Board Game News

Links: Fluxx Featured, Knight Moves Marketed, and Plastic Pushed Out of Packaging

• In August 2019, Elliott Williams at Washingtonian profiled Andy and Kristin Looney of Looney Labs. An excerpt:Quote:As aerospace engineers at NASA, Kristin and Andy Looney spent years working...

Game Preview: Spies & Lies: A Stratego Story, or Nostalgia by the Numbers

Stratego was one of the mainstays of my gaming youth, with my brother and I playing the game on a fairly regular basis. I have no idea what I'd think about the game today as I haven't played in...

Tom Lehmann Talks at Gen Con 2019: Dice Realms, New Frontiers: Starry Rift, and Res Arcana: Lux et Tenebrae

After many delays due to me focusing solely on SPIEL '19 and little else, (almost) all of the game overview videos that BoardGameGeek recorded at Gen Con 2019 are now live on our BGG Express...

Links: Entering SPIEL '19, Translating Rules, and Rediscovering The Genius

• For SPIEL '19, convention organizer Friedhelm Merz Verlag plans to have the East Entrance of the Messe Essen convention structure open for the first time in years (thanks to the long-term...

Collect Tiles Once Again, This Time for Azul: Summer Pavilion

Have you tiled everything in your household yet? Probably not, but you can't blame your lack of tiling on designer Michael Kiesling and publisher Next Move Games because they're doing their...

Designer Diary: On the Origin of Species

On the Origin of an IdeaI first met Gerard Ascensi several years ago studying for a mathematics degree. Years later, we met again around a table, playing board games in Barcelona and traveling to...

Game Overview: FILLIT, or Tiling with Tokens

My wife Linda and I have hosted exchange students on and off since 1999, initially just as something to do and nowadays to give our son a temporary sister who can transmit a broader sense of the...

Mergers, Splits, and Distribution Deals: Remembering Rick Loomis and Richard Berg, and Bringing Swiss Games to North America

• Rick Loomis, co-founder of Flying Buffalo, Inc. and co-founder and past president of Game Manufacturer's Association (GAMA), passed away on August 23, 2019. Until Loomis' passing, Flying...

Nominations Announced for the 2019 International Gamers Awards

The International Gamers Awards is an annual award meant to recognize "outstanding games and designers, as well as the companies that publish them", with the distinctive element to the IGAs being...

Designer Diary: Smoothies, and Carbon-14 Dating

Writing a design diary can be tricky since this is not a thing that we normally do. Sometimes the idea just pops up, and you grab it and go through all the design and development at once, leaving...

SPIEL '19 Game Preview: Bloom Town, or Town-Building Like There's No Tomorrow

Not content to license their games to others, designers Asger Harding Granerud and Daniel Skjold Pedersen have founded Sidekick Games to put more of their creations onto the market, starting with...

New Game Round-up: Break Codes, Speak Truthfully, Control the Lanes, and Feel Your Way to Success

I'm constantly on the lookout for new games to write about, and the richest source of both information and frustration comes from my Twitter feed. I follow only Japanese game designers and...

New Game Round-up: Shovel Knight to Exceed Your Expectations, and The Return of Evil Dead 2

• Level 99 Games' Exceed Fighting System by company founder D. Brad Talton, Jr. is designed to allow characters from multiple universes to go toe to toe to see who ends up toeless, and the...

Make Way for More Mind — to the Extreme!

I am somewhat of a fan of The Mind, Wolfgang Warsch's simple card game that German publisher NSV released in early 2018, and my obsession has continued into 2019, with me having played that game...

Designer Diary: Ka Pai

Getting My First Game on Contract, or Raiders of the Lost MotivationIn early 2012, I went directly from knowing and playing games like Settlers of Catan to sitting down with my girlfriend to...

SPIEL '19 Round-up: Make Plans to Travel in Wayfinders and Rebuild Arrondissements in Paris: New Eden

• Believe it or not, I'm still catching up on announcements made during Gen Con 2019, with one of those announcements being for Wayfinders from designer Thomas Dagenais-Lespérance and...

Game Preview: Blokus Dice Game & UNO Dice Game, or Roll-and-Writes Go Mass Market

At Gen Con 2019, the U.S. toy and game giant Mattel gave a sneak peek at a quartet of roll-and-write games coming out in November 2019, all of them based on games currently residing in the Mattel...

Designer Diary: Oh, Fox!

Nuts to the Dumb Fox"I want to watch Peter Rabbit!", my two-year-old son requests...for the hundredth time. Full of excitement, my son immerses himself in the woodland world yet again. At the...

Reiner Stockhausen Invites You to Relive Orléans Stories for SPIEL '19

Listing #700 on BGG's SPIEL '19 Preview is Orléans Stories, a huge release from designer Reiner Stockhausen through his own dlp games.Stockhausen debuted Orléans in 2014, and the game has been...

Game Overview: Super Cats, or Feline Finger Fighting

My role as BGG news editor and database manager sometimes consists of me throwing games into the database with the expectation that we'll hear more about the game later — then the game vanishes...

Enter Ever-Changing Dungeons in Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated, Then Settle a New Planet in Circadians: First Light

I jumped straight from previewing Gen Con 2019 releases to working on our SPIEL '19 Preview with lots of game announcements getting sidetracked along the way, seemingly half of them from Renegade...

Designer Diary: Yukon Airways, or Designing from Memory

This game was inevitable: I grew up in the Yukon, my father was a bush pilot, and I like to design games.We Welcome You to Yukon AirwaysThe real-life Yukon Airways originally began as a small...

SPIEL '19 Game Preview: Similo, or Let the Characters Clue You In

If you've played Mysterium, then you're already 70% of the way toward learning how to play Similo, a co-operative card game from Hjalmar Hach, Pierluca Zizzi, and Martino Chiacchiera that Italian...

SPIEL '19 Game Preview: Cloaked Cats, or Spotting Kitty's Spots

Cloaked Cats, a deduction game from Connor Reid that HABA will debut in Germany on August 21, 2019, doesn't feel like it has anything novel compared to other deduction games, but I say that only...

Gen Con 2019 Coverage Begins Again w/ Ticket to Ride: London

Two weeks after Gen Con 2019 opened, BoardGameGeek is re-launching its coverage of this show on our BGG Express YouTube channel with this overview of Ticket to Ride: London from designer Alan R....

Steph's Photo Guide to Gen Con 2019!

Gen Con 2019A Photo Guide by Steph HodgeAt the BGG BoothThe booth grew in size, and our store was huge! So much to set up!Re-branding unveiled!Beth & I showing off our bedazzled shirts!WEM is...

Designer Diary: Sierra West

Howdy! Jonny Pac here. I'm gonna share some of the story behind my game Sierra West. It's a mix between a deck-builder and action-programming/worker-placement game, but the two stand-out features...

Asmodee Acquires Lion Rampant Imports, GoKids, Skyship, and Searainbow Group

On August 7, 2019, Asmodee closed a deal to acquire Canadian distributor Lion Rampant Imports, which was founded in 1992 by Rose Kriedemann and Ross Fleming. (Aside from being a distributor, Lion...

SPIEL ‘19 Game Preview: Miyabi, or Refined Tile-Laying Jerkery in the Garden

At Gen Con 2019, the BoardGameGeek team was larger than it's ever been, which gave me the opportunity to meet with publishers and survey their titles coming out in the second half of the year,...

At Gen Con 2019, CMON Limited Revamps Zombicide, Features Ankh: Gods of Egypt, and Looks Ahead to Cyberpunk 2077

I need to clone myself for major conventions because I'll learn something in passing or see a game announcement from a publisher — but I'm already committed to a publisher meeting or a game...