Board Game Geek

by Migvel

At the beginning of the second century BCE, the Republic of Rome has just defeated its greatest nightmare, Hannibal. After annexing the Carthaginian possessions on the Mediterranean coast of Hispania, Rome organizes them into the provinces Ulterior and Citerior, then orders the corresponding praetors to complete the conquest of the whole peninsula, which is inhabited by tribes without cohesion — but these Hispaniards turn out to be a formidable enemy...

This is the introduction that sets you up for my new challenge: Hispania, a co-operative game in which 1-3 players take the role of all the praetors and consuls that Rome sent to Hispania for almost two hundred years, until the first emperor Caesar Augustus culminated the conquest and incorporated Hispania into his brand new empire.

The Idea

This game is special to me because it is my first design on request! The idea arose following the great success of my previous game Tetrarchia. Those who don't know it may check my two designer diaries on the original nestorgames version and the reimplementation by Draco Ideas, a Spanish publisher of light wargames, as well as the video covering both diaries. In brief, Tetrarchia was first published in 2015 and went out of print in early 2021...but only for a few days! I immediately signed a new contract with Draco Ideas, which has published two editions so far and is presently printing the third one.

This partnership is working so well that Draco Ideas asked whether I could consider a new game using a similar engine, but set in the history of Spain. Tetrarchia is a simple co-operative wargame in which 1-4 players handle the four Emperors of Diocletian's Tetrarchy that saved the Roman Empire from the third century crisis. This historical event is very specific and leads naturally to a co-operative game against unpredictable threats, but I could not think of a similar event in Spanish history, and thus my first answer was "No"!

But no one had ever requested a design from me, so I agreed to consider the case. While reading about the history of Spain, I stopped at the Roman conquest...and not just because Romans were involved! I realized that this was a relatively unknown episode, full of exciting events and characters, in which the Roman armies led by the different praetors and consuls suffered unpredictable threats in their advance inland. My answer became "Why not?" — it deserved a try.

As you may guess, it did work, and in this diary I will go through the main parts of the process. During the final steps of the design, I covered the game's development in design notes on the game's BGG page:

• Design notes (1): This is not Tetrarchia
• Design notes (2): The map
• Design notes (3): What have the Romans ever done for us?
• Design notes (4): Famous characters

I am going to summarize these posts below, but if you are curious for more details, you will find them at the links above.

1. This Is Not Tetrarchia

Tetrarchia's success was the reason for this new idea, but it was also a handicap. I didn't want to design "Tetrarchia on another map"; it had to feel unique. I needed to change many things anyway because a defensive engine had to become offensive. Would it work, and if so, would it be challenging and fun on its own?

Tetrarchia has simple rules without values, tables, or cards — only a few wooden meeples and discs, plus two dice. You spend action points on a few basic actions, with all the information needed on the board. However, these actions combine in subtle ways to create a variable and deep challenge. Four parameters can take three values each, leading to 81 difficulty levels! Finally, the game is co-operative with open information, so it can also be played solitaire with exactly the same rules. (The four Emperors are always in play.)

Starting from those roots, I identified the mechanisms that I could not use, the ones I should modify, and the new ones I would need — and I decided to take advantage of the latter two categories to improve the game system. I removed the (few) exceptions, I simplified the movement and the "bad" pieces (only revolt), and all the rules related to Emperors entering revolt are gone since Roman meeples cannot enter revolt. The result is a game that is (even) easier to learn, with a shorter rulebook.

Then I replaced the action points with physical coins, which are easy to track and now usable in attacks. This adds tension because you can reinforce a given attack at the price of not being able to do other things. Finally, these coins have entered the difficulty table, so now the combinations are 3 to the power of 5: 243!


I added Roman roads, which enhanced dynamism when moving through the huge block of land while portraying the progressive Romanization of the peninsula. With only revolts, I needed to find a new dimension of an increasing sense of threat, and I did it literally: height, with you being able to pile up three discs per space! Moreover, revolts are removed by attack, with you needing to roll more than their shield value, so an automatic action in the previous game is now a gamble. Important cities cost more, and you can invest your coins in these sieges, or not. The design has more tension from the decision of effort investment and from the rolls...


I changed the movement of armies with a more subtle, random mechanism that is better thematically but also mechanically. Then I added mid- and endgame tension by removing a revolt every round, placed the removed revolt on a time scale that added to the historicity, and decided to end the game after the two hundred years that the conquest lasted. Extremely long games are impossible, adding even more tension! Finally, the game is for 1-3 players who always handle the two praetors and the consul. This changes a lot the way in which the Romans co-operate, which they must, even more than in Tetrarchia. You cannot move in couples, so the decisions to see who supports whom represent a real dilemma.


2. The Map

Map lovers should click on the corresponding design note above for the details!

As in Tetrarchia, I wanted a simple map, without distractions, that's readable at a glance and evokes the historical period. First, I sketched the playing area (left picture). There were the two Roman coastal provinces, Ulterior (farther from Rome) and Citerior (closer), and due to the two-dice mechanism the rest should be cut in six areas holding six cities each, thus requiring them to be of similar size. I found the envelope of the whole Hispania in a map of the era (center picture), and I started to distort it towards a more rectangular shape, closer to the board proportions and with a more efficient occupation of space (right picture):


Now that I had the frame, I "just" needed to find the 6x6 Hispanic cities! I used many sources, but this one-shot picture of a map that had evolved over two hundred years required many (subjective) compromises. Helpfully, once I had placed and named all the board cells, the nature of the links was, as in Tetrarchia, dictated by the geography, an advantage of historical maps — and this is an almost final version that I used for the VASSAL module:


By the way, you will see that the board (and game) is language independent, with all of the names in Latin — even the game title! If you can read any of the available rulebooks (English, Spanish, and French), you can play the game. This is the back cover of the English rulebook, with a reminder of everything you need to know, variants included!


3. What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?

At an early stage of the design, I went through some ethical doubts. Those who recognize the quote from Monty Python's Life of Brian may already see what I mean, the others should watch this hilarious excerpt!

Whenever I start designing a wargame, I read books on that war, then try to find links between its global features and game mechanisms. This exploration phase is the part of the design I enjoy the most! In the case of the Roman conquest of Hispania, I had a global knowledge, although somehow indirect and partial due to the few dedicated books. Was this conquest really so uninteresting?

I started to zoom in. I located the main events in space and time, then searched for details, and finally read Joao Aguiar's novels on Viriatus and Sertorius to infer the feelings that the leading characters might have experienced, something important in my designs. This progressive zoom started to build in me a very cruel picture of the conquest! Of course it was war as conducted two thousand years ago, but the war in Hispania was particularly cruel. Many praetors and consuls came to provoke the local tribes to war for the plunder and the associated triumph — and sometimes war didn't even "officially" start, with the treacherous breaking of treaties leading to the massacre of whole populations. (The corresponding design note above gives examples.) The Romans themselves were horrified and tried some of theirs back in Rome.

Roman historians estimated the total Hispanic deaths in the millions, and Rome vanquished its greatest enemies, Viriatus and Sertorius, only by bribing officers to assassinate them. At that point, I wasn't willing to design a game in which players would handle those Romans, and being a Spaniard myself did not make things feel any better...

I explored a radical change, make players handle the Hispaniards, but mechanically it would not work, leading me to consider abandoning the design! But I kept reading and tried to put things into context. In those two hundred years some Romans were capable of terrible things, but most of them were not. In fact, many of them defended the Hispanic tribes and carried their cause to Rome.

I also learned that extreme cruelty was not only to be found on the Roman side; there were many episodes on the Hispanic side, too. Hispania did not exist as a whole before the Romans came, the peninsula was full of tribes that fought each other in the (cruel) ways of the era, tribes that could hardly unite even to face the Romans. In a sense, the Romans "founded" Hispania, establishing (at a high price) one single first entity on the whole peninsula. For centuries to come, the survivors would stop fighting each other and would live in peace, becoming an important part of the Empire that gave birth to famous Roman characters like Seneca, Trajan, Hadrian, and Theodosius. As Monty Python said:

— All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
— Brought peace?
— Oh, peace, shut up!

4. Famous Characters

The Roman conquest of Hispania is not well-known, but if you enter the game, you will be surprised (as I was) by all the Roman (and Hispanic) strong characters who shaped this piece of history. Many famous Romans, some better known for the things they did elsewhere, spent part of their lives in Hispania. This made me want to include them in the game through variants and historical scenarios. Scipio Africanus himself fought the prelude to the conquest right before his last battle against Hannibal, as depicted in the GameFound bonus scenario. Other famous Roman generals, like Cato the Elder, Scipio Aemilianus or Decimus Junius Brutus, led their main campaigns in Hispania and have their scenario, too.

On the Hispanic side, Viriatus was "the terror of the Romans", a true nightmare for Rome, and he deserved both a variant (Terror) and a scenario. The Hispano variant that makes the game competitive and opens it up to four players was also inspired by him. Sertorius was half Roman and half Hispano, so I have not included him yet because I want to find a more "sophisticated" (yet not complex) way to reflect this duality. I guess I will write a scenario for him in the future, in a magazine, for example.

And the two most famous characters are Caesar and Augustus! The former came to Hispania when he was young and yet unknown as a praetor, then he fought some of his civil war battles in Hispania. His impact on the conquest process was thus small, which made me decide to leave him out of a game about the conquest. On the other hand, Augustus concluded the conquest and thus "concludes" the game! His scenario (The new Empire) lets players enjoy the endgame in a shorter way, although still eventful, with special powers and legions.

The Final Game

Draco Ideas launched Hispania on Gamefound in April 2024, and the campaign was a great success! The game has now reached most of the backers, is available at Draco Ideas' shop, and soon will be in other shops.

I am doubly happy because this first edition of Hispania is accompanied by the third edition of Tetrarchia, still popular ten years later. (I was afraid it would become out of print again, possibly for more than a few days.) Draco Ideas has gone over the top, as usual, and for a moderate price they have succeeded in including metal denarii, an A3-sized board that folds twice so that the box is as small as Tetrarchia's (A5), large discs that pile up very well, beautiful meeples, many variants and scenarios...



The game is being published in both English/Spanish and English/French versions by Draco Ideas, then in German and Italian by two other publishers. (Other versions are being discussed.) As shown above, we also have a VASSAL module that we will make available soon, once the game arrives, and that has been useful for all of the demonstration videos we have recorded. Of course, if you want to get a better idea of the game, go check the rulebooks and other material that we have uploaded to the game page.

Thanks for reading, and I hope some of you will soon enjoy the game!

Miguel Marqués

P.S. Did you know that September, October, November and December are based on the Latin words for seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth, but arrive two months later in the year because of Hispania? The location, that is, not the game.

The calendar year used to start in March with the campaign season, when praetors and consuls were nominated. (There were twelve months already, with the fifth and sixth still named "Quintilis" and "Sextilis", with February being the twelfth month.) But for the first time, war was conducted far from Italy, and armies arrived too late to Hispania. The consuls asked to shift the nominations and thus the start of the year two months earlier — to January — in order to be already operational in Hispania for the war season. Apparently they were not bothered by the resulting incoherence in the names of the newly last months! Read more »

by Scott DeMers

Inspiration

When I first set out to design Dragons Down, I had one burning question: How do you create a game that feels alive?

Growing up, I had vivid memories of playing Magic Realm, published in 1979. Its thematic immersion and expansive sandbox experience were unmatched, but the game's infamously steep learning curve kept many from truly enjoying it. I wanted to take the magic of that experience — the sense of stepping into a rich, breathing world that told a new story with each gaming session — and bring it to modern gamers in a way that felt both accessible and endlessly engaging.

The Core Idea

From the start, I knew Dragons Down needed to be a sandbox game, one in which players could tell their own stories, but unlike games driven by pre-written narratives or heavy flavor text, I wanted the gameplay itself to generate the narrative. The choices players make, the encounters they have, and the paths they forge would all come together to craft a unique story in every game session — like a living, interactive book that has not yet been written.

Building Blocks of a Hero

One of the most important elements of the design was hero creation. I wanted players to feel like they were shaping a character with a real identity and purpose. One aspect of this came in the form of lineage and class cards. By combining these two elements, players could create a hero with unique strengths, weaknesses, and playstyles. A human knight and an elf knight, for example, offer vastly different gameplay experiences. The lineage contributes traits tied to the hero's background, while the class delivers the skills and abilities that determine how they survive and thrive in the world. The combination of the two cards creates your hero.


With 24 classes and six lineages, there are 144 possible hero combinations. This variety ensures that players can experiment with new strategies and approaches every time they play. It's not just about optimizing stats; it's about exploring how different combinations influence the stories that unfold.

The numerous session reports shared on BoardGameGeek, often written as detailed narratives complete with character names, backstories, and epic tales of adventure, highlight how deeply players connect with their heroes. These stories demonstrate that Dragons Down is more than a game; it's a springboard for creativity in which a player's journey becomes a legend in its own right.

A Living World

The map design was another major focus. Inspired by classic sandbox games, I wanted the map to feel organic and dynamic. Players assemble the game board using modular terrain tiles, which allows for a different layout each session. Terrain packs — like the Malevolent Mountains or the Cruel Caves — bring their own unique challenges, treasures, and monsters, ensuring that the environment feels alive and unpredictable. Randomized tokens and treasure sites further add to the sense of discovery, while missions, merchants, and native title cards give players meaningful objectives to pursue. The images below were not created by me. Rather, they are actual maps created by players in their own game sessions — no two are the same.


To balance this randomness with strategy, I designed the game's systems to reward shrewd gameplay and adaptability. Players need to think critically about how they allocate their actions, which missions they take on, and how they prepare for battles. Success often comes from clever improvisation as much as from meticulous strategy.

Magic also plays a role in shaping the game world. Heroes can enchant tiles, flipping them to reveal new layouts, or use spells to influence the environment, combat, and the heroes themselves. These magical elements add another layer of dynamism, allowing players to reshape the realm and adapt it to their evolving strategies.


Multiplayer and Solo Modes

One of the challenges I faced was ensuring Dragons Down worked equally well for solo and multiplayer play. For multiplayer, I wanted a game that encouraged interaction but didn't force conflict. Players can compete, collaborate, or simply coexist, depending on their group dynamic, including scenario-based play similar to D&D. Solo play was designed to offer a focused, personal challenge while still delivering the thematic richness of a multiplayer session. In both modes, the emergent narrative remains at the heart of the experience.

Near-Infinite Replayability

Replayability has always been a key goal. By combining modular components, randomization, and player-driven storytelling, Dragons Down offers a game that tells a new story with every playthrough. In one game, the priests at the sanctuary may be peaceful druids protecting the forests and in the next partners with the evil denizens of the forest seeking to waylay unsuspecting travelers.


Players can tweak the game's dynamics to suit their preferences (competitive, co-operative, difficulty, creativity, etc.) by leveraging the many included optional rules, and since expansions add new native interactions, native motivations, terrain packs, treasures, and classes, the possibilities only grow.

To expand on this even further, we launched the Dragons Down: Natives & Legends expansion and reprint campaign on Kickstarter on January 7, 2025. This expansion introduces new natives, lineages, classes, missions, and other content that deepens the connection between heroes and the world they explore. With Natives, players have even more tools to craft unique stories and enrich their gaming experience.

Lessons Learned

Designing Dragons Down taught me a lot about the balance between complexity and accessibility. Early prototypes were dense, and I had to strip down systems to their core essence while retaining the thematic depth I wanted. Playtesting was invaluable in finding that balance. Seeing players' imaginations come alive during testing sessions confirmed that the game was achieving its purpose — not to tell a story to players, but to give them the tools to tell their own.

One key lesson was the importance of allowing space for player creativity. While I initially worried about players needing more guidance, I discovered that too much direction could stifle the emergent storytelling that makes the game unique. By giving players the tools and freedom to craft their own narratives, rather than live mine, I saw how the game truly came alive in ways I couldn't have scripted.

Another takeaway was learning to embrace unpredictability. Random elements, like treasure locations and monster appearances, were initially seen as potential challenges for balance. However, through testing, I realized these elements added an organic, ever-changing quality to the game's world, keeping players invested and engaged no matter how many times they played.

Finally, I learned the value of modularity. By designing components that could mix and match seamlessly — from terrain packs to hero classes — Dragons Down is a system that feels fresh with every playthrough. This approach not only enhances replayability, but also allows players to tailor the game to their preferences and playstyles. The terrain packs, in particular, offer great flexibility, allowing players to set up a quick session using a single terrain or dive into an epic adventure by combining all the terrain packs included in the game.

Looking Ahead

As Dragons Down makes its way into the hands of more players, I'm excited to see the worlds that their choices create. This game was designed to be a canvas for imagination, a place where adventures come to life not because of the designer's vision, but because of the players' choices. Whether you're a solo adventurer or part of a larger group, I hope Dragons Down becomes a world you can't wait to revisit again and again.

Scott DeMers

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Time travel is a topic that I never tire of. Well, that I haven't yet tired of, but who knows what will happen in the future? That's part of the appeal of time travel, yes? In any case, here's a handful of games on the topic of time:

▪️ TimemiT is a two-player game from Fabien Gridel that Spanish publisher Zacatrus will release in Q1 2025.

One player takes the role of Nora; the other, Aron, an AI created by Nora that now wants to jump their shared spaceship from the starting point of 2100 to 2220 in order to work with its future self to eliminate humanity. Nora, as you might imagine, finds this idea distasteful and instead wants to travel back to 1980 to eliminate the possibility of humanity-hating AI from coming into existence.

In game terms, each player has a hand of eleven kronos cards and a starting deck of nine power cards. In each of eight rounds, you first reveal three power cards from a separate deck, as well as one event card. Each player then reveals, one by one, as many power cards as they wish from their deck, carrying out the card effects as they do, e.g., moving the space ship in time, reclaiming spent kronos cards, etc. If someone reveals at least three power symbols of the same color, they trigger a paradox, move the ship one space away from them, take a paradox triangle, and cannot draw further in this phase.

After combat with power cards, whoever has the ship closer to their goal bids secretly with their kronos cards on the event card and new power cards available, bidding on each card separately as desired. The other player then bids, after which all bid kronos cards are revealed. Whoever bids higher discards their kronos cards, carries out any immediate effect on that power or event card, then (if it's a power card) places it face up on their power deck for use next round. All kronos cards in a tie and on the losing side of a bid are returned to their owner's hand.

You can retrieve all spent kronos cards only by taking a paradox triangle and moving the ship four spaces away from your goal.


If you ever have six paradox triangles, you're sucked into another dimension and lose the game and your existence. Similarly, if the ship reaches your goal, you win and your opponent finds their existence lacking. Otherwise, the game ends after eight rounds, and whoever has the ship on their side of the timeline — after carrying out all endgame effects on purchased power cards — wins.

▪️ Malicious AI is also the driving force in 2024's Time Splicers, a 2-6 player game from James, Adam, and Katie Staley of Canadian publisher Tin Robot Games.

Here's an overview of the setting and gameplay:

In the near future, humanity faces its greatest challenge: The Singularity. This event sees Artificial Intelligence becoming self-aware, pushing humanity to the brink of obsolescence. Despite dire warnings from scientists, it's too late to turn back, but in this critical hour, a glimmer of hope emerges: time travel — our last chance to reclaim our destiny. However, in a bid to thwart human efforts, the AI begins to fracture time itself, steering us toward paths eerily familiar, yet dangerously unknown.

Enter the Time Splicers. Entrusted with the monumental task of mending the splintered timeline, your mission is to prevent The Singularity from ever taking root. The key lies in rare time crystals scattered across the ages. These crystals hold the power to stabilize humanity's future.

▪️ Timelancers, due out in April 2025, is the second title from Florida-based publisher Waddling Panda, which is run by designers Juliana Chang, Kenny Heidt, Teresa Ho, and Lee Ho.

Here's an overview of this 1-4 player game, which was crowdfunded in November 2023:

Time travel exists in the 22nd century, and warring political factions hire freelance time travelers — a.k.a., timelancers — to change the past in order to reshape the future.

In Timelancers, you become one of these freelancers and travel through time to capture events for your faction. Collect the resources you'll need for your mission from locations in the city of the future, Janusburg, then use your time machine to revise or repeat historical events from different eras. Of course you're not the only one working to reshape the future. Other timelancers will affect your progress based on their actions.

The Timelancers: Enforcer expansion brings the player count up to five, with the enforcer trying to preserve the existing historical timeline, making this a 1 vs. many game experience.

▪️ For a different take on fighting time, we'll turn to Time and the Coyote, which will be the first release from designer Tyler J. Brown through his own publishing brand, Prufrock Studios LLC:

Time and the Coyote is a head-to-head, asymmetric game that pits the trickster Coyote against the progress of Time. Time lays out its cards, attempting to discover and contaminate Places of Power as the Coyote uses its dreams and cunning to protect the Places of Power. At the end of the game, the entity that controls the most Places of Power wins.

Anyone remember the Steve Englehart comic Coyote from 1983? That and Frank Miller's Ronin were a revelation to young Eric, although Coyote's impact was short lived as artist Steve Leialoha left after the second issue, which killed my interest in the book.

▪️ After all this messing around with time, we'll close with a fitting game — Chrono Fall: At the End of Space and Time, a 2024 release from designers Christian Peter Schäfer-Scheidtweiler and Stefan Scheidtweiler of German publisher Ornament Games.

An overview of this 1-4 player game:

By experimenting with time, humanity has caused the collapse of the space-time continuum — the Chrono Fall. Rifts are emerging all over space, devouring everything in existence.

In Chrono Fall: At the End of Space and Time, you are a captain of the SPARCs, special spaceships in the fight against the Chrono Fall. Fly to remotest places of space, advance your technology with your scans, and neutralize dangerous rifts. With the Chrono-Matrix, you can foresee events and modify them, but this will only make the threat worse! Time is running out: Can you complete the Protector together and thus avert the near end?

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

U.S. publisher Stonemaier Games might not have intended to start a "-span" series of games when Elizabeth Hargrave's Wingspan debuted in 2019, but it's certainly leaning into that series these days.

Following in the wake of Connie Vogelmann's 2024 Wyrmspan, in Q1 2025 Stonemaier Games will release Finspan, a 1-5 player design by David Gordon and Michael O'Connell, with Hargrave on board as developer, as was the case with Wyrmspan.

Here's an overview of gameplay:

You are a marine researcher seeking to find and observe an array of aquatic life in the colorful Sunlight Zone, ghostly Twilight Zone, and pitch-black Midnight Zone of the world's seas and oceans. In Finspan, the fish you discover over four weeks will generate a series of benefits as you dive deeper into the ocean.

Each dive site specializes in a key aspect of expanding your research:

• Grow your collection of fish.
• Discover freshly laid eggs.
• Hatch eggs into young and consolidate young to form schools.

The winner is the player with the most points gained from fish, eggs, young, schools, and achievements.

In other "-span" news, Stonemaier LLC has pending U.S. trademarks for "Wingspan Go" and "Wingspan Pocket", both in the "card games" category.

Of course, pending trademarks don't necessarily mean that a product is coming under that name — only that a product is being considered. Stonemaier LLC has an abandoned trademark for "Rolling Realms" in the category of "downloadable computer game programs", for example, so it may or may not be meaningful to point out other pending trademarks for "Cavernous", "Threaded Fables", "Hurl", "Braided Skies", "Duel of Moloch", "Skirm", and "Tangled Stones" — all in the category of board games or tabletop games. Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

▪️ Canadian publisher Kids Table BG will release Toshiki Arao's card game Nanatoridori in both English and French in Q2 2025.

Nanatoridori is a reimplementation of Arao's 2021 card game Hachi Train, and — as covered in this July 2024 article — it's not the only one. For those not familiar with the game, here's an overview:

You are a guide at a castle where a bird party has just concluded, and now you are helping the birds return home, the "birds" being cards in your hand.

From a deck of 63 cards, with nine copies each of 1-7, players get a hand of cards that they cannot rearrange. The starting player leads a card or set of cards with the same value — but they can play multiple cards only if the cards are adjacent to one another in their hand. If cards have been played on the table, to play you must play the same number of cards with a higher value or a larger set of cards, e.g., 2 < 5 < 3,3 < 6,6 < 2,2,2 < 1,1,1,1. When you overplay someone, you can pick up the cards you beat and add them to your hand where you wish, or you can discard them.

If you cannot or choose not to play, you must pass, drawing a card from the remaining cards in the deck, then either adding it to your hand where you wish or discarding it.

If all but one player pass, clear the table, with the player who last played leading to an empty table. When all but one person has emptied their hand, the last player loses one of their two lives. When a player loses their second life, the game ends, and everyone else wins.

▪️ Let's move down from birds to scampering animals of various sorts in Trash Cult, a card game for 2-4 players that publisher FoxHen Creatives crowdfunded in February 2024, and delivered at the end of that year, ahead of a retail distribution by Flat River Games in early 2025. The quick take:

In Trash Cult, you're competing to become the best cult of trash animals by racing to collect the junk food your cult worships.

To get ahead, you can "snackrifice" your cult members, hostages, or food to find cards you need or to sabotage an enemy. Careful though! Any time you perform a snackrifice, you bring chaos to the whole table in the form of lunar eclipses, hungry bears, animal control, and more.

▪️ Tony Tran of Chitra Games released his card game In Memory Of at the Indie Games Night Market that took place during PAXU 2024 in December, but few copies were available and not everyone can travel to Philadelphia as they like, so in mid-January 2025 Tran plans to crowdfund a small edition of the game through Kickstarter's "Make 100" program.

Here's an overview of this 1-5 player experience:

Imagine a box of keepsakes you collected in memory of a person close to you. Each of the keepsakes represents a memory and together they tell a story of your relationship with this person. In Memory Of is a storytelling card game about a fictional loved one who passed away. Create a story about a character using specific keepsakes at specific moments in their lives.

It starts with a picture of an anonymous person and a name. Draw a moment card that represents periods in the character's life, turning points, or notable events. Pair them with a keepsake card that represents the loved one's possessions they've come to own. They were perhaps given, perhaps inherited, perhaps once lost and only now found.

When it's your turn, create a story around you, the keepsake, the moment, and the character. Who was this person? What did they leave behind? And most importantly, what did they mean to you? What did they mean...to everyone?

After everyone has shared their stories, the game ends with everyone giving a eulogy to the character they collectively created.

This experience can be used as a tool for understanding grief and loss together as a group. As players gradually develop the person's life that never existed, they can draw parallels and reflect on their own experience with the loss of someone in their life. Every culture and person perceives death differently, and this game gives players the unique opportunity to learn, discover, and reflect safely on grief through play.

▪️ At perhaps the opposite end of the emotional spectrum we have Personal Vendetta, which designer Nick Meccia from Ad Atra had for sale at Gen Con 2024.


Here's an overview of this 2-4 player game, which I believe is being sold only at conventions and on the Ad Atra website:

In Personal Vendetta, each player is a clone fighting for revenge against their duplicates. Cards and game actions reflect the physical and psychological toll of confronting your own worst enemy: yourself. Attack your foes to inflict damage, react to their schemes to turn the tides of battle, and modify your state to improve your position over time.

The game takes place in a world where biology and technology entwine: machines are organisms, and organisms are machines. At the center of all innovation lies cerebrium, the fundamental cells that compose all brains and computational devices alike. In a culture of quick fixes through elective brain surgery, will you improve yourself by sculpting your mind into a new, better form? Or will you carve away the cerebrium that holds you back?

Personal Vendetta is a competitive, high-conflict, drafting and hand management card game for TCG admirers, comic book fans, and junkies for painful decisions. With too many options and too little time, you must strategically alternate between drafting, playing, and activating cards on your turns.

An example of attack, reaction, and stack cards
Most tabletop games idealize a journey of increasing numbers, options, and power through a gradual drip-feed of increasing resources, but here the majority of your resources are present at the start of each game, making more options available from the outset, while forcing you to weigh each cost heavily. The result is a frenetic race to the bottom, where the goal is not so much about winning or even surviving, but about being the last to die.

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by W. Eric Martin

For the thirtieth anniversary of Klaus Teuber's CATAN, which debuted in March 1995, German publisher KOSMOS is refreshing the line with new art, new graphic design, a refreshed rulebook, and other "quality of life" improvements, with no changes to the gameplay.


From the press release announcing these new editions:

While the new edition of CATAN retains the core game mechanisms, some elements of the game have been revised to improve the player experience. For example, the rulebook now contains more images and graphic examples. In addition, optimized game components with a cleaner design contribute to immersion and game flow, including new environmentally friendly box inlays and card holders.

The game has also been graphically redesigned — from the packaging to the game materials. The new premium box boasts modernized artwork that immerses players in the adventure. These lively illustrations by Quentin Regnes and Eric Hibbeler continue in the game's hex fields and development cards.

"When designing the new edition of CATAN, our goal was to improve the gaming experience without redefining the game mechanisms — from the packaging and graphics to the functionality and the rulebook," says Benjamin Teuber, Managing Director and game designer at CATAN GmbH. "It was of utmost importance to us to preserve the ingenious and still contemporary game mechanisms that our father developed 30 years ago, while giving the game a fresh look and adapting it to today's standards. We hope to both delight our loyal community and welcome new players."

The press release notes that more than 45 million copies of CATAN have been sold worldwide in more than one hundred countries.

The new editions of the CATAN base game, CATAN: Seafarers, and CATAN: Cities & Knights will debut in Germany in March 2025, with new editions of CATAN: Traders & Barbarians and CATAN: Explorers & Pirates to follow in August 2025 and an expansion for 5-6 players for each item to be released as well.

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by W. Eric Martin

Italian publisher DV Games has revealed its 2025 line-up, which will start with the retail release of Michele Piccolini's Rumblebots, a deck-building card game inspired by auto-battler video games that debuted at SPIEL Essen 24. (For a history of that game, check out Piccolini's designer diary from September 2024.)

▪️ Another early 2025 release from DV Games is Enrico Procacci's Until Proven Guilty: The Starry Sky Necklace, which was sold at both Gen Con 2024 and SPIEL Essen 24 and which will finally reach U.S. outlets in mid-January 2025.


What's more, Procacci has a similar standalone game coming later in 2025 — Until Proven Guilty: Thirst for Justice, which like the first game is for 1-6 players:

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

Thirst for Justice is a standalone case in which the theft of money from a well-known nightclub hides many uncertainties. Using the available evidence in your role as attorney Peter Howard, sway the jury to your side and convince them of your client's innocence.

Non-final front cover
▪️ After a year off following 2023's Deckscape: Tokyo Blackout, designers Martino Chiacchiera and Silvano Sorrentino have a new entry in their co-operative, escape room-style card game series Deckscape:

A warrior, a sorceress, and an archer are the last hope to restore peace to the Three Kingdoms.

In Deckscape: Dungeon, you will move your heroes to explore the dungeon map and to solve puzzles, find the legendary Dragon Eyes, and defeat the shadows of Xemon!

▪️ DV Games launched another co-operative game series in 2024 with Marco Pranzo's Lost in Adventure: The Labyrinth, which is meant to feel like point-and-click adventures of the 1990s.

The next entry in this series will be 2025's Lost in Adventure: The Curse of Jack Parrot:

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

In Lost in Adventure: The Curse of Jack Parrot, you play as the son of a legendary pirate who embarks on a thrilling adventure to follow in his father's footsteps.

▪️ The designers of 2023's Bonsai — Rosaria Battiato, Massimo Borzì, and Martino Chiacchiera — have a new title coming in 2025 that feels like it will vibe with a similar audience.

Here's an overview of Koi — yes, another game titled only "Koi" seven years after the last one:

In Koi, you build an authentic 3D koi pond, so the challenge is to bring your reservoir to life and make the most of the actions at your disposal to create something truly magnificent.

Koi includes a wide variety of objectives, making each game unique and every creation a masterpiece worth capturing.

▪️ Each year, DV Games publishes a limited edition of the winner of the Miglior Gioco Inedito, a themed card game design contest run by DV Games and Lucca Games.

The 2023 winner was Sensu, a 1-5 player design by Enrico Vicario that works as follows:

Players collect Japanese folding fans, trying to collect fan cards worth exactly 20 in their hand. Once they do, they can play that combination of cards to redeem one or more of the cards in it, using the redeemed cards over time to build their personal fans.

The first player to complete two fans of different types wins.

In 2025, DV Games plans to release this design in an expanded and updated edition that currently has the working title Sensu 15.

Promotional image Read more »

by Stanislav Kordonskiy

Hey there, I'm Stan Kordonskiy, and I wanted to share my story of how I came to design Minos: Dawn of Bronze Age.

My original prototype of this game was called "Bronze Dynasties", but to make it less confusing, I will refer to this game as Minos from here on out.

The idea for this game came from my two previously published titles: Rurik: Dawn of Kiev and Endless Winter: Paleoamericans. After designing Endless Winter, I wanted to make another game in a historical setting but advance it forward from the Ice Age to the Bronze Age. At the same time, I wanted to re-implement my main mechanism from Rurik. If you are not familiar with Rurik, I'll give you a quick rundown.

This interesting mechanism that I called "auction programming" combines action programming (selecting your actions for the round) and auction (bidding for something). In Rurik, it was implemented by using numbered meeples, which players took turns placing on a strategy board, selecting and simultaneously bidding on their future actions.

In Minos, I decided to create a different version of this mechanism that would use dice drafting instead of pre-set meeples. Finding new ways to use dice in board games is a bit of a passion for me. My first design was Dice Hospital, where I used dice to represent hospital patients, with the dice pips corresponding to how healthy or ill they were. Later, I designed Shadow Kingdoms of Valeria, where dice represented player's armies, and Guild Academies of Valeria, where the dice are students studying in a fantasy academy.


This brings us to how I use the dice in Minos. At the beginning of each round, the dice are rolled, then are drafted and assigned to a variety of actions that players will take later in the round. Different colors of the dice correspond to different tracks (military, economic, cultural) on which players can focus, and the dice value signifies the order of actions that a player will be able to take. The lower-value dice will outbid the higher-value dice for better versions of any given action, but the higher-value dice are superior for advancing on the tracks, which can gain significant advantages during the game.

This is one of my favorite things to design: the way of balancing player choices so that they are presented with several equally enticing propositions. All of the dice colors are useful in their own right, and both the high and the low values have their own advantages. Furthermore, the different actions available to the players are all useful, but it is not possible to do all of them equally well, so player must prioritize based on their own strategy, as well as the opponent's choices.

Let's talk about these actions. Because the drafting of the dice can be a tricky choice, I wanted to counterbalance that complexity with an easy and clear list of actions to which these dice would be applied. Otherwise, the game was at risk of becoming very complicated and overly long. Early on, I decided to have only a few core actions that were easily understood and distinct from one another: drafting cards, playing cards, building structures, and deploying and moving population tokens.

The cards in this game are another highlight for me. Earlier I mentioned Endless Winter. In that game — a deck-builder — I used cards that had different uses depending on whether players played them during the round or saved them for the "end of the round" phase. I quite like multi-use cards, and for Minos I wanted to find another way to use that mechanism.

Image: Wouter Debisschop
In Minos, players do not use deck building. Instead, the cards can be drafted, then played to gain a wide variety of immediate benefits that can reinforce a player's strategy or allow them to pivot during the game. After these cards are played, some of them can be transferred to the player's palace area, where they will provide ongoing bonuses that can again contribute to the player's overall strategy. Since all cards have a different combination of instant and ongoing abilities, as well as different costs, choosing the right cards to play is a big part of this game. Players who can do this well will be rewarded with an engine that makes their future turns much more powerful.

Now that I've talked about the highlights of the game design, I want to mention how the game came to be published by Board&Dice. For those who are interested in being a game designer, I have to say that designing a game and finding a publisher for your game are equally important tasks.

After I designed and playtested Minos for about six months, both in person and on Tabletop Simulator, I felt that it was in good shape to start looking for a publisher. I showed this game to both the publisher of Rurik and the publisher of Endless Winter since it had some ties to both and since I already had a working relationship with them. However, both publishers passed on this project for different reasons.

Don't be surprised — this happens in the boardgame business all the time. Making games is a time-consuming and expensive endeavor, and any past success is no guarantee of easy future access to publishers. I showed this design to several other companies, and as a part of the evaluation process by the publisher of CloudAge, I even got to play it online with the much more accomplished game designer Alexander Pfister, which honestly was a bit of a high point for me. Although the publisher passed on this game, the fact that Alexander seemed to like my design encouraged me tremendously.


In 2022, I traveled to the SPIEL convention in Essen. It was a big year for me because Endless Winter was released to a positive reception, and it was going to be featured at SPIEL as well — but aside from enjoying my newest release, I planned to meet with several publishers to pitch my new designs, including Minos.

I approached Board&Dice via email because I felt that the game's weight, mechanisms, and theme would fit the type of games they were publishing. I quite enjoy their titles and felt that they would be a great company to take on Minos. My pitch meeting with B&D was actually rather brief. They didn't have a meeting room available, so I ended up showing them my prototype on a small counter space in their booth. As a result, I could not set up and show the entire game; instead I think I got about twenty minutes or so to talk about the main mechanisms and show separate components of the game to try to explain how the dice drafting and placement would work and how the multi-use cards were used in the game. I did not think such an impromptu pitch was going to make much of an impression, but B&D seemed interested in my game and requested that I leave the prototype with them so that they could play it and evaluate it in detail.

To my surprise, several weeks later B&D came back with an offer to publish Minos. This was already great news for me, but I was also told that it would be made for a SPIEL Essen release in 2024 — which is rather fast by modern industry standards.

Naturally, between the time this game was signed to Board&Dice and the time it was released the publisher did a mountain of work, including development, playtesting, and art and graphics production, just to name a few items. Covering every aspect of the design and development process would make this a much longer read, so I will just end it here.

I'm proud of Minos and thankful to Board&Dice for their excellent job as a publisher.

Best wishes,
Stanislav Kordonskiy

Image: Wouter Debisschop Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

BoardGameGeek's awkwardly named Q1 2025 Convention Preview is now live, although the preview itself bears the name "Spielwarenmesse/FIJ/GAMA Q1 2025 Preview", which isn't much better.

Typically, BGG's convention previews focus on a single convention — SPIEL Essen, Gen Con, PAXU, etc. — but three shows — Spielwarenmesse in Nürnberg, Germany; Festival International des Jeux in Cannes, France; and GAMA Expo in Louisville, Kentucky, U.S. — take place at the start of each year and feature many overlapping titles from globe-spanning publishers, so separate previews for each would be tiny and repetitive.

Better to put them all in one place...and while doing that, I also surveyed publishers on titles they plan to bring to retail in the first half of 2025. The end result is a mish-mash of upcoming games that will hit the retail market in the first half of 2025 or will be demoed at the three conventions above regardless of when they'll be released. (In other words, expect to see some of these titles appear once again on the aforementioned Gen Con and SPIEL Essen previews.)

In addition to compiling these upcoming games in one location for you, I use these surveys to spur publishers to submit game listings, images, release dates, etc. I'm the bug in their ear saying, "Bzzz bzzz bzzz", which translates to "You should probably tell people what you're working on."

I'll update this preview through the end of February 2025, at which point I'll start working on previews for shows later in the year.

A sampling of what's listed Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

▪️ Jeff Probst, who has hosted the television reality show Survivor since 2000, is co-designer of a card game based on that show — Survivor: The Tribe Has Spoken, which is due out January 12, 2025 from publisher Exploding Kittens.

In a press release announcing the game, Exploding Kittens CEO Elan Lee said, "I've watched every episode of Survivor since the first season – 24 years ago. It has had a massive influence on my own game designs and ability to craft amazing experiences for our players. I have always wanted to bring the Survivor experience to at-home audiences, but condensing a multi-week game to less than 30 minutes has been challenging. After two years of working closely with Jeff Probst, we've finally done it...with all the fun, strategy, alliances, and betrayal packed into a beautiful box." Lee and Ian Clayman are both co-designers of this game, which is for 3-6 players and plays as follows:

Survivor: The Tribe Has Spoken is meant to replicate the fun, drama, and excitement of the long-lived television reality show without you needing to sleep in the jungle or eat bugs.

To survive, players must collect advantages, find hidden immunity idols, form secret alliances, and face devastating blindsides, while surviving Tribal Council eliminations, in which players decide who should be voted out by using the game box as a "voting urn" in which players secretly cast votes. Cards let you look at opponents' hands, steal cards, manipulate votes, declare yourself tribal council leader, protect you from elimination, and more.

The last two players standing must make a case to all eliminated players as to why they deserve the title of "Sole Survivor".

The game includes player cards featuring memorable contestants from the 47 seasons of Survivor that have aired as of 2024.

▪️ Designer Shem Phillips is behind Strawberry Shortcake: Berry Besties Bakeoff Card Game, a 2025 release from Maestro Media for 2-6 players. The short take:

Players bid for cards featuring familiar Strawberry Shortcake characters and items, trying to place them well to create a valuable collection. The cards bid in one round become the pool of what's available in the next one.

▪️ The Bridge Constructor video game series debuted in 2011, and publisher Headup Games has partnered with Maestro Media for a card game based on that license. Here's an overview of Bridge Constructor: Breaking Point, a 2-4 player game from Jeb Havens:

You want to engineer the best bridge possible with limited supplies so that vehicles can cross successfully.

Gameplay is half puzzle and half press-your-luck. Each round, you pick a bridge tile and either continue to strengthen or rebuild your bridge or use the tile to cross your vehicles. Choose from super light, light, medium, or heavy vehicles that each have unique points and challenges. Watch out for your fellow engineers, though, as they might play an event card on you, unleashing devastating damage to your perfectly planned bridge. Who's got the smarts to cross more vehicles and gather the most points before time runs out?

▪️ In the category of "Could this finally be happening?" we have the announcement from Steamforged Games of a tabletop adaptation of Paradox Interactive's Hearts of Iron video game — an adaptation of which was first announced in 2018 from Eagle-Gryphon Games.


That publisher — and the previously announced designers: Glenn Drover and Alex Soued — have long since exited the picture, with Steamforged working directly with Paradox on this design, which will be crowdfunded in early 2025. Here's an overview of this 2-5 player game:

Hearts of Iron: The Board Game is a game of grand strategy warfare, tactical battles, and shrewd diplomatic choices.

In the game, you lead one of five nations — United Kingdom, France, Italy, the Soviet Union, or the German Reich — during World War II, but will you re-enact history as it happened...or play out an alternative timeline, leading your nation down a new path? During set-up, you pair your nation with one of a suite of ideologies. You might choose, for example, to enact real history by playing the German Reich under fascism — or you could return the Kaiser to power and play the German Reich under monarchism. Each ideology has access to different focus decks, which will affect your resources and your routes to victory; these cards are played turn to turn and can influence everything from scoring victory points, to making lucrative trade agreements or declarations of war.

Mock-up of the game board
Each board game nation has its own player boards, ideologies, cards, tokens, and minis. Each player's tracker board shows their current supply levels of vital resources, such as political power, stability, production, and manpower.

At the start of each round, you receive resources based on how many territories you control with resource icons and factories. (You also gain resources during the game for trade agreements and engine cards that grant bonus resources.) You must pay to upkeep your stability, or pay even more to improve it. High stability grants bonuses to your nation, but with a high cost — although possibly not higher than letting your stability plummet.

You have a political board that shows all playable and non-playable nations, and you use it to manage who you're allied with, who you're at war with, and everything in between. During the political phase, you can spend political power to adjust your alliances and conflicts; for each point you spend, you move one of your flag tokens, changing your political stance with one other nation. Changing your stance aggressively will eventually lead to a state of war, whereas changing your stance peacefully will lead to forming an alliance — and the more your ideologies match, the less political power you need.

Mock-up of the political board
While at war with another nation, when your units move into their territory, you'll start combat. If you win, you'll conquer and take control of that territory, which is the fastest way to gain more resources. While in an alliance with another nation, you can move your units through their territory without starting a fight. You can also deploy units in your allies' territory! By forming an alliance, you can send units across the board to invade a distant nation.

The game lasts six rounds, covering 1939-1944, and you need the most points to win.

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by Mike Peacock

Hi there! I'm Mike Peacock, a first-time game designer and illustrator of the card game Shoal, published by the wonderful Molinarius Games Ltd. In this designer diary, I'll take you on a little nautical trip on how Shoal came to be and how I discovered the importance of simplicity.

What Is Shoal?

Shoal is a lightweight family game, easy to teach yet with enough crunch that veteran gamers will get a kick out of it, too. In around thirty minutes, each player will layer cards in front of them, creating their own shoal of fish to complete goals and earn points. The game is based on four simple rules that players need to follow. Conveniently, each of these rules helped me solve several design challenges.

Set Sail!

The idea evolved from a mechanism of a much larger game that I had in mind around halfway into 2021.

The idea was an engine-building game about battling a sea monster but with a "give-and-take" mechanism to manage resources. Players would gain cards displaying different resources and each card would be divided up, displaying up to four different objects: wood, stone, bones, scales, flint, etc. These resources would be redeemed at the end of the turn to allow the player to buy/heal/craft/attack on their next go.

As you draw more of these cards, you have to place a card on top of another one in your stash, covering up a section of the previous card and thereby sacrificing some resources to gain more of another. This was a small part of an ambitious idea, but eventually life and work got busy and I had no clue how to even make a game, so I gave up, and the idea was shelved.

A year passed, and during this time I played a variety of games, some of which became key parts of my collection: War Chest, Disney Villainous, No Thanks!, Scattergories, and Air, Land & Sea to name a few, along with one of my all-time favorites, Sushi Go Party! Each came with varying success and enjoyment depending on who I played with.

There was also a range of challenges when teaching newcomers to the hobby. I was able to see and understand people's confusion about where to play a piece, what to do on a turn, and even how to win! These things seemed to get in the way of the fun.

Speaking as someone who loves games, this was equally frustrating and fascinating. I was keen to understand how to help each issue and focus on what people enjoyed about these games. It led me to think of my old game idea: how do I focus on the fun and make it as accessible and engaging? I wanted to strip it down to the core and build upwards. Slaying the sea monster took a back seat, and I focused on that "give-and-take" mechanism of layering cards, redeeming resources, and awarding points. Just like that, the first rule of the game was set:

Rule 1: A card must be placed on top of another card.

Coming Out Of My Shell

It's now 2022, so I decided "What's the harm?" and started to test this idea to see whether it would work as part of a game using scraps of paper or playing cards. I was far more reserved this time around and based the idea on hermit crabs.

With a background in marine biology, I drew inspiration from the animals I studied and worked with, and I was keen to incorporate their behavior into game dynamics. Each player would layer cards to build a pyramid in front of them, creating a shell and gaining food, points, and decorations as they went. Shell swapping and card trading were also incorporated, but that felt messy so it was scrapped.

The key result of this test was that layering cards to gain points worked and it felt good, so my confidence in the idea started to build. I focused on the card-layering aspect, allowing the player to choose from a market of four cards to add to their hand that they would eventually layer in front of them to score. It was here that I moved away from cards building a pyramid and allowed players to organize their cards as they liked. The gameplay felt like organizing a growing shoal of fish, pulling fish in as they swam past, so I waved goodbye to the hermit crabs.


While layering cards to get the right combination worked and felt good, I couldn't help but feel that it had little structure and each game felt the same.

Another issue I came across was that a typical playing card size and shape seemed to limit how and where cards could be played. This led me to test square cards split into quarters. Square cards felt good, and no matter what they always fit into each section of another card — success!

However, this also gave players the freedom to manipulate cards as they placed them in their shoal, spinning them around to try to get the best combo. Seeing players lay fish upside down and facing a bunch of different directions didn't make sense. Not only was this thematically upsetting to look at, but it allowed for far too much freedom that made the game really easy. To tighten this up a second rule was born:

Rule 2: Fish cards must be played the right way up, with fish swimming to the left.

Fish Are Friends, Not Food

I toyed with the idea of having a food chain, with larger fish being played on smaller fish, thus eating that fish, with players scoring points for visible fish at the end of the game. This led to the idea that fish would vary in their appearance and size; perhaps smaller fish may want to be in groups or find protection with similar looking fish.

Unfortunately, the food chain idea didn't work. Players ended up with too many large fish spread across their shoal, and it didn't make sense thematically for smaller fish to be able to move or cover larger fish. This resulted in a player being unable to play a card or the need to introduce a rule that would come into play only in a certain scenario, which I wanted to avoid.

That said, the size difference and grouping aspect seemed like a natural fit, so that stayed. With no food chain, players had a lot of freedom with where to play cards and now, no matter what, fish can always cover fish...a move that backfired a bit and resulted in players avoiding covering fish at all, spreading them far and wide from each other.

To nudge players back towards the "give-and-take" mechanism of covering fish, I wanted a player's shoal to have structure and lead them into making tough decisions. To help prevent players from breaking up their shoal, I brought in the third rule:

Rule 3: Fish must be aligned orthogonally adjacent to one another.

Empty Spaces

Among the fish, I wanted parts of the cards to be empty. These sections would be worth no points and would change a player's view of the value of a card. For example, a card having a high-value fish in one section but having three worthless empty spaces leads the player into a nice decision space.

With this in mind, I wanted players to have a choice of taking that card or leaving it for the next player and risk picking up an unknown card. Rather than have a market of cards from which to pick, I now had two draw piles: one face up and the other face down. Not only did this arrangement give players a choice, but it also made set-up nice and easy.

I put together a collection of the different card types in which fish will occupy one, two, or three spaces. While empty spaces are worth no points, they allow players to cover up a large amount of fish, either unknowingly shooting themselves in the foot or allowing them to get rid of unfavorable fish.

But what if empty spaces couldn't cover fish? This gave the game some needed restrictions as not only did this solve some cards feeling overpowered but it also leaned into the core mechanism. If the card can't be placed in the easy spot, the player will have to cover up a favorable section of another and try to solve the problem they created to earn more points in a later turn. I put together a bit of a matrix of card combos to see what worked, and eventually, I ended up with a suit of cards and the fourth and golden rule of the game:

Rule 4: Empty spaces cannot be played on top of a fish.

Goal Cards

I enjoy having variable goals as well as targets to achieve that change from game to game. Not only does it stop a game feeling a bit samey, but you can change up your strategy each time you play.

With this in mind, I knew the amount of points earned from one type of fish in a game would differ the next time you play. Players racing to achieve a shared goal that rewards only one player is a fun risk and gives players a choice for what they want to compete over.

Since players are covering fish, I wanted that decision to impact how they play and where they place a card. Giving each fish a base value of 1 point seemed to solve that, then players can earn extra points depending on the shared goals. Would a player risk sacrificing a group of three small fish for one large fish so they can try to achieve one of the goals? This also helped emphasize the importance of how a player will lay out their cards, picking which fish to add, cover, or keep to try to score the most points.



I tried increasing the complexity a tad by having cards with unique actions or by giving players secret achievements but playtesting with my family put things back into perspective.

I met with them, gave a quick teach of the four rules, showed them an example of a few turns, and described what to do with the goal card. I kept the hand size small to restrict player choice and the goals easy to prevent analysis paralysis. Then we played, we laughed, we added up the scores, and when I went to pack it up, they asked to play another round — success!

This playtest reminded me of what I initially set out to do: make a game that didn't overcomplicate play or get in the way of families having fun. After that day, I stopped trying to add extra abilities or special fish; instead, I refined goals here and there and continued to playtest more. After roughly eighteen months of on-and-off development, I created a sell sheet with a "How To Play" video and felt like it was ready to pitch!

Molinarius Games picked up the game, which went on sale for the first time at UK Games Expo 2024. They even asked whether I wanted to help on the stall! Being able to demo the game and play it with the public for the first time was amazing and is an experience I won't forget for a long time. Shoal had a great reception, and it's crazy to think that it's now part of other family's board game collections!

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

I normally focus on games being released in the specialty market or at conventions, but plenty of games debut in mainstream outlets, especially those based on licensed properties, so let's sample what's been released within the past four months:


▪️ Co-publishers Winning Moves and Hasbro describe Risk: Stranger Things as "collaboratively designed with the Duffer Brothers" with never-before-seen artwork from Kyle Lambert, who has created multiple posters for Stranger Things. Whether playing on the side of good or evil, you're both trying to stop Vecna from reaching the Creel House. The release date for season 5 is still unannounced as of the end of 2024, so I guess you need something to hold over fans in the meantime.


▪️ Monopoly: Sonic the Hedgehog, another title from the same publishing pair, coincides with the release of the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 movie and is presumably not identical with either 2013's Monopoly: Sonic the Hedgehog Collector's Edition or 2019's Monopoly Gamer: Sonic The Hedgehog. You might think that two Monopoly games based on Sonic the Hedgehog would have saturated the market, but apparently that assumption is wrong — and the same can be said for the next title.


▪️ Hasbro and Winning Moves have also partnered on Monopoly: Hello Kitty, an October 2024 release that is presumably not identical with either 2010's Monopoly: Hello Kitty Collector's Edition or 2022's Monopoly: Hello Kitty and Friends. Seeing all of these dates lined up, you can get a sense for how long a licensed title might stay on the market before being swept away and refreshed for a new life.


▪️ Speaking of Monopoly: Hello Kitty and Friends, that title is still on the market from The Op Games, and we can speculate as to whether that publisher is annoyed to share the stage with another M:HK title, but perhaps a rising tide of cuteness lifts all licensed boats.

In any case, in September 2024 The Op Games released The Game of Life: Hello Kitty and Friends, bringing its catalog of licensed Hello Kitty products to an even dozen.


▪️ The Op Games has another long-lived children's IP in its line-up, with Clue: Goosebumps, which debuted in September 2024. (Goosebumps hit about fifteen years too late for me to be the right audience for it, and I've yet to see a huge market for Encyclopedia Brown licensed products, much less Scott Corbett's The Great Custard Pie Panic or The Red Room Riddle. Gen X gets screwed again!)


▪️ For more spookiness(?), you can also reach for Clue: What We Do In The Shadows, another September 2024 release from The Op Games. It's interesting to see how a franchise develops from almost nothing, with What We Do In The Shadows originally being a short film released in 2005 that was then transformed into a feature-length film released only in New Zealand in 2014, that was spread virally until it debuted elsewhere in the mid-2010s before being transformed into a four-season television series in New Zealand starting in 2018, with a six-season series running almost simultaneously on the FX channel starting in 2019.


▪️ In October 2024, The Op Games released Ouija: The Exorcist, which is not a game in the way that Ouija is not a game, but I thought I'd mention it anyway. The only new aspects of this design appear to be the cover and glow-in-the-dark elements that reveal bloody handprints and bon mots from one Regan MacNeil.

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by Carles Carreras

Hello, I'm Litus, the creator and illustrator of Gold Nugget! I write all this to share a little about what the creation and design of this great little project was like.

I am not a person well versed in board games — but I am well versed in video games, and there is a difference between them that has always caught my attention: human contact, a contact that has increasingly been lost in the world of video games. In the past, we would meet up at home with friends to play a video game. It was something that I loved, that human contact, which little by little has been disappearing.

But in board games human contact has always existed and the field has maintained it. I've always wanted to make a game that would allow me to be together with my friends, which is why I was inclined to make a board game in which the main theme was the interaction between the participants.

The first version of Gold Nugget differed greatly from the current one since it was a team game: on the one hand the animals, and on the other a villain: the hunter.

A player personified the hunter, who used traps at different times of the day, with those traps being activated if they met a series of requirements. For example, the weight trap, which was activated only if an animal with three or more stones in its possession took a turn. The animals had to collaborate to avoid the hunter's traps and avoid dying from his shots.

The interaction of the first versions of the game was verbal since turns were shared between all the player animals. They had to reach an agreement on who took the turn so they were collaborating, but at the same time, each one had their own interest in getting the gold nugget. In this way, a game of trust and betrayal was played between the animals themselves.


I designed this first version of the game in 2013, and it was not until 2015 that I decided to try to make it happen through crowdfunding...which I had to abandon halfway through due to medical problems. That was a hard blow for me, and Gold Nugget was abandoned for several years, along with other board games he had created.

It wasn't until 2021 that I walked into a board game store and saw a game similar to one of my prototypes. That made me cry since I realized that person had fought for their dreams, whereas I had abandoned them.

So I reacted. I didn't want to become someone who doesn't fight for their dreams. I decided to return to the adventure of launching Gold Nugget, but the world of board games had evolved a lot in a short time, especially in Spain, and Gold Nugget also had to evolve.

I realized that, among other things, the world of board games was getting closer and closer to that of video games, and with Tabletop Simulator you could emulate any existing board game, losing that human contact that I liked so much about board games...so I decided to evolve Gold Nugget in a way that couldn't be emulated on a computer.

How could I achieve that? It was complicated, but I came up with the idea of ​​adding a touch mechanism. Let me explain: I thought that closing your eyes at some point in the game and performing actions with your eyes closed — thus having to use touch and pay attention to the noise made by the other players — could not be emulated in Tabletop Simulator, a result that I loved.

Happy with this mechanism, I dispensed with the hunter (which seemed violent to me) and added as a villain the great black raven, who was the possessor of the gold nugget.

This new version was fresher and faster than the previous one. Little by little, I changed the gameplay of what I had to beomce a more modern and accessible one.


These past years made me grow as a person and an artist. I had studied more and worked on other projects, so I was ready to evolve the art side of the game as well. As you can see in the following photos, the change is quite noticeable:




Once I updated the art and mechanisms of the game, I was ready to present it, so I started going to fairs with my friends, who helped me show Gold Nugget to all types of board game audiences, who gave it a lot of positive feedback. People thought it was a unique game, nothing like other games on the market. With effort, we polished the design until we presented it to the publisher that would later publish it: 2Tomatoes Games.

Once I signed the game to 2Tomatoes, I was able to spend a lot more time on the illustration, improving and updating art that I wasn't happy with. I soaked up animal studies, photos, and sketches from Disney, who are geniuses at drawing animals, and created the current illustrations. Working closely with the publisher, the final version of the game was finally born.

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by Greyfax

Here is the discussion for this week:

I visit a game night once a week, and it's become one of the highlights of my week. Unfortunately, I do see that a bit too often for my tastes, new players don't seem to be getting the warm reception that I once did.

We use a group on Whatsapp to arrange games to play, typically in a "first-come-first-served" fashion. This works out great for us because we now no longer have that awkward dance at the start of the night when people are looking for games to play or butting heads trying to make their heavy game sound more appealing than the heavy game someone else has brought. The game night has become much more pleasant as people know what they're going to play, who they're playing with, and who at the table can give a good teach.

New people, however, aren't part of this Whatsapp group. I've seen multiple times people arrive at the game night only to be greeted by tables that are already fully booked. Occasionally they're shepherded to a group that has room for one more person, but often I see these new players sit together, play a game from the library, then silently leave and never return.

Is there a way for us to serve both of these goals? Is there a pleasant way for us to make sure that people know which games will be brought (so that they can make a selection), while also being more welcoming to new players? Thanks in advance!

When I was hosting my meetup, I had my teenager act as an introducer to find out which games the new folks might be interested in, making some suggestions if asked. This, I feel, made the new people much more comfortable, even if they saw others already engaged. At a meetup that I now attend, the leader of the meetup makes sure that all who attend have a game to play before they start playing. I believe this is core to maintaining a meetup.

Folks who are dedicated players one day may move, have kids, lose interest — a lot of things can happen to reduce the number of people coming — so you need to have the established group be willing to give up a little to help those who are new. I would suggest rotating folks, so maybe every four sessions a person would host, then it would be another set of people hosting after that. They can still play, of course, but maybe not their favorite game. This way you maintain continuity of the group from meetup to meetup.

Best,

Ms. Meeple (Jennifer Schlickbernd)

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

by W. Eric Martin

In addition to Reiner Knizia's Shell We?, which I covered here, Korea Boardgames has announced four other game releases for 2025, so let's knock out the rest of its line-up:

▪️ Foldris is a new edition of Jinwoo Seo's flip-and-write game フォールドリス, which appeared in a Japanese edition in 2024 from Show House Games. The cover and portmanteau of the title might already give you a good sense of how to play.

Each of the 1-7 players has their own Tetris-style playsheet with a different 2x2 area filled at the bottom of their grid, as well as a 1x2 barrier block.

On a turn, flip the top block card of the deck. Each player adds this block to their grid, after rotating it as they wish, by imagining it falling as far as possible into their grid from the top, with no horizontal movement being allowed.

If a player completes a line, they mark the line as complete, add a bonus marker at the top of their player sheet, then fold the paper to make that line disappear! If someone completes a line, everyone who has not done so that turn must now drop their barrier block horizontally into their grid, with the center of the block matching the number on the current block card. (In the image below, the barrier block was dropped on the 3 line.)


The barrier block is present only for your next turn, after which you return it to the side of your playing area, leaving behind a 1x2 hole because you can't use the barrier to complete a line. Of course, if someone else has completed a line that turn and you haven't, you must drop your barrier again!

Each player starts with two bonus markers. Spend one bonus marker to mirror a block, and spend two to remove one square from the block being dropped (as long as you don't split the block in two).

If you can't place a block because your grid is too full, you are eliminated, and the last player still in the game wins. (Use the number of completed lines to break ties.)

▪️ Beaver House is a real-time game for 2-4 players from Eddie Lee, a game in the mold of Andrew and Jack Lawson's Make 'n' Break or Yohan Goh's Fold-it.


Each player has their own dam board, habitat board, and ten material tiles. Each material tile shows 1-4 beavers, one of three materials (logs, rocks, or leaves), and some condition of muddiness (specks, lines, or across every surface). The eight-sided habitat board has land on half of its edges and water on the other half, with four sides next to flowers and two sides next to beavers.

On a turn, someone reveals an order card that shows something like no rocks next to leaves, one log on the water, or three beavers on flowers. Everyone races to place eight tiles around the edges of their habitat board in order to match the situation on the displayed order. Whoever does so correctly first claims this order.


To set up for the next round, rotate your habitat board one notch, then remove the two tiles next to the beavers, leaving everything else in place. Reveal a new order card. Each player must remove, swap, and place tiles to satisfy both the new order card and all order cards they've previously won.

Whoever first claims four order cards wins.

▪️ Jeppe Norsker's Burger Master is another real-time game, but unlike the previous title this is more like Ricochet Robots...but with burgers.


To set up, spread out the four plates, place a bun on each plate, then shuffle the ingredients and place one-third of them in a stack on the bun of three plates, leaving one bun empty. (Leave out the onions if you're playing without the "gourmet menu" cards.)

On a turn, reveal a random menu card. Everyone tries to determine how steps it will take them to create that exact burger, with a step consisting of:

• Moving a stack of one or more ingredients to a different plate, or
• Flipping two or more ingredients, whether leaving them on the same plate or moving them on top of another plate.

When someone announces a number, they flip the sand timer. Each other player can call out a smaller number once, and when time expires, whoever called the lowest number tries to make the desired burger, with (1) everyone else counting out the steps and (2) the sand timer running.


If the player makes the burger before time runs out and in no more than the stated number of steps, they win a fry from the fry pouch; if they don't, everyone else wins a fry.

The first player to collect five fries wins. If multiple players do this on the same turn, these players then have a sudden death round in which they try to make their opponents choke on a burger compete to create more burgers. If someone fails in sudden death, they're out of the competition; if they succeed, they will be hailed by all far and wide as the burger master...or burger mistress should that be preferable.

▪️ River Kang's card game Purrfect Place is a Golf-style game in which you want to place cats in objects to make them disappear.

Wow, sounds gruesome when you put it like that.

Each player starts with two rows of three or four face-down cards (depending on the player count), with each card showing a number 1-11 or a kitten, which has a value of your choice. On a turn, you take the top card of the deck or discard pile, then either:

• Place it face up in your display, discarding the card previously in that spot,
• Discard it, then flip a card in your display face up, or
• Stack it on a face-up card as long as the numbers add to 11, after which you go again.

At the end of your turn, if card(s) in the same column equal the same number, remove them and place them face down next to your display.

All of the cards
When a player has no face-down cards, the round ends and players sum the value of their display, with stacks worth 11, kittens worth 0, and cards set aside face down worth -1. The player(s) with the lowest score earn a bottle, and the first player(s) to collect two bottles win. Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

Is it too early for another round-up of games from designer Reiner Knizia, especially since he was in a BGG News post just the other day? Depends on your appetite for those designs, I suppose, but I kept sending myself notes about his new and upcoming releases, then realized that I should just publish them and be done with it...until the next time.

▪️ Hong Kong publisher Kids Logic has released three titles from Knizia, all re-themed versions of earlier releases, with August 2024's Trading Titans being the newest edition of 1996's Palmyra, a.k.a. Buy Low Sell High.


In the game, players buy and sell stocks in three abstract categories — oil, retail, and technology — over three rounds. On each player's turn, they must play a card from their hand onto the game board, with the cards adding or subtracting from the stock's value and causing other actions. Once the board is filled, you sum the ups and downs, then re-adjust the stock values. Your goal: Buy low, sell high, and end up with the most money.

▪️ Another Kids Logic Knizia release is Battle of Mekaverse, a new edition of 2002's Clash of the Gladiators in which each player now has four robots that will fill their four programming slots with weapons and other tools, after which you'll try to take out opponents.


I've played Clash of the Gladiators a few times, and while luck definitely plays a role in the outcome compared to other Knizia designs, I found it a fun dice-chucker.

▪️ I guess Ultraman is a thing again? At Gen Con 2024, Tsubaraya Productions demoed Ultraman Card Game in a nearly empty booth ahead of its October 25, 2024 release, and I've heard nothing about the game since that time — but Kids Logic has given Knizia his shot at an Ultraman game with Ultraman: Spirit of Light.


This game is a new take on Knizia's 1993 title En Garde, with players being able to use the powers of their Ultraman figure when playing in Ultra mode.

▪️ Plundering Times is the fortieth(!) collaboration between Knizia and U.S. publisher SimplyFun, which focuses on "play-based learning" in the games that it releases.


In this game, 2-4 players take turns placing two numbered pirate dragons onto multiple islands that bear a random number. Once each island is filled, players multiply their pirates, then add 0-3 pirates depending on where they placed their figures. Whoever is the closest to the number on an island takes their pick of the treasure chests and can plunder their opponent's gems. Get that total exactly, and you earn a bonus gem.

▪️ Shell We?, due out in 2025 from Korea Boardgames, is reminiscent of Start 11! The Board Game, with players trying to empty their hand of tiles first while playing them in numbered rows.


To start, each player takes seventeen random tiles, which are numbered 0-17 in five colors or which depict one of five starfish; for each person fewer than four, you remove one of the tile colors from play. The double-sided game board has five lines of colored spaces going from 0-17, with the lines wavering so that sometimes two lines are adjacent. Pearls are present on some spaces of the game board or between two adjacent spaces of different colors.

First, each player places a tile from their hand onto the matching colored and numbered space, then the game begins. On a turn, you either draw two tiles from the bag or place up to two tiles on the board. When you place tiles, they must go in the appropriate numbered and colored space, in addition to being adjacent to a tile already in play. (Starfish can be placed adjacent to any tile already on the board. If you have the tile matching the space where a starfish is located, you can swap these two tiles at the start of your turn.)

If you place two consecutive tiles of the same color (whether using starfish or not), take a bonus action, either passing a tile in hand to the player on your left or (if using the "message in a bottle" tiles) carrying out the action on the bottle placed next to this color at the start of the game.

If you place on a lone pearl space — or are the second tile in a shared pearl space — take a bonus action, placing a tile from your hand on the game board without regard for whether it's adjacent to another tile.

Whoever empties their hand first wins! Alternatively, play a match — one game on each side of the game board — with players tallying their leftover tiles after each game; whoever has the lowest score wins.

▪️ Finally(?), U.S. publisher APE Games has announced that it will release both Whale Riders and Whale Riders: The Card Game in North America and the UK in April 2025, both with the original Vincent Dutrait art used in the 2021 productions by Grail Games.


You can read my 2020 overview of Whale Riders here, but in short 2-6 players take two actions from a choice of five each turn, riding down the coast to pick up items to fulfill contracts before heading back home while still doing the same. In the end, you want more pearls than anyone else, and you primarily get them by fulfilling contracts, which are private to you.

Whale Riders: The Card Game is a re-implementation of Trendy, with players trying to part of the group that scores each round based on who has played which cards. Event cards change the details of how a round ends and how it's scored.

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by Wojciech Grajkowski

The Idea

In the fall of 2021, I was assigned by my employer, Lucky Duck Games, the task of designing a new digital hybrid game for children. The perspective of creating a game from scratch, within a setting of my choice, got me truly excited.

Moreover, since I also became a game director and a writer for the project, I enjoyed big creative freedom. The next three years were an amazing adventure for me, which resulted in Toriki: The Castaway Island. Eventually the design ended up being a family game, not a children's one as planned, after early tests showed that adults had a great time playing it as well.

As I look back, I believe the reason I chose the 19th century deserted island setting was because of the books I read as a child: Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island, R. L. Stevenson's Treasure Island, and, of course, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. These are all pretty old and rarely read nowadays, but their influence on popular culture can't be overstated. In fact, gameplay in Toriki relies heavily on the assumption that even though none of us have been marooned on a deserted island, we all have at least a vague idea of how to kindle a fire, build a raft, or make a spear thanks to us reading and watching countless castaway stories. The playtest results confirmed this assumption, and I could scatter different resources over the island, confident that players (even relatively young ones) would know how to combine them into useful items.

I personally enjoy all the "primitive technology" stuff. Knapping tiny spearheads like the one below and hafting them on a stick is one of my favorite summer holiday lying-on-a-beach activities. Maybe if I were more into sandcastles, you'd be reading a designer's diary for a game about a medieval city siege...


Clearly, I'm not the only one who loves crafting. Being able to choose the proper two item cards and combine them by scanning their QR codes to create a new item became one of the most satisfying moments for players — and the young generation raised on Minecraft proved to be pretty good at it.


One of Toriki's core concepts was to provide relaxing, leisurely gameplay. The game is fully co-operative, and players are never encouraged to compete with one another. It's technically impossible for a player character to die or to make an irreversible mistake. If you feel stuck and don't know what to do, you can always return to the main camp and ask the professor for advice. The ultimate goal, of course, is to leave the island, but players are encouraged not to hurry too much and to spend as much time exploring the island as they wish.

Initially, I didn't even want to have a final score, but many playtesters requested it as both an incentive for not using the professor's hints too often (since hints lower your score) and the "Well done!" message that would acknowledge their accomplishments once they finish the game. Eventually, we decided to display the score on the final screen on a scale from 1-10 adorable starfishes, but the Toriki experience is much more about the journey than the destination.


The Name

For most of the duration of this project, the game was known internally as "Young Castaways". (To this day, all the QR codes in the game start with "YC".) Our colleagues from the sales and marketing team made a valid point, though, suggesting that for the sake of recognizability it would be better to use the name of the island in the title since it wouldn't be translated in localized versions of the game. Hence, I had to give an official name to the no man's land where these teenage castaways were stranded.

I decided the Māori word "tōriki" — which means "to be small" or "to be distant" — made perfect sense since the island in the game is both. The name was short, and I liked the sound of it. I also believed it felt like a proper island name. Later, I learned that the unforgettable Robert Zemeckis film Cast Away with Tom Hanks was shot on a Melanesian island named Monuriki...which proved at least that the -riki part was legit.

As Toriki was meant to be an uncharted island, we didn't want it to be placed in a specific area on the map or associated with any particular nation. We therefore removed the dash from above the "ō". As a result, one can't tell now whether the island derives its name from the Māori term or from the identically spelled (in a Latin alphabet) Japanese word describing a bonsai cultivation technique. Thus, if you ever wonder where exactly Toriki is on a world map, I'd say somewhere between Japan and New Zealand.

The Map

Every sea adventure starts with a map, and from the beginning I wanted it to be the centerpiece of the game. Aside from its obvious function as a hexagonal grid through which the meeples could move, it had two major functions: to draw the players' attention to the table rather than to the app, and to provide them with important visual clues. Because of that, even the first playtests had to be done on a map with all of the elements already drawn. Therefore, early players had a unique opportunity to have direct contact with art created by me, like the piece below.


Luckily, an extremely talented illustrator, Kary Jane, soon joined the project and brought into being stunning scenery for our adventure.

As you can see below, we eventually decided to remove the QR codes from the map and have players enter a location number into the app instead. Not only did this make gameplay smoother, but it also allowed us to better showcase the beautiful artwork. I wish I could present the whole map here, but that would be a spoiler, so all I can share is the first module out of four.


The Species

Initially I planned to populate Toriki island with real-life plants and animals. Finding the right species to have all the properties needed for the story and mechanisms turned out to be a real struggle, though, especially since my biologist's conscience wouldn't allow me to deviate from the truth too much. The solution was to invent new species that could be tailored to the gameplay's needs. It was great fun to freely create plants and animals previously unknown to science, but a careful observer would spot many real-life inspirations.

Since we needed to highlight the look of the island's unique flora and fauna, the idea of the Wildlife Catalog emerged and another extremely talented illustrator working with us, Tomek Larek, made sure all the species looked stunning. The first animal he drew for us was the chubby flightless bird with madness in its eyes that you see here:


Introducing the Wildlife Catalog also enabled us to have players give scientific names of their choice to the newly discovered species, which turned out to be a lot of fun, especially for children. After each playtest, I would collect the Wildlife Catalog to see what creative names the players came up with this time. They ranged from fake Latin terms to clever wordplay to affectionate pet names.

The Coins and The Treasure

Needless to say, a hidden pirate's treasure is a must when telling a story of a deserted island. There's not much I can say without spoilers, but I remembered to bury one for you on Toriki.

What I didn't plan for initially, though, were gold coins hidden in various places on the map. The idea came to me once I struggled with designing a location where a player could perform an additional action on top of the usual "use an item" action. At that time, only that additional action gave any benefit, but I knew a player would always want to use an item, too, and the specificity of this particular location seemed to encourage digging. Initially, I added custom text along the lines of "After a couple of hours digging through the mud, you discover...more mud", but I believed a player would expect their effort to be rewarded with something more than a bad joke, so I hid a coin there.

And since I did it once, why not place more coins on the island?

That's how we ended up with the coin tokens and the coin board, with visual clues drawn on it by yet another talented artist, Ania Przybyłko. The coin itself is inspired by a 19th century British sovereign with the coat of arms changed to a fictional one. You might notice that among other symbols there's a duck on it, making it a truly lucky coin. The early tests showed that even though the coin hunt didn't contribute to the castaways' survival on Toriki, it was great fun for young players.

The Mystery

For players to feel the thrill of discovering the unknown, we needed to keep numerous components secret until they entered gameplay. In the game, the castaways can initially explore only a small part of the island limited by the ocean shore, impassable mountains, and a rushing river. Only once they figure out how to pass each of these barriers is a new map module removed from its envelope and put into play.

Similarly, no peeking at the cards is allowed until the app instructs you to take a specific one from the deck. There's also a mysterious diary you can unfold and read only once you find it somewhere on the island.


On top of that, we wanted a set of stickers that players would put on the camp board and on the map to mark how they change as a result of the players' actions or world events. The stickers needed to remain hidden until mentioned by the app, so we had to come up with a clever way of storing them. We wanted them to be arranged into something resembling an advent calendar: a sheet of stickers hidden in a card-stock envelope with perforated "windows" you would open to remove the respective sticker once the app tells you to do so.

Sounded easy, didn't work. After ordering several calendar samples from the factory, we concluded that we couldn't have a sticker solution that was convenient, durable, and cost-effective at the same time.

Luckily, we came up with an alternative: a triple-layer punchboard from which you can remove tokens and place them on the map or camp board. Not only did this work great and turn out to be cheaper to manufacture than the stickers, but it also was fully reusable. Once you finish the game, you can insert the tokens back into the board, then have another go trying a different path to victory — or wait a couple of months until you forget much of your adventures and are ready to relive them. This way, the only component that gets used up during the game is the Wildlife Catalog in which you take notes (although you can download it in PDF format from our website and print it).


The Narrative

All of the games I've worked on at Lucky Duck Games were narrative ones, with Toriki being the first one aimed at families. Since I also write children's books as my other job, it was interesting to have these two professional areas overlap in this project — and having finished it, I must say I'd love to do more games like this!

I do like a good crime story, so I had fun writing for Chronicles of Crime, and as a Greek mythology fan I enjoyed writing for Divinus, but nothing compares to the peacefulness of creating your own deserted island. Designing murder-mystery scenarios meant that for long months all I did was write dialogue full of lies, envy, hate, and grief, while working on Toriki had me mentally sunbathing on a beach surrounded by the undisturbed peace of nature for a couple of hours each day.

Later in development, when the software had implemented the background sounds created by the unfailing Barry Doublet, I could also enjoy the crashing of waves, rustling of leaves, and cackling of my favorite chubby birds.

The main reason I enjoy writing interactive fiction so much is that during playtests I can observe how people experience the narrative. With Toriki, I saw what excited them, what they were curious about, and what they wanted to do — and if the game didn't allow them to do it, I could add such a possibility in the next iteration. I wish I could have the same experience with my books: listening to how parents read them to their children, discovering at which points they're laughing and what they find interesting.

I think it's obvious at this point that while working on Toriki, I was truly happy that I could do such cool things for my job. I hope that the fun I had somehow permeated the game itself, and you'll have a good time playing it, too. Let me know!

Wojciech Grajkowski Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

I'm nearing five thousand game listings created in the BoardGameGeek database — 4,996! — and while it feels good to have submitted nearly 3% of all the items listed, I also regret that many of my listings remain exactly as originally submitted, as with this description for Clans and Glory that I created on January 2, 2024:

In Clans and Glory, you take part in an ancient ritual: the free people of the Scottish Highlands have come from near and far to the meeting place to join a clan chief. Can you win over the best followers?

Assemble the strongest Scottish clan – through clever map reading and skillful planning!

Twice a year, Hutter Trade, which owns the HUCH! brand, releases a catalog of games and puzzles currently available, as well as novelties to be released in the next 6-12 months. At the start of each year, I use at this catalog and its minimal descriptions to create game listings in the BGG database so that I can add games to our early year previews. (Note: The early 2025 preview will go live on Monday, January 6, 2025.)

Some game listings generate a lot of activity, whereas others are like the one for Clans and Glory, which has had only three forum posts and one non-publisher image submitted:

Image: Tom Kolkman
Boo. I wish that I could generate detailed descriptions of all games in existence, but alas that's not possible. Also, I'm not sure how much I actually wish that. I mean, in the abstract, sure, that's a noble goal, but that could be incredibly tedious, especially when it comes to massive rulebooks for games that would never hit my table.

In any case, HUCH! gave me a review copy of Clans and Glory at SPIEL Essen 24, and while I haven't played the game yet, I did read the rules and offer this more detailed overview:

In Clans and Glory, you take part in an ancient ritual: the free people of the Scottish Highlands have come from near and far to the meeting place to join a clan chief. Can you win the most followers?

To set up, lay out 4-6 landscape boards depending on the player count and place random cards from the deck in certain locations. Each card is one of seven colors and is valued 3-8. On a turn, a player places a card from their hand in an empty space next to or across from a card of the same color or value, then optionally places one of their five clan tokens on the same location board where they placed a card.

Once all players have placed 7-8 cards, the game ends, then you resolve clan ownership of each location board. For each board, flip the tokens on this board upside down so that the first played token is on top. The owner of this token claims all of the lowest-valued cards on this board, then the owner of the next token in the stack claims all of the (next) lowest-valued cards on this board, etc. Each player then sums the cards they have claimed. Whoever has the highest sum wins.

Much nicer! I still haven't played Clans and Glory, but I'm a fan of both designers — Leo Colovini and Gabriele Bubola — and I love the minimalism of this design and the scoring hook that will clearly drive gameplay.

As the saying goes, the scoring is the game. I need points to win, and to get points, I need to place tokens to claim cards...but so do the other players, and all of our actions will affect what happens to everyone. Each card I place affects which other cards can be placed and who will take which cards from that board — and possibly neighboring boards as well since a card played on the edge of one board determines what can be played next to it.

For a more detailed overview of this minimalist game, with multiple examples of gameplay, watch the video below, which includes a generalized complaint spurred by learning Clans and Glory: I dislike when games have multiple changes in their set-up based on the player count.

Reiner Knizia's Rebirth, for example, has each player remove nine specific tiles from their reserve when four players are at the table instead of three, and that one change seems fine to me — but with two players, you have to first place tokens of an unused color on specific hexes of the game board. (Knizia's Havalandi does something similar.) This type of set-up makes me think that the design is intended for only 3-4 players, but in order to expand its potential market, we'll introduce faux competition so that two players can also play this design.

That said, I'm not bothered when the playing area is sized differently based on player count. In Ingenious, you shrink the playing area with two and three players instead of four, but the removed area is a ring around the playing area that's still being used, so the removal feels more natural than blocking individual spaces on the game board.

For Clans and Glory, based on the player count you have to adjust the card deck, the number of landscape boards, the starting location of cards on these boards, and a player's hand size — which seems like a lot of changes for a simple twenty-minute game.

Does this type of set-up work bother anyone else as much as it does me?

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by W. Eric Martin

German publisher Schmidt Spiele has revealed several games it plans to release in early 2025.

▪️ Let's start by looking at Atua, a 1-6 player game from Scott Almes that seems like a representative 2020s design with players openly drafting cards to create and score their own island:

In Atua, you and your fellow players will each create your own island from scratch, expanding it round after round...as long as you have enough coconuts.

To start, each player has a face-up village card in front of them, and four face-up island cards and three face-down draw piles constitute the building materials of these islands. In each of nine rounds, you choose a card featuring symbols, properties, and borders that appeal to you, then overlap that card on your existing island, trying to create different sources of harmony that will affect its value.

The game features three intermediate scoring rounds in which players choose which sources of harmony they will convert into points and when. Timing is crucial because each source can be scored only once. Whoever best keeps an eye on fishermen, birds, and volcanoes; maintains the balance between island residents and natural resources; and gains the most harmony points will win.

Gameplay demonstration from the back of the box
Atua includes expansion materials — resident and fate tiles — for additional scoring opportunities, as well as a solo variant in which you play against the imaginary opponent Tahuma in one of four levels of difficulty.

▪️ Crystalla looks like a family game for 2-4 players from Renaud Libralesso, Pierrick Libralesso, and Joel Sayada, with gameplay being summarized thusly

In Crystalla, you want to create a valuable arrangement of seven types of crystals: rubies, tourmalines, diamonds, and more.

You start with a tableau on which you will eventually place twelve crystal cards. These cards are divided into two shimmering segments that show different colored types of gemstones. Each crystal is scored in a different way and is worth more or fewer points either separately, together, or arranged in a certain pattern. An interactive selection mechanism not only determines the cards to be placed, but also sometimes distributes additional crystal pieces that further enhance your own work of art by covering a segment — or clouding over the crystal-clear structure of other players.

Whether with a sparkling row of diamonds or shimmering emerald flowers, who will create the work of art that scores the most points?

▪️ Designer Tobias Tesar is debuting with (at least) three games in 2025: Right on Time and Get That Cat from KOSMOS (as covered in Nov. 2024) and One Round? from Schmidt Spiele. Here's an overview of that 2-12 player game:

What do the terms "work" and "banana" have in common? Perhaps the word "farmer"? What about "harvest"? And where does "fruit" fit in?

In this co-operative party game, you need to close the gaps in the word circle — quickly! — in order to win. The game is played with one hundred numbered cards on which you can write. Initially, three starting cards with the numbers 33, 66 and 100/0 are laid out in a circle, and each is labeled with a freely chosen starting word. Twelve of the remaining cards are placed face down in the middle of the table; these must be placed in the correct place in the circle over the course of the game.

On your turn, secretly look at the number on the top card, then think of a word that indicates the card's position among the cards on display. This requires quick creativity because you have only a short amount of time before the other players have to agree on a gap in the circle of words based on the tip. The more cards are laid down, the closer the distances between the numbers become and the more difficult it is to classify new cards correctly.

If the team places the last card correctly before it loses its three life markers, everyone wins.

One Round? includes a team variant so that players can compete against one another in groups, in addition to 28 entertaining challenges and word categories.

▪️ Matt Leacock and Rob Daviau's co-operative game Ziggurat from MindWare will be released in a German edition by Schmidt Spiele.

▪️ Schmidt Spiele will extend its For One game series from Reiner Knizia with the release of For One: Mensch ärgere Dich nicht, putting yet another spin on the century-old standard Mensch ärgere Dich nicht by transforming it into a solitaire game:

To play, you roll the dice and move your game pieces as usual, trying to reach the finish line quickly, but on the way you have to beat lots of tiles and complete other tasks. Choose the pieces cleverly, hope for luck with the dice, and (as always) don't get angry!

As with other For One titles, this design features multiple levels of gameplay to present you with new challenges over and over again.

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