Board Game News

New Game Round-up: Dwarves in Switzerland, A Ginkgo Tree in a Fantasy World & Acrobats in Citadels

• HELVETIA Games Sàrl is a new games publisher that will debut at Spiel 2012 with two releases, one being HELVETIA Cup, a two-player football (i.e., soccer) game set in a fantasy world. The...

Links: Architecture and Games, Tasty Minstrel Goes Exclusive & How Games Are Made and Which Ones Sell

• Designer Jeffrey Allers writes about the blending of architecture and game design is his "Postcards from Berlin" series on Opinionated Gamers. Apparently Technical University in Berlin,...

Designer Diary: Sheepdogs of Pendleton Hill

It was the fastest I ever designed a game, it was the slowest I ever designed a game.Seven years ago in 2005 (thankfully without the additional four score) I decided that I wanted to make a game...

New Game Round-up: Plan for Battle During Winter, Escape for Trickier Chambers & Prepare for New Silent Death

• In addition to its other 2012 releases – The Convoy, two Neuroshima Hex! army packs, and Robinson Crusoe: Adventure on the Cursed Island – Polish publisher Portal will come to Spiel 2012...

New Game Round-up: Two Design Competition Winners from Mücke Spiele & Details on Uchronia

• German publisher Mücke Spiele has a couple of new games due out in August 2012, both of them belonging to its "Edition Läufer" series of games, which resulted from a game design competition...

Designer Diary: Suburbia Wasn't Built in a Day

I'm a huge fan of SimCity. I like the idea of planning, building, and most importantly, seeing how everything fits together. I like the idea that you should build your factories far from your...

Links: Too Many Choices x2 & Kickstarter as a Roman Circus

• In The Rumpus Room blog, San Il Defanso discusses "horrible freedom":Quote:[M]any gamers measure the quality of a game based on how much choice they are offered. They will often use the...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Prettier Flowers, Return of the Aces & Klaus von Essen's Twisted Apparatus

• U.S. publisher Asmadi Games is running a Kickstarter project for a professionally published version of Carl Chudyk's FlowerFall, which debuted in a quicky back-alley version at Origins 2012...

New Game Round-up: Uchronia Returns, Expansions from Eisenstein, SolForge from Gary Games & Steve Jackson Ducks!

• Wait, what's this? A cover for Carl Chudyk's Uchronia from IELLO? Why, yes, yes it is. As for when the game will be released and in which languages and countries and with which rules, I'll...

Links: Sweet Game Imbalance, Exclusives = Higher Costs & Behind the Scenes of the 2012 Pulitzer No-Prize

• On the Painted Wooden Cubes blog, Mark Taylor praises imbalance, specifically as it relates to Cosmic Encounter. An excerpt: Quote:Imbalance may feel like part of the charm of Cosmic...

New Game Round-up: More on Ystari's Myrmes & Previews of Netrunner, Clash of Cultures and Flash Point: 2nd Story

• U.S. publisher Tasty Minstrel Games reports that its edition of Inka and Markus Brand's Village – co-published with eggertspiele and recent winner of the 2012 Kennerspiel des Jahres –...

Designer Diary: Crazy Creatures of Dr. Doom/Gloom

I can't recall how many times I've made game prototypes with a Roman theme that transformed into something different by the time they finally appeared in print, the most recent example being the...

Crowdfunding Round-up: 18xx in the Cards for Eggertspiele, Aztec Playtime Reimagined & Exhibitionistic Goddesses from Japanime Games

• What a difference an award makes! Just a few days after winning the 2012 Kennerspiel des Jahres for Village, German publisher eggertspiele launched a crowdfunding project on "Spieleschmiede"...

Links: Mayfair Goes Exclusive with Alliance, The Importance of Self-Promotion & Computers That Learn Games

• Following recent industry trends in the U.S., publisher Mayfair Games has announced an exclusive distribution deal with Alliance Game Distributors for the "U.S. hobby retail network". From...

New Game Round-up: Hanabi and Abbey Return, Knizia Boasts of Dual Hobbits & Going Where Many Games Have Gone Before

• Mayfair Games has announced that it will release an English-language version of Klaus Teuber's Star Trek: Catan, which German publisher Kosmos released in March 2012. Mayfair plans to preview...

Links: Evolutionary Game Design, Game Design the Old-Fashioned Way & The Zeroeth Move

• Cameron Browne's game-designing program Ludi – "author" of the game Yavalath among other designs – has won the gold prize (and consequently $5,000) at the annual Human-Competitive Awards...

Designers' Preview: Starship Merchants

By Joe Huber and Tom LehmannStarship Merchants is a game for 2-4 players who buy starships, customize them with equipment and pilots with special abilities, and explore and mine asteroids,...

The Art of Maciej Rebisz – A Designer's Appreciation

Flashback to the spring of 2011 – Stronghold Games was looking for artists for my new science fiction deck-building game, Core Worlds. Discussions ensued about where to find these artists, and...

Brief Interviews with the 2012 Spiel/Kennerspiel des Jahres Winners

BGG's Chad Krizan (aka chaddyboy_2000) was in Berlin, Germany on Monday, July 9 when the 2012 Spiel des Jahres – Donald X. Vaccarino's Kingdom Builder from Queen Games – and the Kennerspiel...

Designer Diary: Go Designer, Go!, or How to Retheme Your Way to Publication

It all started back in high school with my final project for English class, which in fact I never turned in. The first game I ever designed was "The Great Green Gorf", a silly maze-building game...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Backstabbing, Sheepherding & A Double Dose of Firefighting

 • Gryphon Games has launched a Kickstarter project for a reprint of Sid Sackson's I'm the Boss!, this being one of the games that Gryphon acquired the license to when it bought Face2Face...

Kingdom Builder Wins the 2012 Spiel des Jahres; Village Takes Kennerspiel des Jahres

Donald X. Vaccarino's Kingdom Builder from Queen Games has won the 2012 Spiel des Jahres award, Germany's "game of the year" award, while the Kennerspiel des Jahres has gone to Inka and Markus...

Links: Gen Con 2012 Exhibitors Revealed, The Value of Critics & Last Chance for SdJ 2012 Guesses

• The exhibit hall map for Gen Con 2012, which shows who the 300+ exhibitors are and where they'll be, can be downloaded from the Gen Con website. Time for me to put aside the Spiel 2012...

New Game Round-up: Return to Arabian Nights, Head South on the Rails & Ring the Hero to Win a Prize

• Al Rashid is a new game from a new publisher (Yemaia) and not-so-new designers Giorgio De Michele and Pierluca Zizzi. Here's long description of the game, which will debut at Spiel 2012 in...

New Game Round-up: Color-Based Kills, More Masterful-Looking Mastery & Slower-Than-Expected Horror

• French publisher/distributor Gigamic has started to distribute in France the game line from Envie De Jouer, which includes the word game Octoverso – in which players create words with...

Designer Diary: Urbanization - It Started With a Song

IntroductionHi, my name is Johnny Ebsen, the designer of Urbanization. This is my first published game, but by far not my first design ever. I started designing games as a kid, together with...

Designer Diary: Pixel Lincoln: The Deckbuilding Game – It All Started With A Penny

Here is the story of Pixel Lincoln: The Deckbuilding Game, which started out as a card game, then became a video game, and will now be a card game all over again.How did all of that happen? Well,...

Game Preview: Small World Realms

Small World Realms is an expansion that goes in a different direction from almost all the previous expansions for Philippe Keyaerts' Small World. The main idea of Small World, for those who don't...

Spiel 2012 Preview Now Live

The Spiel 2012 Preview is now live on BoardGameGeek, and while I'd love to sit around and talk about how awesome and jam-packed it already is, I need to hit the road for a couple of days of...

New Game Round-up: Bézier Games Settles Down, IELLO Prompts War & Kolejka Has You Stand in Line

• Ted Alspach has released images and posted preorder information for Suburbia, which will debut at Spiel 2012 in October. Preorders will receive a copy of the "Spiel promo buildings" in...