Board Game News

Game Preview: Pandemic Legacy: Season 0, or Into the Red Zone

Following a teaser in early July 2020, Z-Man Games has announced the forthcoming release of Pandemic Legacy: Season 0 from Matt Leacock and Rob Daviau, the final title in the Pandemic Legacy...

Game Preview: Whale Riders, or Pearls Before Orcas

Whale Riders from Reiner Knizia and Grail Games is an early 2021 release that's being funded now on Kickstarter (KS link), but the game is new only in the sense that it hasn't existed...

Friedemann Friese Wants You to Embrace Finishing Time

Every publisher is facing challenges in 2020 — well, everyone really, but let's stay focused on games here — and they're responding to them in different ways. Here's an excerpt from a press...

Spartacus and Tammany Hall Return — But Not Together

• U.S. publisher Pandasaurus Games has announced a new edition of Doug Eckhart's Tammany Hall, which first appeared in 2007 from StrataMax Games in the version shown at right. Here's an...

Designer Diary: Pandoria Merchants, or Reconnecting Through Game Design

Bernd Eisenstein (irongames) GermanyBerlin This is the story of how Bernd Eisenstein and I reconnected during the pandemic to make a game that could help reconnect others: Pandoria Merchants, a...

Designer Interview: Rita Modl on Men at Work and Creating Family Games

[Editor's note: This interview was first published on Diagonal Move. —WEM]Rita Modl joins Neil Bunker from Diagonal Move to discuss the development and publication of her hit dexterity game Men...

Chip Theory Games to Deliver More Exciting Gladiatorial Combat with Hoplomachus: Victorum

It has already been an exciting year on the Chip Theory Games front with new expansions and content for Too Many Bones (Splice & Dice, Dart, Lab Rats) and Cloudspire (Horizon's Wrath, The...

The Shield of Daqan Hints at a New Descent: Journeys in the Dark

I first wrote about Aconyte, the fiction imprint for Asmodee Entertainment, in April 2019, with a follow-up post in December 2019 that highlighted the brand's publication schedule starting in May...

Designer Diary: Sonora, or Turning a Desert into a Flood of Ideas

It all started with a prompt on Twitter in the middle of 2018, a prompt that I have lost track of, but thanks to these mysterious posters anyway! The tweet was something like "Game design...

Giochi Uniti Signs Distribution Deal with Asmodee USA

Giochi Uniti International, which represents the Giochi Uniti board game line on the global market, has signed a distribution deal with Asmodee USA Distribution.Here's an edited excerpt from the...

Southern Rails Rides Again Courtesy of Rio Grande Games

First edition coverU.S. publisher Rio Grande Games has announced the next title in its Winsome Games reprint line following the release of Gulf, Mobile & Ohio in April 2020 and the impending...

Teaser for Pandemic Legacy: Season 0

• On Sunday, July 5, 2020, Reddit user u/arankas posted the following image, writing "I stumpled [sic] upon the Pandemic Legacy season 0 box art on the z-man games website" and "I believe a CMS...

New Game Round-up: Use Magic Beans, Capture Monsters with Dice, and Hunt Spies in Harsh Shadows

• Wonderspell is a new publisher founded by designers Jason Greeno and Jason Tagmire that plans to release 54-card games (submission form here), and its initial release will be Harsh Shadows, a...

Gaming From My Perspective

[Editor's note: First published in The Manifold and reprinted here with permission. —WEM]As the tabletop gaming hobby expands toward more diverse markets, we will see more games that surprise...

Designer Interview: Matthew Dunstan on Game Design and More

[Editor's note: This interview was first published on Diagonal Move. —WEM]Matthew Dunstan, designer of Monumental and co-creator of the Adventure Games series, joins Neil Bunker from Diagonal...

Links: Diplomatic Computing, Modern Games in Mainstream Media, and Gaming Easter Eggs

• DeepMind, the AI research and development company behind the AlphaGo AI that mastered Go, is now attempting to train an AI how to play Diplomacy. Here's an excerpt from an article on...

The Return of the King: Knizia's The Lord of the Rings Being Released in Q4 2020

U.S. publisher Fantasy Flight Games has announced that in Q4 2020 it will release a twentieth-anniversary edition of Reiner Knizia's classic co-operative game Lord of the Rings under the new...

New Game Round-up: Undaunted Awaits Reinforcements, Powerwolf Hunts Again, and a Llama Turns Pink

• In 2019, UK publisher Osprey Games released the two-player, deck-building game Undaunted: Normandy from Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson. In November of that year it announced a sequel game...

Stonemaier Games Announces Pendulum; Viticulture Digital Now Available

• In a July 2020 update from Stonemaier Games, Jamey Stegmaier announced an upcoming new release, Pendulum, designed by Travis P. Jones featuring art from Robert Leask.Pendulum is a...

Designer Diary: High Rise, or Building Skyscrapers and Contemplating Lepidopteran Body Horror

In 2017, I held an event at a private convention for some fellow game designers in which we brought out some very early games of ours. My thought is that we would share a bit of a laugh at them...

BGG Will Livestream Game Demos and Interviews during SPIEL.digital 2020

BoardGameGeek to Broadcast Game Demos Galore for SPIEL.digital Travel to Essen online to check out new board and card gamesDallas, Texas, July 1, 2020 — Tabletop gaming site BoardGameGeek (BGG)...

Stephen Buonocore to Retire from Stronghold Games; Sydney Engelstein to Become Stronghold's Director of Game Development

Stephen Buonocore, founder and president of Stronghold Games, has announced that as of August 1, 2020 he will exit that role and take on a new role with far different challenges:...

Discover the Lost Ruins of Arnak with Czech Games Edition

In addition to Under Falling Skies, a solitaire game by Tomáš Uhlíř due out in Sep/Oct 2020 that BGG previewed at GAMA in March 2020, Czech Games Edition has one other title due out in 2020,...

Replay the U.S. Suffrage Movement for Women in The Vote and Votes for Women

• The 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution guaranteed women — or more generally, people other than men — the right to vote in the country's federal and state elections:Quote:The...

Watch Game Demos for Days with BGG & Comic-Con International

In April 2020, San Diego Comic Convention announced that Comic-Con International (CCI) — which has run annually since 1970 — would not be held in July 2020 as planned, with that convention...

Designer Interview: Hermann Luttmann on Wargames and the Zombie Apocalypse

[Editor's note: This interview was first published on Diagonal Move. All photos were provided by Tristan Hall. —WEM]Hermann Luttmann, designer of Dawn of the Zeds and creator of the "Blind...

Roll Player Gets Deeper with Fiends & Familiars

Keith Matejka's Roll Player began in 2016 as a puzzly, dice-drafting, fantasy character-building game and has since evolved into a full-on series with its expansions and spin-offs, Cartographers:...

Ravensburger Announces Game Inventor Days and Another Character from Marvel Villainous

• What's a publisher to do when it can't meet game designers at conventions to take pitches? Head to the meeting space that everyone is flocking to these days: the swirling chaos of the...

Designer Diary: The Story of the Making of The Field of the Cloth of Gold

PrologueWhen my wife Mary and I started our company Hollandspiele, we chose a print-on-demand model, which I like to describe as the most expensive and least efficient way to publish games. Our...

A Report on the Games Scheduled to be Sold at Tokyo Game Market 2020 Spring

[Editor's note: Game Market was scheduled to take place in Tokyo on April 25-26, 2020, but wasn't held. Even so, Saigo — who translates game rules between Japanese and English and who tweets...