tried hard to use the space well. Three examples (among others):

☑️ In first edition, resources flow into the diagram through one arrow each turn. In Second Edition, resources flow in through two to three arrows, but in different proportions each turn. This creates a more complex flow through the diagram, especially because there's more recursion in the Second Edition diagram.

☑️ The dotted lines are more variable and triggered much more often in Second Edition.

☑️ The number of distinct ways to take each turn is higher on average in Second Edition than first edition

5. "There's Too Much Luck"
This is the criticism we had to handle with the greatest care. The more one reduces luck, the less suitable a game usually becomes for families, so Second Edition does still have a fair amount.

However, as the legendary Richard Garfield has pointed out, luck and skill aren't opposites: it's possible to create games which have high luck AND high skill.


Here's a toy example to illustrate:

Imagine a game called RandoChess. It's exactly the same as Chess, but when you're done playing, you roll a die. If the die comes up 1-4, the player who won the Chess part of the game wins. If it comes up 5-6, the other player wins.

RandoChess has as much skill as Chess: every strategy and tactic that improves your chance of winning at Chess ALSO improves your chance of winning at RandoChess...just not as much.

RandoChess is a bad game, but if you mix skill and chance together artfully, you can make a good one. Poker, for example.


This is the approach we took. Specifically, we tried to make it hard for players to know where skill ends and luck begins. In first edition, if you happened not to draw a particular card you needed, you were screwed through no fault of your own and it was obvious. We tried to remove things like that in Second Edition.

How we did all of this is a long story, and this is already long. Suffice to say it took elbow grease and an astounding developer named Marceline Leiman, who also designed the solo mode and the expansion:


I've posted a few design essays covering some of those efforts in the Trekking the World: Second Edition BGG Forum for those who want to go deeper.

How'd We Do?

The short answer is we don't know. We'll know as the feedback rolls in post-publication. One encouraging thing: the early response so far is the strongest of any game I've worked on.

But my favorite thing so far is my wife's response. You must understand, I've introduced her to hundreds of strategy games, and I can count on my hands the six that she's enjoyed: Battle Line, Carcassonne: The Castle, Hanabi, Blue Moon City, Finca, and Trekking Through History.

Well...


Trekking the World: Second Edition is now available through the Underdog Games website.

If you happen to play it, I'd be deeply grateful if you left a thoughtful comment about your experience, both the good and the bad, in the ratings section of its BGG page.

Best,
Nick Bentley, lead designer


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