Board Game News

New Game Round-up: Join XCOM to Save the World or Become a Penguin to Wreck a Small Part of It

• Man, am I behind on news posts! Sure, the Gen Con 2014 Preview is nice and beefy now with more than 260 game listings, but what about all those other games being announced, such as XCOM: The...

Designer Diary: Caught Up in Catchup, or My Attempt at a Deep, Minimalist Game for Everybody

"The famed Argentinian writer Jorge Borges said that to not read Dante's Divine Comedy is 'to ascribe to a secret and obscure asceticism'; this comment also applies to Catchup.""Catchup is truly...

The Piecepack Remakes — and Allows You to Remake — the World of Games

I wrote several articles and short pieces for GAMES Magazine (R.I.P.) in the late 1990s and early 2000s with topics covering international game shows, chess boxing, the Spiel game convention, the...

Stretching and Prepping for Gen Con 2014

I haven't posted anything here the past couple of days, but I have been updating BGG's Gen Con 2014 Preview, which now numbers 232 listings with more still to be added over the next nine days....

New Game Round-up: Pictomania in North America, Spiel Previews from Lookout & Mining at a Far Space Foundry

• Stronghold Games has snuck Vlaada Chvátil's Pictomania — a party game in which players simultaneously draw and guess what others are drawing — onto its publication schedule with a Q1...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Firefighters, Assassins, Gangsters, Octopuses & Much More

• As is its custom, Indie Boards and Cards is blasting through a Kickstarter campaign — two, in fact — with both consisting of expansions for previous releases. Flash Point: Fire Rescue –...

New Game Round-up: Monsters and Diamonds, Crimefighters and Dinners & Guardians and Dynastic Deck-Building

• Will fortune strike twice for IDW Games and Pandasaurus Games? Those publishers are handling the English version of Masao Suganuma's Machi Koro — although admittedly that game was already a...

Game Preview: Imperial Settlers, or Unsettling Your Brain

Ignacy Trzewiczek's Imperial Settlers was previewed at Portal Games' PortalKON in July 2014 in Poland, and the game will debut in the U.S. at Gen Con 2014 in mid-August. Thanks to Portal sending...

New Game Round-up: New Land for Hansa Teutonica, New Vampiric Battles from Daviau & a New Thirstquencher in King of New York

• German publisher Argentum Verlag has released basic information about its offerings at Spiel 2014 in October, starting with a new edition — a new printing, I believe, with no changes — of...

This Space Intentionally Left Blank

Apologies for the relative lack of posts this week. I'm actually taking a quasi-vacation of sorts ahead of the crunch that starts pre-Gen Con and doesn't let up until after BGG.CON ends in...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Mice, Elves, Aliens, Unpleasant Family Members & More

• Stronghold Games has partners with BrokenMyth Studios to bring out a digital version of Andrew Parks' space-based deck-building game Core Worlds, with the iOS version to come first and the...

Gen Con 2013 – More Con Reports, 922 Settlers of Catan & Final First Game Impressions

(While prepping posts ahead of a weeklong trip, I ran across this completed but never published round-up of reports on Gen Con 2013, and while the prudent thing to do would be to delete it and...

Game Overview: Blood of the Werewolf, or Am I Really Who I Think I Am? Aw, Forget It — I'll Kill You Anyway

Blood of the Werewolf, released in 2013 by designer Chen Zhifan and publisher Homosapiens Lab, consists of few components and one big idea: What if you played Werewolf, but you didn't know...

New Game Round-up: Witches Get Sneaky in Coven, Kansil Puts Dice in Krakatoa & Sparks Games Invites Hypocrisy

 • Jason Maxwell at 8th Summit has announced that Paul Saxberg's Coven will see print in 2015 following a Kickstarter campaign to run before the end of 2014. (So make that "may see print",...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Ye Olde Kickstarter Standards — Cthulhu, Zombies, Dragons & Fighting Games

• Heroes of Normandie is still warming in the sun on the doorsteps of some Kickstarter backers, and publisher Devil Pig Games has already launched a companion game: Shadows over Normandie,...

New Game Round-up: Previews from Portal & Mucho Munchkin from Steve Jackson Games

• Polish publisher Portal Games held one of its regular gaming events on Saturday, July 12, 2014, and during that event Portal's Ignacy Trzewiczek revealed a few of the items coming from that...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Ants, Athlas, Dawns, Doom & CLASH!

Move over Spiel de Whatever — it is time for some REALLY important news! A whole slew of new games is looking for your hard-earned cash.I love July. My lovely wife and daughters are off from...

Camel Up Wins the 2014 Spiel des Jahres; Istanbul Takes the Kennerspiel Award

Steffen Bogen's Camel Up from eggertspiele and Pegasus Spiele has won the 2014 Spiel des Jahres! Bogen accepted the award wearing a bespoke T-shirt emblazoned with a stack of camels, and I now...

Game Overview: Camel Up, or Humping to the SdJ Finish Line?

The winner of the 2014 Spiel des Jahres — Germany's game of the year award — will be announced on Monday, July 14, and in these final few hours before the announcement I thought I'd post a...

Game Overview: Desperados of Dice Town, or This Town Might Indeed Be Big Enough for the Lot of Us But We'd Really Prefer to Be Left on Our Own If You Don't Mind

French publisher Matagot released Desperados of Dice Town by Bruno Cathala and Ludovic Maublanc in the middle of 2014, with Asmodee distributing the title in North America and elsewhere. Here I...

New Game Round-up: Digging and Deck-Building, Rolling and Rallying & Flicking and Fighting

• First-time Canadian publisher Roxley Games plans to make its debut with two games in the next twelve months: Super Motherload from Gavan Brown and Matt Tolman, and Steampunk Rally from Orin...

New Game Round-up: Teaser Edition – Temporum, Rattlebones, La Isla, Tokaido: Matsuri & Max Michael's Mysterious Box of Wonders

• Donald X. Vaccarino and Rio Grande Games, well known from their combined efforts on the industry-dominating Dominion, have a new title due out in 2014, with Temporum possible being available...

Spiel 2014 Preview Now Live

BoardGameGeek's Spiel 2014 Preview is now live, opening with 101 titles on it and sure to swell to at least five times that size by the time that Spiel 2014 opens on October 16. (The Spiel 2013...

New Game Round-up: Spiel 2014 – Fresh Deus from Pearl Games & Fish Dice from Piatnik

• Pearl Games has at least one title scheduled for release at Spiel 2014 in October: Deus by Pearl's own Sébastien Dujardin. (Dujardin has been showing prototypes of L'Auberge Sanglante, or...

New Game Round-up: Lookout Offers Gems and Gold, Red Glove Offers New GodZ & No One Offers Cookies

• Another day, another dude offering you a bunch of gems. I must be hanging out in the wrong places because I never encounter retailers like these in the real world; of course I'm not usually...

Origins Game Fair 2014 VI: Alchemists Game Preview, or Mixing and (Sometimes) Matching

At Origins Game Fair 2014, I met up with Petr Murmak from Czech Games Edition to record a game preview for Matúš Kotry's Alchemists, CGE's big game for Spiel 2014 in October.As with CGE's Space...

New Game Round-up: Bang Reboxed, Bots Released & Bracelets Revealed

• Italian publisher dV Giochi plans to release new versions of expansions for Emiliano Sciarra's Bang!Bang! Dodge City, first released in 2004 then later packaged with the Bang! High Noon...

New Game Round-up: Pandemic Builds a New Legacy, Kemet Builds New Pyramids & Eggertspiele Builds New Dolmen

• In May 2014, I posted a brief item about Pandemic Legacy, which had apparently popped up at a few conventions in prototype form. Accused co-designer Matt Leacock noted at the time that "Rob...

Designer Diary: The Battle at Kemble's Cascade, or Long Live the Shoot 'Em Up!

Do you remember the classic arcade shoot 'em up games? R-Type, Uridium, Gradius? Thunder Force III, Kingdom Grand Prix, Battle Squadron, Tyrian? DonPachi?Did you ever hang out in the arcade game...

Origins Game Fair 2014 V: Kickstarter Edition – Paradox, Dead Drop, Phoenix Covenant & Golem Arcana

• In what's likely a surprise to no one familiar with the modern games market, Origins Game Fair 2014 featured a number of games that will be coming to Kickstarter for funding or that have...