Board Game News

New Game Round-up: Jonathan Strange, Men in Black and Ghostbusters Come to the Table for a Piece o' Cake

• In June 2019, Osprey Games plans to release Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: A Board Game of English Magic, an adaptation of the 2004 novel by Susanna Clarke by designers Marco Maggi and...

Links: Variability, Rulebook Quality, and Game Classification

I'm clearing house in the wake of SPIEL '18 as many things were pushed into a bucket labeled "later" while I tried to keep up with everything related to that show. Thus, the items below might not...

In 2019, Lookout Games Brings Grizzlies to Bärenpark, Roll-and-Write to Patchwork, and Card Play to Mandala

Near the end of SPIEL '18, I got a peek at three titles due out from Lookout Games in the first half of 2019, so naturally I thought I'd share what I know with you, dear reader.Let's start with...

WizKids Fills Its 2019 Release Calendar with Warhammer, Waterdeep, and Much More

• U.S. publisher WizKids has announced the latest title coming from its partnership with Games Workshop, a 1-4 player design from Rustan Håkansson called Warhammer: Age of Sigmar – The Rise...

Portal Games Delivers Expansions Galore in 2019 for Detective, Robinson Crusoe, Stronghold, 51st State, and Alien Artifacts

During SPIEL '18, Ignacy Trzewiczek of Portal Games held a seminar in which he announced some of the titles coming from the publisher in 2019. My notes from this seminar are a bit haphazard as I...

New Game Round-up: Printing Money, Flicking Ships, and Walking with the Dead Once More

• Gavin Birnbaum's auction game Q.E. is getting a new, non-wood edition courtesy of BoardGameTables.com, which moved into board game publishing in 2018 with owner Chad DeShon's On Tour. DeShon...

SPIEL '18 Post-Mortem: First Thoughts After the Show

I'm at the Düsseldorf airport for a couple of hours, sitting next to an indoor tree that keeps dropping leaves every few minutes, so I thought I'd jot off a few notes about SPIEL '18, the...

Publisher Diary: Scientia, or Finding Something Unique from Typical Elements

Hello, my name is Jade Yoo, the owner of Korean board game company BoardM Factory. I want to introduce stories behind our new game Scientia. Of course, every game has its own efforts and stories...

Designer Diary: Tour Operator, or Designing Games with Your Ear

Modern board game designers have many tools at their disposal to design their games, from the traditional pen and paper to the high-end editing and calculation computer programs, such as...

Designer Diary: A Long Journey to Adventure Island

We are tremendously happy about the release of our new game Adventure Island at SPIEL '18 in Essen by Pegasus Spiele. The game is very dear to our hearts as we have put several years of our lives...

Eurazeo Completes Sale of Asmodee to PAI Partners; Asmodee to Acquire ADC Blackfire Entertainment

Two bits of news have emerged about the industry's largest hobby game publisher ahead of the SPIEL '18 game fair in Essen, Germany.First, in July 2018 I had noted that Eurazeo, the private equity...

SPIEL '18 Preview: Short Takes on Discover: Lands Unknown, Dare to Love, and Dozens More New Games

Time to close out my SPIEL '18 previews with what is arguably something I should have done in the first place: a long video that presents short takes on dozens of games. After all, I created a...

Designer Diary: A Pleasant Journey to Neko, or A Journey to Game Design

Hello everyone, I'm Citie Lo, designer of A Pleasant Journey to Neko. I'm from Taiwan and now based in Berlin, Germany. I test my games with some publishers or groups here, like Spielwiese. You...

SPIEL '18 Preview: Another Shade of Blue, or Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra

One of the most anticipated titles on BGG's SPIEL '18 Preview is Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra, a sequel to the 2018 Spiel des Jahres-winning Azul from designer Michael Kiesling and publisher...

Designer Diary: How Potato Chips Inspired Gobi

Diary by Scott Huntington & Shaun GrahamDesigning board games as a duo is great. You have two brains to think up ideas, four hands to build prototypes, and so many opportunities to talk about...

SPIEL '18 Preview: 5 COLORS, or Bursting the Rainbow

I'm almost finished with SPIEL '18 previews, but only because that convention starts in a few days, which means I'll have time then only to postview games, as it were.As always, Japon Brand will...

SPIEL '18 Preview: Atlandice, or Rolling on the Waves

With so many games hitting the shore every week, it's easy to overlook or be surprised by new releases — even when you know they're coming.At FIJ 2018 in Cannes in late February 2018, we...

SPIEL '18 Preview: Fertility, or The Grapes of Thoth

Both designer Cyrille Leroy and publisher Catch Up Games debuted in 2015 with the tile-laying game Sapiens. I previewed that title in this space in September 2015, and while I correctly...

Designer Diary: Relatively Speaking, or Say Whaaat?! How Far Will an Idea Go?

My party game Say Whaaat?! will debut from Drawlab Entertainment at SPIEL '18 in late October 2018. It's the latest version of a simple game I made almost 18 years ago. I'm really looking forward...

SPIEL '18 Preview: Majolica, or Fire Up the Ovens (in an Orderly Manner)

As SPIEL '18 gets ever closer — or rather, as I move ever closer to SPIEL '18, it being an event fixed in time whereas I travel through that substance in a predictable and mundane way — I...

Designer Diary: From a Marvelous Mechanism to Witless Wizards

I've always enjoyed the "I split, you choose" board game mechanism: One player divides a group of items into smaller sets, but the other players then get to choose one of these sets first. It's a...

SPIEL '18 Preview: Papering Duel, or Wall-to-Wall Warfare

Martin Nedergaard Andersen's Papering Duel from Korean publishers Mandoo Games and Dazzleedu has a delightfully silly premise: Two roommates disagree over what the wallpaper in their room should...

New Game Round-up: Ponder Lehmann's Res Arcana, and Rebuild Rome in a Day

• Sand Castle Games is a new California-based game publisher run by Maud and Cyrille Daujean that will debut in 2019 with the Tom Lehmann title Res Arcana, which features engine-building,...

SPIEL '18 Preview: Impact: Battle of Elements, or If You Strike Me Down...

I love introducing games to people, but you need to have the right games on hand for this process to succeed. My favorite game is Carl Chudyk's Innovation, but I'm unlikely to whip out Innovation...

Designer Diary: Mechanisms or Theme? — Underwater Cities and Other Games

Which comes first: a game's mechanisms or its theme? In a March 2018 interview, Kuba Šotola opened by asking Katka from Delicious Games and me about the theme of our upcoming release, Underwater...

SPIEL '18 Preview: Terra Shifter, or Make the Earth Move

Continuing my practice of highlighting SPIEL '18 titles that are only edging their noses on the periphery of most radars, I thought it time to cover Terra Shifter, a co-operative puzzle game from...

Designer Diary: From Honshū to Hokkaido

Did you know that Japan (Nippon) consists of over 6,800 islands? The four largest are Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Shikoku, and those four are referred to as home islands. Hokkaido is the...

The BGG Show: Answering Viewer Questions, and Preparing for SPIEL '18

Two weeks have passed, so Scott, Steph, Lincoln and I have returned with another episode of The BoardGameGeek Show — and because Lincoln pleaded so magnificently in the previous episode, many...

SPIEL '18 Preview: Magic Fold, or Creasing Your Flying Carpet

I think about games in relation to music sometimes, mostly in an extremely mathematical way since I've only absorbed music, never created it. There are only so many notes on the scale, and you...

New Game Round-up: Preparing Time of Empires, Making Sauce That Buurns, and Welcoming More Couples to the Fog of Love

• Belgian publisher Pearl Games is still a few weeks away from releasing its SPIEL '18 title Solenia — video preview here — yet it's already teasing a new game for SPIEL '19. Yes, here's a...