Board Game News

Designer Diary: Dark Darker Darkest, or Dipping into the Dark...A Beginner's Guide

The Birth of an Idea"How does an idea for a board game actually start?" someone asked me out of the blue. We were sitting at a table playing a game described on the box as an "exotic adventure",...

Game Previews at Origins 2013 I: Freedom: The Underground Railroad, Conflict of Heroes: Solo Expansion, Spyrium & Council of Verona

• Time to start the video coverage of Origins 2013, and despite having many problems with the camera and its audio recording – some of which I discovered only after returning home and...

Origins 2013 News Round-Up I: Asmodee, Asmadi and IELLO

While Origins 2013 is still ongoing as I write this, my participation in that convention is over, so I thought I'd round up the news items that I tweeted during my two days at the show. In case...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Rockwell, Council of Verona, Kaosball, Kremlin, Cthulhu Wars & More

• Belgian publisher Sit Down! has turned to Kickstarter for its third release: Bruno Crépeault's Rockwell, which will be released at Spiel 2013 in October. (KS link) Not too many Eurogames...

Designer/Developer Diary: By Now, You Should Be Expecting the Ultimate Werewolf Inquisition

(Editor's note: Legend Dan Hoffman, designer of Ultimate Werewolf: Inquisition, wrote the first half of this diary; publisher Ted Alspach of Bézier Games took over after the ••• break...

New Game Round-up: Trollfens for Descent, Space Maps for Star Trek: Catan & No More LEGO Games for Anyone

• With the Labyrinth of Ruin expansion now bearing a July 2013 release date, U.S. publisher Fantasy Flight Games has unveiled yet another expansion for the second edition of Descent: Journeys...

Designer Diary: Epic Breakthroughs in Viticulture

There are two types of game designers: Those who start with mechanisms and later incorporate an appropriate theme, and those who start with theme and later incorporate accompanying mechanisms.I'm...

Blue Orange Games' 2013 Line-up: Nada!, Flash!, 20 Express, Ooga Booga, Spot It! Party & Keekee the Rocking Monkey

• U.S. publisher Blue Orange Games focuses on quick-playing games with few rules for the mainstream market. In February 2013, Blue Orange released two dice games: Nada! (with HUCH! & friends...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Elemental Clash, Escape: Fighting for Freedom, Fairytale Games, Frontline General & Several Other Games Not in Alphabetical Order

• Austrian designer Andreas Propst first released Elemental Clash in 2009 and a handful of expansion sets have followed in the intervening years. Now he's releasing Elemental Clash: The Master...

New Game Round-up: Make Yourself a Mogul, Join the Titanium Wars & Prepare for a Cosmic Storm

• U.S. publisher Mayfair Games has announced the July 2013 release of Global Mogul from Manifest Destiny designer Bill Crenshaw. Global Mogul retails for $55 and has a ton of bits in it, but...

Links: Computed Card Games, Lines for Leisure Items & A Game Good Enough to Eat?

• In early May 2013, I included Néstor Romeral Andrés's open-ended game system The Mystique Deck in a crowdfunding round-up, quoting him as saying, "I'm planning to run a design contest once...

New Game Round-up: Bullets Become Dice in Bang! The Dice Game & Pre-Origins Overviews of Templars and Dungeon Venture

• Italian publisher dV Giochi has announced the August 2013 release of Bang! The Dice Game, the next iteration of Emiliano Sciarra's decade-old card game Bang!. Bang! The Dice Game was designed...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Now Featuring Fyodor Dostoyevsky, John Steinbeck, Tarō Gomi, and Shakespeare! (Oh, and Some Games, Too)

Every month I think to myself, "Hey, Matt, you great-looking son of a gun, that nogoodnik W. Eric has written about EVERY new crowdfunding game of consequence. How are you going to pull this...

New Game Round-up: White Goblin Games Keeps the Rats Coming & AEG Prepares for the 2013 Convention Season

• U.S. publisher Alderac Entertainment Group has dropped a bit of information about Nightfall: Eastern Skies, the next release in David Gregg's deck-building series of games, each of which is a...

New Game Round-up: More Wrong Chemistry, Fear and Phobias in Amityville & Riots in Urbania

• Greek publisher Mage Company has a few projects in the works, starting with an expansion for Wrong Chemistry from designer Tony Cimino – Wrong Chemistry: Expand Your Lab – which the...

Designer Diary: You Suck! No, Really, You Do

Trick-taking card games are one of my favorite sub-genres. I have a fondness for Wizard, Hearts, Spades, Sticheln, Wizard Extreme/Die Sieben Siegel (commonly referred to as "Die, Steven...

Convention Coverage in 2013 of Origins, Gen Con and Spiel

I plan to attend the Origins Game Fair on June 12 and 13 – the first two days of the convention – and I'll be toting a camera and mic with me in order to interview people about their new...

New Game Round-up: Spooks Confront The Phantom Society, Dice Visit the Stars in Quantum & Náufragos and Soccero Find Passports

• In February 2013, while writing about games being shown at Festival International des Jeux in Cannes, I mentioned the Funforge title The Phantom Society from designers Hervé Marly and...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Berserk, Romolo o Remo?, Princes of the Dragon Throne & Among the Stars: The Ambassadors

• Berserk: War of the Realms, from designers Maxim Istomin and Ivan Popov and publisher Hobby World, is the second English-language edition of the Berserk trading card game. That first edition...

New Game Round-up: Fighting Zombies in a World War, Mining with Kramer and Kiesling & Creating (Or Not) Two-Headed Dragons

• U.S. publisher University Games has a pair of games on the market tied into the World War Z movie due for release in June 2013: World War Z: The Game and World War Z: Card Game. Here are...

Game Preview: Canterbury

Designer Andrew Parks expects to release Canterbury before the end of 2013 from his Quixotic Games publishing house, and he sent me an advanced prototype of the game in order to preview it on BGG...

New Game Round-up: Visit Frontier Skies, Develop Networks for Tea Sales, Kill Animal Zombies & More

• U.S. publisher/distributor Game Salute has paired with social gaming publisher Gaia Interactive to announce Frontier Skies, which according to the press release "brings players on a tabletop...

Designer Diary: Banjooli Xeet, or The Sorcerer Apprentice's Diaries

1. How to turn seven dice into ostrichesJanuary 2009 was passing. The Third Granollers Contest (Los juegos de Granollers) had been announced, and even though I had been working on two games –...

New Game Round-up: Pompeii Blows Again in 2013, Fighters Have a Seven Hit Limit & Updates on Origins 2013

• In addition to the titles it's already released in 2013 – Catan: Explorers & Pirates, Zen Garden, Road Rally USA – publisher Mayfair Games has a few other games on its release schedule....

Crowdfunding Round-up: Hunters of Arcfall, Woodland Race, Pack of Heroes, Admiral & Scalawag!

• Following the advice in the header above and at the bottom of most of these crowdfunding posts, a BGGN reader contacted me about Tony Go's Hunters of Arcfall, which this reader described as...

Links: Kickstarting Plastic, Battling Trekkies, Playtesting Pandas & Germanizing Classic Children Games

• ICv2 has posted a list of the "Top ten tabletop game Kickstarters", including stats on each for the number of backers and the dollar amount per backer. Kingdom Death: Monster, for example,...

New Game Round-up: Pandasaurus Adopts Firenze and New Amsterdam, Hanabi Hits the U.S. in June & Zvezda Spurs Battles Over Oil

• U.S. publisher Pandasaurus Games, which has already announced a June 2013 release of Yedo in North America, has now added two more titles to its release calendar: Andreas Steding's Firenze...

New Game Round-up: Smashing Up Cthulhu, Renaming La Boca, Saving Passengers from the Titanic & Setting Sail in a New Fleet

• After a distributor destroyed the surprise reveal that publisher Alderac Entertainment Group had planned for June 1, 2013, AEG went ahead and released details on Smash Up: The Obligatory...

New Game Round-up: Dice Dueling in Space, Three Revolvers for Four Hands & Druids vs. Necromancers

• In addition to the titles covered in this Origins 2013-centered round-up, U.S. publisher Stronghold Games has announced several other titles in the offing, all of which it expects to debut at...

New Game Round-up: Origins 2013 – Four Short Stocks from Z-Man, Three Imports from Stronghold, Two Mages from Arcane Wonders & One Invitation Each from Minion and Steve Jackson

Okay, with a game round-up for UK Games Expo 2013 in the can, it's time to move on to the 2013 Origins Game Fair, which takes place June 12-16 in Columbus, Ohio. I've already covered a couple of...