Board Game Geek

by Tom Lehmann

Chu Han is a two-player trick-taking and shedding card game set in ancient China during the Chu-Han Contention (206-202 BCE).

I've long been a fan of games that combine both trick-taking and shedding, such as Big Two, President, The Great Dalmuti, Gang of Four, Tichu, etc. In these games, the entire deck is dealt out, then players vie to be the first to go out by playing tricks to get rid of all their cards.

Would it be possible to design a two-player game in this style?

Sketching Out a Design

Dealing out the entire deck to two players is obviously problematic as then players would know exactly which cards their rival holds. What if we dealt out two-thirds of the deck? Any card you don't have then has a 50-50 chance of being in either the deck or your opponent's hand.

This leads to a problem: removing so many cards destroys deck structure. In these games, to play on a trick, you must play a higher rank version of the combination led. Being able to deduce, based on what has been played so far and what is in your hand, which combinations you can lead that your opponents likely won't be able to play on is an important skill element. Destroying the deck structure interferes with this.

Hmm...what if there were some way to draw the undealt cards during play? Suppose before a play, you can optionally take one imperial writ to draw two cards? If you go out first, no problem — but if your opponent goes out first, they score an extra point for each writ you took. That's an interesting tension because drawing more cards gives you more information and enables you to play larger combinations, but it's risky.

What if there's two fewer writs than the number needed to draw all the undealt cards? That way, if you take all the writs (and your opponent chose to take none), you can get close to perfect information, but there's still some chance that a vital card is in the bottom four cards of the deck.

Some of these games are played with a standard (Western) card deck, allowing various poker combinations to be led, while others use a specialized deck. Given that at the start of a hand (before any writs are taken), there won't be a lot of deck knowledge and structure, I decided to go with a specialized deck and allow only N-of-a-kind combinations to be played, i.e., three 1s, one 7, four 5s, etc.

N-of-a-kind combinations emphasize length and the value of having more cards, which further encourages players to take writs.

The Chu Han deck consists of nine 1s, eight 2s, seven 3s...two 8s, one 9, plus a single 0 that can either be played by itself as the lowest card (a 0) or can extend any set to make it one larger.


Having a "wild" adds uncertainty. For example, a pair of 8s is usually unbeatable, but they can be beaten by playing the 9 and 0 as two 9s.

This structure is similar to the deck in The Great Dalmuti. Unlike it, I made higher numbers stronger (to both suggest "climbing" and a hierarchical society). The disadvantage is that the rank values no longer match the # of cards of that rank in the deck. To remind players how many cards of a given rank are in the deck, we added small squares to their banners.


To further exploit that core 50-50 uncertainty about where a card is, I then added unique special powers to all the rank 3 and rank 6 cards. These cards can either be played normally (as 3s or 6s) or used for their special powers.


For example, Ziying, the nominal emperor at the start of the Contention, is the 9 and should normally win any singleton trick. However, Liu Bang (the peasant who founded the Han dynasty) has the power to be played as a 10 only on the 9.

Adding Special Powers

Games built around special powers want a simple structure so that powers stand out. This turns a potential flaw — the reduced variety of lead combinations (no straights, full houses, etc.) due to not dealing a third of the deck — into a feature.

Having the lead is important in climbing games. To further emphasize this, three cards have lead powers that can be played only at the start of a trick by the player on lead.


Ji Bu allows the lead player to peek at and replace (in the same order) the top four cards of the deck. This can be quite useful before deciding whether or not to take a writ.


Ying Bu and Yu Ji allows the lead player to adjust their hand, either to recover a 3 to reuse its power, make a rank 1-5 set longer, or get rid of any singleton.


With special powers, it's useful to have some way to cancel a power before it takes effect and, of course, to possibly cancel the cancelling power.


I wanted ways to score points within a hand, not just by going out, so the rank 2 cards have an ability (not a power, which means it cannot be cancelled) that if six or more of them are played, they score that number of points. This further encourages players to take writs.


Zhongli Mo lets you play a set of all different cards whose rank is equal to the lowest ranked card in that set. If six different cards are played including a 2 (but not a 1 or 0), it becomes six 2s and scores six points.

Some powers revolve around responding to plays. For example, Peng Yue lets you respond with a set of equal (not higher) rank.


Han Xin skips your response to an opponent's play back to them. For example, it forces an opponent who played two 8s to either beat them or pass, giving the lead to you.


Xiahou Ying lets you simply pass and take the lead. Both of these powers are quite strong and give 1 or 3 points to your rival.

If you're truly confident that you can regain the lead and go out, you can pass using Xiang Yu's power to double all points for the rest of that hand (both the points gained during the hand by either player and the points scored by the player going out).


The game is played as a series of hands, typically 4-7, until a player reaches 31 or more points.

Summaries are provided listing all the card abilities and powers, in addition to the short explanations on the cards. Icons were added to the banners as graphic reminders once players know the game. We considered providing banners on both sides of the cards — as a left-hander, I appreciate this issue — but the result was too visually cramped.

Finding a Setting

When Arnaud Charpentier of Matagot decided to publish this game, we debated changing its setting to make it a companion game of Inis before settling on the Chu-Han Contention.

During this time, the Han and Chu clans vied to defeat the weak puppet Qin rulers who had succeeded Ying Zheng, the man who defeated six other warring kingdoms to unify China and become its first emperor. Historically, the Chu began in a stronger position, but the Han managed to defeat them to forge China's first true dynasty.

Portraying the founding figures of another country can be tricky. I'd like to thank Mingjie Chen and Zongxiu Yao, who served as cultural consultants.


For example, Fan Kuai was a peasant butcher from the same village as Liu Bang who rose through the ranks from an ordinary soldier to eventually become a respected general. They pointed out that his artwork could be seen as disrespectful, so we added a note to his entry in the historical guide stating that it portrays him at the start of his military career.

Another issue was how to present the Chinese names. To romanize them, should we use pinyin, which helps those familiar with it to pronounce them? Pinyin uses various accent marks to indicate Chinese vowel sounds (and tones), but this may confuse players unfamiliar with pinyin, especially those whose native language (such as English) does not use accent marks.

A further complication is that several pinyin systems exist. After consultation and considering our wider target audience, we elected not to use pinyin and instead supply the actual Chinese characters in addition to the romanized names.

Wait, There's More!

The various powers and which cards are in each player's hands allows each hand to unfold differently, providing lots of replayability. Arnaud requested optional events for further variability. Both Arnaud and Christian Martinez helped generate a candidate set of events from which we selected the ones in the final game.


If events are used, one is turned up at the start of each hand. Events modify play or scoring. The fifteen events include five Calm events, which have no effect. The first hand's event is always Calm.


Wei-Hwa Huang double-checked the event name translations back and forth between English and Chinese to ensure that no literal translation occurred where an existing idiom or historical phrase should be used instead.

Adding events allowed me to create two historical campaigns, one depicting the prelude to the Contention and the other the Contention itself.


For example, in the historical prelude campaign, instead of randomly generating the two cards set next to the Swan Goose Gate event, I force them to be Liu Bang and Fan Zeng as historically this feast was a trap for Liu Bang set by Fan Zeng.


The colored marks in these cards' lower-right corners serve as an aid for finding specific cards that each player has in hand for a historical campaign as each player begins with a mixture of preset and random cards.

In them, depending on which side wins a hand, the next hand will use a different event or various figures will join or leave a coalition, representing hostage taking, assassinations, generals dispatched to other theaters, etc.

The historical guide, in addition to these campaigns, provides a summary of the Contention and a "Who's Who" section with short descriptions of each of the nineteen historical figures in the game.

Packaging Considerations

As a card game that doesn't involve tableau building, Chu Han doesn't need much table space. Should we lean into that, emphasizing portability, or provide a nice scoring track and wooden markers to increase its table presence? Why not both?


The die-cut dragon scoring track is 360 mm (14 inches) wide.


The summary tiles are large and chunky.

We've also provided a score tracker, summaries, and writs in card formats, plus a tuck box to hold all the cards (even when sleeved), so players have a portable version to take to a cafe.



Finishing Touches

Ryan Ferriera and Maxime Erceau provided the card illustrations, while Maxime did the graphics and production work.


Since we began in the winter of 2017, this project has been a labor of love for both Arnaud and myself. I'm really happy with how Chu Han has turned out.

I hope players will have fun exploring this twisty two-player game of trick-taking and special powers set in ancient China. Enjoy!

Tom Lehmann

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by W. Eric Martin

As I noted in my overview of Castle Combo, I appreciate games in which you set your own scoring conditions.

Another strong design that does this is the two-player game Mandala from Trevor Benjamin and Brett J. Gilbert. That game includes cards in six colors, and during the game, each player determines the value of each color for themselves, which means you value cards differently, leading to interesting playing decisions. (For more on Mandala, check out my enthusiastic overview from 2019.)

The September 2024 release Inori from Mathieu Aubert, Théo Rivière, and Space Cowboys works similarly, with six colors of "favors" that players collect, spend, and score, but in this design each color scores the same for everyone — but you score points for the color only if you have the most (or secondmost) of it at game's end.

What's more, while colors in Mandala are indistinguishable from one another — it doesn't matter whether red or green is most valuable; only how they differ from your opponent's valuations — in Inori each color is tied to a particular aspect of the world, so red being the most valuable favor will likely lead to a different experience than any other color being on top.

To step back a bit, a game of Inori lasts four rounds, and in each round players take turns placing their "offering markers" (i.e., player tokens) on available (i.e., empty) spaces on the spirit cards, on the Great Tree at left in the image below, and in the Tree's roots. The root spaces each give you two favors, then remain barren for the remainder of play; the spirit cards initially give you 1-2 favors, a rune token, or a scoring opportunity, but more actions (and more player tokens) come into play as the game progresses. More on that later...


The Great Tree features six actions untethered to a particular color, and the first player who takes one of these actions locks in a color for it by claiming one of the available altar tiles seen at left above. Taking the top action, for example, allows you to take two favor in whatever colors you want, but first you must establish a colored cost for this action, say, one blue favor — then you must spend a blue favor, and since you've now locked blue's value at 10 points for whoever has the most at game's end (and 5 points for secondmost), you've just discarded a favor of the most valuable color to get...what? Much of the game is about "giving to get" in this manner.

In short, Inori is a game of resource management. You get stuff that you'll turn into other, ideally more valuable or plentiful stuff. The first round features starting cards that give more resources than what you'll see later — an accelerant to give everyone raw materials, while also letting you start to lock in how each color will score, if you wish.

This last aspect — players collectively deciding what each color is worth — resonates through the entire game. At the end of a round, if all of a spirit card's action spaces have been occupied, it's replaced by another card of the same color, and if not, it's replaced by a card of the "opposite" color. In the former case, everyone who has a token on the card scores points equal to how much favor they have of that color; in the latter, no one scores anything (with one exception).

At the start of round three in a two-player game
Thus, players collectively determine where they travel in the world of Inori. If you fill a red card with tokens, for example, those players on the card score red favor, then you'll replace that card with another red card. If not, a blue card will take its place.

This matters because each color has its own flavor: green cards let you score for how many different colors you have (shades of how green works in MTG), while gray cards have one or more rune token action spaces, letting you take a chance on the one hidden element of gameplay. Action spaces on red cards frequently require you to spend a red token first, which means you might want to invest in red if you think you're going there. Yellow cards score yellow favor as an action (in addition to if the card is filled) and costs are primarily green favor or whichever favor you have the most of.

In games with three and four players, you often find yourself working with someone else to direct where you go next, and as in all games of this type, ideally you profit a bit more than they do from your collective work or they spend more actions than you to fill that card, giving you the opportunity to work on something else.

The end of a three-player game
Through all of this activity, however, you want to keep your eyes on the end goal: scoring majority bonuses. In the game above, for example, my two opponents were collectively pumping purple every chance they got and scored it multiple times during play, but I had buried purple on the Great Tree, so it scored nothing at game's end, while I picked up 18 points from having majorities in yellow and gray.

On top of this, at the end of a round, the player with the fewest points picks one of two random "new start" cards to add to the board for the next round, and these start cards break the normal color pairings and also score points for the "recessive" color when the action spaces aren't filled — which meant that in this game I scored 5 points for yellow from this unfilled card, in addition to taking actions on it to score 5 and 3 points. I also scored 5 for the gray Tree action and 5 for the "points = most of one color" action on the red card.

In total, 41 of my 65 points came in the final round...and this was my least favorite time playing Inori as the game devolved into little more than "choose whichever space nets you the most points". Why? Because purple spirit cards focus on scoring purple — we had two of them in play — and the only "new start" card that features nothing but scoring action spaces landed in the final round.

I've played Inori four times total on a copy borrowed from the BGG library, and the other three games felt much different as our final actions were less obvious and blunt, but I guess sometimes the cards will fall this way thanks to the alchemy of both chance and player intent.

For a full explanation of how to play Inori along with more examples of spirit cards and gameplay, watch this video:

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by Robinson Crusoe

Kelp: Shark vs Octopus takes place just off the coast of South Africa in an area called False Bay (or Valsbaai in Afrikaans) in one of the world's most enchanting and mysterious habitats. The kelp forests of False Bay are home to a myriad of species, including a beautiful and ingenious creature — the charismatic common octopus (octopus vulgaris) — but also her mortal enemy: the cunning pyjama shark (Poroderma africanum).

Her struggle for life is constant. She finds herself between the shark's jaws and it seems like game-over. However, she has an unexpected plan. By inserting her tentacles into the shark's gills, she's able to suffocate it until it releases her and she escapes!

If that's not incredible enough, in a second encounter, she does something so clever, witty, and ludic that it begs to be included in a game design. Again, she is being hunted by the pyjama shark, but this time she's exposed in a part of the kelp forest with fewer places to hide. She has to improvise, so using her tentacles she grabs the shells that litter the sea bed and then by rolling herself up, she creates a makeshift ball of armor, giving her some protection and confounding the shark.

It circles her, clearly able to smell her but unable to figure out that she's right under its nose. As the shark finally deduces where she's hiding, she drops the shells, darts off in the other direction, leaving the shark completely baffled and still very hungry, chomping at the debris as it floats slowly back to the bottom.


The Birth of the Idea

It was April 2021 when I saw the Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher for the first time. I was immediately struck by the interactions between the two animals and wanted to capture this fascinating encounter from nature in a game. After a few attempts at creating my own board game in the years before, ideas were now starting to form in my mind of some mechanisms that could convey this. I was reminded of some of my favorite games that feature hunter/hunted dynamics: Mr. Jack, Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space, and Android: Netrunner.

I particularly enjoy the thrill of playing as the Corporation in Netrunner, being under mounting pressure but with some control over the flow of information and with plenty of tricks up my sleeve. (In fact, if you know Netrunner at all, my favorite faction is Jinteki because of all the shenanigans they have available in their arsenal.)

But Netrunner is a game that neither my partner nor most of my friends is interested in playing with me. It's very involved and often a steep challenge to learn, due in part to the asymmetrical aspect of the game. Nevertheless, it is this asymmetry that works so well for the hunter/hunted dynamic, so I wanted to see whether I could create a similar experience to Netrunner with the same emotional journey that I love, but in a more approachable game. With that in mind, I began the work on Kelp.

Hide-and-Seek and Hand-Building?

After a couple of months of incubation, my ideas began to develop into something that I could prototype and playtest. By June 2021, version 1 was ready.

To simulate the tension of the octopus having to balance its need to eat yet stay hidden from the pyjama shark, I knew I wanted a system like the agenda cards in Netrunner.

My idea for Kelp was for the octopus to be represented by a single card that would keep moving from place to place on the board, sometimes appearing, then disappearing again, always in the search for food. It would have tricks it could employ and ways to bluff, trying to deter and deceive the shark from killing and eating the octopus. The octopus would be playing a kind of three-card monte or "shell game".

At this stage, my idea was that the octopus would play a kind of deck-builder that actually functioned more as a "hand-builder". In games like Dominion, players draw a hand of five cards each turn, but I thought it would be cool to have those hands already set at the start of the game, spread out on the board.


I tried laying out four hands of five cards, with the octopus card hidden in one of the hands. Each turn, the octopus would manipulate and improve one of those hands of cards by moving cards around, upgrading them to better ones, and flipping hidden cards over to activate them. To use the card effects, the octopus would have to reveal them, slowly reducing the options of where the octopus could be hiding. Cards had abilities like "Swap one face-down card in this quadrant with this card", "Shuffle three adjacent cards, then place them face down on the board", and "Reduce an adjacent die by 2".

I love games with dice because of the highs you can get when you are able to overcome the odds. I wanted the shark to be mitigating and managing their dice by improving their dice-pool and by using special abilities (inspired by my favorites, Dice Masters and the very underrated Shanghaien).

I also took inspiration from the worker-placement system in Spyrium, which gave me the idea of placing dice (instead of workers) at the intersections between cards, with this functioning within a dice-pool-building system for the shark — a LEGO shark from my childhood collection! They would circle around the board, place their dice next to the octopus' cards and, if they met the required value for that area of the board, reveal cards and hopefully attack the octopus.

Both players had ways to improve their options, but each had a different victory condition: The octopus won the game by surviving until the end, while the shark won by finding and killing the octopus.

This early version had fun concepts, but they were overwhelmed by the problems created with my hand-builder idea. I had dramatically exceeded my complexity budget for the game. The octopus had twenty cards in play at the same time, and even though they could interact with only 5-7 of them per turn, they had to keep track of too much hidden information. In addition to tracking where they were hiding, they had to either remember all of their hidden cards or check them every turn — and if they didn't check a particular card frequently, it was often a clear sign that it was the octopus, leading to unnecessary loops of checking cards to bluff, which frustrated players further. I went through a couple of iterations of this version, but ultimately moved on in order to reduce the memory element and simplify the amount of information present on the board.

Mahjong Blocks Change Everything

In August 2021, I playtested Kelp with a friend who's also a game designer and it was a great playtest — which means the game sucked and my friend told me so.

In the debrief after the game, he suggested reducing the amount of information on the hidden components by adding a 3x3 grid of tokens and using the cards to manipulate them instead. It was one of those lightbulb moments that seems so clear in hindsight, but I'd been unable to see it for myself.


I knew that tokens still wouldn't work well as the octopus would need to remember what was on the face-down side of them just the same, but the suggestion launched me down a new path, eventually leading me to using blocks. Blocks with information on only one side could be placed upright so the octopus could always see them, but also laid on their back so they could be revealed to the shark as well.

Suddenly, I had a Stratego-like concept, similar to Lord of the Rings: The Confrontation, but with only one of the players having hidden blocks. I just needed to find a suitable component.

I had only Jenga blocks on hand and tried them, but they were too narrow. Dominoes wouldn't really stand, and there was nothing suitable in my LEGO collection either.


For a while, I scratched my head and searched second-hand stores for a game from which I could salvage some suitable parts. Fortunately, I struck gold in the form of an unused Mahjong set for €1, an absolute bargain! With some blank stickers, it was perfect for my needs.



Once I came up with the idea for the octopus to "pay" for their card effects by revealing blocks to the shark, this system of hidden/revealed blocks materialized into something captivating, challenging, and fun. There was a satisfying tension for the octopus in finding a balance between hidden and revealed information, and for the shark there were chances for "A-ha!" moments in tracking the octopus' movements by reading a bluff correctly or taking a chance on attacking a block. This was when playtesters started saying things like "Oh, that's cool!" as I explained the rule, and I knew I was onto something.

Initially, however, the shell-game idea was overpowered as the octopus was able to shuffle their blocks too frequently, making it difficult for the shark to keep track. After I introduced another way for the octopus to move without randomness, the combination of the two forms of movement led to a hidden movement mechanism that created lots of interesting gameplay opportunities. There was plenty of bluffing and mind games for the octopus to play with and just the right amount of deduction for the shark.


While I was working on the octopus, the mechanisms of the shark were also developing as I streamlined and refined what I started out with.

Hunger, Energy, and Dice!

One of my favorite games is Abyss, and what I love the most about it is the way it harnesses "opportunity costs" when players take actions in the game. (I first heard the microeconomic-theory term "opportunity costs" described by Tom Lehmann in the Think Like A Game Designer podcast — it's an enlightening listen!) In Abyss, you have to make compromises to get what you want and often the action that you take improves the options available for your opponents, or sometimes you push your luck too far and a great opportunity passes you by. I wanted Kelp to have those elements so that players had tough choices to make each turn.

An early idea I had for the shark side was to allow dice to have multiple uses, and what I finally settled on was two interlocking systems through which dice cycled. The first was that dice could be placed on the main board for the shark to move more easily and to be able to reveal and attack the octopus' blocks. Then most of those dice would get added to "growth tiles" that gradually unlocked permanent abilities for the shark.

The second was that dice could be stored for their value to eventually purchase more dice and one-time effects that did all sorts of different things. High-value dice were often useful in both systems, making the choice of where to place them each turn a satisfying decision point.


That in itself was quite fun, but I wanted the shark's compromises to more closely mirror the octopus'. Therefore, I made it so that whenever the shark spent their stored dice or whenever they used a rare "strike" die and missed, they would have to place a die onto their "hunger track", which would count down to the end of the game. Now they had to be efficient and accurate in their hunt, and there was satisfaction in that, too. This ratcheting up of tension for the shark equaled the tension experienced by the octopus, and Kelp started to be really enjoyed by playtesters.


A Last Chance to Escape

The next year saw further balancing and streamlining changes take place, though the endgame still needed refining. In earlier versions, the octopus won the game by surviving until the end and the shark won by killing the octopus. This was a clear, simple victory condition for each side, but I was searching for a way for the octopus to have a chance of escape if they were caught. Without this, the game can be anticlimactic as the octopus can be discovered suddenly, attacked, and killed without a chance to react.

Returning to that moment in My Octopus Teacher when the octopus suffocates the shark to escape, I implemented a mini-game that simulates the tricks both animals employ in this final confrontation. The octopus chooses an escape strategy of fight, flight, or flinch, and the shark tries to correctly counter it.

The octopus now has a last-ditch attempt to escape if they get caught, but rather than the cards being equally beneficial, the effect of each card is circumstantial and may have pros and cons if it triggers. There is often a better or worse choice to make, which adds to the mind game of what your opponent will play, so now you have an interesting dilemma.

Most importantly, the mechanism is in place to lead to an exciting and tense climax of the game. With the confrontation, both players know the end of the game could be imminent, and they have to make a decision that impacts which way it goes. This leads to a spike in tension: If the octopus does manage to escape, they must discard the card they used, with the shark discarding their matching counter card. Now if the octopus is caught again, that spike of tension will be higher and their chances of escape lower. There are more nuances to the endgame as well, but those are to be discovered in gameplay.

Finally, I wanted one last wrinkle to encourage the octopus to take more risks and not to just turtle and wait out the game. That incentive came in the form of food blocks that give the octopus a one-time special power but at the cost of revealing themselves in order to eat the food. This move was a big risk and the payoff was good, but I knew I needed to increase the stakes even higher. Now, if the octopus manages to successfully eat all of the food in the game, they win immediately — a very enticing, but challenging prospect.


With this alternate win condition for the octopus and the final confrontation giving a little bit of hope, tension peaks in the endgame. As the octopus comes closer and closer to winning outright with food — and also closer and closer to death — the shark is growing in power and looking for the perfect chance to attack...

It is with all of this that Kelp simulates the relationship between common octopus and pyjama shark, and hopefully delivers a tense, thrilling experience at the same time.

That wraps up my designer diary. Thanks for reading! I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Carl Robinson
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by W. Eric Martin

I write about games and create videos about them to help people find designs they might like and avoid designs they won't — but a side benefit of doing this is learning how game designs work, thinking about different elements in comparable games, and discovering more about my tastes, about me.

For example, I've written about how the lack of player interaction in Cascadia makes me dislike this take-and-make game, further covering this topic in a video about Spots, Queensland, and Tribes of the Wind — yet I enjoy Johannes Goupy and Corentin Lebrat's Faraway despite it also being a take-and-make game in which you draft elements from a shared pool and build your own thing, so what gives?

After playing Grégory Grard and Mathieu Roussel's Castle Combo, another take-and-make title from Faraway publisher Catch Up Games that hits me the right way, I think I better understand why these designs work for me, while other such titles don't.

Conditional Scoring

In both Faraway and Castle Combo, you're not working within a scoring system set up at the start of play, and you're not just piling up points; you set up your own scoring conditions, then try to satisfy them the best you can.

Image: Nick T (@BoardGameReviewUK)
The bottom quarter of each card has a scoring condition, and you acquire cards one by one, building a 3x3 grid as you go. Each new card you acquire must be placed adjacent to a previous one, but you're not locked in to exactly which card goes where until you place the third card in a column or row — at which point you've now determined the periphery of your castle.

The left column in the image above features cards that score (from top to bottom) when placed in a corner, when placed in the left column, and when placed in the bottom row. Were these the best cards to choose for these locations? I have no idea, but the player made them work. What's more they work toward other scoring conditions, such as the doctor in the middle of the bottom row, which scores for pairs of green and yellow shields — and the doctor works with the apothecary at the top of that column that scores for green shields in that column.

Winning Castle Combo is nice and all, but more importantly, you want to satisfy the conditions that you established for yourself. Did you follow through and create an aesthetically pleasing and coherent castle?

Intertwined Drafting

Castle Combo includes two decks of cards: castle (gray) and village (brown). On a turn, you draft a card from the row where the messenger is located by paying the cost in the upper left corner.


That seems straightforward, but each card has multiple elements:

• Color
• Cost
• One or two shields, with shields coming in six colors
• An instant effect or ongoing ability
• A scoring condition
• Possibly an arrow, which indicates that the messenger changes rows after this card is acquired

These elements are rich enough that — until the final couple of turns — you rarely have a straightforward choice as to which card is best for you. The locksmith might seem like a fine first choice as you establish a scoring condition that will guide all future purchases: 1 point per key in your possession at game's end. Keys are normally worth 1 point anyway, so now you're doubling their value — and you'll get a key when purchasing the locksmith since it has an orange shield and gives you a key per orange shield in your castle.

But you're not forced to draft from where the messenger is located. You can discard a key to move it to the other row, and the devout looks like a great choice: 8 coins immediately since only one spot in your castle will be filled, and 10 points if you acquire no orange shields by game's end. Surely that won't be hard, right? The alchemist gives you a discount on every future purchase and is worth 4 points for itself since it has a discount. Maybe you can pick up a few other discount cards along the way?

The general would give you five keys immediately and set up a long-term goal of collecting shields in groups of three — but acquiring it would take nearly half of your starting 15 coins...

Instead of moving the messenger, you can discard a key to discard and replace the three cards in a row. Sometimes you don't like the current choices and are willing to gamble on the unknown; sometimes you want to bury a card an opponent wants; and sometimes both urges combine — which is true for the cards in general.

Financial Restraints

You can easily run out of money in Castle Combo, at which point you'd have to pick up a 0-cost card or else take a card from the row, place it face down in your castle, then take 6 coins and 2 keys from the back. This amount is enough to get you going again, but at the cost of a scoring condition.

Beyond that, the cards are often highly conditional to where you are in the game. The baker, for example, costs nothing, but it gains you only 1 coin and 1 key, while being worth at most 3 points. That's nothing to jump out of your chair about, but if you were drafting that near game's end when you're low on funds in a yellow-rich castle, then you'd be much happier to see that card.

The master-of-arms is worth 2 points per coin on the card at game's end, and those coins often come from money you haven't spent, so the value of that card is determined by your thriftiness, ability to gain cards, or purchase of cards that place coins from the bank on purse cards.


Even when I played Castle Combo with five people at Gen Con 2024, I cared about what everyone else was doing, especially the players to my right. Are they looking for cheap cards, cards with certain shields? What are they going to take that would make it harder for me to achieve my goals?

(Faraway lacks financial restraints since the game has no currency, but if you play a card higher than your most recent card, you receive a sanctuary card that provides resources or points, so in that sense you're rewarded for minding what you "spend" on a turn.)

I've now played Castle Combo four times on a review copy from Catch Up Games, and its appeal is similar to that of Faraway: puzzling together your own tableau one card at a time, with each of your limited choices meaningfully affecting the outcome.

For more examples of cards and gameplay, watch this video — but note two errors: (1) I took a face-down card from the top of the deck, not from a row, which matters since you can bury a card wanted by someone else, and (2) the carpenter scores you 8 points if you have a face-down card in your castle:

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by Ferran Renalias Zueras

"Wake up, it's time to enjoy a day route on the mountains..."

We are Guillem Coll and Ferran Renalias, the designers of Trekking. With this diary, we'd like to share the design process and experience that has made this game evolve since its inception, focusing also on the workflow of designing a game as a team.

Planning the Route: An 18-Card Game

Guillem: At the beginning of 2021, I discovered a new format of games that excited me: the famous wallet games popularized by Button Shy. I was fascinated by the wide range of possibilities that these types of games offered, using very few cards and components to deliver a deep gaming experience without envy towards their larger counterparts.

In mid-February 2021, Salt & Pepper Games announced a design contest for a wallet game with the condition that the components consisted of 18-24 cards — and nothing else. I embraced the challenge with enthusiasm to explore new and original uses for the cards and implement unique mechanisms, as with such limited components, one must truly be original to stand out from the rest of the proposals.

I liked how these games approached puzzle mechanisms with variable objectives in each game, often revolving around dividing cards into four plots of different terrains to build patterns. Therefore, I was eager for my game to follow the puzzle theme but with a different touch.

After a few days considering various ideas, I ended up choosing to explore a proposal that divided the card into four plots, but not in two columns and two rows, as other games did; instead, a card was divided into a single column and four rows. Cards were placed next to one another, connecting one of the four colors with the same color on the other card so that they were placed at different heights since on one card, yellow could be in the first row and on another, in the third.

First tests of connecting cards
I liked the shapes that formed on the table and the mechanical originality of breaking away from the linear placement of cards. Quickly, a theme came to mind that fit perfectly with the presence of the table and the shapes formed by the cards: mountaineering. The silhouette formed by the cards fit perfectly with the profile of a mountain; it was very evocative.

Beginning the Journey: The First Development

Guillem: Initially, I wanted to give the mountaineers a more active role, with players starting from one side of the mountain and trying to advance as much as possible. Each of the four altitudes could have a ray symbolizing energy on the side of the card, and when you placed the cards, if you matched rays of the same color, your mountaineer could advance.

The energy concept for advancing your alpinist
After trying a few games and making iterations, I wasn't convinced by the mountaineers' active role of moving through the mountain they were building, so I decided to shift the essence of the game — forming the silhouette of a mountain — towards a puzzle game, as the original idea was.

For the puzzle system, I added three elements: mountaineers, flags, and shelters, which could be red or black. These elements were found at one of the four card altitudes and had to be matched according to the objectives of that game. Sometimes you earned points for each mountaineer and flag of a different color at the same height, and at other times for each mountaineer found between two flags of the same color.

Final proposal of the 18-card game
Wanting to make the most of the components, I put on the back of each card a different variable objective divided into three categories: brown (for mountaineers and flags), blue (for shelters), and yellow (for the shape of the mountain silhouette).

I liked the altitudes having a symbol that had to be matched with the adjacent card, considering that the combinations were vast as the height varied and the cards could share more or fewer segments. To emphasize this aspect of the design, to the three scoring categories (brown, blue, and yellow) I added a fourth white symbol: the Yeti, which subtracted points if connected.

Scoring was simple as you multiplied the points listed on the scoring card by the quantity of symbols of that color that you had connected.

After playing many games, adjusting numbers, and rethinking certain aspects, I considered that it was mature enough to submit to the contest, which received many proposals from candidates. The game, titled "Himalaya", became a finalist, capturing the attention of the jury, who contacted me to express interest in the idea and propose improvements.

Encounter in a Shelter: The Need for Growth and Teamwork

Guillem: Although I was satisfied with the work done and what the wallet game proposed, I felt that the proposal demanded growth towards a larger game with the implementation of new mechanisms. I saw that the silhouette of the mountain mechanism had potential that could be much better exploited in a different type of product than what I had at that moment. This shift that the product needed was an abrupt change from the game I had, and I had so internalized the previous proposal that it was difficult for me to distance myself to give it a 180º turn.

For a few years, I had been a regular follower of the podcast Laboratorio de Juegos, which covers topics related to board game design, often featuring interviews and collaborations with authors to share their experiences. In one of the episodes, they invited Ferran Renalias, a renowned author whom I personally admired a lot, an author who is characterized by all of his designs being co-authorships. In the program, he explained the benefits of this work methodology and how it allowed him to progress more quickly and have the vision and skills of two people with different approaches.

At that moment, I was clear that a good option to grow the game and be able to have that external and renewed vision of what it might need was to approach it as a co-authorship — so I wrote to Ferran, with whom I had already met at some gatherings, to explain the game and propose my intentions. Fortunately, he liked the premise and agreed to work together to make it grow — which should be obvious as otherwise we wouldn't be writing this design diary!

Ferran: When Guillem contacted me, I knew him because a prototype called "Txotx" had caught my attention in a contest, a design now released as Cazamanzanas. When he presented the proposal to collaborate, he sent me the rules and the game prototype so that I could study and understand it. I especially liked how it managed to create the profile of a mountain by placing cards sideways. This idea was genuinely central to the experience.

The GPS board
However, and as we discussed later after a first analysis, the game never conveyed any story or experience; you never felt transported to the mountain at any point. The game was more or less an abstract puzzle.

Continuing the Journey: The Second Development

Ferran: Seeing the potential of the game, we decided to embark on a development with a more critical and distant look that I thought could contribute. The main point to address was the narrative. The game had to make you feel at the end that you had enjoyed a great day in the mountains. With this goal, we decided to introduce a map of the area, where you could move, manage energy, and link with the elevation curve of your GPS.

We started with a map of the real Pyrenees, creating different points marking the different elevations. From this, we connected different elevations with lines, coloring them according to their elevation: 100m – green, 200m – yellow, and 300m – red. We also added the color according to the elevation on the GPS cards, linking it with the route on the map and recording your experience during the day.

One of the first map boards
We also introduced energy management during the day, allowing you to choose more or fewer cards from a river of cards based on the fatigue level. With this, we introduced rest cards, allowing you to "skip a turn" to recover. We also added shelters in the middle of the map to recover directly when passing by. The more energy you have, the more flexibility you have when choosing which route card to use during the journey.

The energy track on the game
Midday: Última Ronda Contest

Guillem: In October 2021, the respected podcast and channel "Última Ronda" announced that it was organizing a prototype contest. Our game was a family+ level, not as complex as many of the games evaluated in the contest, and we thought it was a good opportunity to put the game to the test and receive the opinion of an expert audience. Fortunately, Trekking was selected among the contest's six finalists.

Showing the game in Última Ronda's contest
In the final phase held in mid-2022, we played a game with one of the six collaborating publishers. The chosen publisher was TCG Factory as the organization thought that the design could fit better into their editorial line. We broadcasted a game with the jury and Gonzalo Pastor, editor of TCG Factory. That playing was very fun and interesting, and it reinforced that he liked the game a lot and would be delighted to try it again. After some conversations over the next two months, they confirmed that they wanted to publish the game.

Midafternoon: The Third Development

Ferran: At this point, we wanted to share our vision with the publisher, aiming to make the final development to adjust the game to the target editorial product.

The final prototype
The most noticeable change was breaking the map board into nine double-sided pieces, topologically forming a torus. I made this change using cereal boxes during a vacation in Ireland. (The glamour of board game design!) Combining four of the nine different pieces increased the game's variability, which was necessary to provide replayability without adding additional elements.

Working on the nine map boards and their multiple connections
The final map board
In the same vein, we expanded the scoring objectives so that in each game the animals, the summits, and the topography scored differently. We also wanted to add an additional layer of planning in energy management, incorporating variations in shelters and changing weather conditions midway through the game.

On all the cards, we added narrative elements, enriching the overall narrative of the games.

Sketch of the backs of the objective cards
On the individual boards, we added small vignettes in which we recalled different experiences during the day, adding an additional layer of interaction between the map and GPS. Additionally, taking advantage of the other side of the GPS board, we introduced four slightly more challenging asymmetrical boards to increase the diversity of the games.

Sketches of experience vignettes
The last point we developed was the solo mode. We wanted to recreate the experience of a game with more people by minimizing maintenance and replicating the interaction of the map when reaching summits and seeing animals. That's why we created the "pixapí", a deck of nine cards and four pawns that replicates people who go to the mountains, make a lot of noise, and scare the animals.

The automa cards for the solo mode, along with one of the "pixapin" pawns
Noon: Time to Enjoy It

Once our part was finished, the final result of the game is mainly due to the magnificent editorial development of Jose D. Flores, the illustrations of Michel Verdú, and the graphic design of 221B Studio.

Trekking on the table
Trekking has been a collective expedition that took shape when Guillem started his journey. Along this journey, Ferran joined the adventure, bringing a new perspective, and over time, our paths crossed with the TCG Factory family, walking together at the same pace.

A hiking meeple in the middle of a game
Thank you for accompanying us on this journey that has been very exciting and stimulating. We look forward with great excitement to seeing how the game reaches the tables, allowing you to share a great day of Trekking yourselves.

Ferran Renalias and Guillem Coll

Ferran and Guillem — two happy designers in love with their game Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

I've accepted that many of the games that I like best look terrible when photographed. Innovation, The Mind, The Game, and oh, so many other card games — none of them are appealing when you see images of cards scattered across a table. The cards look adrift, and the joy that comes from digging into these designs can't be captured in a still image.

Fairy Ring, a 2-4 player game from designers Laurence Grenier and Fabien Tanguy and publisher Repos Production that Asmodee released in mid-September 2024, falls into this category. I mean, look at this pic of a four-player game, with the cards and a few other bits floating on a large dining room table:

Hideous
In Fairy Ring, each player builds a troop of mushrooms from thirteen cards, starting with a random card, then drafting and playing six cards in each of two rounds. Each new card you play goes to the left or right of what's already in your troop — or on top of a mushroom of the same type, increasing that mushroom's scoring potential.

After you play a mushroom card, you move your fairy figure clockwise as many spaces as the movement number on that card. If you land on one of your mushrooms, you (usually) score mana; if you land on an opponent's mushroom, they (usually) score mana — but if you have a mushroom of the same type, you also score your mushroom for yourself. (Scoring mushrooms is better when you share, right?)

The game includes six mushroom types, each of which scores mana a different way: based on how far your fairy travelled, how many mushrooms you have, how many cards are in that particular mushroom, how many lightning bugs are visible across your troop, or whatever the fixed value is on that card. (The sixth type earns points for its owner only when someone passes it; landing on it gives the owner no points, making it an attractive landing spot if you'd otherwise give points only to an opponent.)

Players choose their card simultaneously, but they play them in sequence, so the round's first player knows exactly where their fairy will land, but each subsequent player might have their plans disturbed by those who play before them. Will those players add a mushroom to the left or right of their troop, changing your potential landing space? Can you choose a mushroom that will score you points no matter where you land? Is that type of mushroom meshing with what you want to build? (The sixth type of mushroom gives you options for how far your fairy moves, but it feels like the weakest scoring mushroom, especially with only two players.)

Drab
Fairy Ring slips a nice portion of uncertainty into a planning game, and while your first drafting choices might seem inconsequential, they impact the entire table and set up what's possible in the future: Are you choosing purely for fairy movement to score now? Are you also boosting the mushroom you hope to score? Or are you boosting where you think other fairies will land? Or widening your troop to keep others landing in your area longer?

In general, you seem to be building wide or deep. Place four cards in a mushroom, and you can earn 15-25 mana in one move...but your success will also depend on what everyone else is doing. If no one else has this type of mushroom — possibly because you've hoarded all of the cards — then you'll score only when you or an opponent lands on this single spot, which might never happen, as was the case for me in one of the five games I've played on a copy borrowed from the BGG library, a copy which Asmodee gave us at Gen Con 2024.

As in other good drafting games, you need to pay attention to what others play and what you're passing them, especially if you play with the optional objective cards. Fairy Ring includes four double-sided objective cards, and you use three at random. In the image above, for example, if you have three mushrooms that are three cards tall, all six types of mushrooms, or ten visible lightning bugs, you score 20 mana. Ideally you can score all three, and pushing toward those goals adds another element to consider when both drafting and playing.

Why?
The only negative element in Fairy Ring so far is the scoring system, which has you automatically convert 20 mana — which is tracked with plastic tokens — into 1 point, which is tracked on a dial that you're supposed to keep hidden, but which we never do.

I suppose the intent is to lighten the playing experience as some players won't track who has what and take that into consideration with their moves, but in practice we track points, which makes the dials pointless and a source of possible mistakes as you (needlessly) convert between currencies. (Leftover mana is a tiebreaker, after all.) I wish the game included 20-mana tokens instead, but as the saying goes: "If wishes were mushrooms, fairies would fly."

(Also, the box is twice as wide as needed, but this is a BGG library copy, so I won't cut it down to size.)

For more on my experience with Fairy Ring, watch this video:

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by Tang De Naranja

Today I come to talk to you about love.

Yes, about board games, too. And of swords, axes, monsters, and glorious deeds — but everything starts with love. Let me tell you that publishers also experience love at first sight, and although it happens rarely, when it dos happen, it can lead to such wonderful things as Valkyries.

Of course, by the time we sat down for the first time in front of the game — then called "Barbarian Queens of Valhalla" — and noticed that "je ne sais quoi" that led us to tell authors Paz and César that (if they wished) they would no longer need to show the game to other publishers because it had found its home, the game had already lived many lives: robots on Mars, the wild west...

We'll get to that, but first, since we have mentioned them, let's meet the two authors of Valkyries. Tell us, who are you and what is your background in the world of board games?

Paz: I am Paz Navarro Moreno. I was a board game player, more traditional and occasionally modern. It was César who got me more fully into this world of modern games, and I was able to get in contact with board game creators. Although I didn't think about it initially, I ended up making game proposals, although what really awakens my interest is the analysis and critique of the mechanisms.

From left: César Gómez and Paz Navarro
César: Hello, I am César Gómez Bernardino. I came from playing role-playing games in high school. At university, we set up a role-playing and board game club, and there I met Paz. We met again many years later, and it was around that time that my interest in creating board games started. As a gamer, I like to play absolutely everything, and I like to gut the mechanisms behind the game and find the winning strategies. Possibly because of that, what I like the most are the hard Euros and what I like the least are games of negotiating and convincing the rest of the players.

As a designer, I like to explore simple mechanisms and see how much they can do. That's why almost all of my games usually fall into the category of family games. For a long time, I've dedicated myself to self-publishing through the Spanish crowdfunding site Verkami, but for the past couple of years I've tried to focus on a game's creation and look for professional publishers who want to take care of the publication.

Q: And tell us, we know you've worked together before, but how did the idea for Valkyries come about? Was it the theme or the mechanisms first?

Paz: We always work on several ideas, both thematic and mechanical. Valkyries came out of different proposals and work we did with simple mechanisms that we had observed in traditional games of wide diffusion. The initial idea was to create a game with that mechanical simplicity on a common board where we could write. We also tried to create simple confrontations between players.

César: Although we work indistinctly from the theme or the mechanisms, I think we both end up starting more often with the mechanisms. Sometimes you are working from a theme, you think of a mechanism, and suddenly that mechanism absorbs you and takes you down another path that has nothing to do with what you were doing at the beginning.


Valkyries was born from the desire to reinterpret the classic Spanish card game "La Mona" [Editor's note: rules PDF in Spanish and English]. We started to revolve around the concept of discarding pairs, playing two cards, a board, direct points...and from there came a game of robots terraforming Mars, the cards being programming cards for the robots, and the players operating their robot to transform Mars according to the plan they had created on Earth.

Over iterations, that game visually morphed into a game of the conquest of the American West as we wanted to participate in a historical game contest, but then, oh, surprise, we failed to win despite having the best name of the contest: "How the West Was Drawn". (If John Ford would raise his head...)

From there, we made the almost final leap to "Barbarian Queens of Valhalla", which was going to be the title of the game until the publisher said it was too long and didn't fit on the box. In this last transformation, new mechanisms appeared to adapt aspects of the theme such as combat or mythology.


Q: These publishers with their mania for changing things in games... How was the development process of the game from that original idea until the final version?

Paz: or César: At the beginning a lot of ideas are jumping around the table, notes in notebooks, board sketches and experiments with UNO cards. In this phase of development, we jump from one mechanism to another, making drastic changes and redoing the game almost completely. It's like one of those metal jigsaw puzzles that you keep turning around until something clicks and you say, "Here's something."

From that moment when you think you've found the right combination of mechanisms, you start to put things together. The first playable proto is from 2020, and although the main mechanisms have not changed, we've been polishing details to make it more agile, reduce paralysis by analysis, control chance by giving more control to players, increase replayability...

The last change, and perhaps the most complex, was to restructure the game instructions to create a manual that would work as a tutorial. It took a lot of work by everyone, but we believe that a magnificent result has been achieved.

In the case of Valkyries, the core mechanism around which the whole game revolves is one of the simplest we have developed: you pick a card that tells you how far you can move, you pick a card that tells you what kind of enemies you capture, and your turn is over. You do that eight times, then the game is over. In that simplicity, we believe, lies its success. The game has a super accessible learning curve, and anyone can get into the game and enjoy it from minute one. The manual also incorporates optional rules that add depth to the game and make it a duel suitable for all tastes.


Q: Of course, it has been an arduous and long process, but the result — and it is true that we are not at all objective about this — has been worthwhile. What do you think of the final result? Are you happy with the editorial work and that of Isabel Vílchez, the illustrator?

Paz: or César: We are very happy with the result. Although the graphic part is the publisher's task, we authors always have nerves when thinking "How will our game look? What if I don't like it when I see it?" But as you can see, both the illustration and design work has left a spectacular product that leaves no one indifferent.

The work with the publisher in the development part has also been good. In any development, there is a part of discussion between the visions of the publisher and the authors, and David Vaquero has always managed to find the common ground between the two so that the project could go ahead and reach Valhalla.

Q: Excuse me, I've got a dragon scale in my eye...


•••
Q: But look, speaking of love, Isabel Vílchez is the one who has put some good stuff in the illustration. What can you tell us about yourself?

Isabel: I'm a professional illustrator, and I've always been passionate about animation, video games, illustrated books, and everything that has reference to the art world, so, without hesitation, I graduated in Fine Arts in Granada and later I graduated in Illustration and Design in Madrid.

With a lot of perseverance and effort, I came to fulfill my dream of becoming a professional illustrator, and today I have more than ten years of experience in the sector. I have worked in editorial illustration projects, animation, video games and mobile applications, and board games, and I'm also a teacher of digital illustration and character design. Finally, I have been able to collaborate for big companies like Disney, a dream that I thought impossible to fulfill.

Q: An impressive résumé indeed. You say you have worked in the board game industry before? And it's one thing to work, but are you a board game fan?

Isabel: Yes, I had illustrated several covers for a board game and its expansions, but I hadn't done a whole board game from start to finish. Valkyries is the first board game I have illustrated in its entirety, and I loved the experience. The best moment of all is when finally what started as a project with a lot of effort and dedication ends up on a board game and can be enjoyed by everyone.

It has been an honor to illustrate this game because for as long as I can remember, my house has never lacked board games and cards. I used to spend whole summer vacations at the beach playing with my family and friends, and it was the best time of the day, where we all laughed the most together. Board games bring us together and make us spend quality time with each other. It is also a way to get to know people on other levels. And when I'm not sure what to give someone, the truth is that a board game has never failed me! And, of course, I also like to be given one as a gift.


Q: And the illustration process, how was it? Did they let you contribute your own ideas and style from the publisher?

Isabel: From the beginning, Vaquero indicated to me, with examples of my own personal work, the particular style they were looking for to capture the mythological and epic essence of the game, so within some guidelines to follow (as is the case in all projects), they gave me a lot of creative freedom in terms of the design and finish of the illustrations.

While the Valkyries came out basically the first time (making only small tweaks in each of them), it was not so easy with the enemies. There we had to study more carefully the designs of each of them, and it took me more time, but in the end I think they match well with one another and with the aesthetics of the game in general.


Q: And tell us Isabel, apart from being in charge of the illustration of the game, you have been able to test it. What do you think of the game?

Isabel: I tried it at the InterOcio convention, and I was delighted to see how the project, after so much work, had already become a palpable reality, holding it in my hands and everyone playing and having fun with it. I couldn't wait to play a game, and it's so original and I liked it so much that, in fact, I played several times with strangers from the event and we had a lot of fun.

I loved its playability and also that it offers the option of being able to choose various levels of play. I imagined it would be something more complex, but each game is enjoyable and fun, and the body asks you to play more! Not only I felt this way — everyone who played Valkyries thought the same and repeated games.


Q: Well guys, to finish, if the game is successful (and I'm sure it will be), could there be more Valkyrie adventures in the future? And I don't mean the campaigns that we will post monthly coinciding with each new moon, we are talking about real expansions!

César: There are expansions because some of the material we designed during development was put aside due to space issues or excessive complexity. When Tranjis gets tired of selling copies of the original game, we hope to be able to develop some of those ideas to expand the Valkyrie universe.

Isabel: I hope so. I've enjoyed working on Valkyries, and I'm open to future collaborations with the publisher. If it succeeds, I would love to continue to be part of this project and contribute my illustrations to future expansions or sequels to the game.
•••
Sounds promising. You see people, that's how games are born, from the master...

Okay, okay, I'll cut the crap with the love. We hope you enjoy Valkyries a lot with its adaptive rules, its increasing difficulty, its challenges, the campaigns, killing monsters, stopping Rägnarok...

In short, for Asgard!

Daniel Benavides
Tranjis Games

Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

One of my favorite publishers to write about is Clemens Gerhards as they create beautiful wooden games that stand out from pretty much everything else on the market.

The publisher has three new releases for 2024, and we'll start by looking at the most eye-catching title: Drachentreppe, a game from Werner Hodel for 3-6 players aged 6 and up who like to push their opponents down a staircase:

In Drachentreppe, you want to bring your magicians to the top of the dragon stairs, or collect the dragon's eggs — or both, of course!

Each player starts with three magicians at the bottom of the staircase. On a turn, you choose a magician you want to move, then roll the die:

— If you roll 1, 2, or 3, move that magician up that many steps, then roll again or end your turn.
— If you roll an up arrow, move that magician up to the same step as the next higher magician, no matter whose magician it is.
— If you roll the dragon, place the dragon on your step, then take a dragon egg from the supply.
— If you roll a down arrow, you can place a dragon egg on that magician's step to keep them from falling, or your magician falls down until they're caught by one of your other magicians, landing on the step above the catcher. If your lowest magician is falling, they fall to the starting step.

Anytime you move, you place your magician on the outside of the staircase compared to other magicians — and anytime three magicians are on the same step, the magician closest to the staircase column falls to the starting step.

Anytime you move up and pass a dragon egg on a step or land on the same step as one, you collect it. The same goes for move up to or passing the dragon.

To reach the top step, you must return a dragon egg to the supply. When a player has all three of their magicians on the top step, the game ends after everyone has had the same number of turns. Players score 1-3-6 points for getting 1-2-3 magicians to the top step and 1 point for each egg they hold. Whoever has the most points wins.

No chutes in this game. When you fall, you fall hard.

• Giansimone Migoni's Blütentanz is a traditional, two-player abstract strategy game, something firmly in the Clemens Gerhards wheelhouse. Here's how to play:

In Blütentanz, you want to dance your figures across the blossoms to reach your opponent's side of the field.

To set up the game, place the sixteen discs onto the game board at random; each disc features a blossom in the two player colors — orange and blue — as well as a neutral gray blossom.

On a turn, rotate all the tiles in a row or column 90º, with any player figures on those tiles rotating as well. Next, you have up to three movement points that you can use on 1-3 of your figures. Your five figures start off the edge of the game board, and by spending a movement point, you can place a figure on a gray blossom or a blossom of your color on the edge of the board. You can spend points to keep moving a figure orthogonally to gray blossoms or blossoms of your color.

Your goal is to move four of your five figures off the edge of the game board near your opponent. Whoever does this first wins.

• Wippe-lig!, a Martin Schlegel design, is another release labeled for players aged 6 and up, but I think this is because the rules are incredibly simple, not necessarily because this 3-5 player design is a children's game:

Can you rock the game board in Wippe-lig! to line up your discs?

To set up, place the wooden seesaw game board on the table, then place one white disc in each of the four grooves. Each player takes five discs in a color of their choice. On a turn, you either:

— Place one of the discs in your supply into any groove on the raised side of the game board, or
— Remove any disc already in a groove, then place it into a groove on the raised side of the game board.

To end your turn, tilt the game board. If three or four of a player's discs are now in a line, whether in the same groove or across multiple grooves with no other discs between them, that player wins, regardless of whose turn it is.

If 3-4 white discs are in a line after tilting the game board, remove these discs from play for the remainder of the game. Note that removing these discs might cause other discs to roll and set up a winning line.

• Finally, Clemens Gerhards has released a travel edition of Andreas Kuhnekath's 2018 game Rukuni under the name Rukuni to Go. For those not familiar with this wonderful two-player game, here's how to play:

Rukuni is played on a hexagonal grid, with a red tower starting in each of the six corners. On a turn, a player moves one of the towers any number of spaces in a straight line (not jumping anything else in its way), then places a tower of their own color in an empty space adjacent to this tower. Players alternate turns until none of the towers can move, at which point the game ends.

Players then score each group of their connected towers. To do this, count the number of towers in a player's group, then multiply it by the number of red towers this group touches. Add up the scores for all of these individual groups, then see which player has the higher score!

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by Vincent Dutrait

In October 2023, artist Vincent Dutrait talked about his work on two French game releases — After Us from Catch Up Games and The A.R.T. Project from Lumberjacks Studio — and in February 2024 he answered questions about AQUA: Biodiversity in the Oceans.

In September 2024, Lumberjacks Studio is bringing Flavien Dauphin and Benoit Turpin's game Umbrella to market, with Pandasaurus Games releasing the title in the U.S., and Dutrait has returned to talk about the artistic challenges presented by a minimalist game.

Q: How did you approach illustrating an abstract game?

A: In the past, I have illustrated abstract games such as Queenz or Holi, abstract in the sense that they are generally games with pure and simple rules — which doesn't exclude considerable strategic depth! — where the theme and illustrations should not overshadow the gameplay and its accessibility.

It is primarily a delicate positioning exercise, finding the right balance between descriptive, functional, decorative, and narrative elements. This challenge is often underestimated as it is usually much more complex and meticulous than illustrating a game meant to make us live a story or simply "illustrate" card effects, for example.

With Umbrella, which has very few game elements, the bar was set even higher! Because one must propose illustrations that, of course, beautify the game's object and material, but above all must support the mechanics, make them more fluid, and render them even clearer and more efficient.

In short, one must ensure that players can fully focus on their choices and actions, on their strategy, rather than being distracted and led astray. One must find the essence of the elements to describe, share, and put into images, must extract from the theme what will be most representative and symbolic, must draw impactful patterns, shapes, and designs that will be immediately recognizable and identifiable by all players. A form of synthesis and reduction work...in the culinary sense!

Here, we have a paved ground with some building parts, a few umbrellas with basic shapes and designs, a unity of time, place, and action with few colors but bright and marked colors for strong contrast.


Q: There was another cover proposal at the beginning. How did you come to this second proposal, and what was your guiding principle?

A: Initially, we discussed the idea of a box cover like a Broadway musical poster, a very graphic, very stylized rendering in the spirit of the 1950s-1960s. It's an approach I particularly like and have successfully used in games like Detective: City of Angels and Heat, recapturing the spirit of those period illustrators and poster designers by working on textures and vintage "old school" effects, with a catchphrase like "Slidin' in the Rain!" thus referencing the classic film of the genre.


But it was ultimately not "abstract" enough, even too concrete, tangible. For instance, visually one does not perceive the "slide" effect of the umbrellas, which is the most important part of the game mechanics, and it was better to emphasize the umbrellas and have more umbrellas.

One must know how to question one's work, be a source of proposals, and I finally opted for a scene much closer to the game and its elements contained in the box. A direct link between the cover illustration and what the players will have in front of them on the table, even if it means being "down to earth" with an imaginative, fantasized representation of the game in action. With also a much larger and massive title in the image, ultra-readable, approaching the work of a logo for a strong identity. While retaining the feeling and codes of posters from that period.

And nothing is lost. We can find here the silhouette of the dancer on the ground and that of the dancer in the title in a second reading of the image, as a complement and thematic enrichment.

Players will also have the surprise of discovering the initial poster on the game insert, as if laid on the ground, in the street, on the paved texture.


Q: On the theme of Broadway, how did you approach illustrating a game on such a theme without bringing characters to life?

A: It was preferable to avoid any direct representation of characters in full light to avoid diverting attention and maintain this form of detachment, being immersive but without projecting through dancers — the famous delicate balance! — especially since we were not going to play "a" dancer, but a "group of dancers" to be shared and moved between players, a significant nuance. Hence the idea of barely sketched character silhouettes on the poster or the final cover, and no character on the game elements.


However, I always strive to bring life to illustrations. This can sometimes be missing in some abstract games that are too cold or distant with players, sometimes even hermetic. One can manage to infuse this life in a somewhat indirect manner, in details, on the sidelines, in decorative elements that dress up the whole, while ensuring not to clutter or pollute the game spaces.

It's also an opportunity to slip in some poetry and imagination, small tricks that will mainly suggest activity and a certain dynamic, ornaments that will not immediately catch the eye and will be discovered little by little, but that the brain will pick up on the periphery and contribute to the overall atmosphere — in this case, a hopscotch where one can imagine children jumping on one leg or chalk drawings that the rain will wash away, a cat and dog seemingly chasing each other, an abandoned cone of fries next to a pulp magazine, a manhole cover with a curious pattern...or the storefront of a donut shop and, for the sharpest, the street of the famous scene where Gene Kelly sings in the rain climbing a lamppost!

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by W. Eric Martin

German publisher Zoch Verlag has three new titles due out in October 2024 in time for SPIEL Essen 24, and the first on I want to talk about is Ananda, a 2-4 player game from Dirk Barsuhn, who debuted in 2023 with the Piatnik title Tea Time Crime.


Here's an overview of how to play:

Balance is the most important thing at Ananda, balance between body and soul, meditation and work, but above all between building and getting new building blocks.

In Ananda, players build a temple with domino-style tiles and let their monks meditate there. The larger the colored area built, the more karma points the player can collect. More specifically, at the start of their turn, a player must move their monk to a new colored area on the game board. They then play as many tiles from their hand as they wish, as long as at least one of the tiles is adjacent to their monk, all of the placed tiles expand the color area, and each tile covers precisely two tiles that are on the same level. (Tiles do not need to be on the same level to be part of the same color area.)

After you finish placing tiles, count the number of squares that comprise the color area to determine your area value. You may then discard meditation cards of this color from your hand that sum to this number or less. Next, you draw face-down tiles from the reserve equal to the difference between your area value and your meditation value, with your rack holding at most eight tiles. Finally, if you have more tiles on your rack than cards in hand, draw cards from your personal deck to make those numbers match.

Once all the tiles have been built, the player who has scored the most karma points with their played meditation cards wins.

Mmm, sounds good, with the Pickomino-style tiles creating a six-color playing surface as the game progresses. This is now my second "must have" title on the SPIEL Essen 24 Preview, with the odd-looking Sail or Die being the first.

• The second Zoch title is a family-weight game from Carlo A. Rossi in which you hustle around the countryside trying sell whatever you can get your hands on.


Here's an overview of the 2-4 player game Die Trödler aus den Highlands:

As dawdlers second-hand dealers from the Highlands, players travel from village to village to collect and sell goods because what is useless old junk for one person is very useful old junk for another — and therefore worth its weight in gold.

In Die Trödler aus den Highlands, the players use their carts to transport their junk over mountains and among villages. To set up, each player starts their cart in a different village with a route card, a goods request card, and a special feed card in hand. Goods are placed at random in other villages. A deck of route, goods request, extra good, and special feed cards is shuffled, and at the start of a round the dealer creates piles of four face-up cards, one more than the number of players, then players draft piles in order.

On a turn, you play as many cards from hand as desired. Play a route card to move your cart over the matching path (mountain, bridge, etc.), then optionally pick up a good from that village. If you play an extra good card, you can take a second good. If a village has no goods, you can play a goods request card and the matching goods from your supply — placing those goods in the village — then placing the card face down in a personal "value" pile. You can even do this in a village that you just emptied — that's a testament to your powers of persuasion!

Each time you play a special feed card, you can travel on the route of your choice, pick up an extra good, or fulfill a goods request card with a mismatched good. All of these played special feed cards go into your value pile.

When a player has completed a certain number of goods request cards, the game ends — then players compare how many special feed cards they used and how many goods they have left over. Whoever has the most has exhausted their horses and busted their cart and cannot win. Of the remaining players, whoever has the most points from completed goods cards and remaining goods wins!

• Finally, Zoch has a fourth entry in the Beasty Bar series from designers Stefan Kloß and Anna Oppolzer, with Beasty Bar: Down Under being playable on its own or in combination with other titles in the series. (To do so, each player will have a deck of cards numbered 1-12, taking each number from whichever set they like.)


In the game, you start with a hand of four cards, and on a turn you play a card at the back of the line to enter Heaven's Gate, the bar that everyone wants to enter. Next, you carry out the ability of the card you just played, then you carry out any recurring abilities from the front of the line to the end, after which you draw another card from your deck.

If five animals are in line after you've played, the first two animals are admitted to the bar, while the animal last in line in bounced.

After everyone has played all of their cards, each player counts the value of their animals who made it into the bar to see who came out on top.

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by

Translator's note: This is a translation of the "Minecart Town - Design Diary Part 3" article originally written by Shun on Studio GG's Note profile. This article was originally posted on July 30, 2024, and has been translated and posted on BoardGameGeek with Studio GG's permission. Background info: Studio GG's My Trolley Town is receiving a new edition from JELLY JELLY GAMES in 2024 as Minecart Town. —Jacek Mackiewicz

Hello everyone, we're Shun (@nannann2002) and AYA from Studio GG, here to share with you how we worked together with JELLY JELLY GAMES to remake and develop My Trolley Town into Minecart Town.

What is My Trolley Town?

My Trolley Town is a 1-4 player tile-laying game with a 45-minute playtime. All players start with a wood-producing forest tile and a stone-producing mountain tile. Using these resources, players must further develop their individual towns by constructing a variety of buildings and railroad connections.

These constructed buildings can provide you with a wider range of resources: wheat, coal, sheep, etc. Resources are then transported around town to be turned into victory points. The player with the most victory points at the end of the fourth round wins!

For a detailed overview of the game, please visit the game page on the Studio GG website (Japanese only). You can also find the original two design diaries for My Trolley Town translated into English on the game's BGG forum page.

New Edition Target: Reducing the Game Set-up and Teardown Time

The specified requirements from JELLY JELLY GAMES' game designer Akiyama-san (@yutrio_a) were: "We want to reduce the set-up and teardown time of the game."

My Trolley Town requires you to set up six basic tiles, five A- and B-type building tiles, and two V tiles per each play session, as can be seen from the image of the board below.


Additionally, each time the round advances, players must flip over any used basic tiles, followed by the A and B tiles. All of this adds to the game's set-up and teardown time cost.

To address this, Akiyama-san wanted to consider reducing the number of different tile types and implementing bag pulling instead of tile stacking. Alongside this initial proposal, we received the following rule guidelines:

JELLY JELLY GAMES: MY TROLLEY TOWN RULE SUGGESTIONS
• Remove basic tiles (leaving A, B, V, starting tiles, railroad tracks only)
• Replenish B tiles during rounds 1 and 2, and A tiles during rounds 3 and 4 (a total of eight tiles on the board)
• Replenish A and B tiles immediately when they are purchased
• Remove any A and B tiles remaining from the previous rounds
• There are always four V tiles available (replenished immediately)

We found these suggestions to be very interesting.

During the development process of My Trolley Town, we had previously considered drawing tiles from a bag, but we never thought about removing the basic tiles. (See our previous design diaries for a glimpse of the various considerations and decisions made.)

While the basic buildings were effective in providing clear guidance to beginner players, advanced players would usually focus on the other buildings to maximize their scoring potential.

Considering this, removing the basic buildings was a tempting idea. However, the game was balanced around the existence of basic buildings, so removing them would cause the need for major rebalancing and gameplay adjustments.

Resolving Issues with the Rule Changes

Although the rule adjustments proposed by Akiyama-san provided us with a clear direction, a variety of problems needed to be resolved for the game to be playable again.

We'll cover the issues, and how we resolved them, one by one below:

Offering A & B buildings to players
In My Trolley Town, B buildings contain effects that are useful toward the start of the game, whereas A buildings are geared toward the end of the game. For example, B building tiles contain more buildings that provide resources or points at the start of every round.


A buildings tend to have immediate effects, offering a player access to resources that can be used within the same round. The scoring conditions are also set at the end of the game and are dependent on other factors, such as surrounding building tiles.


Thus, B Buildings are stronger and more desirable in round 1, whereas A buildings are stronger and more desirable toward round 4.

In the original My Trolley Town, the ratio of buildings offered changed each round, going from four B buildings and one A building in round 1 to four A buildings and one B building in round 4.

However, this staggered approach to replacing B tiles with A tiles led to a limited choice of A tiles for three rounds, with not enough A buildings being replenished until the end of the third round. Also, while a lot of buildings combo well together, players would rarely be able to pull these combinations off due to the limit of options presented.

We implemented the following changes to address these issues:

• Rounds 1 and 2 feature only B buildings. At the end of round 2, all B buildings are removed and only A buildings are used for rounds 3 and 4.

• Some of the A buildings with immediate effects were modified to become B buildings instead.

With these adjustments, A buildings could be acquired at a more consistently rewarding time, while enabling a wider range of potential combinations.

Portraying the various building effects
A key role of the original basic buildings was to create a slightly different play experience for each resource.

• Wheat Field: Wheat is easily obtained during the production phase at the start of each round.
• Coal Furnace: Coal is processed from wood during the processing phase.
• Ranch: Sheep are acquired immediately after constructing the building during the construction phase.


With the removal of basic buildings from the game, these characteristics of the resources were no longer represented. Furthermore, all other building tiles in My Trolley Town were originally designed to provide players with effects that the basic buildings could not provide.
To rephrase slightly: only "special" buildings gave players "special" abilities, allowing them to break through each resource's characteristics.

With the newly changed rules, the basic buildings could no longer be used to showcase each resource's unique play style. If left unchanged, the special building tiles would not appropriately convey each resource's features, so we did what we had to and adjusted all buildings in the game to more appropriately convey their depicted resource play style. This helped us preserve the feeling we were striving for with the original basic buildings.


Modifying building tile effects to better match the feeling of resources
Rebalancing all of these tiles was a major, time-consuming task, but we're happy with the end result. All buildings now convey the characteristics of their depicted resources, and tiles can combo off of each other easily.

Rebalancing the victory point buildings
In the original release, two basic scoring buildings were always available: the bakery and the farm. You could always purchase one of these two buildings as a scoring back-up.


These two scoring buildings also served as guidance for newer players, helping guide them to consistent goals.

Simultaneously, the wide variety of V building tiles provided players with other goals to potentially aim for. This led to a scoring structure that was difficult to achieve...


The suggested rule change to randomly reveal four V building tiles increased the likelihood that multiple buildings with three resource requirements would be displayed, which was undesirable for newer players.

To address this, the following two changes were implemented:

• Creating scoring combinations requiring two resources.
• Introducing V building sets for unfamiliar players.

Due to the lower number of required resources, players can score points more frequently and flexibly. The difficulty level of scoring victory points had been adjusted to their desired state.


The rulebook now features a recommended range of V building tiles to use for beginner players, allowing those who are unfamiliar with the game to experience an easier game experience.

Adjusting the balance of A and B buildings to increase throughput
If a player didn't want to pay for or couldn't afford any of the available special tiles, building the basic tiles was always a back-up option. Therefore, there was no risk of being blocked when it came to building options.

However, since basic buildings were removed in the remake, being blocked from buying special buildings was suddenly a huge problem.

In the remake of My Trolley Town, we took even greater care with careful balancing of all the buildings, their construction costs, and their resource output.

• Add the old basic buildings "Field", "Charcoal Kiln", and "Grassland" three times within the A and B buildings.

Since these basic tiles are flexible and highly useful throughout the game, we wanted them to be included in the game's tiles. However, if too many of these buildings appeared on the board at once, they would block up the board and greatly limit potential strategies. We therefore included these buildings amongst the A and B tiles.


• Remove the need for special buildings to be unique, and duplicate some of the existing buildings.

Originally, all special building tiles were unique to contrast with the basic building tiles. However, now that we were including the basic buildings within the special buildings, there was no longer a need to have each building be unique. This allowed us for more wiggle room in balancing the tiles, and we could increase the number of tiles that would frequently be used and balance around these new rules.

• Introduce tiles with new opportunities.

Due to the removal of basic buildings and the need to increase the number of special buildings to accommodate rule changes, we devised new buildings with new effects. For example, the building that allows you to immediately acquire five of any resource is a new building tile, carrying with it a wide range of uses and exciting opportunities depending on the construction timing.


All of these changes together ensure that it's less likely for a player to have no buildings in which they're interested, with the bonus of smoothing the flow of tiles.

Relaxing transport restrictions
JELLY JELLY GAMES provided us with an idea that arose during their playtesting: Why not let players transport their resources during the construction phase?

We never considered this previously, but being able to transport your resources during the construction phase would make planning ahead easier and reduce the friction of thinking about which resources you need to place where to prepare for future phases.

However, one single tile prevented this: the stockpile.


This tile's effect allows the player to move resources from anywhere in their town onto the stockpile at the start of the transport phase. Since this tile specifically calls out the start of the transport phase, allowing transport during construction would break this tile's effect and the clarity of the rules. We adjusted the wording of this effect to state "Once, during the transport phase..."

The original version of the stockpile could be activated multiple times during the final round (when transportation and processing phases can be repeated), but multiple players felt that this was counterintuitive and devalued the stockpile in previous rounds. With the adjusted wording of the effect, while the stockpile did get weaker in the final round, it ended up stronger in previous rounds. This was an acceptable trade-off for us.

As a result of these changes, we implemented the rule that allows you to transport resources during the construction phase. This change makes calculating resource costs easier and less stressful than before, leading to a smoother gameplay process for everybody at the table.

Evolution of the solo rules
During the remake process, there was also a request to update the solo rules.

Previously, the game's solo rules had a player choosing seven basic buildings and rotating through special buildings each round, but with basic buildings out of the game we had to adjust the solo experience.

Therefore, the tile management was changed to a system in which the player now lines up tiles in order from oldest to newest, and each time a tile is acquired by the player, the oldest remaining tile is removed.
This had the dual positive effect of making the tile turnaround faster, closely resembling the multiplayer game and allowing the player to plan ahead.

Additionally, since the initial chosen seven basic buildings had a large impact on the style of play in the original game, we have prepared several set-up variants consisting of eight tiles that form the game's beginning state.

These set-up variants all contain their own scoresheet within the manual, allowing you to track your achieved high scores. The solo mode offers a light, varied, and fun challenge that retains the core fun of the multiplayer game.

We hope you enjoy striving for a high score in the solo game!

Conclusion

And that's how My Trolley Town evolved into Minecart Town. We hope you enjoyed reading through this design diary, and you can check out our previous two design diaries that cover the inception and development of the game here.

While Minecart Town retains the fun of the original game, it features plenty of changes, adjustments, and refinements, so even if you're familiar with My Trolley Town, we hope you check out the remake!

Minecart Town will be available for purchase at SPIEL Essen 24 and releases in Japan in November 2024. If neither of those options is good, you can find the game on Kickstarter through September 23, 2024.

Thanks for reading and have fun boardgaming!

Shun & AYA

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by W. Eric Martin

Here's a sampling of smaller games on BGG's SPIEL Essen 24 Preview that are either newly added to the preview or not previously covered here:

• I thought this absurd cover should be displayed as large as possible, so let's start this post with an overview of Sail or Die from Andreas Preiss of Loosey Goosey Games. Here's how to play this 2-5 player card game:

Sail or Die supplies you with 15 points and a handful of cards. You want to keep the points and ditch the cards.

To start a round, the first player plays any single card to the center of the table. Each subsequent player can:

— Play as many cards as the previous player, but in a color that's not face up on the table.
— Place a point token in the center, then play as many cards as the previous player in a color that's already present.
— Place a point token in the center, clear all played cards, then play exactly one more card than the previous player in any color.
— Retrieve their tokens from the center, then pass, sitting out until play resets.

When only one player hasn't passed, reset by removing all played cards and point tokens in the center from the game, after which this player takes the start player marker, then plays a single card of any color.

When a player has no cards in hand, the round ends when the player to the right of the start player marker has finished their turn. For each card still in hand, a player removes one of their point tokens from the game.

After three rounds, the player with the most points wins. In a tie, the tied player who had the fewest cards in hand at the end of the final round wins.

• Seven Merry Monsters is a card game for 3-6 players from Martin Schlegel and 10 Traders that falls into the category of trick-takers in which you want to dodge as often as you take. Here's the short description we have for now:

In Seven Merry Monsters, only the numerical value of a card is important in a trick, and any cards you win in a trick are added to your display — but in the end, only the color of the cards counts.

The player who plays the highest card in a trick wins those cards and places them in their display. However, if a second player plays the same highest card in a trick, they immediately decide who wins. Any player who hasn't played a card yet can now place a card from their hand in their display.

At the end, you score points for the cards in your display. It's a good idea to collect as many different monsters as possible, but as few of the same type (color) as possible.

• Charidice is a 2-4 player dice game from Jürgen Adams that fits the NSV model to a T, at least as far as the description goes:

Take points, give points: Both can lead to success in Charidice.

On a turn, roll the six dice up to three times. Each die features the numbers 1-6 in six colors, and after you stop rolling, you score either all of the dice of one color (as long as you have at least four dice of that color) or one die of each color. Get certain combinations — such as a straight of 4-6 numbers in the first case or a 4- to 6-of-a-kind in the latter — to score bonus points.

Whatever you don't score gets scored by the player to your left, with 5s and 6s scoring double for them. Once during the game, before your right-hand neighbor takes their third roll, you can ask them for "the greatest of gifts", and whatever they give you that turn is doubled.

Whoever gives away the most points receives 20 points at game's end, with the bonus rising to 30 points if they gave away 60+ points. Yes, you may be rewarded for your charitable givings, but is it better to give than to receive?

• German publisher HABA has a new series of games from first-time designer Lukas Bleuel. The first release is Point of View: Lost Places, which will be for sale in both English and German at SPIEL Essen 24, with Point of View: Spooky Festival to follow before the end of 2024.


The listed player count of Point of View is 2-8, but from the description it seems like having at least four players would be ideal, as with Dominique Bodin's Witness:

Point of View: Lost Places features four large folding maps that show a scene with hidden objects in a 3D style — but each map shows this scene from a different perspective, and each player (or pair of players) sees only one map at a time. As a result, no one has a complete overview of what's in the scene, so you'll need to pool your information together, which means that communication is key.

The game includes 4x40 puzzle cards that challenge you with a wide variety of tasks. What do the others see that you don't see yourself? To solve the puzzles, you have to talk to each other intensively, both about what you see and about what you don't see. Over four chapters, you'll immerse yourself in exciting adventures and face new challenges time and again. In addition to teamwork, abstract thinking and smart combinations are required, with each chapter taking roughly two hours to solve in full.

HABA plans to release an app in case you want an automated reader while playing, and it notes that no material is destroyed while playing, so once you finish, you can pass the game on to someone else...or wait a few months to forget details, then perhaps play again from a different orientation. Read more »

by David Thompson

Undaunted 2200: Callisto is a standalone game in the Undaunted series, adapting the core gameplay of previous designs to a new science-fiction setting.

In Undaunted 2200: Callisto (Callisto, hereafter), players navigate the barren lunar landscape of Jupiter's moon of Callisto, maneuver to seize dominant high-ground positions, and utilize their mechs and vehicles to gain control of precious resources. Callisto is the first game in the Undaunted series to include solo and four-player team play in the core game box.

This is the story of how Callisto came to be...

Origin

The origin for Callisto can be traced to 2021. On 2nd September 2021, Trevor Benjamin and I met with the Osprey Games team to discuss a variety of topics, including Osprey's status with Undaunted: Stalingrad (its release was imminent), our status with Undaunted: Battle of Britain (we were wrapping up the final bit of design work), and what the next game in the series would be.

Among Undaunted's wargamer audience were calls for different theaters of war for the next game in the series, with Pacific being the most frequently requested. We did consider the idea of an Undaunted title set in the Pacific, but Trevor and I felt the time was right to push the series in a new direction. For years, gamers had asked us to explore non-historical settings, and by far the most requested genre was science fiction. The idea of a new setting was appealing to me and Trevor, too. After all, every game in the series set itself apart in significant ways:

• Normandy was the original, of course, establishing the core gameplay system.
• North Africa introduced asymmetric forces and objectives.
• Reinforcements brought solo and four-player team play to Normandy and North Africa.
• Stalingrad featured a non-destructive legacy-style resettable campaign.
• Battle of Britain shifted the system to aerial combat.

We felt now was the right time not just for mechanical evolution in the series, but also a radical change for the setting. We presented our idea to the Osprey Games team at the meeting in September, and they eagerly agreed.


The Approach

From the start, Trevor and I wanted to approach Callisto with a fresh perspective. We knew the game would be embraced by the Undaunted faithful, but we also knew it would be bringing lots of new folks to the series. We self-evaluated the series, looking for opportunities to improve the gameplay experience wherever possible. Before we started the actual design process, this was the overall approach we established for ourselves. Trevor and I wrote these notes in late 2021 just after our meeting with Osprey Games:

• Setting: Fictional instead of historical. Science fiction is the most commonly requested.
• Components: Moving to a scenario book massively speeds the set-up — not just the tiles, but other smaller things like spawn spaces, using destruction tokens to cover things rather than creating separate counters.
• Play modes: 4p (and solo?) version. Head-to-head is great, but some folks prefer to play games in larger groups, and the solo system has proven very popular.
• Rules: Try to remove fiddly exceptions that have crept into the game over time, e.g., friendly fire, beyond all hope. Remove some keywords and rely more on a standardized set of symbols.
• Onboarding (campaign and rulebook structure): While we have always tried to ease players into the game with simpler scenarios, we want to take extra attention here.

Looking back on these notes, I think we’ve largely been successful in what we set out to achieve. The only significant change is that the scenario book we envisioned eventually became a set of four double-sided boards, but more on that later.


Creating the Setting

Once we had settled on the idea of a science-fiction setting, we needed to decide on the tone: space opera, hard sci-fi, etc. Trevor and I are both fans of grittier, more realistic sci-fi, and we also wanted the game to continue with the military traditions of the series. We looked to the real world for inspiration, eventually settling on a study published by NASA in 2003. The study's authors hypothesized that the moon of Callisto might act as a staging ground for the exploration of Europa and Jupiter's other moons. This served as our thematic springboard.

Before we started the game design itself, we drafted a two-page "lore pitch" for Osprey Games. We presented this document and our proposal for the tone of the game to Osprey in late January 2022. Here is an excerpt from that document:

The premise is that Earth's leading governing entity initially sent a large expedition to colonize Callisto in order to explore Europa. The exploration mission was funded by a conglomerate of Earth's leading corporations, who provided financial support in exchange for lucrative contracts for exploiting Jupiter's moons.

Once space stations had been placed in Callisto's orbit, efforts began to establish a presence on the moon itself. While most of the Jovian Government and corporate conglomerate remained in orbit around the moon, some facilities needed to be established, and mining Callisto's ice water was necessary to sustain life and support exploration.

Due to the conglomerate's influence, the miners were obligated to provide the ice water they mined to the Jovian Government through trade agreements. In recent years, protests and discontent among the Jovian population increased. The miners — the strongest organization outside the influence of the government and conglomerate — have emerged as a symbol for the protests.

Though the setting background evolved during the design process and was significantly improved by author Robbie MacNiven (who wrote the narrative in Callisto and Undaunted: Stalingrad), the final version of the game largely reflects this initial vision.

Our concept for the corporate conglomeration would eventually become the Lunar Frontier Authority (LFA). In the game, we describe the LFA as "a conglomeration of Earth's foremost corporations that provided monetary support in exchange for lucrative land and deposit contracts and first discovery rights on Callisto. The financial power and influence of the LFA left them as the de facto powerbrokers of the colonization of Callisto, despite the official governance of the Galilean Federation."

Meanwhile, the concept for the miners evolved into the Inter-Jovian Mining Union (IMU). We describe the IMU as an "organization born out of an alliance of worker unions and dedicated to redressing the balance between the laborers and the corporates. Known colloquially as the Breakers."


Improving Immersion and Speeding Up Set-up

One constant with the Undaunted series has been the use of modular tiles for constructing the board. These modular tiles allowed us to construct a wide range of boards, evoking different historically-inspired locations — but with Callisto we wanted something different for two reasons. First and foremost, we wanted the play area to be even more immersive, for each scenario to feature a location that told a story. Second, we wanted to speed the set-up time for the game. Finding the right tiles and building the game board has always been one of the elements we liked least about Undaunted.

Our original vision was to create a scenario book in which players would flip open the book to the scenario they wanted to play. However, the scope and scale of the scenarios made that approach impossible. In order to give the game the space it needed, we eventually had to transition to boards. Fortunately, Osprey Games was supportive of the change and included four large, double-sided boards for eight maps. Each map features a unique environment linked to one of the game's scenarios.

We couldn't be happier with this — gone are the boards built of modular tiles and lengthy set-up times, replaced by scenario-specific boards gorgeously illustrated by the series' artist, Roland MacDonald.


So What's Different About the Gameplay in Callisto?

Although the boards feature irregularly-shaped spaces, they are topologically identical to a hex grid. This is a carryover from the series' use of offset squares in a hex-grid configuration. Roland worked magic in transforming our hex-grid playtest maps into the irregularly-shaped, hex-grid topology for the final board designs — and we took advantage of these irregular spaces to introduce a couple of "line-of-sight-adjacent" concepts to Undaunted for the first time. Some blank areas of the board block adjacency, and we introduced doors that similarly block "line of sight". We think players are going to love these subtle additions.

Callisto also introduces the concept of elevation to Undaunted for the first time, with each map featuring elevated spaces. When units on elevated spaces fire down at other units, they roll d12s instead of d10s, and if a unit is firing up at a unit on elevated terrain, they roll d8s. This minor tweak results in a significant need to keep positioning in mind at all times. Controlling the high ground in Callisto is critical.

The game also features mechs for the LFA and vehicles for the Breakers. Each mech is a single unit on the board, but it consists of three different people: a commander, a gunner, and a navigator. Each person in the mech has either one or two cards, and each person has unique attributes. Players have to decide whether they want to focus on the mech's firepower and add gunner cards to their deck, focus on mobility and add more navigator cards, or try to balance the two. The Breakers' vehicles allow for improved mobility as each vehicle can carry up to three troops whenever they move.

There are other gameplay changes, of course – new actions, unique ways to interact with the custom boards, and lots of other things – but we'll leave that for players to discover as they play the game!


Development

One of the reasons working with Osprey Games is such a delight is that they run a tight schedule and hold Trevor and me accountable. As mentioned above, Callisto was first conceptualized in late 2021. Here was the schedule they provided us at the time:

• April 2022: Conceptualization complete; initial production spec.
• August 2022: Present early design work (with a fully playable scenario and core rules complete).
• January 2023: 70%+ of the design work complete; art brief complete.
• April 2023: Rules and gameplay finalized.
• September 2024: Game published.

Of course LOTS of critical dates are not included in this schedule, but those fall more on the development side of things rather than the design work that Trevor and I were focused on.

Trevor and I completed the last tweaks to the core design of the game in February 2023 (a couple months ahead of schedule — whew!), but just as the heavy lift on our end was ending, work was cranking up for others. The Osprey team had been orchestrating the production planning, and Roland MacDonald had been working on the art for months already. Now it was time for Trevor and me to hand the game design baton to David Digby for his work on the solo system. David leveraged the same system that Dávid Turczi had conceived and David Digby had implemented in Undaunted: Reinforcements, but of course Callisto required him to push the system in entirely new ways.


Callisto development occurred during a changing of the guard for the developers at Osprey Games. When work first began on the game, the developers were Filip Hartelius and Anthony Howgego. They commissioned the game and were with us at the start of the design process (and they had also led the development of previous titles in the series, from North Africa to Battle of Britain). Filip left Osprey Games in 2022, then Anthony left in 2023 — but they also brought in some amazingly talented folks to take over development. Rhys ap Gwyn, Jordan Wheeler, and Luke Evison had all joined the team by mid-2023, and with them they brought fresh new excitement and fully embraced Callisto and the future of the Undaunted series.

Through the rest of 2023, the team led the development of the game, frequently checking in with Trevor and me about questions for certain units or scenarios and passing along sneak peaks of Roland's art and Robbie's narrative. In addition, Gareth Clarke was now working on the graphic design for the game. His work was critical in making sure Roland's gorgeous illustrations for the maps were seamlessly integrated with gameplay elements, the updated graphic design for the cards felt right, and the visual aesthetic for the game felt both new but also harkened back to the series.


Art

Roland MacDonald's art is as much a critical part of the Undaunted series as the gameplay itself. Callisto is gorgeously illustrated by Roland, and while it echoes the style of the rest of the Undaunted series, Roland took the art to a whole new level in my opinion.

He had the unenviable challenge of depicting the units in the harsh environments of the Callisto landscape, and so came up with the genius idea of adding illustrations of each person's face on the cards, balancing the need to provide a realistic depiction of characters in the environments, with keeping the human touch that Undaunted is so well-known for. As brilliant as his character illustrations are, it's really the gorgeous boards that make the game stand above all the others that have come before it. For the first time, he was able to approach each location as its own unique setting.

Here's a comparison of what we used for our playtesting and Roland's final work:



The Story

We always knew that world building in Callisto would be a critical part of the game. Finding the right balance between not being too verbose, while also providing enough of a narrative to provide a sense of place in a board game can be a challenge.

Our process for the overall story in Callisto was that Trevor and I would brainstorm the overarching storyline, then I would go away and provide a rough narrative concept for the scenario. Once all of the scenarios were designed and the overall story of the game was set, we turned everything over to Robbie MacNiven. Robbie is a super talented author and has worked in many fantasy and sci-fi IPs, such as X-Men and Warhammer 40K. His narrative for Undaunted: Stalingrad was an instrumental part of that game, and we knew from the start we wanted him to work on Callisto. His narrative was the final piece we needed to help the world come to life.

Here's a comparison of what we provided to Robbie for scenario text, and his revised verbiage:



Release

When Callisto is released on September 10, 2024, it will mark the end of an over two-year process to make the game a reality. From our first discussions with Osprey Games to the published version of the game, the creative process for Callisto has been extremely exciting for us. We hope that everyone enjoys playing the game as much as we enjoyed creating it!

David Thompson

Trevor and Roland at UKGE 2024
David at Gen Con 2024 Read more »

by W. Eric Martin

• In Q4 2024, dinosaurs join the Similo universe created by Martino Chiacchiera, Hjalmar Hach, Pierluca Zizzi, and Horrible Guild.

Similo: Jurassic World features 37 dinosaurs from the various Jurassic * films, with the illustrator Naïade getting to put his own touch on each of them. If you're not familiar with the game, here's how to play:

Your goal is to make the other players guess one secret character (out of the twelve characters on display in the middle of the table) by playing other character cards from your hand as clues, stating whether they are similar to or different from the secret character. After each turn, the other players must remove one or more characters from the table until only the right one remains and you win — or it is removed and you lose!

You can play with one of the Similo sets on its own, using the cards from, say, Fables both for the characters being laid out and for the clues being given to the guessers, or you can use the cards from one set for the twelve characters on display and the cards from another set as the clues. The game is far trickier this way!

Gigamic will release the French edition of Similo: Jurassic World on October 25, 2024, and I've poked Horrible Guild to see whether this title will appear at SPIEL Essen 24.

• In August 2024, Vesuvius Media crowdfunded a 2025 release that exhibits full "Tyrannosaurs in F-14s" energy: Jurassic Feud, with this two-player game from Kristian Fosh being a counterpart to 2021's Catapult Feud.

The goal of both games is the same: Knock down all of your opponent's warriors and be the last one standing.

In short, choose your warriors, then use your bricks to build a prehistoric-style fortress on your player board. Place your warriors on top of your fort, then take turns using your dino-catapults to launch boulders in an attempt to destroy your opponent's fortress and knock over their warriors. Each turn consists of four phases: tactics (playing an action card), aim, fire, and clean-up. When all warriors of one side are knocked over, the battle is over. The winner must have at least one warrior miniature standing upright.


Jurassic Feud is a standalone game, but it can be combined with Catapult Feud and its expansions.

• Another 2021 release with a spinoff coming in 2025 is Dodos Riding Dinos, a design from Rubén Hernández, Detestable Games, and Draco Studios in which players each control a dodo bird riding a dinosaur, with the teams hurling stuff at one another in order to race ahead of everyone else and (somehow) avoid extinction.

Of course they'll then be the sole representatives of their species and die out anyway...but victory!

Dodos Riding Dinos: First Race, which will also be crowdfunded, is a standalone game featuring new tracks, new projectiles, smaller packaging, and simpler effects to make the game more approachable by younger players.


• We'll close with Roaring 20s, a 3-5 player bidding card game from Leo Colovini and Deep Print Games. What do dinosaurs have to do with the 1920s, you ask? Unknown to most, Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke liked to dress up as velociraptors between club sets to scare waitresses.


Here's how to play:

Welcome to the Roaring 20s, when you will try to attract the trendiest dinos to your glamorous party.

Each round, you bid on a dino or pass. As every dino has different preferences, you need either the right snacks to lure it or splendid gems to bribe it. If you want to jump out of the bidding, place your "Mine!" card on one of the bid cards available; the earlier you pass, the more choices you have. Whoever sticks in the bidding long enough wins the dino, then they decide whether to pay with snacks or gems, with no change if you overpay.

Your goal is to have the most points at game's end. Each dino is worth 1-5 points on its own, with pairs and triplets being worth 3 and 6 points. That said, you can choose to discard an acquired dino if it's a duplicate in order to transform your "Mine!" card into a joker. Why would you want to do that? Because sequences of dinos are also worth points, with six in a row being worth 15 points, for example.

If you make clever bids, occasionally pass at the right moment, and get the most valuable guests, you’ll be crowned the ultimate prehistoric party animal!

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by Bonghwan Ju

"Let's make a soccer tactics board game!"

This idea suddenly came to me in early 2021, and Magic Number Eleven was produced and shipped to Korean crowdfunding backers in February 2024, so it took exactly three years from conception to production.

The time it takes to commercialize a board game varies widely, but I believe three years is quite a long time, especially for an independent creator like me.

The reason I was able to complete Magic Number Eleven without giving up for three years was because I had conviction — not a conviction like, "This game will be a huge success"; rather, it was the belief that I could create a completely new type of soccer game that had never existed before and that there would surely be people who have been waiting for such a board game.

Before being a creator, I loved both soccer and board games, and as a gamer I had been waiting for such a new soccer game, so in a way, the process of creating Magic Number Eleven was also the process of me personally realizing the game I wanted to play as a user.

Setting the Main Principle for the Soccer Board Game Design

When I said I was going to create a soccer board game — more precisely, a soccer-tactics battle game — the usual reaction from people around me was: "Is that even possible as a board game?"

This question makes sense because soccer is one of the most dynamic sports, with 22 players moving and interacting in real time. Board games are too analog to meaningfully handle such simultaneous interactions. The theme (dynamic) and the medium (static) inherently conflict.


Would it be best to make a soccer board game as a "flicking" game that could best capture the dynamism? Some have done this, but I thought I should go the opposite way, so I set this main principle when planning the game: "Let's not physically mimic soccer."

What I mean by that is the best way to experience the "physical vibrancy" of soccer is, of course, to play soccer yourself. The next best thing is probably watching a live soccer match, and if that's not possible, enjoying a realistic soccer video game.

With these better options available, I could not see any reason to play a soccer board game that attempted to recreate the physical vibrancy of real soccer. Therefore, instead of striving to replicate something "physically similar" to soccer, I decided to create something different in which the "static fun" that only board games can offer would stand out. (Flicking-type soccer board games are excellent games in their own right. I mentioned them only to explain that they did not align with my direction, so I hope there's no misunderstanding.)


The Three Core Elements of Soccer I Defined

After setting the direction, I started by figuring out the core elements of soccer. What are the factors that have the biggest impact on winning or losing in a soccer match?

I thought the two most essential were 1) the abilities of the players and 2) the tactics of the coach. If I had to add one more, it would surprisingly be "luck", so I decided to design the soccer game with these three core elements as the main engine.

• Ability of the players
• Tactics of the coach
• Luck

The next step was to convert these elements into game components and set the rules that allow players to combine these components during gameplay.

Idea notes about how to turn soccer into a board game
Core Element #1: Player's Ability, or Combinable Icon

For the first core element, I decided to adopt the form of cards. In the beginning, I experimented with subdividing abilities like shooting, dribbling, passing, and defense into numbers as commonly seen in typical soccer video games.

Initial prototype of the player cards based on numerical abilities
However, the process of handling these abilities — adding, subtracting, and comparing numbers for each ability — often became cumbersome. I wanted a more straightforward approach, so the final decision was to use the form of "combinable icons".

Prototypes with combinable icons
A combinable icon is an icon that becomes complete only when combined. Each player card has semi-circular icons drawn around the edges that have no effect on their own. However, when they are appropriately connected with others, a completed icon is formed, and its effect is activated.


I adopted this system because soccer is a team sport. Soccer is not a sport you can win just by being good on your own. No matter how powerful a striker you have at the front, without an organic team system to send the ball forward that striker's ability becomes virtually zero. The "combinable icon" works similarly. A semi-circular icon is essentially a zero ability on its own, but when well connected with other teammates, it can exert a 1 or even more significant ability.

It is true that adopting the combinable icon system made it challenging to establish detailed differences in the characteristics of individual players compared to when abilities were expressed in numbers. Therefore, I tried to reflect the personality of each player as much as possible by adding special abilities like instant effects and passives, apart from combinable icons.

Some players have a special ability working independently
Core Element #2: Coach's Tactics, or Every Moment is a Series of Choices

Magic Number Eleven is a turn-based game, and on each turn, you usually place one of your player cards on the field board. The important thing here is the meaning of "placing a player card". In this game, the field board does not represent a real pitch but a symbolic space showing how the coach's tactical instructions are reflected in the match. Therefore, "placing a player card" is an abstract representation of which position and which player my team is currently focusing on to unfold the game plan.

For instance, if you place a defender card in the backline during the first turn, this means the coach has adopted a tactic of solidifying the defense first. On the other hand, if you place an offensive player up front, your opponent will be forced to consider whether to respond aggressively or reinforce their defense to counter the attack.


As the game progresses, more and more player cards will be placed on the field, and when connected to one another these player cards create four types of icons: ATTACK, DEFENCE, PRESS, and PASS. With this approach, the coach makes tactical decisions every turn: "Which icons, at what timing, and how many should I make?"

In this game system, you can't attack while defending and you can't do pass plays while pressing. For example, if you conduct a PASS action, you can get synergy cards that can be used when attacking, but to play these synergy cards, you need to take control of the game first with the PRESS action.

The control track shows which team is controlling the game
If you are leading on the control track, you can play more synergy cards
Each turn, the coach must decide whether to conduct PRESS or PASS in the team level, and whether to strengthen the attack or bolster the defense based on the opponent's tactics — and within that process, the coach must seek the right moment to attempt a shot and successfully score. After all, soccer is a game in which the team that scores more wins.

Core Element #3: Luck, or Adding Dynamism to the Game

I said earlier that I would not physically mimic soccer. However, I didn't think it was good to completely remove the dynamism of soccer just because board games are a static medium. I thought the best way to add dynamism to the game was by introducing an element of luck. Actually, luck plays a significant role in a soccer match. Shots that seem certain to go in sometimes don't, and defenses that seem impenetrable can be breached by just one mistake.

So how should I capture the element of luck in soccer?

While creating this game, I set a personal rule that I wouldn't use dice. Dice rolls are independent variables. Technically, if you're unlucky, you could get only bad results endlessly, and vice versa. Since I didn't want luck to overwhelmingly dominate the game, I decided to exclude dice.


Instead of using dice rolling, I introduced the synergy card system. This game has a total of 25 synergy cards, each with a value of 1 to 5, and the proportion is higher for values closer to the average value (3) and lower for extremes like 1 or 5. (The 25-card deck has only two cards with a value of 5.)

When attacking or defending, each player must randomly draw at least one synergy card and add it to their attack/defense power. The maximum possible difference due to card luck is 4, and since the probability of both players drawing 1 and 5 simultaneously is relatively low, I thought this level of luck involvement was appropriate. Of course, since the deck is shared, one player could consistently draw low cards while the other consistently draws high ones.

Here's another important point: Since luck is involved anyway, no matter how high or low the probability, the fact that "it's good to draw a high number and bad to draw a low number" doesn't change. To add a bit more dimension to this, I introduced the "Magic Number System".

If the attack power (5) of the target man is combined with team synergy (6), you get a Magic Number!
When you attempt a shot, if your attack power exceeds the opponent's defense power, you score a goal — and if your attack power exactly equals 11, the "Magic Number" is triggered, and you always score regardless of the opponent's defense power.

However, if the attack power exceeds 11, you always fail to score, regardless of the opponent's defense power. This represents the theme of making an overly forceful shot or being offside, and it also serves as a twist, showing that higher numbers aren't always better.

Additionally, some synergy cards trigger an ability — "TACKLE (with the value of 1)" — allowing you to stop a goal you certainly would concede, turning it into a penalty kick. (Conversely, a shot that seemed easy to block might concede a penalty kick due to a tackle.) Through these elements, I aimed to design a more dynamic luck factor that goes beyond simply rejoicing or lamenting over high or low numbers.

You can also feel the thrilling tension of the penalty kick
I've briefly introduced how I designed a soccer board game using the three core elements of soccer I defined. I know the game itself may have mixed reviews regarding the theme or personal preferences. However, as a creator, I am very satisfied with this game — not because I think it's perfect, but because there hasn't been a board game that interpreted soccer from this perspective until now, and actually I've received feedback from quite a few users that they had been waiting for a soccer game like this.

Magic Number Eleven at Tokyo Game Market 2024 Spring
Magic Number Eleven was launched in South Korea through crowdfunding earlier in 2024 and was subsequently showcased at the Osaka BGBE in Japan in March, followed by the Tokyo Game Market in April. In October, it will be presented in Europe, the home of soccer, at SPIEL Essen 24.

I hope this game reaches more people around the world who love both soccer and board games, people who are known to be not many, but hidden here and there.

Bonghwan Ju
Pluto Games

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by Kristian Amundsen Østby

In the first half of 2023, I had a talk with Matthew Dunstan, one of my favorite game designers.

Matthew has made a lot of great games and is able to repeatedly come up with original and varied ideas: games as different as echoes (the narrative sound-based game published by Ravensburger in which you puzzle pieces of an audio-story in the right order), the Kennerspiel des Jahres-nominated The Guild of Merchant Explorers, the thematic wargame Monumental, and the underrated sci-fi game Scorpius Freighter to mention a few examples from his wide range of designs.

Anyway, I wanted to talk to him because I admire his designs, and since he is located on the far side of the planet, it had to happen through a Zoom call. We talked about games in general, narrative games in particular, and lastly we talked about finding inspiration in digital games.

Matthew showed me a small indie-game on Steam called "Luck be a Landlord". This game is a strange roguelike deck-building game in which you try to pay your rent by playing on a slot machine. The game is easy to get into and has the "just one more turn" type of thing that manages the fine balance between light-hearted fun and life-ruining obsession — and as a source of inspiration, it worked. I decided I wanted to create a similar, light game with quick short rounds and a slot-machine feel, a game in which you draw a number of tiles from your bag to get some result, and between turns you add new tiles to your bag to gradually improve your output.


That same evening I started sketching a prototype. I have a notebook — an analog notebook with a regular ballpoint pen — where I sketch various game ideas. It is filled with single-page description of ideas as I prefer to quickly advance to a physical prototype to test ideas in practice, but the notebook is useful for early theoretical brainstorming.

In the digital slot-machine game, you activate a slot machine to see what happens, and since the rounds are quick and the results immediate and the scores counted automatically, it is fun and satisfying, even if the slot machine output is quite random. Your only active choice during the game is which new tile you add to your bag between rounds.

But a board game will necessarily be slower, and the scoring will be handled manually. Randomness is fine in itself, but the level of randomness needs to be balanced against the amount of work you have to put in. Drawing several tiles from a bag and manually calculating a score will make you feel entitled to more than some random result. In a way, this situation is somewhat similar to how it can be fine for a ten-minute game to be decided by a final die roll, whereas a final die roll is not as fun if it happens at the end of a two-hour strategy game. For these reasons, I figured the players should make more choices during the round. Instead of drawing random tiles for a slot-machine result, your choice of how to play the tiles could matter.

I was able to come up with a playable prototype the next day. It consisted of "domino tiles" with various half-symbols on the edges. I played around with these tiles and found it was quite fun trying to puzzle the tiles to make matches. This became the central mechanism of the game that would come to be Gardlings.

In the digital slot-machine game, some of the fun was collecting tiles with new abilities because then the combination of tiles that came up could have surprising effects and combos. I wanted to include this in the game as well, so I created special abilities for the various tiles: ones that you could move around freely after they had been placed, tiles with particularly valuable gems, tiles that let you draw more tiles from your bag, etc.


At this stage of the prototype, you always drew only five tiles from the bag. Similar to the digital slot-machine game, the number of tiles was constant. Your increased score came from the improved tiles added to the bag. I realized that the tile ability that let you draw more tiles was easily the most powerful ability in the game — and it was also the one most fun. In a good game, players need to feel progress, some "story arc". Increasing the number of tiles that players could draw was currently the best way to give a sensation of progress throughout the game.

I had to return to my notebook. Having the "draw one extra tile" as an ability on certain tiles didn't work as I wanted. I tried several variations on this, including having combinations of certain tiles trigger the drawing of an extra tile, but it didn't fix the issue.

Then a playtester suggested trying a push-your-luck element. Of course. This approach felt obvious, but it provided a natural way of letting players draw more tiles: When you begin the game with negative tiles in your bag, out of which you can draw only a certain number, every new tile will water down these negatives, effectively letting you gradually draw more tiles throughout the game. It worked.


For a while I was worried whether I had introduced a too random element, but in practice it turned out fine, and it made the rounds a lot more varied. How many tiles you got to draw varied from round to round, which made the design feel more like a slot machine again, with highs and lows. Quick games should be like emotional roller coasters.

Yet the design wasn't without brains. New players could just try to make a good match with whatever new tile they drew, whereas experienced players could place their tiles in shapes that made it possible to maximize future matches.

At this point, I showed this game to my daughter Maria, and she really enjoyed it. Convincing my children to play board games instead of Roblox or Grand Theft Auto or whatever can be hard enough in itself. Asking them to play an ugly homemade prototype with clipart is like asking them to bring me a Middlemist Red camellia from a nearby mountaintop. The point is, it is hard — but this was a game that my daughter actually enjoyed, so over the next months, we playtested this game again and again and designed lots of special creatures and special abilities for the tiles.

Finally, I introduced the game to my Alion – by Dr Ø publishing partner Kjetil Svendsen, and we continued the playtesting and asked our favorite illustrator, Gjermund Bohne (with whom we have cooperated many times before), to do the art.

Gjermund masters several styles, but I believe his favorite things to do are bizarre, surrealistic, and slightly disturbing characters (as can be seen on the cover of How Dare You?). For this game, he toned down the grotesque level and created a universe with strange mystical creatures befitting the spirit of the game.



After sending the files to the manufacturer, Kjetil and I continued playing the game in different settings, and we even came up with a mini-expansion: Gardlings: Missions. These extra tiles give each player a small mission to focus on while building their gardens.

Gardlings will debut at SPIEL Essen 24 in October, and we hope that the mini-expansion will make it there in time. My daughter (and co-designer!) Maria will also be at the fair. It's her first time at SPIEL, so if you're there, please come by and say hello — and if you ask her to sign a game box, she will be thrilled and hopefully be converted to analog cardboard gaming forever, never to return to the digital realms of Planet Zoo or the morally deprived streets of Grand Theft Auto again. Yes, I am asking you to help me do proper parenting, and I believe it is a reasonable request.

Kristian Amundsen Østby

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by W. Eric Martin

As I've said many times, new games are for new gamers — that is, what feels familiar and old hat to you might be novel to someone else. That "knock-off" game isn't necessarily for you, the gamer who already has an overstuffed closet, but for someone who isn't in your situation. People discover modern games at all different points in life, and new gamers come into being all the time.

All that said, a familiar game can still be highly enjoyable for those who have experienced its predecessors. Flip 7 from Eric Olsen and The Op Games does nothing novel for a press-your-luck card game, but that in no way makes it a bad game.

The deck is essentially The Great Dalmuti — one 1, two 2s, etc. up to twelve 12s — along with one 0, six modifiers, and three copies of three action cards.

To start a round, deal each person a card, resolving action cards if they are dealt. Going around the table, each person holds — scoring points equal to the sum of cards in front of them — or hits, getting a new card from the deck. If they are dealt a duplicate number card, they bust and score 0 points for the round. Once all players have held or busted, the round ends. If no one has 200+ points, pass the deck to a new dealer and start another round. If someone has 200+ points, the game ends, and whoever has the most points wins.

Image: Alexander Varela, from The Op Games
The only wrinkles in the game come from two things: the three action cards and the round-ending bonus. When you're dealt an action card, either keep it or give to another player still in the round:

• Freeze: This player is forced to hold immediately and is out of the round.
• Second Chance: If you're dealt a duplicate number, discard that number and the Second Chance card.
• Flip Three: The recipient of this card is immediately dealt three cards.

Why would you give away a Second Chance? Because you already have one. Why keep a Freeze? Because you're the only person still in the round. Flip Three is the only action card that requires a moment's thought: Do you want to take a chance on getting more cards, or do you want to try to push someone else out of the round?

If someone has seven number cards in front of them, the round ends immediately, with this person scoring 15 points on top of whatever they would normally score. That bonus has rarely occurred in the seven games I've played on a copy of Flip 7 borrowed from the BGG library, but the promise of it is often enough to make you flip another card or two. Having a 10, 11, or 12 in front of you — or all three! — can be enough to scare you into holding, but you can also (in theory) track all of the cards dealt to determine your odds of busting, although thankfully I've never played with anyone who's done this.

Gameplay is straightforward and easy enough for players of all gaming backgrounds to get into, and you can start playing in less than a minute. As with many press-your-luck games, part of the joy of playing comes from the unexpected: the same player busting in round after round on their second or third card, the player in the lead getting passed a Flip Three only to land the x2 card to push them even farther ahead.

The only drawback to Flip 7 is the oversized box with the absurd slogan given that Innovation is clearly the greatest card game of all time, but you can resolve both problems at once by cutting down the box.

For more examples of gameplay, watch this video:

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by Jorge J Barroso

During one of my visits to London in 2018, I visited Science Museum with my wife, and among the interactive activities, they had one that explained how mobile networks work. This stuck with me. Bless my wife's patience for putting up with dinners where I talked about the topic and how I could turn it into a board game.

I work in IT, and at that time, I was involved in mobile application development, so the concept of coverage and how it works was familiar to me. I was so fascinated by the subject that I decided to create a game featuring this complex topic.


After returning from the trip, I got to work. The first version of the game involved worker placement, with players drawing areas on paper instead of using a board. It turned out that the drawing part was a confusing mechanism and didn't add anything to the game — but from those early tests, I learned three things that would remain throughout the development.

First, I didn't want the game to have a majority-based scoring system. That often narrows the focus of scoring, which wasn't something I wanted for this Eurogame. Additionally, based on the theme, I wanted the players' goal to be building antennas and providing coverage to clients, so the majority mechanism was ruled out.

Second, I opted for a worker-placement system that I wanted to give a lot of importance to by introducing something new through worker specialization.

Finally, I wanted to explore using a contract system to allow players to combo and have more actions.


From there, the game underwent significant restructuring, and I began the first tests with workers specializing in an action tree. It was an idea that had been on my mind for a while, and I found it strange that no other game had implemented it.

This worked well from the beginning, and it was fascinating to race to claim spots, while also knowing that if you advanced a worker up a branch, you would block actions for yourself. Seeing people realize that they couldn't perform a basic action because they had specialized was entertaining.

I also started working on a central board where clients would appear, and you had to build antennas and coverage using semi-transparent pieces.


I went through many iterations of this version, experimenting with different shapes for the central board and especially developing the action tree, always promoting the idea that it should be a time-management game in which timing your actions was crucial.

That's how quick access to higher levels and level-based technology cards were born, and I gave more importance to advancing a worker to the top of the tree.


After many plays, Ferrán Renalias told me that the central board wasn't going anywhere, and he was right. That part of the game was causing a snowball effect in generating money, which made the game less fun so that had to be changed from the ground up. It's important during testing not to fall in love with ideas because they might not be right for the game.

Additionally, I decided to reduce the number of resources from two — iron and money — to just money, a decision that would cause many problems down the road.

I replaced the central board with something more conventional. The idea of making a Eurogame with semi-transparent templates still seems like a great idea to me, though this wasn't the right game for it. Games like Redwood and Maglev Metro demonstrate that it's a wonderful and fun concept.


From this point on, the game started to resemble its final version. The board, with zones where you can build antennas, allows you to open up spaces for other players, who can place their pieces and receive bonuses, in addition to the various scoring areas.

I like mid-weight Eurogames that offer alternative ways to take action, especially in a worker-placement game where your actions might be blocked. My idea in developing this type of game is that while you're waiting for your turn, you can think about what you want to achieve and which of the available paths offers you the best move — and if someone takes the action you wanted, there should be one or more alternatives that lead to the same result. It's essential to be able to read the game. These escape routes help the player avoid frustration and make it enjoyable to find that path. They also help strike a balance, ensuring that neither long turns nor excessive downtime are created.

At this point, I was starting to feel satisfied and thought the game was ready to be shown to publishers. I submitted it to a prototype contest hosted by the podcast "Última Ronda", where it made it to the final phase alongside other top-level Spanish games, which I didn't expect.

It was around this time that Chuz from Perro Loko Games tried the game at an event and liked it a lot. However, like other publishers, he said he didn't find the theme attractive and asked whether we could work on a new one. Chuz is one of the people I work best with, and I completely trust his judgment, so I told him no problem and offered ideas for alternative themes.

From there, we took the game into a post-apocalyptic world. I had recently played Death Stranding and liked the idea that large corporations weren't the ones changing the world, but rather a small group. Chuz then came up with the idea of commandos recolonizing the Earth in an alternate timeline that never happened. From then on, the antennas would be habitat-regenerating towers and energy extractors. The coverage or clients would be military, scientific, or civilian buildings.


We wanted to have the game ready for SPIEL Essen 24, so we had to work hard, playing 3-4 games a week for months, then applying changes. The truth is that many people have tried the game and contributed important ideas, especially the group of Chuz, Motedu, and Carlos, who spent week after week for many months breaking the game.

One of the biggest problems we had was balancing resources because with only one resource, changing a cost in one currency could cause the game to snowball or get stuck. From this game, I learned that having multiple resources always helps balance different parts of the game separately. If anyone is thinking of removing a resource from their prototype, carefully evaluate how it affects the rest of the game. This might be Eurogame 101, but I learned it the hard way.

We also worked a lot on the rhythm of the turns. You have several ways to do things, always having a path available that allows you to squeeze a bit more out of your turn. However, chaining too many actions is fun for the player but not for the others watching, so we worked hard to balance that aspect.

Additionally, from the beginning, the game was a positioning race, a race to place your worker or your tower, or to grab a card or a bonus. We worked hard to incorporate these little races throughout the game. The development of the population track, the command leader, and the central board plans all stem from the idea of fostering that sense of urgency that drives the game. Something you will strongly feel is the pressure from the other players...


Another important aspect for us was to avoid having a dominant strategy, so the game offers different ways to win, where the key is to read the board at any given moment: Which endgame bonuses are available? How can you combine them? Have the other players left you an opening?

After many games in the last few months, we tested different strategies, limiting those that were overpowered and fine-tuning those that were underwhelming. The development of personal boards helped with this, and we finally managed to have different paths and playstyles achieve similar and close scores by the end of the game. You can win by focusing on increasing your income from the start or barely moving it throughout the game, going after common objectives or securing the best positions on the board, specializing your workers or keeping them at the lower levels, making contracts or avoiding them altogether.

In the end, the key will be to read the board and figure out where the final game scores are located, and with that information, set your goals early, mid-game, or late.

Another important aspect for us was always having groups of people who hadn't tried the game, so we could ensure that the first experience with the game was also rewarding, not just focusing on those who already knew how to play. Throughout development, we had eight regular testers and about fifteen others who rotated in and out. This system allowed us to identify which parts of the game were less intuitive and correct them. We believe a game should be enjoyable from the first playthrough, with layers to discover in subsequent plays.


I’d like to thank Chuz not only for his contributions during development but also for his thematic work. He tested various aesthetics and evaluated different themes. I think focusing on a late-1980s post-apocalyptic world was a great choice.

Moreover, having Jorge Tabanera on the artwork was a delight. From the moment we told him about the idea at SPIEL Essen 23, he dove into it, doing much more work than necessary and always contributing. I remember that we were amazed by the concepts that Tabanera taught us in Essen.


We invited him to play a game so he could fully grasp the essence of it, and although he came in last, he held his own. A few days later, he surprised us with this wonderful cover for the game.


Thank you, Chuz, for believing in this game and for the love poured into every component. Thanks to all the testers, from those who tried it with the drawable board to those who endured the versions with economic scarcity. I hope you all enjoy it; there are many hours and a lot of learning behind this game.

Jorge J. Barroso

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by W. Eric Martin

When I introduce a new game to someone, I rarely spend time on the game's setting: "You're building buildings in a city", "You're growing mushrooms for fairies", "You're installing a parquet floor badly" to use a few recent examples. One sentence, then we're on to the gameplay because I rarely find a setting compelling enough to make a meaningful connection to that gameplay, to assist in an explanation of what we do in the game in order to win.

Geonil's The Yellow House struck me differently, probably because the setting involves actual people having meaningful interaction that resonates with my interests.

The game's cover riffs on a painting by Vincent van Gogh known as "The Yellow House", although van Gogh supposedly referred to it as "The Street". To quote the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam:

In May 1888, Van Gogh rented four rooms in a house on Place Lamartine in Arles (southern France). The green shutters in this painting of the square show where he lived. Shortly after moving into the "Yellow House", he sent [his brother] Theo a description and sketch of his painting of it: "it's tremendous, these yellow houses in the sunlight and then the incomparable freshness of the blue." [...]

The Yellow House (The Street)
Vincent had finally found a place at the Yellow House where he could not only paint but also have his friends come to stay. His plan was to turn the yellow corner-building into an artists' house, where like-minded painters could live and work together.

The game The Yellow House asks you to recreate arguments that van Gogh had with fellow artist Paul Gauguin about what was most important for the creation of art. This trick-taking game presents the two of you with four elements — skill, passion, inspiration, and money — required for art, with these elements becoming suits in a 28-card deck, with seven unnumbered cards of each suit.

In a round of play, you each get a hand of twelve cards, with the remaining cards being set aside. You pass two cards to your opponent, revealing these cards and boosting the strength of the featured suits. One of you leads to the first trick, and the other either passes or responds with a stronger card. In effect, you are arguing through cardplay.

Each suit can appear in a trick only once, so if you look at my hand below, how can I respond when my opponent plays green in response to my red?


Yellow and purple are both weaker than green, so you might think I'm stuck, but you are allowed to boost a color if required to make it playable, and to boost a color you discard as many cards from hand as needed to make that color one stronger than whatever is currently leading the trick. Thus, I can discard two yellow to raise yellow to a strength of 4 (or two purple to make purple a 4), after which I must play a card of that color to the trick.

When boosting a suit, you can use one "support" card — the blue cards next to the cloth "suit meter" board — in place of a colored card, so I could discard one yellow (or purple) and take one support card in order to boost yellow (purple) by 2, after which I must play yellow (purple).

If you can't play or don't want to play, you pass, the cards are cleared, and your opponent leads the next trick. When a player runs out of cards, they win the round, and their final card is placed under their palette. (You can see that my opponent and I have each won with red once.)

If you win a color a second time, you win the game; in effect, you have made an argument for that element so forcefully, that your opponent has conceded. Alternatively, if you win three rounds, you win the game, with your opponent conceding not due to your support for a particular element, but due to your overall persuasiveness.

Image: Mandoo Games
I've played The Yellow House three-and-a-half times on a review copy from Mandoo Games, which will sell the game at SPIEL Essen 24, and I find the design fascinating, while also being baffled as to how to play well.

Your goal is not to win tricks as much as to shed cards, which means you want to boost to ditch more cards during a turn, yet you might need those (now) more powerful cards to win tricks in order to keep leading.

You need to find the right balance between when and how much to strengthen a suit, which sometimes involves playing the odds as to what your opponent might have in hand. In the first round, four cards aren't dealt, but with each succeeding round, one fewer card is set aside, which means you move closer to having perfect information of what your opponent holds, which means you can play out scenarios of how they might respond to whatever you do.

Or rather, that's possible in theory, but I haven't yet had the game gel enough to better know which cards to pass and what to play when. (In the game image above, my opponent and I have each won red once, a red is on the table, and I have three red in hand. How can I best use this info? Was my initial red lead a bad idea?! In retrospect, yes.) Maybe in time I'll improve, but regardless I find the setting of the gameplay both novel and relatable, something I greatly appreciate in a field filled with similar-sounding games that blur together when viewed at a distance.

For more gameplay examples, watch this video:

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