Board Game News

Game Preview: Buccaneer Bones, or Treasure to Die For

The first title released from Kris Gould's Wattsalpoag Games was his own dice game Claim It!, which appeared in 2006. Claim It! is a push-your-luck dice game reminiscent of Sid Sackson's Can't...

Designer Diary: Nosferatu, or Hidden Roles + Asymmetric Goals = A Design Challenge!

Nosferatu was born in 1998 and released in March 2013, so the history of its design and development is a long story!Starting Idea (in the 1990s)Why did I start to design a vampire card...

Designer Diary: Futterneid, or Mother Always Said, "Don't Play With Your Food"

Friday, June 29, 2012: For my Friday project I needed one more game and tried a different way of inspiration — just put "Freitag" in Google search and look for the 2,013th entry. Google didn't...

Game Preview: Eggs of Ostrich, or Is There a Doctor in the House?

The list of games that require precisely three players is short — After the Flood, God's Playground, and (fittingly enough) Drei are the only ones I'm aware of — but now Japanese designer...

Designer Diary: Trains and Stations

Trains and Stations is my newest design, releasing shortly from WizKids Games. It blends tense risk management, cutthroat commodity control, and a subtle dynamic partnership element into a quirky...

New Game Round-up: No Fields of Glory, Marabunta's Plans for 2014 & It's Finally Time to Eat Electric Death

• I know that some users never thought they'd see this day, but the long-delayed, certainly-thought-dead two-player space combat game Eat Electric Death! is going to be printed, with Andrew...

Designer Diary: The Business of Suburbia Inc

Suburbia Inc has its origins in the base game. Oftentimes when designing a game, many ideas find their way into the game only to be tossed out later. As Suburbia took a long time to develop (even...

Designer Diary: Plunder, or How to Sail the Seven Seas and Live to Tell the Tale

I love deduction games. I have played lots of Black Vienna on Greg Aleknevicus's amazing online implementation of Black Vienna. I have played Sleuth since the late 1970s. I love Larry Levy's...

Designer Diary: Of Ice and Isomorphism, or The Story of Expedition: Northwest Passage

In 1845, Sir John Franklin led a British expedition which undertook to find the Northwest Passage. He had two great state-of-the-art ships — the Terror and the Erebus — 128 men, and...

New Game Round-up: Passport for a Quantum of Fool's Gold, Bending Low to Play Rice Paddy & Mayfair Stops the Press— I Mean, Holds the Front Page

• U.S. publisher/importer Passport Game Studios has announced (sort of) that it will publish Joshua Balvin's Fool's Gold, previously listed solely as a publication of Balvin's own Rock Paper...

Designer Diary: An Illustrated Journey through Theomachie

Dreams can come true and the story of my friends and me, the design team behind Theomachie, proves it. After a successful crowdfunding campaign on Spieleschmiede, an expanded German edition of...

Game Preview: Donburiko, or Poker-Faced Mini-Coloretto for Dirty Liars

Let's start this game preview with a short song: Okay, in fact that's a children's nursery rhyme from Japan titled "Donguri Korokoro" (どんぐりころころ). Here's a translation into...

Designer Diary: The Canals of Tempest Were Dredged by Rejection

In Canalis, players continue the story of Tempest by developing a tract of swampland recently opened up by one of the city's famous storms. Resources must be connected to production buildings and...

New Game Round-up: Working the Markets in Istanbul and 30 Carats, Small World Figures Made Big & From Comics to Games for Kill Shakespeare and 30 Days of Night

• To step away from the focus on Spiel 2013 for at least one game, here's an overview of Istanbul, a Rüdiger Dorn design that H@all Games' Ralph Bruhn is developing for Pegasus Spiele for...

Designer Diary: Golem Arcana

While we started development on Golem Arcana only about six months ago, you could say that I have been working on it for almost ten years now because that's how long I have been looking for the...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Emus, Pandas, Lions, Glamazons, Aliens for Mars & a Handful of Humans

• Dozens of games have been designed for P. D. Magnus's Decktet card game system, a deck of 36 cards in six suits, with most of the cards being double-suited. One of those games is Magnus' own...

Designer Diary: Super Fantasy, or Hacking & Slashing Over the Top

The Beginning Everything begins somewhere. A game is often made by combining a lot of elements, making it difficult to understand how the whole thing started, but sometimes there's a clear-cut...

Designer Diary: Days of Honor: Operation Wildhorn III

You may find this diary long, but the story behind the game Days of Honor: Operation Wildhorn III is also long. I hope you will find it interesting.I. The Reason WhyThere is always a reason that...

Upper Deck Previews Legendary Encounters, Announces Deal for Predator and Firefly

In post Gen Con 2013 coverage in August, I wrote about Upper Deck Entertainment's suprise reveal during that convention: Legendary Encounters, a deck-building game based on its Marvel...

New Game Round-up: Fighting for What's Mine in Kings Under Mountains, Factions and In-Fighting in Coup & Gerdts Reinvents Deck-Building in Concordia

• I'm adding still more titles showing up at Spiel 2013 to BGG's Spiel 2013 Preview, including Kings Under Mountains from Russian publisher Rightgames LLC. A description:Quote:Players command...

Game Preview: Sukimono, or Thrifting for Treasure in 18th Century Japan

If you're like me, you've scoured thrift stores far and wide in the hope of finding unwanted treasures, whether games, books, LEGO sets or otherwise heretofore unanticipated items that are more...

Designer Diary: How to Rule the Nations of the World

Writing the rules for a game like Nations is hard as it's an advanced civilization-building game, much more involved than the standard 45-minute family fare. Teaching new players is not such a...

Crowdfunding Round-up: A Few Captains, a Pile of Occulites, a Witch or Two, and a Gaggle of Lords and Ladies Fight to the Death — or Attempt to Secure Monetary Support for Various Game-Related Endeavors. Either Way.

Wow!! October! That means it is nearly Spiel!! With W. Eric allegedly off gathering news for Spiel stuff, I figured it was a good time to cover the TRULY important stuff — games you have not...

Designer Diary: A Pulp Nonfiction, or The Story of Citrus

Creative JuicesDesign competitions can be helpful in many ways, especially for someone like me who doesn't do this full-time. Apart from the opportunity to have a game playtested and critiqued by...

Game Preview: CV, or This Is Your Life and It's Ending One Roll at a Time

Polish publisher Granna sent me a prototype version of Filip Miłuński's CV in the hope that I'd preview it on BGG News prior to the game's release at Spiel 2013 — then it went and released...

Designer Diary: Yunnan, or From Railroads to Tea-Roads

When it comes to designing a game, my approach is to first work out the game mechanisms, then once these are stable I start looking for a suitable theme. (I know a lot of designers design games...

Game Preview: Venetia

It's not simple to write something about a game just from the rules, but when I learned that Marco Maggi and Francesco Nepitello were working on a new title, I asked the publisher, Stratelibri,...

Designer Diary: Creating Rokoko, or How About a Threesome?

{We want to give you some insight into the long development of Rokoko by means of an imaginary interview performed by the gorgeous lady on the Rokoko cover, Mademoiselle Juliette.}Juliette: How...

Zoch Verlag's Late 2013 Line-up: Chickens, Pigs, Birds, Beer & Even More Things for Grabby Players to Grab

• As we get closer to Spiel 2013 and news of new games continues to come out of the woodwork, it's time to run through Zoch Verlag's offerings for late 2013, starting with a new take on the...

New Game Round-up: Trick-Taking Through the Ages, More Steamy Punks in Clockwork Kingdom & Sales, Sushi and Snacking Wolves from Japan

• French publisher Spiel-ou-Face has two new games appearing at Spiel 2013, one of which — Oss — is a co-publication that I've already covered on BGGN. The second title is S-Evolution from...