Board Game News

Walk the Glass Road Again, and (Re-)Release Five Ravens

• In mid-2021, German publisher Feuerland Spiele will release a new edition of Uwe Rosenberg's Glass Road, with no changes to the game other than the addition of all previously released promos:...

Fend Off Llamas with Dice, and Assemble Alien Teams in Silence

• In December 2020, I shared a teaser image from German publisher AMIGO about its early 2021 releases. Now more info is available on these games, so let's check them out in more detail,...

Build the ISS, Expand Your Tavern, and Fold Paper Thanks to Schmidt Spiele

• German publisher Schmidt Spiele has released first details about its early 2021 releases, and the title that stands out as most unlike previous Schmidt titles is the co-operative game Mission...

Game Overview: Silencio, or The Game You Lose If You Don't Begin

I've written long essays about why I love The Mind and how The Game got me thinking about mortality, so it's no surprise that I'm a fan of Silencio, a co-operative card game by César Gómez...

Check Out the Games Being Released in Jan-Apr 2021

The year of Spirit is upon us! Lift those game pieces with your mind!While I'll resume regular posts before you know it, I thought I'd kick things off by pointing out that BGG's game release...

Play Concordia on Your Own, and Return to Hanamikoji on Geisha's Road

• With only a couple of days remaining in 2020, I thought I'd briefly cover a few items seen in passing, starting with Concordia Solitaria, an expansion for both Concordia and Concordia Venus...

Game Overview: Sumatra, or Should I Stay or Should I Go Now?

In Q4 2019, Spanish publisher Ludonova released Reiner's Knizia's Babylonia — which I covered here — and now the designer-publisher pair is back in Q4 2020 with a new release: Sumatra, which...

Unlock! for Kids, Mirror-Based Quests, and Sherlock-Inspired Mysteries in Arkham

• In mid-December 2020, French publisher Space Cowboys announced that Unlock! Kids — a version of its Unlock! series of escape room games — will appear in 2021 from its Space Cow brand for...

More Stuffies, More Old OneZ, and More Rome & Roll in 2021

• TaZmania is an expansion for Martin Wallace's AuZtralia from SchilMil Games and Stronghold Games. Here's what awaits inside this tentacled exterior:Quote:In AuZtralia, humanity came to build...

Interview: Morten Monrad Pedersen on Solo Gaming

[Editor's note: This interview was first published on Diagonal Move on December 1, 2020. —WEM]Automa Factory founder and lead designer Morten Monrad Pedersen joins Neil Bunker from Diagonal...

Venture into the Galaxy with ISS Vanguard, Galactic Era, Sidereal Confluence, and Space Empires: All Good Things

I'm sure many of us have a game (or several) on our shelves that we just can't wait to play when it's safer for larger group gatherings. For me, one of those games is Twilight Imperium, which for...

Visual Design Diary: Master Word, or Simple is Complicated!

Simple is Complicated! (or, The Puzzle of Determining an Artistic Direction for a Game Without a Theme)The process behind creating the visual assets for Master Word was more of a collaborative...

Links: Gender in Game Rules, Gen Con in 2021, and No Forums for FFG

4/4• In Analog Game Studies, Shelly Jones and Tanya Pobuda have written an article that summarizes itself in the title: "An Analysis of Gender-Inclusive Language and Imagery in Top-Ranked Board...

Designer Diary: Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game Takes on the Supreme Court

We're three siblings from a gerrymandered district in Austin, Texas, and this is the story of how we designed a board game about gerrymandering — and ended up at the Supreme Court with 82...

Explore Lush and Twinkling Bloodstone Transmissions

• For years, UK artist Matt Dixon has been creating illustrations of robots in a print series titled "Transmissions", examples of which you can see here. Now designer Adam West has created a...

Tichu, Sobek, Lucky Numbers, and Catan Get Revamped

• Urs Hostettler's climbing card game Tichu has been in print continually since 1991, and while you don't need a specialized deck to play — Jon from JonGetsGames and I taught two new players...

Links: Why Virtual Conventions Fail, and Quantum Chess Becomes a Reality

• Jeff Tidball of Atlas Games gives a post-mortem of the 2020 game convention scene in an article titled "Why Virtual Tabletop Conventions Fail, and How Organizers Can Fix It".From his...

Dominate Ancient Greece, Control Battlefields in Feudal Japan, and Relive Famous U.S. Trials

As the pandemic has significantly worsened in the past month, I do hope that everyone's doing their best to stay safe and healthy. I suspect most people are either playing board games digitally,...

Start with Nothing, and Build Iberian Railways

U.S. publisher Rio Grande Games has announced the next title in its "Winsome Games" line following Gulf, Mobile & Ohio, Trans-Siberian Railroad and Southern Rails, with Matthias Burtt's Iberian...

Tokyo Game Market 2020 Autumn: Report from Table Games in the World

Editor's note: Game Market took place in Tokyo on November 14-15, 2020, and Saigo — who translates game rules between Japanese and English and who tweets about new JP games — has translated...

Drop Marbles, Jump Opponents, and Get Caterpillars Home

One of my favorite parts of the annual SPIEL convention in Essen, Germany is visiting the Clemens Gerhards booth on Sunday and spending a few minutes actually playing games — something I rarely...

Bring Marvel Heroes to the Table in Unmatched

Just a few weeks after releasing Unmatched: Little Red Riding Hood vs. Beowulf, U.S. publishers Mondo Games and Restoration Games have revealed a new quartet of Unmatched titles that will debut...

Designer Diary: Skora

Skora is my first published game. I'm the designer and the illustrator, Rose Atkinson is the developer, and Inside the Box Board Games is the publisher.In the BeginningA few years ago, I decided...

Spielworxx in 2021 and Beyond: Tharos, The Smoky Valley, La Granja: Possessions, and More

In October 2019, I published an overview of the titles coming from German publisher Spielworxx in 2020 and 2021. For the most part, Spielworxx's 2020 releases followed that initial schedule,...

DEFCON 1 and DEFCON 2 Coming in 2021

• Two months after SPIEL.digital, I'm still surfing pages on that site and discovering games I hadn't known about previously. I'm not sure whether you're aware or not, but there are a lot of...

From the Big Apple to Mr. Cabbagehead's Garden via the Titanic

TGG Games is a U.S. game publisher founded in 2020 by The Gaming Goat retail chain, with TGG owner Jeff Bergren noting in an April 2020 article in Las Vegas Weekly that after stocking hundreds of...

Settle Prehistoric Lands, Expand Your Dinosaur Park, and Attack Opposing Dinos

• I recently loaded up on some Hollandspiele games during its 2020 Hollandays sale, and one of the games I picked up was the two-player game Dinosaur Table Battles, designed by Tom Russell,...

From Andor to Nottingham with Michael Menzel

Michael Menzel has been illustrating games for nearly two decades, but he also made waves in the role of game designer with the 2012 release of Legends of Andor, which collected multiple awards...

Should Board Game Designers Be Paid by the Hour?

[Editor's note: This article originally appeared in a November 2020 newsletter from Canadian publisher Scorpion Masqué. I invited company owner Christian Lemay to reprint the article in this...

Game Overview: The Castles of Tuscany, or Hexed in Italy

With the online conventions behind us, I'm catching up on many things, such as my inbox and (more importantly for this space) video overviews of new game releases.In the past few weeks, I've...