Board Game Geek

by Pam Walls

I remember I was sitting in my best friend's car as we drove around my hometown of Calgary, Alberta when I opened my email and saw a message that would change my life...not to be too dramatic or anything. This was October 2021, and the email was from Shanon Lyon at Ravensburger asking me whether I wanted to submit a pitch for a board game that seemed made for me: a co-operative, expandable, immersive game featuring Disney characters.

I've always loved watching Disney movies and going to the parks as a kid and adult, but when I was trying to remember what joy felt like in the depths of the Covid pandemic, I stumbled across Disneyland vlogs on YouTube, and it ignited an even bigger love for all things Disney. To be asked to come up with a game based on beloved Disney characters felt like such a perfect, and exciting, opportunity for me.

I will forever be grateful to Shanon for inviting me to submit a concept for this game — but how did I even get this email? We have to go back to February 2020 for how it all started. I was attending New York Toy Fair for the first time because my party game Act Fast was debuting there and I wanted to be on hand. This was the first time one of my games was on display at a convention, so it was a big moment for me as a board game designer.


I also took the opportunity to pitch other games to publishers attending the event. I did one of the most uncomfortable things you can do, especially as an introvert: go up to booths, introduce myself, and ask whether anyone would like to hear a pitch.

Thankfully, everyone was incredibly kind and friendly, even when rejecting pitch after pitch, but one of the publishers I really wanted to introduce myself to was Ravensburger. I grew up playing The aMAZEing Labyrinth and admired the success they had had with their Villainous board games.

I tried to discretely peruse their booth until I saw an opportunity to introduce myself and see whether anyone would have time to hear a pitch. It was toward the end of the festival, and they could have easily said they didn't have the time or capacity to hear a pitch, but thankfully Steve Warner from Ravensburger made time. I will be forever grateful to Steve for making the time to meet with me!

I showed him a tile game I had been working on for a while called "Where the Wind Blows", and it was ultimately a no, but I got Steve's contact information and we stayed in touch. I then started to get emails from Ravensburger inviting me to pitch new game concepts to them. Over the course of the next year, I would pitch six games to them, and they were all noes. In fact, just a few weeks before getting the email about the Disney game, I had received a rejection email from Ravensburger.

This is all to say that I had to repeatedly put myself out there and get through quite a few rejections in order to reach a point where I received the email asking for submissions for a new co-operative Disney game.

•••
[Editor's note: Let me interrupt this diary to highlight a video Walls has made that summarizes this story. Walls has a YouTube channel in which she discusses all things boardgaming, including a viral July 2024 video about "Meeplegate", Hans im Glück's mid-2024 effort to have a company cease using the word "meeple":]

Youtube Video
•••
One of the biggest strengths a designer can have is forgetting rejections quickly and hoping the next one will work out. If I had let those rejections cast doubt on my abilities as a designer and didn't even submit an idea for this Disney game, then I wouldn't be here writing this design diary today.

On that day in October 2021, my mind started to whir a mile a minute as I thought about all the different directions I could go for a co-operative game featuring Disney characters. I tried to focus on the specific aspects the game had to have. It had to be:

• Co-operative: Teamwork is key.
• Immersive: Players should feel like the characters they are playing.
• Accessible: Can be played in 45 minutes by players aged 8 and up.
• Scalable and Expandable: Should be playable by two, three, and four players, and standalone expansions should be able to be added to the base game or played on their own.

The game had to play up to four players, and the characters that had to be included were Maid Marian from Robin Hood, Elsa from Frozen, and Moana from...Moana. The fourth character was up to the designers submitting their ideas. (Elsa would eventually change to Violet from The Incredibles, but my first prototype included Elsa, as you'll see below.)

The fourth character I chose to include in my pitch was Belle from Beauty and the Beast. I always loved how her main attributes were her curiosity and her love for books. I felt like those qualities would be fun to work with in a co-operative game about adventure.

So I had my four characters — now what?

I want to frame this design diary with the challenges that I faced and the different approaches I took. Sometimes us designers start changing things without really thinking about what problem those changes are trying to solve, so I want to break up each section into what the challenge was that I was facing and how I tried to solve it.

The first major challenge was coming up with my overall concept for the game. Ravensburger didn't want a thoroughly playtested, final game. They wanted to hear initial concepts and would then work with the designer to develop the game, so I had to come up with a strong initial concept.

Challenge #1: Brainstorm concept for pitch

I tried to focus on two of the keywords from the brief provided by Ravensburger: immersion and teamwork.

For immersion, I wanted to have a good handle on all of the characters featured in the game, so the first thing I did was re-watch all of their movies. I paid special attention to the qualities the characters embodied and any quotes that could be used for flavor text and help give direction for the tone of the character.

I also thought about games in which I felt completely immersed, like Dungeons and Dragons and classic adventure video games like Riven, Leisure Suit Larry, and the Monkey Island series. In these games, exploration is a central factor, and I wanted to have that same feel in my game. This approach helped set the overall tone for my pitch: an immersive game based on exploration and completing quests.

I also wanted players to feel like they were the character they were playing. This led to me wanting each character to have their own quests, unique abilities, and custom dice that they would use in their quests, but also for combat. I imagined each character having their own "adventure pack" filled with all of their pieces.

Ravensburger specified that the game should take place in a neutral land, not in any lands associated with the characters, so I sketched out a board with locations that I felt could be incorporated into many different quests: a castle, a village, an inn, a jail, and spaces for location tiles that would change depending on which characters and quests were being used that game. This would increase the replayability factor that was also in the back of my mind.


I then sketched out player boards that showed each character's special ability and how they would engage in combat. For example, I wanted to focus on Belle's love for books, so I gave her three books she could read that would help her with healing, combat, and movement.


I then brainstormed quests for the characters with a focus on immersion. In the photo below, you can see Maid Marian's quest to save Robin Hood from Prisoner's Tower where she needs to find rope that she can attach to her arrow, then shoot through the window so that Robin could slide down.


The quest involved Maid Marian choosing between stealing rope or buying rope, then doing target practice (rolling dice onto the back of the card that had a target on it) before attempting to shoot the arrow through the window. As you can probably guess, this was far too many steps and too much text for a game that should be playable for kids aged 8 and up. This issue of simplifying the game and reducing overall text would be a recurring theme for me over this game's development.

I sketched out each character's custom dice, action tokens, quest locations, and quest items, enjoying the direction I was heading.


Now, moving to the concept of teamwork which was my other focus besides immersion. I kept rolling the words "cooperation" and "collaboration" around in my head, and the idea of having shared action cubes came to me. Rather than each player taking a certain number of turns as in most other co-operative games, I wanted to have a supply of action cubes and the group would decide which actions they would take for the round. They could decide to sail on Moana's boat for an action, or Maid Marian could deliver a gift to the castle to increase the group's maximum number of actions. This way, there wouldn't be any turns; the group would just decide which actions they would take each round.

By not having turns, communication and collaboration are necessary. When each player has a set turn, you can get into a situation in which each player simply performs their actions without any input from others and play moves to the next person.

I was aware of the issue of "quarterbacking", which is an inherent problem in co-operative games. Quarterbacking refers to one player taking control of a game and dictating what others should do on their turn. I researched the topic and remembered something I believe designer Gil Hova said, that sometimes all players need is something tangible to hold up to say, "Hey! It's my turn to make the decision!" This gave me the idea to have a leader badge, which would rotate to the next player the following round. It is amazing how effective it can be to have a physical thing players can hold up to show it's their turn to make the final decision.

I also wanted to emphasize teamwork in the quests. While each player had their own individual quest, other players could help with their friends' quests and in many cases, it is much easier — or even necessary — to rely on other players to help complete quests before time runs out.

Which brings me to another major consideration for my pitch: What is the endgame?

For my initial concept, I said that players had to each complete their individual quests before the end of seven rounds to win. They would lose if they all reached zero health. This, more or less, stayed the same throughout the development process, but I will speak more about the evolution of the endgame later on.

I playtested my initial concept with my sister Liz and her husband Rob. After the playtest, I felt confident enough to create my pitch video and cross my fingers.

Here is what my initial prototype looked like:


And my pitch video:

Youtube Video
After a few days, Ravensburger asked me to mail them the prototype — which is always a good sign! I was very excited, but still kept my expectations low. I packed up the prototype, mailed it off to them, then waited.

The Ravensburger team played my game and enjoyed the direction I was headed, so they scheduled a phone call to tell me they chose my concept to move forward with. I was a delivery driver at the time and pulled over on a side street to take the call; I was so excited and buzzing for the rest of my shift.

Now it was time to really get to work...

Challenge #2: Make game scalable, expandable, and replayable

I first focused on the design challenge of building a system that would make the game scalable (able to be played by 1-4 players), expandable (seamlessly add future expansion characters to play with base characters) and replayable.


Let's start with making the game scalable.

Early on in the design process, I had the idea of creating "adventure packs" for each character that would include all of their components so that players could grab the character packs they wanted and use those components to set up the game. These packs originally included quest location tiles that were added to a static game board. While the map of the board would never change, the tiles would depend on the characters in play.

I decided that the static game board didn't offer enough variation and replayablity. Additionally, it created awkward situations in which you might have three players and four quest locations, with you then needing to decide who would add two quest location tiles so that no locations would be empty.


I decided to create a grid of small land and sea tiles that were shuffled and laid out to create a different map each game.

This was heading in the right direction, but the high variability and randomness of the layout of the tiles created situations that could make things difficult for certain players, such as one character's quest location being isolated from everything else, or many of the water tiles being surrounded by land tiles, which would render Moana's special boat ability (free movement on water) ineffective.

I found a happy medium between a static board and a grid of small tiles by creating larger landscape tiles that included several locations on each and had exits on each side so they could be easily connected with each other. Each character would have two of these landscape tiles related to their character — a lot of water for Moana, land for Belle, etc. — so that the landscape of the game would differ depending on the group of characters involved. This also made the game inherently more scalable because the number of players would create a larger or smaller play area. I also made a generic castle tile that would be included in every game.



The system of self-contained adventure packs also meant the game could be expandable since expansion characters could be swapped in and out, with the chosen characters' landscape tiles building the board for that game. It also meant that few components would be repeated in the base game and any expansions.

To aid replayability, I increased the quests per player to four for a total of sixteen quests in the base game. This meant players could play a significant number of games with new quests each time.

Challenge #3: Reduce complexity/fiddlyness and increase fun

Reducing the overall complexity and fiddlyness (number of steps or in-game maintenance) was the main feedback Shanon would reinforce with me and it helped streamline the game, keeping the target market in mind: casual adult gamers and families with kids aged 8+.

The main areas that required streamlining were:

1. Actions

I originally had quite a few things cost actions — or "energy" as I called it for awhile — including healing, fighting, and moving, as well as specific actions related to quests. This meant that players would have to refer to the rules or the quest cards to see what did (and didn't) cost an action.

Over time, and thanks to Shanon's feedback, the only things that cost actions would be movement, healing, and special player abilities represented by action tokens on the player boards. This greatly reduced the players' mental load.

2. Player abilities

In my original pitch and for several iterations after, each player's ability acted in completely different ways. For example, Belle had several books that she could activate for different powers and Maid Marian could pick up gifts around the land and bring them to the castle to increase the group's maximum actions per round.

Over many playtests and discussions with Shanon, we decided to standardize how players activate their abilities, and for each player to have the same number of ability tokens. This would eventually turn into each player having two move/heal tokens, two base abilities, and one special locked ability that would become available once that character completed their quest. Each player's ability would be unique, but the way they activate it — placing the ability token on the action board — would be the same.


3. Combat

For my original concept, the enemies had their own dice that would be rolled in response to the heroes' attack. The number of times the dice would be rolled corresponded to the strength of the enemy, with stronger enemies rolling more than weaker ones. Wound tokens would be placed on the villain to represent their damage, and once their damage reached their strength level, they would be defeated.

The heroes also had unique dice or tokens and engaged in combat in entirely different ways. For example, Belle would flip her Combat 101 book token during combat rather than rolling dice. If it landed on the book side, she would inflict damage on the enemy. Maid Marian had arrow dice and would roll a number of them equal to her health.

The heroes could also face multiple villains at a time and would have to declare which villain they were attacking before rolling their dice.

All of these things, while fun in theory, resulted in slow, drawn out battles and greatly increased the component count with all of the wound tokens and enemy dice.

Shanon had the awesome idea of combining the heroes' attack and enemy response dice. Now, when the heroes attack, they could inflict damage on the enemy, but also roll damage against themselves at the same time. This increased the pacing of combat and reduced the overall number of dice needed in the game. Also, we decided that all players should roll dice in combat rather than some flipping tokens (as Belle originally did) since everyone agrees rolling dice is fun! (I'll confess that when I played as Belle, while I loved the idea of activating my book token, I felt left out of the fun of rolling dice during combat.)

Through a lot of playtesting, we landed on the distribution of hits and damage on the dice that felt the most balanced. We also decided that giving players one re-roll during combat seemed to work best.


We also decided that the enemy would recharge to full strength at the end of a failed battle, so there was no need for wound tokens.

It was also clear that the heroes should face only one enemy at a time, so they never needed to declare which enemy they were attacking as that slowed things down and created confusion. (Could leftover damage from one defeated enemy be transferred to the other remaining enemy?)

To resolve this, I marked different locations with numbers that corresponded with numbers on the villain tokens. You would place that villain at that specific location, and only one villain would ever be at each location, with land villains appearing only on land and water villains on water, like Gaston at the Village and Ursula at Deep Cove.


However, the numbers added visual clutter to the landscape tiles and enemy tokens. What's more, since the enemies were the "essences" of villains, they should be able to appear on land or water without any issue. In the end, we moved to the Vortex (which I'll speak more on below) spawning villains on unoccupied spaces on that specific tile. It is a simple solution to ensure only one villain per space.

There was also the idea of gaining something when you defeated a villain. I went down quite a few paths for this, including having the enemies drop different items that the heroes could use or energy that could be used to move or heal. I also explored the idea of the villains turning into light, which could then be spent to buy powerful items the group could use, including portals that could transport the group from one location to another on the board.

Again, a lot of these ideas were fun in theory, but they added a layer of complexity to a game in which a lot is already going on. It was difficult to let go of the idea of the enemies leaving loot behind after defeat, but it was ultimately the right decision. Now, the enemies turn into light when they are defeated — and sometimes that light is used in quests — and players start the game with fun abilities rather than having to buy special powers during the game.

4. Quests

Coming up with sixteen unique and interesting quests that didn't add too many more components with fairly restrictive text limits was challenging. My original quests had quite a bit of narrative and story since I felt they were a primary way of immersing players in the game. They also had multiple steps since I wanted them to feel like epic quests with a lot of twists and turns.


The text limit made me focus on the most fun parts of the quests, while cutting everything else. This was for the best since players, and in particular casual gamers, would feel overwhelmed looking at a wall of text with multiple steps on their quest cards. I reduced the narrative (which moved to the back of the cards to free up space), reduced the number of steps, and used icons instead of words whenever applicable.

Challenge #4: Building tension towards a climactic endgame

The original endgame was simply once all players had completed all of their quests. This led to a fairly unsatisfactory ending for a few reasons:

1. Players who had already completed their quests didn't have much to do while they waited for their friends to complete their quests.
2. Not everyone was involved in the final actions needed to win the game.
3. If players weren't paying attention, they might not even realize the game had ended.
4. Doesn't tie into a story.

This led to me wanting to create a build-up toward a climactic and thematic endgame. One simple path I tried required all heroes to gather at the castle after they all completed their quests before the end of a certain number of rounds. This was heading in the right direction, but still didn't result in any "high five" moments.

Another path I explored extensively was that of a super villain unleashing enemies in the land. The heroes would then have to defeat the super villain at the end of the game to win, as with the final boss in a video game. We played around with the super villain increasing in strength as the rounds went on, but most games ended in the same couple of rounds, so this didn't create much tension — but the super villain was at such a high strength level by the end of the game that more than one player would be needed to defeat them. This eventually led to the requirement of all heroes having to gather for the final battle, which helped everyone feel involved right until the end of the game and reinforced the idea of teamwork, which is at the core of the game.


Eventually, the super villain was replaced by a Vortex that spawns villains in the land, and the players being required to gather together to close the Vortex as a team at game's end.

Throughout my playtesting process, I had played around with how and when to add villains to the board. They were mostly added from quests and event cards — see the "Killed Darlings" section below — but adding villains at the start of each round solved the issue of wanting to increase the pressure on the players throughout the game. We wanted some uncertainty about how many villains would be added, so we played around with flipping tokens that would range from "Add 0 villains" to "Add 5 villains", but found that to be too swingy; we reduced it to adding either one or two villains each round. These would eventually turn into the darkness cards, which were also specific to which heroes were being played that game.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed reading this somewhat lengthy designer diary. This game went through many different iterations, but the core remained the same: an immersive adventure game that reinforces teamwork by not having turns and deciding as a group which actions the group should take as they defeat villains and embark on quests.

I am grateful for this opportunity and want to thank Shanon Lyon for sending me the call for submissions, then working alongside me to bring out the best in this game. I also want to thank the many, many playtesters who helped shape the game, in particular my mom Nancy and dad Darcy, as well as Liz, Rob, Meg, Lau, Pat, Michelle, Deb, Anna, Lorna, Tammy, and everyone at Vancouver Playtest Group.

I spent many, many hours working on this game, but one moment stands out, and that was during a playtest with a family with three young daughters. When asked what they thought after the game, the youngest said, "This isn't like a regular game, it's an adventure!" and that truly was the highlight of the entire process for me. Anything beyond that will be the cherry on top.

Now, I hope this game helps you and your friends and family create memories together as you embark on your own adventures.

Pam Walls

Killed Darlings (RIP)

1. Event cards (Choose your own adventure style cards that would affect the gameplay based on the players' decision)

Cut because: low replayability


2. Each hero having a specific characteristic (exploration, magic, royalty, combat, intelligence, and kindness)

Cut because: Didn't add much, hard to decide who would have which characteristic since they all embody a lot of them


3. Belle's book collection (activate different books for different powers)

Cut because: Had to standardize the players' abilities


4. Doctor (Had to get the doctor from the village to heal wounded players)

Cut because: Took too many actions to travel to the village to get the doctor, simplified to players being able to use actions to heal themselves


5. Upgrading abilities (flipping tokens to upgraded side, like Moana's boat moving one space for free at the start, and three spaces once upgraded)

Cut because: Overly complicated for target market, too much to remember

6. Buying items with light from defeated villains/them dropping loot

Cut because: Delayed getting fun powers to use during the game; now players start with abilities instead of picking them up)

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

While working on a project, I rediscovered game news tweets I posted in 2009 when I was on my own at BoardgameNews.com. Here's a sampling:




Nearly all of the links in these tweets are dead, whether due to the link-shortening site shortening itself out of existence or the original source going poof.

(One link that lives: The Forbes blurb about Prince Albert von Thurn und Taxis, who was worth US$2.1 billion in 2012, with the blurb leading with this timely note: "German prince reclaims the title of world's youngest billionaire as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg drops out of the billionaires' club." Those were the days. Also, Forbes is so filled with pop-ups and interstitials that the site is a struggle to use.)

While those tweets are useful only as artifacts, I did like their formatting and brevity, mostly because I regularly email myself game announcements and news that end up only as compost under later emails. Rather than email myself a link that will often go no further than a dedicated inbox folder, why not post a short message that takes roughly the same amount of time to write?

Thus, as of today I've started posting game news bits on BoardGameGeek's Bluesky account:


Will I also post these bits on BGG's Twitter account? No. Once is enough as I'm not trying to add more busy work to my life — only re-direct the busy work that I already do into a more productive result.

We'll see whether I keep at this, given that the result will be little more than a similarly long list of dead links in 2034, but that's the plan for now. Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Let's spend our Sunday checking out creators passing around the offering plate to see who wants which games brought to life:

• Epilogue will be the debut title from Violet Daisy Games, with this being a new edition of Emma Larkins' co-operative storytelling game ...and then we died., which I covered in 2018. (Kickstarter)

Epilogue skirts the edge of what can be considered a game, but that technical detail should be overlooked in favor of what Larkins' design offers: hand-holding creativity that spurs you into an unforgettable blend of mortality and silliness...assuming that's what you want to do, of course. Results will vary widely depending on who's holding the cards and which words you put together while playing.

• The Magnus Protocol is a horror podcast from Rusty Quill, which is not the name of a little-known 1950s baseball player from Iowa, but a production company and podcast network founded in 2015. Here's the setting:

The Magnus Institute was an organization dedicated to academic research into the esoteric and the paranormal, based out of Manchester, England. It burned to the ground in 1999. There were no survivors. Now, almost 25 years later, Alice and Sam, a pair of low-level civil service workers at the underfunded Office of Incident Assessment and Response, have stumbled across its legacy, a legacy that will put them in grave danger.

If this intrigues you, then it is our pleasure to welcome you to the Office of Incident, Assessment and Response. Make sure you pick up your badge at desk and report to your line manager before sitting down. Oh, and stay away from I.T., seriously.

Designer Sydney Engelstein has created a half-dozen co-operative mystery games inspired by The Magnus Protocol that make you a member of the O.I.A.R. and charge you with investigating strange happenings. (BackerKit) Here's what Indie Boards & Cards plans to release in the second half of 2025.


— In The Magnus Protocol Mysteries: The Doppleganger, a man is terrified to see himself dancing in a club with his ex-husband, while a rash of bad luck tears its way through his friend group.

— In The Woman on Fire, a block of flats burns down in the night, after which the residents claim they saw a woman made of fire wandering the hallways.

— In Six Feet Under, a small-town therapist goes to the doctor for chest pain and discovers that her lungs are filled entirely with dirt.


— In Blackout, you confront two situations: In 1940, a boy is trapped alone in the dark with a broken camera. In 2022, with energy prices rising out of control, a strict blackout curfew is imposed upon the residents of an apartment building, and a student goes missing from his flat.

— In The Grinning Corpse, a man is hospitalized and in a coma after a car accident, yet even through his vegetative state, his face is locked in a rictus smile.

— In The Last Supper, a famous young chef who specializes in cooking organs is found dead in her apartment, with an organ missing from her own body.

• If you're looking for more spooky games that you can't play until Halloween 2025, you can check out Mystic Manor from Jake and Nathan Jenne of Last Night Games. (Kickstarter)


In the game, 2-5 players perform actions outside said manor that allow them to build up their character's maximum courage and storage, gain new items, sell items they've collected, enlist the help of a pet dog, or reset their courage points to re-enter the manor. Once inside, you spend courage to move to a new room to collect items, attack ghosts, capture imps, bargain with apparitions, or gain the companionship of a house cat.

• Carla Kopp of Weird Giraffe Games has a new roll-and-write design — Reef & Ruins — that can be played by any number of people, each of who has their own reef, ruin, and enchantment player sheets. (Kickstarter)


On a turn, someone rolls three dice, which represent the three heads of a hydra you control. You can use these "heads" separately to make progress on all three sheets, or have them together on a single sheet. After eighteen rounds, you calculate the value of found treasures, enchant them for more points, then add in reef benefits to get your final score.

• Designer Totsuca Chuo and publisher uchibacoya describe their upcoming title Sweet Lands as "a heavy Euro game inspired by Terra Mystica and Terraforming Mars". (Kickstarter) The game bears a 1.5-3 hour playing time, so this game is operating on a grander scale than earlier games from this designer/publisher duo such as Aqua Garden and Ostia, but the gameplay details are minimal for now:

Welcome to "Sweet Lands", the kingdom of delightful confections! The former king has succumbed to his gluttonous love for sweets, leaving behind a final decree. Summoned by this royal edict, you and your fellow players are challenged to build the most magnificent city — and if you succeed, you will ascend as the new ruler of Sweet Lands. Gather the support of various townsfolk and navigate through fierce competition to create the richest and most prosperous city of sweets!

Sweet Lands is a heavyweight Euro-style game with over 200 cards, 14 unique characters, and 449 wooden tokens, offering an unprecedented gaming experience. This game captures the essence of traditional Euro-style games while introducing fresh and innovative mechanisms. Come and experience our biggest masterpiece!

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• In March 2025, Renegade Game Studios will release Risk 2210 A.D.: Frontline, a collection of four Risk 2210 A.D. expansions originally released in 2004(!) that were available as tournament prizes:

— Mars: Shake up combat by fighting in two new locales: Mars, and the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos. Unlike the Earth map, these maps add neutral territories that don't belong to any continent, so no continent bonus can be gained from having control of them.

— Tech Commander: Introduce a sixth commander to the game, with a new command card set that adds advanced weapons and tactics such as mind control and technical espionage.

— Factions: Before the game begins, each player chooses one of six factions, which determines the amount of energy, cards, and commanders you start with, as well as whic h special abilities you have.

— Invasion of the Giant Amoebas: At the beginning of a turn, the active player draws from the amoeba event deck, with amoebas being an extraterrestrial threat with advanced technology that will threaten everyone.

•••
Not to downplay the good news of these items becoming available again for those Risk 2210 A.D. fans who previously had to scrounge eBay and convention vendors, but I sometimes wonder whether the current era is too much of a good thing, making us devalue items that used to require persistence and long-term effort to acquire. RoboRally expansions were a rarity, and Heroscape was a glorious garage sale find, and now we have new items being added to these product lines on the regular. If you miss one, well, whatever because two more will be on store shelves before too long.

I will now relinquish the soapbox for others who recall what a soapbox even is.

•••
• At Gen Con 2024, Italian publisher DV Games debuted BANG! Dice Explosion, a collected edition of Michael Palm and Lukas Zach's BANG! The Dice Game, the Old Saloon and Undead or Alive expansions, and four new characters packaged in a giant stick of dynamite that will look nice on your shelf next to Ya Blew It! and Reinhold Wittig designs from Edition Perlhuhn.


• In September 2024, Cranio Creations crowdfunded Barrage: The Legendary Box, which it describes as a storage solution for everything related to Tommaso Battista and Simone Luciani's 2019 game Barrage, along with two new companies: Japan and Brazil. This item should reach backers in mid-2025.


• Grey Fox Games has announced a tenth anniversary edition of Ole Steiness' Champions of Midgard that will include the Valhalla and The Dark Mountains expansions and every promo previously released — all rebalanced to mesh well — along with new artwork and "super premium components".

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

This mash-up glows...To follow up today's post about new editions and spinoffs, let's talk about two other titles that Renegade Game Studios has recently announced on top of Battle for the Deep.

• Christopher Chung's 2015 game Lanterns: The Harvest Festival will be magically transformed into My Little Pony: Festival of Lanterns, with Renegade taking advantage of its Hasbro licensing deals to add 100% more sparkle to its catalog. (Chung is also the designer of 2022's My Little Pony: Adventures in Equestria Deck-Building Game and its handful of expansions.)

Here's an overview of this March 2025 release:

Join Twilight Sparkle and her friends as they visit Mistmane's Eastern Village, where they will celebrate all of their accomplishments in restoring Equestria to its peaceful ways by releasing Cutie Mark lanterns. As the glowing lanterns rise up to form patterns in the sky, they all can feel the magic of friendship abound!

In My Little Pony: Festival of Lanterns, players have a hand of tiles depicting various color arrangements of floating lanterns, as well as an inventory of individual lantern cards of specific colors. When you place a tile, all players — both you and your opponents — receive a lantern card corresponding to the color on the side of the tile facing them. Trade mooncake tokens for new lantern cards, and return lantern cards to claim a dedication tile worth points. After all tiles have been placed, all players get one final turn, then whoever has the most points wins.

My Little Pony: Festival of Lanterns features some modifications from Lanterns, including a solo mode and a "Gala" expansion in which you add up to four friend cards to the game from the sixteen included; on a turn, you can now spend mooncakes to use the power of a friend to fain a bonus lantern, make a second dedication on a turn, force someone else to trade lanterns with you, and so on.

• If rainbow colors and friendship aren't your thing, you can instead bring Diplomacy: Era of Empire to the table, with this being a standalone game with a four-hour playing time aimed at both new and experienced Diplomacy players.

Here's an overview of this 2-7 player game due out in September 2025:

The 19th Century was a dynamic, yet turbulent time when huge areas of the Ottoman Empire, the Indian sub-continent, China, Indochina, and the East Indies were fought over by competing empires.

In Diplomacy: Era of Empire, seven great empires — Britain, France, Russia, Turkey, China, Japan, and the Netherlands — vie for control as alliances are formed and trust is betrayed. Players negotiate and outwit one another in a delicate balance of co-operation and competition to gain dominance of the region. Players must rely on their own cunning and cleverness, not dice, to determine the outcome of this game of conspiracies and conquest.

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

I'm still working through notes from SPIEL Essen 24, but let me take a detour to highlight new editions and spinoff titles of existing games, starting with one that relates to a title that debuted in Essen in October 2024:

• U.S. publisher Capstone Games has signed a deal to release Tomáš Holek's Galileo Galilei from new Czech publisher Pink Troubadour. This title will hit North America in Q2 2025, and Capstone Games promises more collaboration with Pink Troubadour in the future.

For background on the game, read Holek's designer diary on BGG News.

• Nighthawk Interactive is crowdfunding Half Truth: Second Guess, a party game from Richard Garfield and Ken Jennings that mirrors the gameplay from their 2020 release Half Truth. (Kickstarter) The gist of gameplay is that each round, a team is presented with a question and six answers to that question, half of which are true and half of which are lies. You want to guess as many true answers as possible, scoring nothing for the round if you fall for a lie.

• French publisher Jocus plans to crowdfund Pitch Out: Under vs Aquilies, a new edition of Adrien Charles' disk-flicking game Pitch Out, which debuted in 2020, then was followed by Pitch Out: Nomads vs Seeds in 2022. (Gamefound)

Each set includes components for two players, with each player getting five walls and 5-8 disks, with each disk having a special power. You can combine sets for team games. If you knock an opponent's leader outside the playing area — or all of that opponent's other pieces — you win.


• In May 2025, Polish publisher Board&Dice will crowdfund a new edition of Federico Pierlorenzi and Daniele Tascini's Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula, which was apparently not ultimate enough for today's game market. The publisher states that this new edition will feature "streamlined rules, intuitive graphic design, and completely new artwork".

• In December 2024, Level 99 Games will have a new printing of Cliff Kamarga's Sellswords: Olympus on the market.

In this two-player game, you lay out one of four terrain cards, then each draft six of fifty hero cards. You take turns placing them in an imaginary 5x5 grid, using special abilities in order to win head-to-head battles with the opponent. You score once all cards have been played, then you draft another six cards each and complete another round.

• In an August 2024 post from Gen Con, I posted a teaser pic of a new Axis & Allies game from Matt Hyra and Renegade Game Studios. Now the publisher has revealed that Battle for the Deep: Powered by Axis & Allies will debut in March 2025. Here's the pitch:

Four aquatic factions vie for control of the vast oceans: the Undersea Kingdom led by Coraline Oceanus, the Leviathans commanded by Scyphozoa Regina, the Protectors and their Turtle Mother, and the Denizens of the Deep, who are controlled by the necromancer Azazel Dreadborne.

However, after centuries of battle, it has become obvious that no one kingdom is powerful enough to bring peace to their world. The factions must choose an ally...

Despite this description, the game is listed for 2-4 players as opposed to only four, so I would imagine that all four factions are in the game each time you play no matter how many people are at the table.

Read more »

by Derek Croxton

I have always liked card-drafting games. The drafting aspect creates player interaction, and the use of cards allows a variety of outcomes.

The first game I remember that used drafting to build a tableau was Fairy Tale, which I love. I also had the good fortune to know Bruce Glassco and played his Fantasy Realms many years ago in prototype form. That design takes advantage of the possibilities of set collection more than Fairy Tale as each card is unique; they come in suits but are scored differently, and most of them have special bonuses and penalties that make up a significant part of the final score. This creates a role-playing aspect, and you can actually make up a story with your cards.

There is a catch, though: Although Fantasy Realms is extremely easy to learn, it is hard to play well until you know the deck. I wondered whether I could use a similar system to create a game that you could play well without having to know the details of which bonuses were on specific cards.

Thus, the principle of King's Coalition is that the bonuses are open to everyone, bonuses such as multiple cards of a class, a sequence, or one of the card bonuses that is turned up in the game. Unlike in Fantasy Realms, the cards have a narrower range of values; since none of them get blanked or blank other cards, it wouldn't make sense to have some cards worth three or four times the value of others. The classes are asymmetric but are easily summarized, so you can start playing competitively in your first game.

A key feature of the game is the random bonuses that are turned over during play. On the first four turns (out of six), a bonus card is revealed. The first one is worth 30 points if you achieve it; the second 20; the third 15; and the last one 10. Most of the bonuses require you to have cards from certain classes, while frequently preventing you from having a different class. The peaceful bonus, for instance, requires you to have at least three peasants and/or artisans, but you are not allowed to have any knights. Some bonuses will conflict with one another and possibly with your set or sequence bonuses as well; a lot of the game is figuring out which bonuses are worth pursuing.


One playtest group asked whether the bonuses shouldn't be reversed, with the highest value coming last in the series and the lowest first. This was, in fact, how the design started, but I discovered that the last bonus was too random; by that point in the game, if you didn't already have some of the cards, you weren't likely to get them. Some players, by contrast, happened to have the right cards and stumbled into 30 points virtually for free. Putting the most valuable bonus first gives all players a chance to work toward it — or not — as they choose; you might stumble into the 10-point bonus, but that's not going to be a game breaker.

As a player, the trick to King's Coalition is to not fall between two stools. The game features several ways to score points, and it's important to pick the ones you're going for in time to fulfill them, rather than grasping for too many only to find that you miss them all. The design reminds me a bit of Race for the Galaxy in this respect. Race is obviously a very different game, but when I first started playing it, I became enamored of too many cards that I wanted to play rather than to spend.

In King's Coalition, you don't want to hold on to a card for a potential bonus that you probably won't achieve. It is easy to forget (at least for me) that you have to get rid of some cards to get others; I have a tendency to imagine getting the right cards for several bonuses, forgetting that my hand is only seven cards, so getting one bonus often means sacrificing another.


On the subject of hand size, I should mention the innovation of "enlisting" peasants. In principle, with twelve peasants in the deck, it seems like they should be valuable for a large class bonus even though their individual scores are low. In practice, this didn't seem to work out until David Platnick suggested the enlisting mechanism. What this means is that if a peasant is in the recruitment area, you can place it in front of you without having to discard another card that turn; in effect, your hand size gets larger.

The downside is that peasants played this way are visible for everyone, and you can't get rid of them later — but these disadvantages are relatively minor. You could argue that peasants are the best cards in the game, although as long as multiple people are going for them, their value is diluted since individually they aren't worth much. Peasants show up on bonuses more than any other card, both as "must haves" and as "must not haves". This means that people who enlist peasants are risking unrevealed bonuses, which mitigates the value of going for them early in the game. On the other hand, if they are required for the 30-point bonus, they tend to get snapped up as soon as they appear in the offer, so it's hard for anyone to accumulate a lot of them.

I first tested this game with my sons Alex and Jonathan. When we had something playable and we needed a name, Jonathan said, "It has to be something 'coalition'." King's Coalition seemed like an obvious name and theme to me. I did have one gamer question me about it since he thinks of kings as giving orders, not making coalitions.

I was trained as an early modern historian (for the 16th and 17th centuries), so this is my background showing through: The king is negotiating with his subjects to raise taxes, which he can do only with their support. I don't think the current rules refer to raising taxes, but that was my working scenario when I came up with the cards.


After shopping the game around for a while and failing to find a publisher, I decided to try going the Kickstarter route. I want to give a shout-out to my artist, Rebecca McConnell, who did a great job for a reasonable price. The publisher wanted to go with different art, but I'm sure that her art helped the game get attention. The final art by Rod Rodrigues is amazing, and I appreciate the work he put into it.

It was due to a random encounter at the Origins Unpub room that WizKids decided to pick up King's Coalition. That was in 2021, and it has been a long road since then to the current version produced by Play To Z. Thanks to Zev Shlasinger for sticking with it through these three years.

Derek Croxton

Demo game with non-final cards at GAMA Expo 2024 Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

While working on the SPIEL convention preview, I look at thousands of pages in the BGG database, and while doing so, I (among other things) try to note which creators lack images on their pages. If I happen to run into those people at SPIEL and the situation is right, I'll snap a pic so that they can be better represented in the database.

I picture the database as a multi-dimensional structure that's riddled with millions of holes, somewhat akin to this Mandelbulb image that I use for my laptop's background:

Floating in cerebellar space
Ideally I can patch holes to smooth out that surface, but I know that's a Sisyphean endeavor given that thousands of new listings are added annually. Still, I do it...

• To represent my role as a database fixer, we'll start with designer Takaaki Iida / イイダ タカアキ, whose trick-taking game FIXER from JELLY JELLY GAMES was available in Essen. In FIXER, you compete in multiple tricks at once, going head-to-head against each other player. You can read Iida's designer diary about the game here.


• Another designer diary author who presented their game at SPIEL Essen 24 was Alexandra Ivanovici, who had her debut title Chonker Party from her own Chonker Games. You can read her story about the game here.


• Jesse Eyer from Dangerous Games demoed his debut title: Siberian Manhunt, which is due out in 2025. An overview:

During the height of the Cold War, the U.S. mounted a surveillance program over the Soviet Union, flying U-2 spy planes at high altitude to avoid radar and fighter interceptors. Not every pilot returned...

Siberian Manhunt is an asymmetrical hidden movement game for two players. One player takes the role of a U-2 spy plane pilot who has crashed behind enemy lines and must escape across the border into China. The fugitive must use their wits to navigate the dangerous landscape, survive encounters with predatory animals, and avoid starvation and hypothermia, all while being pursued by the KGB. Do they dare enter towns, risking detection by the local authorities, or will they strike out into the wilds and rely on their wilderness survival skills to stay alive?

The other player is a Soviet general assigned to capture or kill the fugitive. At their disposal is the full might of the USSR: KGB agents and Yakut trackers, the Red Army, aerial searches, road blocks, and propaganda campaigns. But the Soviet government is fickle and not all Russians are loyal communists — and sometimes the hunted is deadlier than the hunter.

• Designer Frank Müller launched his debut game at SPIEL Essen 24: Space Missions from his own tiros-games brand. Here's an overview of this game, which was crowdfunded in the first half of 2024 and available for purchase in Essen:

As director of a space agency, experience the time of the 1960s, when mankind began to explore the universe. Your goal is the manned moon landing. You will train astronauts, make technologies more reliable, assemble rockets, and launch missions into space. The player with the most successful space program wins the game.

From left: Frank Müller and Britta Firmenich
Space Missions is a risk management game. Using a new deck-sizing mechanism, you optimize several decks at once, which will determine the success or failure of your missions.
In order to prepare the missions as well as possible, you perform actions in each round with the help of six specialists. Plan ahead and take a few risks to get an early slot for the launch of your rocket.

• Malaysian designer Goh Choon Ean has released several titles under her brand LUMA, including Kaki Lima: Downtown KL, a new version of her 2019 release Kaki Lima.

The term "kaki lima" refers to the "five-foot way", the covered walkway in front of shops in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia designed to protect walkers and shoppers from the sun and rain.

Kaki Lima: Downtown KL takes place in the historic center of Kuala Lumpur, with players walking along with other pedestrians and trying to both create and enjoy "sticky" activities as they move about the city.

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

The games I was looking for at SPIEL Essen 24 were mostly behind closed doors, which on the one hand makes sense given that these games could not be bought and would distract attendees from the new games that were available and on the other hand doesn't make sense given that I'm just showing you pictures of these games now — but maybe everyone is over SPIEL at this point and looking forward to 2025.

Non-final front cover
In any case, Matagot announced that it would release a new edition of Mission: Red Planet in 2025.

This design from the Brunos Cathala and Faidutti debuted in 2005 when Asmodee was still publishing games under its own name, then was re-issued in 2015 by Fantasy Flight Games with an expanded player count (2-6 instead of 3-5), new action cards, and a separate moon board that players could occupy. Matagot plans to keep the larger player count, while introducing a modular game board.

Non-final back cover
For those not familiar with the design, in each of the ten rounds of Mission: Red Planet each player chooses a role card from their hand, then these cards are revealed one by one, with players trying to place astronauts on spaceships that are launched to Mars, after which they will move across different regions of the planet to fulfill missions and score points.

• In late 2025, Matagot will release The Peak Team, a co-operative design for 2-5 players by Scott Almes in which (if I can follow my notes correctly) each player gets four cards at the start of a round and distributes them to other players, after which everyone will play two cards, using any two cards as a joker should they not get what they need.

Non-final front cover
Players need to move through regions on the map, using cards for transportation of different types as they try to complete personal missions that ask them to rescue animals or restore their habitat. When you do so, you can use the ability of that animal. You want to ensure that you collectively complete all missions in a round to avoid negative consequences.

• One note about the Matagot brand: Starting in 2025, Matagot will use its "black cat" logo on family and family-plus games, with Kolossal Games taking over expert-level games and cobranding the classics Epic line games such as Kemet, Inis, and Galactic Renaissance.

• I'm a sucker for card games with simple rules, and French publisher Lumberjacks Studio featured a trio of such titles at SPIEL Essen 24.

Debuting at the game fair in Cannes in February 2025 is Paper World, a game for 2-4 players from Alexandre Aguilar and Benoit Turpin, with a cool paper cutout look from artist Olivier Derouetteau.

The game includes colored cards numbered 1-5, with face-up card piles starting in the center of play. On a turn, either you draft all top cards of the number or color of your choice into your hand or you play cards from your hand of the same number or color into your 3x3 tableau. You have a maximum hand size, and if you surpass that limit, you dump extra cards into a trash pile that will cost you points.

When you play cards, you need to play them in order — first 1, then 2, etc. — with cards in the same stack being the same color. If you want, once per turn you can trash a card in hand to skip a level, say, going from 2 to 4.


Some cards have a scissors icon around their number, and whoever played a scissors card most recently places a scissors token on that card; this grants them 2 points and the power to skip a level for free once per turn — with the drawback that you can't play on top of that scissors card.

You want to build up stacks since higher numbers have more stars, a.k.a. points, but you also want to complete goals, with players who complete them first scoring more points. In the game above, the goals were to have a central card surrounded by four colors (completed by the player at left), have two piles with 5s on top (completed by the player at front), and have a 2x2 square with 3s on top (not yet completed).

The box cover mirrors the cutout look of the cards
When only two piles of cards remain, each player takes a final turn, then tallies their stars.

Paper World feels much in the spirit of Faraway and Castle Combo in that you can have a plan, then sometimes you're gifted with the perfect card(s), so you swerve into a new plan. Unlike in Castle Combo, you have a bit more freedom to steal cards that other players want because the power of, say, a green 3 isn't as specialized as the scoring powers on cards in that other game.

• Looking at a slightly smaller game, in April 2024 Lumberjacks Studio released Solstis, a two-player game by Bruno Cathala and Corentin Lebrat, and in January 2025 Solstis will be available in the Barnes & Noble bookstore chain in the United States as its "game of the month".

In the game, each player has a small hand of tiles, and a number of tiles are face up on the table. On a turn, lay down a tile from your hand, then take a tile from the center that matches either the number or color of your played tile, then add both tiles to your tableau. (By matching number, you'll have two tiles to place in the same column; by color, two tiles in the same row.)

If you can't match, place a tile face up on the table, then flip a face-down tile from the reserve. If this tile matches any of the face-up tiles, take the newly flipped tile and a match; if not, leave the flipped-up tile on the table, then take a rainbow tile from the reserve and place it anywhere in your tableau.

Almost everything is connected, with many fires lit!
In effect, the players divide the mountain scene between them over the course of the game. You want to connect as many tiles as possible because at game's end, you score 1 point for each non-rainbow tile in your largest group. Additionally, if a fire tile on top of the mountain has a continuous path to the bottom row, you earn 1 point from this tile.

Finally, whenever you create a 2x2 square of tiles, either you draw two spirit tiles, choose one to place in the middle of this square, and leave the other one face up, or you take a face-up spirit tile and place it in this square. Each spirit tile has an immediate effect or a scoring bonus.

Lumberjacks Studio is working on an expansion for Solstis, but revealed no details about it.

• An even smaller design from Lumberjacks Studio is KADO, a card game from Antoine Bauza due out in France on November 21, 2024 in which 2-5 players give one another gifts. ("Cadeau" is French for "gift" or "present".)

Cards have three characteristics: a value from 1-5, a ribbon in one of five colors, and one of five objects. Players take turns being the giver, and when you're the giver, you draw a card, look at it in secret, then give it to someone face down; this player can look at their card.

Once you've given everyone (including yourself) a card, the player to your left can try to swap gifts with you. If they want to, they name a color and object; if either of them match the gift you gave yourself that turn, you must swap cards, then everyone adds their card to their display. If they fail to name either your gift's color or object, the next player can try. (If someone guesses both color and object, they receive a face-down card as a 2-point bonus at game's end.)

Part way through a game
After twelve rounds, everyone will have twelve cards in a grid that's three rows tall and four columns wide. If all the ribbons in a column are the same color, you score points equal to the highest value in that column. For each row, choose an object in that row, then sum all of the values on cards that show that object.

KADO is a perfect little gift for gamers as it plays quickly, lets you gamble on getting the right card (as in Biblios, which has a similar card-gifting system), and allows you to play mind games with opponents, making the game quietly interactive. After all, if I give you a halfway decent card, is that because I'm trying to keep a better one for myself, or am I trying to make you think that way so that you'll give me the card that I gifted to you?

If I were working at a game store once again, I'd have KADO set up by the register so that I could demo it as often as possible...

The player on the left crushed it in bears Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

U.S. publisher Bitewing Games has been teasing a "secret epic" Reiner Knizia project, and today it's revealed that the project is a trilogy of games — two updated editions of older games and one new design — that together tell the story of how aliens discovered Earth, how humans in our solar system ventured to other systems, and how we're so comfortable in space these days that we compete in races between celestial bodies. Together these games form the Cosmic Silos Trilogy.

Let's start with SILOS, a re-imagining of 2008's Municipium from Valley Games that might be better known for its divisive artwork from Mike Doyle than its gameplay.

Here's an overview of the setting and gameplay in this 2-4 player design:

It is the year glork-too-vleep, or mid-20th century according to Earthling time. We recently stumbled across this planet called Earth and discovered intelligent, albeit primitive, life. The most intelligent and valuable of these specimens are the creatures known as cows. Many precious secrets of the universe have already been discovered through our studies of these cows, but to our frustration, we've found these particular Earthlings to be far too tranquil to harness for our political purposes.

Alas, for our galactic goals we must settle upon the second-most intelligent form of life on Earth: the human being. These creatures are just intelligent enough to meet our puppetary standards. Their brains appear eager to be molded, and their civilization perfect for our siloing, so we've selected a small municipality to begin our trial invasion.

My comrades and I have decided to make a game of it, splitting into factions and competing to gain the most human pawns and claim the most community power. Through shapeshifting and impeccable disguise, we've been able to blend in and establish our secret presence. Some of the humans have sensed a threat; others have publicized their abductions but to no avail. Cries of conspiracy abound, but it is already too late. We are in control now. The invasion has begun...

Aliens have come to silo humans — brainwash, steer, and preserve human civilization — for their cosmic purposes! In SILOS (Secret InterLopers from Outer Space), players control competing factions of aliens who abduct and brainwash humans and cows while secretly invading their community. Players tussle for majority influence in the key locations of this small town as they seek to activate location powers and control human specimens for societal power.

Players take turns repositioning their alien figures and activating an event card. The objective is to collect a complete set of humans: politicians, government operators, influencers, and professionals. A complete set will earn a player a societal power emblem, and the first player to earn five emblems wins the game. Cows are particularly valuable and thus count as wild tokens toward forming a complete set.

A Crop Circles expansion introduces more elements of long-term strategy through the crop circles module, while also featuring diverging asymmetry through the permanent skill tiles module.

After covering humanity's past, we skip to the present day for EGO, a 2-5 player game that transforms 2005's Beowulf: The Legend into a modern setting:

We are not alone! It is the 23rd century, and proof of alien life has finally been discovered beyond our solar system. In fact, recent developments in technology have triggered a cascade of discoveries throughout the galaxy; intelligent life and advanced civilizations are now known across many planets, moons, and asteroids in the Milky Way.

Now the race is on to establish interstellar relations with the aliens. The peoples of Earth, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and Jupiter know that any one of these planets can gain dominance and rule the system by making powerful alien alliances, but despite our best efforts, the individual planets are not capable of creating their own galaxy-traversing vessel. The only chance we have of reaching alien life is by pooling our resources to build the required Super Ship. In an unprecedented, albeit uneasy, co-operation between the planetary governments, the peoples of our solar system have finally built the first of these Super Ships.

And thus, the coalition known as the Extraterrestrial Greeting Organization — EGO — is now ready to launch our first mission. While our final destination is the Galactic Senate, EGO's declared mission is to visit many advanced civilizations throughout the galaxy and establish friendly relationships between our solar system and the aliens. Through careful politics, our five planetary governments aim to gain allies and benefit from these interstellar relations.

Alongside a ship crew, one ambassador from each planet will be on board the Super Ship, and they will take turns leading the mission. Even before the mission is launched into space, the tactical maneuvering between our governments and their representatives begins.

Expectations are high, as is the rivalry between our governments to get their fair share – or even more than that – from this unprecedented mission. Each ambassador has been discretely tasked to ensure their home world comes out on top. Of course, these ambitions require methodical politicking, and all tactics must be cautiously tempered. Alien races may easily be offended by overly aggressive advances. This could lead to adverse effects for our planetary governments – if not failure of the whole mission...

In EGO, players proceed through a sequence of major and minor events including auctions, drafts, risks, and more. Risks and egos are the lifeblood of this game as players will frequently find themselves in a game of chicken with their rival ambassadors as they try to impress various alien civilizations and earn political power.

By offering gifts, attempting persuasion, plotting intrigue, exchanging technology, and displaying charisma, these ambassadors will be able to gain advantages and allies. But careless tactics can lead to damaging or even disastrous encounters. Taking a risk during a negotiation event can possibly tarnish your reputation with the aliens...or at least confuse them greatly as you retreat to the ship in a fluster of embarrassment. Yet there's always the chance of a triumphant success, and nobody ever made it to the top without stepping on a few challengers.

During auctions, everyone must spend whatever they bid. These auctions require you to spend matching icons from your hand (including charisma, which can satisfy any demand). The winner of the auction has first dibs on the available rewards, then second place will pick their reward, and so on — yet some of these options are less rewarding and more...penalizing. Whether they win rewards or suffer penalties, the players who pick and choose their battles — who predict best when to conserve their cards and when to spend big — will come out on top.

Being the naive humans they are, these clumsy ambassadors will undoubtedly offend many aliens along the way, but you'll have many opportunities to mend these offenses. At the end of the game, players earn significant bonus points or suffer serious penalty points depending on how offensive the aliens find them to be. Ultimately, the ambassador with the most prestige and respect will earn a seat in the Galactic Senate and be crowned the winner of the game.

EGO's I.I.I. expansion (Interstellar Interludes & Interruptions) adds special alliance tokens and extends the journey map with ship boards featuring new competitive transmission events.

Finally, we come to ORBIT, a new design for 2-4 players:

Come one, come all to the Silo System, the beating heart of our galaxy, for the race of the decade! We've recruited the best tourists in all the cosmos: travel-hardened explorers who will compete in the ultimate contest. These pilots must race to visit all the planets in the Silo System, surfing upon orbital paths, teleporting between hyper jump portals, and beaming through hyperspace. Enjoy your dream vacation on one of our luxurious planets or lavish space stations as you witness the ultimate interstellar marathon. All the eyes of the galaxy will be watching this decennial event celebrating the unification of our systems under Silo Supremacy.

ORBIT (Orbital Race Between Interstellar Tourists) is a 24th century tactical space race with simple turns, yet challenging possibilities. Players compete to visit all planets of the system, then return to their starting planet first.

On your turn, you play a card, activate its actions in any order, then draw back up to your hand size. Cards allow you to do a combination of things: move your ship, collect energy for bonus movement, advance planets along their orbit, or even reverse the orbital direction of a planet.

When your space ship is docked on a planet, the moving planet will carry you along its orbital path, helping you to traverse the map even faster. Planning your route wisely as you ride orbital currents and bounce between planets is the key to success — but your cutthroat competition will no doubt seek to spoil your plans and sabotage your tourism progress. It helps to be flexible and adapt on the fly, literally.

You shouldn't ignore the opportunity to upgrade your ship along the way. Visiting certain space stations and planets allows you to increase your hand size and energy storage capacity, so you must balance short-term efficiency against long-term advantages. The game board features additional tactical resources such as fuel depots, hyper jump portals, and hyper acceleration cannons.

Players can enjoy a randomized set-up across two unique game boards. The game also includes a few variants: a solo mode, four-player partnership mode, and a stationary planet.

ORBIT is the third and concluding game in the Cosmic Silos Trilogy by Reiner Knizia, and with the Nebular expansion, you can add three modules to the game: navigation tokens, hyper accelerator engines, and artificial nebulas.

Bitewing Games is running a crowdfunding campaign for the Cosmic Silos Trilogy through November 20, 2024, with the games due out in Q3 2025. In a press release for this trilogy, Nick Murray of Bitewing Games writes:

With the success of games like Zoo Vadis, Cascadero, and others, we feel like Bitewing Games and Reiner Knizia make a great team. We also happen to be some of Reiner's biggest fans — his best designs are among our all-time favorite games. So we had this dream to concoct an Avengers-level event by recruiting some of our favorite artists to bring a huge Knizia project to life. It would be a love-letter to fans and a celebratory tribute to the many amazing games created by Reiner Knizia and the passionate illustrators of his titles. That's part of the reason why we decided to keep this project a secret right up until launch day.

The artists in question are Kwanchai Moriya, Marie Bergeron, Vincent Dutrait, and Brigette Indelicato, with the first three being responsible for the look of the past, present, and future games, and Indelicato providing graphic design for the series.

As for the setting and story behind the games, perhaps you'd like to hear Knizia's explanation confession:

Youtube Video Read more »

by 3 Minute Boardgames

Kia ora Koutou, ko Jarrod Carmichael toku ingoa. Hello everyone, my name is Jarrod Carmichael, and I am the designer of Red Dust Rebellion, the latest title in GMT Games' COIN franchise. You might also know me as the voice, and occasionally the face, of the 3 Minute Board Games review channel on YouTube. I am also the designer of the upcoming Shadow Moon Syndicates from Arkus Games.

Red Dust Rebellion is my first published game, and it has been a long and fascinating experience. Thank you for this opportunity to share it.

What Is the COIN Series?

"COIN" stands for COunter INsurgency, and the COIN game series is about irregular and asymmetric wars. To put that in layman's terms, those are wars in which one side is a conventional organized military and at least one of their opposing forces are not. Conflicts that have appeared in the COIN series include the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Julius Caesar's invasion of Gaul, and the Vietnam War.

The COIN game series tries to model these conflicts by treating irregular and regular forces in quite different ways. Firstly, irregular forces need to be found before they can be targeted for attack, but once found they are generally not a match for the regular military in a stand-up fight.

COIN games also focus on the political aspect of war more than many other wargames, with the deciding factor in games being whether civilian populations support or oppose the government, rather than capturing points on the map. The political aspect also plays out in the different factions as well, and there can be multiple regular and irregular factions in the game who will work together most of the time, while only one of them can win the game.

The COIN series has done an amazing job of recreating and modeling these historic conflicts, so why did they let me make an entirely fictional game about a conflict that hasn't taken place?

Why Mars?

I was setting up and playing a game of A Distant Plain — a game about Afghanistan and the third game in the COIN series — and on the television was Ron Howard's "Mars", a dramatization of Martian colonization combined with documentary information and interviews with scientists and engineers about the reality of colonizing Mars.

Ron Howards' Mars
And as those two things were happening, I started thinking about how Mars is always a hot bed of rebellion in science fiction. Whether in Total Recall, Babylon 5, Red Faction, or any other number of sources, Mars is always the place where stories about independence movements are told.

I thought, "This would make for a cool COIN game. I'll make it to play with my friends" — and that is literally what I did. I designed the world and the different factions first. The Martian Provisional Government was the main government force, and I wanted them to be quite a normal COIN government faction, the main rebels started off as "Free Mars" and were a normal insurgent faction; they didn't become "Red Dust" until much later on. Then we made the slightly weird factions: the Corporations who are trying to terraform mars, and the Reclaimers who want humans to adapt to Mars, not the other way around.

I threw all this together in a few weeks, made a ton of cards, and designed the first iteration of the game on my whiteboard before drawing it more permanently on a big piece of white paper. Working prototypes really don't need to be pretty; they need to be functional.

First map version
After a few tests, I thought the game was working quite well, and I thought about sharing it as a print-and-play for people online — but I thought I'd better ask the designer of the original COIN games, Volko Ruhnke, for permission first.

How the Game Became Real

In 2017, which is before I started the "3 Minute Board Games" channel, I emailed Volko asking for permission to share my game once it was finished, and I shared with him some pictures and an overall treatment of the game.

To my total surprise, it turned out that Volko and some other folk at GMT Games had been talking about branching the series out into fictional conflicts, but no one had yet come up with a good idea or put in the effort to make a game — and here I walk in with a working prototype and a built-up and developed world and setting.

Volko suggested I not publish it as a print-and-play and instead consider developing it to be published with GMT officially. He warned me then that it would be years before the project would see the light of day because of all the other games in the line ahead of it, but I was so excited and keen, I didn't care. I got to work polishing the game and even got a friend to make a fancy board for me to do my testing on.

Prototype map
I was given the direction to make the game normal for COIN, mostly because they worried the setting was going to be enough to confront without the rules being over the top as well.

I worked away on this quietly for two years or so...

The Great Shake-Up

Around late 2020, we had a meeting about the course of the game, and the decision was made to take the shackles off the design and lean into what made war on Mars different from war on Earth — and this was when Red Dust Rebellion started to become the game it is now.

It's also when I started working more closely with my developer Adam Blinkisop and with Jason Carr, who manages the COIN series for GMT.

First, I completely redesigned the board. Mars has roughly the same surface area as all the landmass on Earth, which means the spaces between settlements on Mars are massive, so I wanted to represent that on the map. I found a map someone had done of how Mars would look when terraformed and found three regions on there to zoom in on. These three regions would become our zoomed-in areas of conflict, with the rest of Mars being represented by an abstract wilderness.

Our three focus regions
I added in the Aldrin cycler, which is a system of ships doing a figure-8 orbit around Mars and Earth and using the gravity to keep going with minimal fuel required. This system became how we moved resources from Earth to Mars.

Refugees and housing were always something I wanted to show in any conflict on Mars because it shows how vulnerable humans are on a planet without oxygen. To do this, we created a conflict system that would cause damage and create refugees if battles took place in populated regions. Adam did a lot of work getting this system to work as well as it does now.

I also completely revised how the Reclaimers faction works, making them into a card-driven faction that breaks just about every conventional rule in the COIN series. I think the bulk of Adam's testing work was trying to get my vision of how these weirdos should work into reality.

We also introduced satellites and a lot more special rules about Earth Government, a fifth faction whose control swaps between the Martian Provisional Government and the Corporations based on how well the conflict is going.

Almost all of the development work at this point was happening on Tabletop Simulator, and it was a real collaborative process. Many of Adam and Jason's ideas are in the final design. Later, Joe Dewhurst was brought on, mostly to design the solo systems, as that's outside my wheelhouse, and he too had a few additions to the core game.

Through this process, we went from being a normal COIN game to something quite unique — and although Red Dust Rebellion is the latest in a long series of games, it is very much its own thing.

Tabletop Simulator
The Art of Red Dust Rebellion

I wanted the game to look great, while looking a little different from others in the franchise. Thankfully, Jason and the GMT crew were 100% behind this, and we got ourselves an amazing artist: Marcos Villarroel Lara.

I got to have a lot of creative control and wrote every single card's creative brief, for example:

Card 9 – Red Wednesday Riots — The Red Wednesday Riots were the single bloodiest night of public unrest during the whole rebellion. Street battles between protestors and security forces became deadly. The foreground of this card should show a protestor on the ground, defenseless, as a security officer's boot comes down on their head. In the background, similar acts of violence and chaos should appear. (indoors/subterranean)

Sketch
I would then get back a sketch on which I could provide feedback before getting the final art later. I rarely had to give much feedback as Marcos seemed to take my words and get them right the first time. It was a truly remarkable experience to work with an artist like this and see your vision of a world come to life.

Final art
The Long Wait

Red Dust Rebellion was approved to go ahead on the GMT P500 in 2020, and it's finally going to come out in 2024. Covid definitely got in our way, but a huge part of these delays was an effort by me and the team at GMT Games to get the game right, to get it polished and perfected as much as we could. The game had strong bones and core concepts from day one, but it took a huge collaborative process involving passionate and skilled people at all stages in the game's development to make it what it is today.

As the designer, I held the overall vision for the design and the world in my head at all times, but it took a literal army of testers, developers, artists, and others to make that vision a reality. All I can hope is that people enjoy the game half as much as I enjoyed designing it.

Final game on the table Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Let's continue the reports from SPIEL Essen 24, focusing this time on the 2025 release schedule of French publisher IELLO, which is distributed in the U.S. by Flat River Group and in Germany by Hutter Trade. Each year in Essen, IELLO puts together a media showroom, and I'm happy to share pics from that show. Note that all components and graphics depicted are not necessarily final.

We'll start with what IELLO plans to be its biggest release of the year: Popcorn, a 2-4 player economic management game from Victor Saumont that will debut at either Gen Con 2025 or SPIEL Essen 25:

In Popcorn, each player manages their own movie theater and tries to show the best combination of movies in order to attract guests to their seats.

The game plays out over nine rounds, and in each round you may acquire a new movie, build or upgrade your theater, and use advertising to attract new guests — then it's showtime, with you drawing guests at random from your bag to see who has shown up. Place guests in the right seats to activate special powers; match them with the right movies, and you get a movie bonus as well, thanks to their enthusiasm for your good taste.

Reminder: Non-final graphics, as with all images in this post
After watching films in your theater, guests might be spirited away to other theaters thanks to ads presented by those theater owners...but you'll probably do the same to them, too.

The bonuses from a movie get worse the longer it runs, so be sure to bring in fresh films to keep guests on the edge of your seats. After all, happy guests can help your theater win awards in town; more importantly, they can keep the "popcorn" piling up in your coffers, and whichever theater owner fills their popcorn box the best wins.

In the lower-left theater, you can see four bonuses to the left of The Godmother, and when you match guests with this movie, you choose the bonus you want, then slide up the audience tile to cover the bottommost bonus, which represents the audience becoming less eager to see this film over time.

• While you looking at Popcorn, you might notice that only two bonuses remain in the green theater for the debut title "King of Tokyo". Are audiences tiring of seeing giant monsters beat on one another? IELLO sure doesn't think so based on other releases coming in 2025, such as the Bookwyrm, a promotional King of Tokyo monster that will be available exclusively through bookstores.


• If you saw my 2023 write-up of IELLO's forthcoming titles in 2024, you might recall a poster that featured 88 King of Tokyo monsters. That number has jumped over the past twelve months, with Bookwyrm being monster #98.

Monster #99 will the Globe Smasher, one of four monsters included in the King of Tokyo: Tournament Kit, which will debut in Q1 2025. The other monsters are Lynxote, Scheggiatron, and Marhanagy Szürke, which used to be exclusively distributed within (respectively) Spain, Italy, and Hungary.


The King of Tokyo: Tournament Kit is designed to facilitate organized play, with components included to run a 16-person tournament or two 8-person tournaments. These components include 16 buttons and 18 promo cards, specifically six copies each of three new cards, which can also be used as prizes. IELLO plans to refresh the Tournament Kit every two years.

• King of Tokyo monster #100 will be...The 100th, which is decked out in IELLO's colors — yellow and black — and which will first be available in Q1 2025 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the company.


• Also coming in 2025 is King of Tokyo/New York: Monster Pack – Luchador, the fifth title in this series and the first in five years following Cybertooth in 2019. Like previous monster packs, this consists of multiple elements that can be added to your games individually or together. First, the monster Luchador enters the ring, with or without power cards depending on how you play King of... games.


Second, the expansion introduces "challenge mode", with each monster donning a mask at the start of play. If you damage a monster in Tokyo (or New York) and that monster doesn't retreat, you can challenge them to a one-on-one match. Each of you will play a challenge card face down, and other players can contribute challenge cards to one side of the match or the other. Whoever pulls off the best wrestling move — a "Giant Powerhouse perhaps? — wins the match and takes the other monster's mask, which is worth 2 VP as long as you hold it.

• Richard Garfield's King of Tokyo: Duel will get a small expansion in the form of a Baby Gigazaur monster card that will be packaged with new power cards. This item will be available exclusively as a tournament prize for the first six months of its release in 2025, then it will be made available for retail purchase.


• On Nov. 8, 2024 in France and in 2025 elsewhere, IELLO will release Time Bomb: Undercover, a new version of Yusuke Sato's Timebomb co-designed by Quentin Schoemacker in which 4-8 players are divided into three teams, with Agency trying to stop a bomb from going off, the Organization trying to destroy the world, and the Shadow trying to manipulate everyone else in order to snip the final wire on the bomb.


Each player has an ID badge in the lower-right corner of their card, and at certain times you might reveal your ID to a neighbor — but some roles (Viper, Ace) are double agents, and the Shadow can choose an affiliation as it suits them. Location cards revealed each round introduce twists to gameplay as players keep snipping wires bit by bit.

• IELLO released Yann Dupont's Piña Coladice in France in July 2024, and the game will come to the U.S. in 2025. Each turn, you roll the five dice up to three times, ideally then claiming one of the coasters in the 4x4 grid. The earlier you claim a coaster, the more points it's worth — and if you place four of your cocktail markers in a line, you win instantly.

• Taiki Shinzawa's LUZ is in a similar situation, debuting in France on October 11, 2024 and coming to the U.S. in 2025.

In this trick-taking game, you know the colors of the cards you hold, but not their numbers, with your neighbor having arranged your hand with each suit going from high to low, then giving you those cards to hold. Each round, you bid on the exact number of tricks you'll take, although you can fudge that number by one, with you scoring fewer points should you hit either target.


Nice image progression on the cards!
• In 2022, Korean publisher Playte released a new version of Manfred Reindl's Skull King: Das Würfelspiel — a trick-taking dice game combination — under the name Mino Dice. IELLO has already released this title in France under the same name, but when the game debuts in the U.S. in 2025, it will be called Mythical Dice to avoid any chance of someone overhearing the name and thinking it's a dice game about tiny fish.


• IELLO's deduction game series Guilty will receive a new entry in 2025 with Guilty: Fontainebleau 1543 from Jérémy Fraile, Eliette Fraile, and Yohan Servais:

The royal court in Fontainebleau reeks of conspiracy, and it's up to you, René Bianchi, perfumer to Catherine de Medici, to get to the bottom of things. You must use your flair, medical expertise, and appetite for intrigue to find out what is preventing the crown princess from conceiving an heir — and fast.

To start Guilty: Fontainebleau 1543, you'll read the introduction, then place the specified cards on the table. Choose a card, then turn it over and read it. What will you find there? And behind reading, you might have to put your skilled nose to the test with scratch-and-sniff cards that bring history to the present.

Time will keep passing, possibly leading to surprises as you become immersed in the French royal conspiracies of the 16th century, which are based on historical facts. Conduct your investigation, card by card, but time is short and your choices have consequences...

• The party game Canoe Rabbit Bat Peas? was the most "work under construction" title that IELLO showed at SPIEL Essen 24. This party game for 3-10 players from Justine Vanhuffel and Louise Blaise has players work in teams to give clues to their teammates that sound like nonsense, but which will ideally converge in meaningful words or expressions when they repeat the clues aloud.

In the category of gastronomy, you have a two-word phrase, with each word having two beats
• Little Soldiers — a wargame/party game combo from Florent Baudry and Adrien Fenouillet, based on a concept from Cédric Barbé, that was originally intended as a Gen Con 2024 release — has been moved to 2025/2026 to give the company more time to streamline the design as a family-plus game instead of something more complex.

• IELLO distributes Restoration Games' Unmatched line in Europe and Asia, and it expects to release Unmatched: The Witcher – Realms Fall and Unmatched: The Witcher – Steel and Silver in Q1 2025, with Unmatched Adventures: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles following in Q3 2025.

IELLO also plans to release Unmatched: Acrylic Sidekicks Pack 4 in November 2024, with this set featuring minions from Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze.

• For the past couple of years, IELLO has encouraged SPIEL attendees to graffiti a long exterior wall on its booth. Here's a section of that wall I snapped on Sunday evening after SPIEL Essen 24 was over, and everyone was heading for the door:

Don't luz yourself looking at a thousand messages from gamers around the world Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

In game overviews, I often prize "simple rules" as a positive characteristic, but I've rarely gone further than that phrase.

What constitutes "simple rules"? A ruleset that you can explain within x seconds? That fits within a certain paper size? I tend to think of simple rules as not having exceptions from a core of possible moves. A game might have exceptions, yes, but the exceptions as effectively outside of the rules themselves. In Innovation, for example, each action you take is one of four possibilities:

• Draw
• Achieve
• Meld
• Dogma

Innovation's rule structure is formalized and minimal, but the game includes 105 cards, each with a unique ability, and those abilities come to life with each dogma. Your (basic) action transforms into something else courtesy of a card in play.

Steffen Mühlhäuser's TOKAN from Steffen Spiele works differently in that its rule set is (almost) a single sentence. After setting up the thirty tokens in a random 5x6 grid, players choose a color (red or black), then alternate turns, and on a turn:

If possible, you move one of your colored tokens orthogonally — with a mouse moving exactly one space, a jackal two, and a lion three — so that it ends up at a higher level than it started, with a jackal being able to carry one tile when it moves and a lion carrying up to two tiles.

We must add three wrinkles to this minimalist rule set, the first being an explanation of how you win after no one can move and the game ends:

After discarding all single-token stacks, your score is equal to the sum of tokens in stacks that have your color on top.

The second wrinkle is a tad more complicated:

When you move a token, if one or more tokens are "behind" the moving token, then you slide these tokens to fill the gap left behind.

The final wrinkle:

Tokens cannot move over gaps.

The black lion in the upper right can land only on its own lion, which isn't necessarily bad
Everything derives from these rules...other than one exception that I frequently forget during play:

You can't cover the token that the opponent moved on the previous turn.

This restriction, as small as it is, feels like a cowlick on an otherwise well-styled model. My memory isn't great, and sometimes I will literally forget which token the opponent just moved as I buzz through possible moves on my turn in my head. We could rotate a token 45º to mark it as off-limits, but then we'd have to unrotate a token and rotate a new token each turn, and so far we haven't noticed anything breaking from us not using this rule. We play with the assumption that any token is fair game for being stacked upon, and all is fine.

The moved mouse has dragged two tiles with it
Well, sort of fine. I've played five times on a copy from the BGG Store — yes, we have copies for sale — and so far I've won only one game, being routed in the other four.

TOKAN remains a mystery to me at this point; I find myself unable to easily picture which tokens are moving where, which responses the opponent could have to a move. Like Kris Burm's DVONN, the board starts with a plethora of possible moves. Each token can move almost anywhere! So much freedom!

Then tokens and stacks start getting cut off. A token will have only one move possible, and what potential does it have after that? One aspect of the game that I think I undervalue is the ability to carry — or not carry — a token or two with a jackal or lion. You can always look at the tokens in a stack, so before moving a carnivore, you can review what it would carry and what would be left behind.

And now the lion is kaput for real
Jumping on your own token gives you something to carry so that you can end the move at a higher level — and sometimes you are forced to carry something so that you can make a legal move — but you can sometimes move while uncovering a token of yours previously hidden, effectively getting two attacks from the same space.

I know this intellectually, yet I haven't been able to play well with this in mind. No lions have sprung from the bush unexpectedly to swallow my opponent's stacks.

As with other games of this type, I feel like I'll learn TASSO best by playing multiple times, spotting mistakes along the way and seeing how to set up future moves, but so far I'm still on the horizontal part of the skill curve. We'll see whether that changes with time.

For more examples of gameplay from start to finish, watch this video:

Youtube Video Read more »

by Przemysław Fornal

Hello everyone! My name is Przemysław Fornal, and together with Michał Łopato, I co-create the Oak Dell game series. In 2023, we released Villagers of the Oak Dell, and for 2024, we've been working on Dungeons of the Oak Dell. I would like to tell you about the process of designing this new game.

•••
While creating the Oak Dell series, we wanted to pay homage to the classic video games that had a huge impact on us in our childhood. Villagers of the Oak Dell was inspired by The Settlers, also known as Serf City: Life is Feudal, while Dungeons of the Oak Dell draws from classic RPGs such as Eye of the Beholder, Dungeon Master, and Legend of Grimrock.

When we began the project, we started by defining the key elements that we wanted to emphasize. We quickly realized that all of these elements — combat, character development, and dungeon exploration — were equally important. However, the first-person view and combat became our priorities. Together with Michał, we decided to focus on creating a unique combat system that would be highly immersive.

Since our game series is based on roll-and-write mechanisms, it was natural that the writing tool would also serve as a sword to fight monsters by drawing lines. This was a good starting point; we just needed to develop mechanisms that would allow for diverse combat tactics and a variety of monster classes.

Our first idea was to use a grid on the monster where life points (circles), monster attack points (triangles), and miss points (X) were located. The player had at their disposal a set of weapons that could be used depending on their choices. The monster would be defeated after marking all of the circles and triangles. This system was somewhat reminiscent of Tetris but had the advantage of drawing lines. However, its main drawback was its tediousness. Decisions about weapon choice and attack location slowed down the gameplay significantly.


To solve the problem of long pauses between actions, we decided to simplify decision-making. In the second version of the game, players chose a die from an available pool. (I'm skipping the dice selection system as it's not the most important part.)

The new system involved drawing a line from a point marked as a die. The length of the line depended on strength, while possible turns depended on dexterity. The monster's life and attacks remained unchanged, but we removed the miss points and added points outside the monster that provided additional rewards (torches, potions). The new version was faster, but still unsatisfactory.


Seeing potential in this system, we decided to improve it by removing the dice to further reduce downtime. In the new version, players could draw lines from an external point, with the restriction that each point could be used only once. This was interesting but still did not meet our expectations.

Upon analyzing the system, we concluded that the problem lay not in the choice of actions but in the line drawing itself. The multitude of possibilities and the need to analyze each subsequent move made the gameplay too complicated and less immersive. Additionally, we did not like the effect of the grid and points on the monster.


It was time to change our approach to line drawing. As we started thinking about what cutting monsters should feel like, we spontaneously drew quick lines on their silhouettes. This was our first glimpse of what combat in our game should truly be. We drew several points outside the monster and tested whether there was potential in this idea. There was!


A simple mechanism in which two intersecting lines create a point turned out to be excellent. The rule for drawing lines was straightforward: draw a line from point X to point Y. When designing the matrix for strikes, we had to determine the average number of strikes needed to defeat a monster. We decided that six moves should suffice to defeat any creature. This gave us twelve points from which a strike could be launched. Additionally, we divided the points into four sections to increase the variety of choices.


Next, we explored different shapes for strikes to allow for more diversity. Unfortunately, we had to abandon this idea because all shapes, except for the circle, resulted in imprecise intersections of lines. The example below shows an intersection grid that zooms in on intersecting lines.


For our system, we needed a "clean" grid with appropriate distances between line intersections. Here is what our system's hit map looks like:


With such a map, we drew several conclusions:

• Assuming that each intersection with a line deals damage, we must exclude the central point that would deal 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 damage. Exclusion means omitting this point in the monsters' silhouettes. (We will return to this later.)
• Objects cannot be large blobs.
• The outline of the monster must be at the right distance from the line intersections to easily identify hits or misses.

The more we worked on this system, the more we liked it, mainly due to its "depth" and immersiveness. Adding additional fields with rewards on the monster's board and creating new monsters with unique abilities that change combat style became simpler.

We present two types of monsters as examples:

The first is the Strzyga, which has a large silhouette with many "easy" points to hit. However, its HP increases (marked by dashed lines) when it deals damage to the player, forcing a quick elimination to prevent a shortage of points for strikes.


The second type of monsters is the Spiders, whose difficulty lies in their numbers. Each has 1 HP, but each must be hit separately, making it harder to optimize actions. For this monster, we avoided the problem of stronger points to hit as they simply cease to matter.


Looking at the grid overlaid on the monster, it might seem that hitting it would be easy. Nothing could be further from the truth! In the game, you can't use a ruler or closely examine the angles. You simply declare from which point to which point you are drawing the line, and slash! But don't worry, we added a skill that allows for precise measuring of strikes.

Of course, a ruler is helpful for drawing straight lines. Specifically for this game, we created a shield-shaped ruler equipped with a special grip that allows for comfortable and quick use. We also included a universal writing tool handle to transform it into a real weapon...


In short, this is how our combat system was created. Naturally, we also had to design an action selection system, dungeon maps containing different scenarios, and a hero board with unique abilities. These elements also contain interesting solutions, but they are not innovative enough to delve into here.

Thank you for reading.

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• On October 3, 2024, Routledge released Graphic Design for Board Games, a book by designer/artist/graphic designer Daniel Solis, who has more than two decades of experience in the industry. A summary of the book:

With a sense of humor, plenty of examples, and simple tips, Graphic Design for Board Games covers everything from typography to retail presence. Learn how to effectively use graphic design elements to enhance player experience. Create stunning game components, clear rulebooks, and effective game boards that will keep players engaged...

Newcomers will learn introductory concepts of visual communication. Intermediate designers will find ways to anticipate common visual obstacles and improve playtest results. Experienced veterans will find insightful comments shared by fellow professionals.

Graphic Design for Board Games is the second book in the CRC Press Guides to Tabletop Game Design series following January 2024's Thematic Integration in Board Game Design by designer Sarah Shipp. (More on that book here.)

• The third title in this book series will be Cardboard Ghosts: Using Physical Games to Model and Critique Systems from designer Amabel Holland, with this book scheduled for release on January 13, 2025. An overview:

Games can be used to model systems because they are themselves systems. Video games handle this under the hood and teach you as you play, but because board games are operated manually and require the player to understand the system beforehand, they can be a valuable tool for recognizing, understanding, and critiquing real-world systems, including systems of oppression. These systems, often unseen and misunderstood, haunt our world. Board games turn these ghosts into pieces of cardboard we can see, touch, and manipulate.

Cardboard Ghosts: Using Physical Games to Model and Critique Systems explores both the capabilities and limitations of overtly political board games to model systems and make arguments. Two major approaches are considered and contrasted: one, built around immersion and identification, creates empathy. The other, applying the Verfremdungseffekt to distance the player from the game, creating space for reflection. Uncomfortable questions of player roles and complicity when modelling oppressive systems are examined.

Throughout this book, board game designer Amabel Holland draws connections to computer games, literature, theatre, television, music, film, and her own life, framing board games as an achingly human art form, albeit one still growing into its full potential. Anyone interested in that potential, or in the value of political art in today's world, will find many provocative and enriching ideas within.

• During SPIEL Essen 24, Funforge and Stonemaier Games announced a deal in which the former sold the Tokaido game line to the latter, effectively giving Funforge a lifeline that would allow it to complete its long-delayed Kickstarter project for Monumental: African Empires and continue as a business.

The same cannot be said of Mythic Games, with co-owner Leonidas Vesperini posting a long note on BGG on October 1, 2024 that can be summarized as "we have no money, and please stop harassing us". (Given the responses on that thread, the request did not succeed.)

In a January 2024 post on Kickstarter, Mythic Games stated that CMON had acquired the intellectual properties of both HEL: The Last Saga and Anastyr, two long-delayed releases that will be further delayed since in its acquisition announcement CMON states that "Upon careful evaluation of both titles, we have concluded that neither HEL: The Last Saga nor Anastyr are currently ready for publication in their current state and will require substantial effort to complete them." (I contacted CMON in October 2024 for an update on these projects and have not yet received a response.)

• Nucleum from Simone Luciani, Dávid Turczi, and Board&Dice has won the 2024 Jogo do Ano, the Portuguese game of the year. The other nominees were Evacuation, Hegemony, Horseless Carriage, and Scholars of the South Tigris.

• To catch up on an older national award, in June 2024 the Österreichischer Spielepreis, Austria's annual game awards, were named, with Daniel Greiner's Mycelia from Ravensburger receiving the top prize, the "Spiel der Spiele".

Other winners included Germán P. Millán's Sabika (expert category), Mathieu Aubert and Théo Rivière's Bag of Chips (trend), Julien Prothière and Juan Rodriguez' Featherweight Fiesta (families), and Fabrice Chazal and Anthony Perone's Garden Heist (children).

• For a lesser-known honor, let's look at the Generationenspiel, an irregularly-granted "seal of quality" to games that are suitable for play across all generations.

The Generationenspiel is issued by Spielecafé der Generationen, a non-profit organization in Pfarrkirchen, Germany that aims to create meeting spaces for all generations.

In September 2024, the card game Odin from Gary Kim, Hope S. Hwang, Yohan Goh, and Helvetiq was named the newest Generationenspiel winner, with Johannes Goupy's Rainforest having been selected in April 2024 and Richard Garfield's Dice Hunters of Therion chosen in January 2024. You can view all previous winners here.

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

BoardGameGeek had a booth at SPIEL Essen 24, but unlike SPIELs of old, we were not livestreaming from the show.

The effort of that activity was monumental, consuming weeks of preparation time in order to schedule hundreds of game demos, followed by the on-site workload of booth management as we worked with no-shows and added in what we found on site, with a concluding push to edit and publish 300+ videos only to discover that few of them were viewed in great numbers.

Instead, this year in Essen we repeated what we did at Gen Con 2024, with Candice filming game demos at various booths with technology that far outstrips what I used in the 2010s. I'm not a tech guy, so this is all new to me, and I'm blown away by what's available in portable equipment.

Here's what Candice and Derek Porter have published so far, starting with Candice and me scouting Spielbar's used game booth at the end of SPIEL Essen 24's first day. We hadn't planned for this, but Stephen was on hand to film, and we started by Candice being curious and me being unable to stop talking:

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You can see the SPIEL Essen 24 playlist here, and for convenience I'll include all of the other videos published so far below, starting with Paolo Mori and Francesco Sirocchi's Battalion: War of the Ancients from Osprey Games:

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An overview of VPJ Arponen's Order & Opportunity: Making of the Post-Cold War World Order from GMT Games:

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An intro to Thaloria Quest, which blends gaming with journaling:

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An overview of Revenant, which is coming from Mindclash Games in 2025, courtesy of designer Allan Kirkeby:

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An overview of Jeremy Rozenhart's Tatsumi, which Adam's Apple Games will release in 2025:

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Candice wanted to conclude day two of SPIEL Essen 24 with a bit of show-and-tell of games discovered, and boy, was she ready to share. You can see a list of all the games featured, along with links to their BGG game pages, here.

Youtube Video Read more »

by Matthias Cramer

Prototype box coverComedy and Dramedy

In 2017 the film "The Death of Stalin", directed by Armando Iannucci, was released in cinemas. The film depicts the power struggle after Stalin's sudden death in 1953 in a humorous way, with a great ensemble portraying the Soviet leadership circle. In the battle for Stalin's succession, only the victor Nikita Khrushchev gained a place in the history books, while his opponent Lavrenty Beria fell into oblivion and is known only to those interested in the topic.

I find the scenario that took place thirty years earlier much more interesting: the battle for Lenin's legacy. Two heavyweights entered the ring who could not be more different: Leon Trotsky and Josef Stalin. Trotsky, the intellectual revolutionary, organized the Red Army during the Russian Civil War and drove his armored train across the country. Stalin, on the other hand, started out as a professional revolutionary and street thief and only rose to Lenin's leadership circle late in life. Lenin wrote in his will:

Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution. Comrade Trotsky, on the other hand, as his struggle against the C.C. on the question of the People's Commissariat of Communications has already proved, is distinguished not only by outstanding ability. He is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present C.C., but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work.

The Death of Lenin

When reading up on this subject, two major differences from the death of Stalin immediately stand out. The power struggle between Stalin and Trotsky did not just begin before Lenin's death, but actually peaked during this period. Lenin suffered several strokes between 1922 and 1924, after which he was partially paralyzed on one side and lost the ability to speak.

For a long time, the Bolsheviks tried to keep the state of his health a secret as he did not fit the image of a revolutionary leader. In fact, it was during this time that the personality cult around Lenin emerged, mainly on Stalin's initiative. The Georgian managed to gain personal access to Lenin and thus control the flow of news from and to the Bolshevik leader in his sickbed at home. At the funeral, it became clear that the power struggle had already been de facto decided: Stalin marched behind Lenin's coffin together with Lenin's widow, Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya.


The second aspect that distinguishes Lenin's death from Stalin's is the suitability of the subject as a tragicomedy. While two kleptocrats are engaged in a bloody power struggle in 1953, the first power struggle is still influenced by the civil war that has just ended and the subsequent famines, especially in Ukraine. This was the beginning of Russian nationalism, which is still relevant today with the current Russian war of aggression. The Bolsheviks did not "solve" hunger riots with food, but rather with the Red Army: They declared the hungry to be counterrevolutionaries and shot them.

Another parallel to the current situation is the fact that there was also fighting on the media front in the 1920s. The photo used on the prototype box is one of the early image manipulations. Stalin was enlarged in this picture; at 1.65m (or around 5'4"), he was just one centimeter taller than Lenin. His face was also edited to remove smallpox scars as Stalin had contracted smallpox at the age of six and had a correspondingly pockmarked face.

First Prototype as a Trick-Taking Game

For the first prototype of Lenin's Legacy, I tried to combine a card-driven game with a trick-taking game. The result was sobering, and the prototype was thrown away.

The game, which was called "Lenin's Death" at the time, remained a dead project for a few months, then I made a new attempt to model this power struggle: the players were to draft the cards and use them to fight for different regions and cities on a game board. This version of Lenin's Legacy was played with a fix deck of around thirty cards and lacked depth outside of the card functions. I was not happy.

Early game board with a VP track (left) and an issue track (right)
Deck Construction, Deck Destruction

At this point, I started to concentrate on the cards since they were the strongest point of the design. Most elements from the board were converted to cards or reflected by the issues that players compete over.

I wanted the deck to be modified a lot, so the common deck destruction element in CDGs — cards leaving the game after choosing the event — was not enough deck manipulation. Since the deck is a common one for both players, a deck construction element fit perfectly into the design. The politicians now moved from the base deck into a reward for winning the Politburo issue.

The scoring function of the regions also moved to cards. This added a nice twist as you can score powers with the regions in the game at the cost of neglecting the issues.

Politician and region cards
Pressure and Counter-Pressure

When I developed Watergate a few years ago, I wanted to have important cards on both sides that would allow powerful moves and pose a threat to the opponent if they were in play. When Nixon starts using "Gambit", the Washington Post must adjust its strategy and attack the conspirators.

When designing the cards for Lenin's Legacy, the question was whether this pressure could be increased further, and it quickly became clear that I needed several competing victory conditions. Thanks to the three power markers — Army, Party, and Fame — the status in these three victory conditions is always visible. No player can neglect one of these conditions. This makes choosing a region after winning the issue of the same name a strategic decision. At the same time, it means that a player who moves power markers several times is likely to fall behind in the issues and give their opponent the opportunity to catch up.

The Face-Down Card

For long stretches, I tested the game with all seven cards available for play each round placed face up. The mechanisms were exciting in themselves. The players not only had to choose a card, but also think about which card their opponent should not be allowed to play under any circumstances.

Nevertheless, there always seemed to be a little something missing: uncertainty. This eventually led me to simply cover up one card for each player. The consideration of whether it should be one or two cards quickly gave way to the realization that one unknown was quite enough to severely disrupt any predictability. This is also where the character of the players often becomes apparent: some take the opponent's face-down card as the last sensible option; some test whether they can land a surprise attack with it.

This was the final ingredient, and the game now felt complete. After showing it to Gene Billingsley and Jason Carr at SDHistCon in San Diego in November 2023 GMT Games decided to pick it up, and the game is now available for pre-order on GMT's P500 system. We've continued to test and tweak the design slightly, and we will eventually add a solitaire mode, but the playtesters are enjoying it so far, and I am looking forward to sharing it with all of you.

Matthias Cramer Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Not the logo!In 2016, Sophie Gravel sold F2Z Entertainment — a Canadian publisher/distributor that owned the Z-Man Games, Filosofia Éditions, Pretzel Games, and Plaid Hat Games studios — to Asmodee.

Less than a year later, she launched Plan B Games, which she then sold in March 2021 — along with the studios eggertspiele, Next Move Games, and Pretzel Games (yes, again!) — to Asmodee.

In August 2021, Gravel took the role of Head of Studio at Z-Man Games. Among other things, she oversaw the release of the 2023 Kennerspiel des Jahres-winning game Challengers!, then she moved on.

And now Gravel seems ready to return to the game industry with new publisher Final Score Games as indicated by this October 8, 2024 Facebook post in search of a graphic designer. Curious to see what will result from this as she's consistently made smart choices about which titles to develop and promote. I've reached out for info, but have yet to hear back.

Read more »

by Wolfgang Kramer

It all started on May 31, 2021 with an email from Charles Amir Perret of publisher Super Meeple.


He pointed out that Tikal would be 25 years old in 2024 and asked Michael Kiesling and me what we thought about releasing a special edition of Tikal in 2024. He also said that Super Meeple would be ten years old in 2024.

Michael and I immediately spoke on the phone. It was a long conversation, and we agreed to develop a second Tikal game that was similar but with new, additional elements.

When I write about a second Tikal game, I have to add that the 2010 game called Tikal II was not developed by us as "Tikal II". The game we submitted to GameWorks SàRL was called "Der Schatz der Tempelritter" (The Treasure of the Knights Templar). GameWorks published "Knights Templar" as Tikal II: The Lost Temple, and it was our mistake that we did not try hard enough to prevent the title Tikal II as that design is not a Tikal game at all.


On June 1, 2021, one day later, I wrote to Super Meeple that we agreed to the proposal to develop an anniversary game for Tikal.

Before I tell you the story of the development of Tikal Legend, let's go back 25 years. It was the summer of 1999 in Berlin. The Spiel des Jahres jury had invited the media, publishers, and authors to the awards ceremony. We — Ravensburger and us authors — sat spellbound in our chairs as a beam of light moved in a circle from one of the nominated games to another, from Tikal to Giganten to Union Pacific to Tikal and so on.

The game on which the beam of light will remain is the new game of the year. Our eyes traveled with the beam of light. As the light illuminated Tikal, our hearts beat harder, and as the beam moved on, we were gripped by disappointment, but it moved on and on. It felt like a long time, in reality not even a minute, when the beam finally stopped at Tikal, and we jumped up enthusiastically and hugged each other. One of those moments that remain in our memories, that shape our lives, that trigger a feeling of elation, that show us what happiness is — one of those moments that leave others bitterly disappointed.


What does the Spiel des Jahres jury think about Tikal today? Here is an excerpt from an article on the Spiel des Jahres website written by Jochen Corts in 2024:

The Game

Tikal is an exploration game for 2-4 players aged 10 and over.

Two to four teams set off in search of Maya sites in the Guatemalan jungle. In the process, they penetrate deeper and deeper into previously unexplored territory. Temples that have already been largely uncovered can be taken out of the hands of the competition by leaving a guard behind. If a volcanic eruption occurs, there is a kind of cash check in which the excavation results and gold finds to date are evaluated.

After revealing and placing a terrain tile, ten action points can be used to recruit new team members, advance further into the jungle, work on uncovering a temple, post guards, dig up a treasure, swap finds with another team to increase their value, or finally set up a new camp to save long journeys. All of this costs between one and five points, meaning that only some of the most urgent tasks can be completed in the hunt for victory points. If the round is not subject to Fortuna's whims, one variant even offers the option of auctioning off newly revealed terrain tiles.

The Reasons

The technical implementation of the theme is brilliant. Although this is not the first time that action points have been used, they have been used in such a way that Tikal is generally regarded as a style-defining game element. Not only is it possible to distribute movement energy to different characters as desired, but there is also a whole bunch of different actions from which to choose. Moreover, this is so finely tuned that the resulting agony of choice is a pleasure to experience.

Even if it usually takes a while for a player to use up all their action points in a meaningful way when the game is full, there is no boredom for those waiting. After all, they can get a rough idea of the goals being pursued and immediately incorporate them into their own plans. This guarantees around two hours of enjoyable entertainment at a high level of difficulty, including set-up and maneuver critique, an evening's entertainment.

Two pictures from the award ceremony in 1999:

From left: Synes Ernst (chairman of the jury), Franz Vohwinkel (illustrator), Michael Kiesling, Wolfgang Kramer, Cornelia Rist (editor), Lothar Hemme (editorial director)
From left: Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling
Tikal was the first game in a trilogy. As the covers of all three games show masks, the games belong to the "mask trilogy". The other two games were Java (2000) and Mexica (2002).



The three games have the following points in common:

• All three games are building games. On a game board that is empty at the beginning, an advanced civilization is created, that of the Mayans or the Aztecs or the Hinduists and Buddhists on Java.
• All three games work with action points.
• All three games have new, original but different movement mechanisms.
• All three games have new, original but different piece placement mechanisms, i.e., how the pieces come into play.
• Box sizes are the same.
• The number of players is the same.
• All three games are tactical and strategic games with an element of luck.
• All three games were illustrated by Franz Vohwinkel.

What Happened to Tikal?

Tikal was in the Ravensburger program only until 2004. It then moved to Rio Grande Games, with distribution for Germany being taken over by ABACUSSPIELE. From 2017, the French publisher Super Meeple acquired the rights, with the exception of German and English, which finally followed in 2021. Super Meeple launched a beautifully designed new edition in 2017, which is still available today and will remain so in the future.

The First Steps in the Development of Tikal Legend

On 31.05.2021 Charles Amir made an inquiry, on 01.06.2021 we accepted, and on 02.06.2021, we presented our concept. I wrote an email to Charles Amir (Super Meeple) with the following content:

Yesterday and today Michael and I have phoned a long time. The theme was Tikal 25th anniversary.

We will add a new dimension to the game that can be played with existing and additional game material on the back of the game board. We have in mind a river that runs through the entire game board. It can be crossed with bridges that must be purchased (action points).

Gold can be mined in the river. Players can also purchase a boat (action points) and sail along the river.

There are also jungle fields that can be moved to if a staircase points to the field.

To move forward in the jungle, you need a machete (costs action points). In the jungle you can find statues/monuments and dig them up. As before, it is about the most victory points, but you can also earn them by digging gold and statues, so we have several strategies how to win.

Perhaps there is also a cave to descend into to find gems or find an exit that leads to a small game board that is outside of the actual game board.

All of this requires extensive development work with lots of testing. We would be willing to do this.

Michael developed several new game boards with a river and bridges. You could find gold in the river. To recover the gold, you needed at least one boat with an expedition member. During this phase of development, Michael designed several game boards.





There were action cards for exploring a volcano and buying a boat, the latter of which could be used to sail along the river.

Unfortunately, the first tests with the jungle divided into several parts by a river did not produce satisfactory results. We decided not to pursue this route with a river that divided the jungle into several pieces.

I then developed a new game plan that was identical to the Tikal game plan. The river flowed around the outside of the jungle, where you could mine gold.


The yellow dots next to the river showed where gold could be recovered in the river. Trucks replaced the missing ships. Michael and I conducted several tests with this game plan and came to two important conclusions. The interconnected jungle brought the Tikal feeling back into the game. That's why we wanted to use the Tikal game board for the new game as well.

We felt that the integration of the river into the Tikal game was not a unity. It was two different mechanisms that existed side by side. It didn't feel like they belonged together.

It was with a heavy heart that we decided to remove the river completely.

On the Right Track

I carried out my subsequent tests with the Tikal game board and terrain boards. I experimented with the Tikal rules. I deleted all the rules that restricted the players' development options. For example:

• A terrain tile can be placed anywhere on other terrain tiles. This means that you can also place it in such a way that the new tile cannot be entered.
• A terrain tile can also be placed on the game board in such a way that it has no connection to other terrain tiles.
• Expedition members can also enter volcano tiles if stairs lead to them.
• Expedition members can also enter jungle tiles that do not have a terrain tile on them if there are stairs leading to the jungle tile.

These changes made it possible for the game board to vary wildly at the start of the game. Whereas with Tikal, you always have to start at the starting square, you can now start on a different terrain board if you set up a camp there right at the start.

The standard set-up for Tikal Legend is that nine terrain tiles are placed on the game board.


Scenario 1
Two terrain tiles are placed on the left in the starting area, and seven terrain tiles are placed on the right edge of the game board.

The starting area is now more attractive because two four-point temples start there, whereas the right edge of the game board is also attractive because you can get there only if you build a camp on a jungle clearing and place your own explorers there.


Scenario 2
The nine terrain tiles placed on the game board at the start of play are laid out in the middle of the game board.


Scenario 3
The nine terrain tiles initially placed on the game board are not connected to one another. (And yes, I know ten tiles are on the board above.) In this way, you can start each game with a new, interesting jungle landscape that presents players with new challenges each time.

The Cenotes

The new game board is larger than the old game board. Players can now enter volcano, lake, and jungle spaces and use these spaces for victory points. The cenotes were of particular importance to the Maya. These are sacred lakes, sacred springs, and underwater caves. Centuries ago, they ensured the Mayan water supply; they were ritual sacrificial sites and are full of stories of Mayan culture. The word "cenote" comes from the Mayan language and means "place with access to water".

A cenote on the Yucatan peninsula (Royalty-free image from the Internet)
Multiple Winning Strategies

Tikal Legend is designed to offer players multiple winning strategies, whereas Tikal has only two winning strategies: the temple strategy and the treasure strategy. To enable further strategies, new areas are needed that can lead to victory points.

In addition to the temples and treasures, the following new areas have been added and are scored:

• Volcanoes
• Lakes
• Treasure fields with and without treasures
• Jungle glades


The Outer Squares

There had to be new fields for the new areas, so I introduced the outer fields, which are located at the edge of the game board. These spaces are dashed. Under the action tiles are tiles that are placed on these spaces. They show cenotes (lakes), temples, volcanoes, and jungle spaces and have a step so that these spaces can also be entered.


There are outer fields on which a lake or a volcano is already marked on the game board. However, most of the outer spaces show only jungle. To enter these spaces, a staircase must lead to them, e.g., from the treasure space to the volcano, which is marked with a "1" in the image above.

Action cards showing a volcano, a lake, or a temple can be placed on the outer spaces. An outer space without an action card is a jungle space.

From left: volcano, lake (cenote), temple (level 6), forest field
Sequence Control with Action Pool and Action Tableau

The decisive step forward in this project came from my idea of the action pool and the action board for each player.

Each player receives an action board at the start of the game, and the objects from the action pool are placed on this board. The action board of a player:


The following objects are in the general action pool for two players:

Sequence cards
There is a sequence card for each player. The player who takes order card 1 is the first to select an object in the next round.


Action point cards

Terrain tiles


Action tiles


The players fill their action board from the action pool. The player with the order card 1 begins, and they and the other players are spoiled for choice. Should they take the new order card 1 first, or the highest action point card, or an action point tile, or a terrain card?

The player first takes the action tile with the additional 2 action points per round. In the next round, they take the action point card with the 9 action points, then the terrain card with the volcano, and so on.

After the acquisition phase, the player board is full. Now the players take one action after another. The player with the order card 1 begins and carries out an action. This is followed by the player with card 2. The player with the adjacent tableau decides to perform the action "build a camp" first, building the camp on a clearing on the right edge of the game board.

A round is completed when the player board is empty except for the sequence card. The dark blue spaces on the left-hand side may still contain action tiles that the player would like to carry out in the next round.

Action tiles

There are 72 action tiles, which include good and very good tiles. Each tile is advantageous for the player. The following tiles have been developed:




Scoring

Players score twice during the game and once at the end of the game.

The scoring during the game takes place after a player places a volcano on the game board. Each player now has one turn with 10 action points available. Each player scores for themselves, and the following are evaluated:

• Temple: The value of all temples in which the player has the majority of EM are added together.

• Highest temples: From temple height 7, victory points are awarded according to the table.


• Treasures: One treasure scores 1 victory point, two identical treasures score 3 victory points, three identical treasures 6, four identical treasures 10, and five identical treasures 15 victory points.

• Volcanoes: For each volcano where the player has the majority of EM, they receive 10 VP.

• Lakes: Number of lakes multiplied by number of gold masks. The player must have the majority of EM for both the lakes and the gold fields.

• Jungle fields: Number of jungle fields multiplied by number of temple fields. The player must have the majority of EM for both the jungle fields and the temple fields.

Handover of the Tikal Legend prototype to Super Meeple


Special abilities per player
In December 2023, Super Meeple had the idea of equipping each player with special abilities. To keep the balance of the game intact, these abilities should be used only once in the game. I designed various ability cards with three alternative abilities on them. The player could use one of them once in the game.

Although four ability cards were needed, I sent eight cards to Super Meeple and let them choose and assemble them for the game.

Test experience and introductory game
When Michael carried out the first test, he called me immediately: "What have you come up with? You have so many opportunities to make good moves that you're constantly spoiled for choice. Ina is flabbergasted. Do we want to make an expert game for Tikal Legend? Or should we make the game a little less complex?"

Super Meeple had a similar reaction after the first test. Charles Amir wrote something like this:

I am always impressed by your games and your talent for designing. You did a really fantastic job. Keeping the spirit of Tikal and bringing a great, new mechanic into the game. I really love how it is.

However, I do understand Michael and we think the game is maybe a little too expert as it is now.

The difference of level between the basic Tikal and Tikal Legend is too large. Perhaps we should make an introductory game to which modules are added: lake module, volcano module, jungle module.

Depending on who I was playing with, I had very good test results, but also those in which I was told that the game was too complex, so I complied with the request and developed a "starter game" that was between the levels of Tikal and Tikal Legend. Anyone playing for the first time should start with the starter game, then switch to Tikal Legend later. I developed and played the starter game completely. However, the starter game was not realized after all. This was probably due to the fact that Super Meeple became more and more familiar with Tikal Legend through many test games.

Final image of a test by Ina and Michael Kiesling from August 2023
Solo Game

For Super Meeple, it was clear from the start that Tikal Legend had to include a solo game. With time well advanced in May 2023, I agreed that Super Meeple should award the contract for the solo game to Dávid Turczi, John Albertson, Aleksandar Šaranac, and Jeremy Avery, with playtesting by Chuck Case.

In addition to the solo game for Tikal Legend, there is a solo game for Tikal "Classic".


Start of the Kickstarter Campaign

The crowdfunding campaign will begin in the second half of October 2024. We are all excited to see how it will go. We hope that there will be enough fans willing to purchase the game so that the project can be realized.

The games will not come onto the market until 2025. Until then, the publisher and the authors will continue to test the game frequently in order to improve it. The game was created during Corona. At that time, it was not easy to find test partners; today this is no longer a problem.

A long time has passed since the end of May 2021, when development on the game began, until 2025, when the game will be released. I've enjoyed working on the game during this time and wouldn't want to miss a minute of it — but what will happen after the game is released is no longer in our hands. Now it depends on the game fans whether the game will be a success. I wish everyone who plays Tikal Legend a lot of fun with it.

Wolfgang Kramer
September 2024

Tikal Legend set-up at SPIEL Essen 24 Read more »