Board Game News

2020 Teasers from NSV and AMIGO: Contact, The Game: Quick & Easy, Verflixxt!, and More

In years past, German publishers would wait until the start of the new year before sharing info about the titles they planned to demo at the Spielwarenmesse trade fair in Nürnberg, Germany. This...

New Game Round-up: Find the Replicant, Beat the Queen of Hearts, and Marvel at Splendor's Licensing

• In late 2017, WizKids announced an early 2018 release for the deduction game Blade Runner 2049: Nexus Protocol, then it pulled the game from its schedule in early 2018. That title, designed...

Designer Diary: Lost in the Woods with Anja Wrede

[Editor's note: Bruno Faidutti submitted this designer diary in November 2018. I held onto it with the intent of publishing it when this title hit the North American market — then it slipped by...

Asmodee Distributes Funforge, Acquires Tric Trac, and Prepares a Summer Reading List

Asmodee — more specifically, Asmodee USA Distribution, a sales, marketing, and distribution arm of the global Asmodee Group — has signed a distribution deal with Funforge to carry that Paris...

Tokyo Game Market 2019 Autumn: Report from Table Games in the World

Editor's note: Game Market took place in Tokyo on November 23-24, 2019, and Saigo — who translates game rules between Japanese and English and who tweets about new JP games — has translated...

Game Overview: The Mind Extreme, or Melding Point

I've already discussed my love of The Mind in great detail in this space, and now I'm back eighteen months later to express similar love for The Mind Extreme, a design from Wolfgang Warsch and...

Japanese Game Round-up: Arrange Glasses, Make Cake, Collect Treasure, and Find Valuable CDs

• I'm clearing out my inbox since we're nearing the end of the year, and I'd wager that at least 20% of the messages are notes that I sent to myself about Japanese games that I swore I'd follow...

Links: Games as Life Lessons, Games as Clothing, and Games as Storytelling Vehicles

I'm still digging through my inbox and discovering items that I sent to myself throughout 2019, so let's examine a few that are still relevant:• Takuya Ono is a board game journalist who runs...

New Game Round-up: Color Yourself Ready for Crime and Swarming Animals in the Pacific Northwest

• I've been running across lots of game announcements that consist mostly of an image and little more, as with a pre-PAX Unplugged tease of Cascadia from Randy Flynn and Flatout Games.Given...

New Game Round-up: Bet on Horses and Numbers, and Risk Going In Too Deep

In Too Deep is a 1-4 player game from Josh Cappel and Daryl Chow that's due to hit Kickstarter in early 2020 ahead of a release later that year. The game description on the BGG page is heavy on...

New Game Round-up: Revisiting the Dark Ages, Betraying Others, and Digging Graves

• Publishers, unintentionally or not, love to come up with new ways to test the BGG database. The latest example of this is Dark Ages, a pair of games from designers Adam Kwapiński and Andrei...

Developer Diary: Bloom Town, or Take the Subway, and Don't Get Hit by a Car!

Bloom Town is a tile-drafting and -laying, city-building game by Asger Harding Granerud and Daniel Skjold Pedersen that debuted at SPIEL '19, a game for which I, Kirsten, am the developer.My...

Game Preview: The Crew, or Tales of Tasks Tricked

I wrote an overview of The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine in late November 2019 after finally playing the game on the eve of BGG.CON 2019 and finding myself enraptured by the design. At that...

Japanese Game Round-up: Drop Eggs, Drip Water, Make Colors, Avoid Traps, and Admire Fluff

• Time for another round-up of Japanese games that came into existence while most of us weren't looking in that direction, starting with いろかるた (Color Karuta), a 2-5 player game from...

Links: Playing Italo Calvino, Reviving Abstract Games, and Profiling Ravensburger

• I started exploring the world of designer games in 2000 and 2001, thanks partly to me attending Mensa Mind Games. (I was a freelance writer at the time and had pitched coverage of the event...

New Game Round-up: Arkham Goes to the Dogs, Communists Go to Space, and K&K Go to Paris

• I shun April Fools Day jokes, not talking about them in this space or on BGG's Twitter account, partly because I don't find them amusing, but mostly because I don't want someone to question...

Isaac Childres Heads North from the Gloom to Prepare for Frosthaven

In October 2019, designer Isaac Childres of Cephalofair Games announced a scaled-down, mainstream-friendly version of his monstrously large game Gloomhaven, a game later given the specific title...

New Game Round-up: Escaping from Alcatraz, Excelling as The Beheaded, and Erasing Minds in Dungeon Mayhem

• Hanno Girke of Lookout Games reports that the long-awaited reprint of Uwe Rosenberg's Ora et Labora has been produced, with English, German, and Korean editions of the game due to hit stores...

KOSMOS 2020: Save Dodos, Build a City Worthy of Legacy, Explore Andor with Kids, and Exit from Even More Terrible Situations

• German publisher KOSMOS reports that it's sold 4.5 million titles in its Exit: The Game series of escape room games since their debut in 2016, so as you might anticipate, more are on the way...

Publishing Diary: Lair, or It's A Long Story

It's currently Saturday night, a couple of hours after a Friendsgiving day full of creamed ham and playing the fifth round of a game I like to call: "What Else Can We Fit Into a Food Processor to...

New Game Round-up: Key Signs of 2020 as We Roll Out 2019

• Just ahead of GridCon, a convention run by Paul Grogan of Gaming Rules! from Nov. 29 to Dec. 1, 2019, designer Dávid Turczi‎ posted a teaser image of Keyfoundland, a game he's co-designing...

New Game Round-up: More Fantastic Factories, More Evolving Zombies, and More UNO for More Players

Time for the annual inbox clearing, with short takes on many announcements that got stuck in the convention gears and dislodged only now:• Fantastic Factories, the first title from designers...

Links: An Infamous Traffic in Profiles of Kwanchai Moriya and 10 Games

• Gamers Geekery & Tavern is a board game café that opened in July 2019 in Cary, North Carolina — just one town over from where I live! — and I still haven't made it out to visit. For...

New Game Round-up: Explore Fallout Underground, Spike Top Guns, and Revisit The Thing

• The video game series Fallout has already been the inspiration for one tabletop design from Fantasy Flight Games — 2017's Fallout — and now a second standalone game is coming from FFG...

New Game Round-up: Steal Paintings, Loot the City, and Convert Your Wealth into Coins

• Sometimes a particular feature about a game strikes you in an odd way, and you think, "Wait, really?" I recently ran across the BGG game page for Bruno Faidutti's Stolen Paintings, due out in...

New Game Round-up: Become an Elite Sniper, Travel to the Moon, and Fight Death

• Once again I'm reminded of how little I know about video games thanks to the announcement of Sniper Elite: The Board Game from Rebellion Unplugged, the new board game publishing division of...

Designer Diary: Carrossel, or How an Over-the-Top Dungeon Brawler Became a Merry-Go-Round Game

Dear Diary,How the hell did this happen? Could you please tell me how a weird over-the-top dungeon brawler became a game that features...a merry-go-round??Well, to make a long story short:...

New Game Round-up: Find Treasure, Assist Charles Darwin, and Visit The Shores of Tripoli

• Loot of Lima is a deduction game from Larry Levy that's derived from his 2003 game Deduce or Die. BoardGameTables.com is crowdfunding the game now for release in July 2020 (KS link), and the...

BGG.CON 2019 Game Preview: The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, or Tricking Your Way Through the Solar System

Thomas Sing's Die Crew: Reist gemeinsam zum 9. Planeten was the surprise hit of SPIEL '19, the one title about which people most frequently asked me "Have you played it yet?"Honestly I hadn't...

Five Vampire: The Masquerade Games for Your Tabletop

I worked in game stores from 1991 to 1993, and the release of Vampire: The Masquerade during that time had a huge impact on the RPG audience, with the books presenting a setting and having a look...