Game Preview: Animals on Board, or Every Living Thing of All Flesh, You Shall Bring One or At Minimum Three of Every Kind into the Ark

Ralf zur Linde and Wolfgang Sentker's Animals on Board is built on a cheeky premise: You and others are populating an ark with animals during the time of Noah, but due to Noah's previously agreed contracts, you are prohibited from having pairs of animals once it comes time to launch.

The game doesn't need this premise to exist as the design works well on its own, but the concept gives you a package, a framework in which to think about the game. And as eggertspiele did with Camel Up and its unnecessarily awesome pyramid, the publisher has used simple cardboard to provide players with well-designed bits, specifically four cardboard arks that players use to hold their animal tiles during the game. When you first open the box, you see a few punchboards floating in air and think, "That's it?!" Then you punch out and assemble everything, and suddenly you barely have room in the box to fit it all!

Designer Diary: FUSE, or This Diary Will Self-Destruct After 10 Thumbs

May 05, 2016

One way that I think up new game ideas and refine game designs is to picture people playing a game and having fun. I try to picture different elements of the game and get a vague idea of what...

Links: Wizards of the Coast Gets Sued, Refugees Get Games, and Carcassonne Gets Tabled

May 04, 2016

• Four judges of Magic: The Gathering tournaments have sued Magic publisher Wizards of the Coast in United States District Court as they claim that they have been employed as judges by WotC but...

Thieves Join Five Tribes, and SeaFall Prepares to Set Sail

May 03, 2016

• Bruno Cathala's Five Tribes debuted at Gen Con 2014, then The Artisans of Naqala expansion joined the game at Gen Con 2015.For Gen Con 2016, publisher Days of Wonder will debut a...

Designer Diary: 13 Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis, or Blowing Up the World, One Card at a Time

May 03, 2016

My name is Asger Sams Granerud and with Daniel Skjold Pedersen, we are the designers of 13 Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis. We want to share the journey of our game from idea, through development,...

The Complaints in Spain Stay Mainly in Pandemic Iberia

May 02, 2016

As I noted in April 2016, Z-Man Games plans to hold the 2016 Pandemic Survival World Championship in Barcelona, Spain, and in an entirely not coincidental turn of events, Z-Man will also release...