Board Game News

Designer Diary: Shadows: Amsterdam

This is the story of a nice story, one of those that should never end, such as a Ken Follett book or an HBO episode.I work at Libellud with the best job in the world, awesome colleagues, nice...

Buy Pappy Winchester's Land, Then Go Boat Hopping in a Dragon Market

• Every year ahead of Gen Con and SPIEL — the two conventions with the most new game releases — I discover that we've added lots of new titles to the BGG database in the early months of the...

Take a Trip to Wonderland for Hats, War, Gears, and the Ever-Present Alice

• Rather than talk of a game's theme, I prefer to talk about its setting — that is, the environment in which the action of the game takes place. When you have an understanding of that...

Game Preview: Amul, or Balancing Arabs and Mongols on the Silk Road

Gen Con 2019 opens in just over three weeks, and I have lots to preview before that time, including the card-drafting, hand-management game Amul from Remo Conzadori, Stefano Negro, and...

Designer Diary: Unlock! Heroic Adventures: Sherlock Holmes, or A Study in Story

Okay, I thought. I guess that's a no.I just couldn't think of a way to do it. The key issue I had to tackle if I wanted this Unlock! scenario to work — namely, the translation of a detailed...

Links: Tariff Talk, First Loves, and The World's Best Vending Machine

• Designer Mike Selinker and publisher Scott Gaeta of Renegade Game Studios have written about the potential tariffs that the U.S. government might impose on goods coming from China, a change...

Getting Games from SPIEL '19, Whether in Essen or Elsewhere

This is the time of year to move into overdrive. With less than a month before Gen Con 2019 opens, I'm still adding titles to our Gen Con 2019 Preview, although we've hit a lull recently in terms...

Return to the Past to Survive the Thirty Years' War, Then Battle Video-Obsessed Mutants in the Future

• I love the look of everything coming out of Mondo Games, with the most recent announcement from the company being Video Vortex, a 2-4 player game that will be demoed at Gen Con 2019 ahead of...

Dive Through the Deep Blue for Wealth with Granerud, Pedersen, and Days of Wonder

Days of Wonder has announced its big box release for 2019, a game that has been in development for six years with designers Asger Harding Granerud and Daniel Skjold Pedersen. The game in question...

Century: Golem Edition Heads to the Eastern Mountains for Gen Con 2019

A week prior to Gen Con 50 in 2017, Plan B Games announced that it would release a special edition of Emerson Matsuuchi's Century: Spice Road as Century: Golem Edition.To recap, in 2016 Z-Man...

Designer Diary: Tonari

(An earlier version of this diary was first published on my website on March 18, 2019.)Games by Alex Randolph in my collectionI became really interested in board game design in the early 1980s....

Game Preview: Whozit?, or Naming Names in Games

Romaric Galonnier's Whozit? — published first in 2017 by Cocktail Games under the name Profiler before landing with Gamewright in the U.S. — fits the classic model of a party game in that you...

Game Overview: Subtext, or Drawing in a Goldilocks Game

Like Dixit, A Fake Artist Goes to New York, Spyfall, and other communication-based party games, Wolfgang Warsch's Subtext is a Goldilocks game. To do well in the game, you need to communicate...

Ticket to Ride Being Developed into a Television Series

In an April 2019 post, I gave a short description of Asmodee Entertainment in relation to the founding of a fiction imprint within it: "Asmodee Entertainment is a newly formed platform of games...

Ride the Gulf, Mobile & Ohio with Rio Grande Games

In 2018, Rio Grande Games released a new version of Tom Russell's Northern Pacific, which had debuted in 2013 from Winsome Games. This wasn't Rio Grande's first licensing of a Winsome title —...

Keep Voldemort at Bay in Harry Potter: Death Eaters Rising

In a May 2019 announcement for Star Wars: Dark Side Rising from The OP, a standalone game similar in gameplay to Thanos Rising: Avengers Infinity War, I asked, "Which franchise might rise next,...

Prepare to Unknot Worms, Flip Houses, and Escape from Black Holes at SPIEL '19

• I had previously mentioned Magic Maze: Mars as a SPIEL '19 release, but now Belgian publisher Sit Down! has revealed more of its SPIEL '19 line-up, with Wormlord from Jonathan Bittner and...

Game Overview: Bloom, or Fling Flowers Flagrantly to Flaunt Your Floriculture

Another week, another overview video for a roll-and-write game, this time focusing on Bloom from Wouter van Strien and Gamewright, with this same game design being published with different...

Tal der Wikinger Wins the 2019 Kinderspiel des Jahres!

Tal der Wikinger from designers Marie and Wilfried Fort and publisher HABA has won the 2019 Kinderspiel des Jahres, Germany's children's game of the year award! (In February 2019, the Forts won...

Game Preview: Jaws, or Please Stop Boat-Shaming Quint!

Summer has just started in the northern hemisphere, so it's time to break out your fake fins and start terrorizing others when you visit the beach.Alternatively, you can get your fill of sharky...

Take Another Ride on the Underground and Through the Hexes of Space

• LudiCreations has announced that it will release a new version of Sebastian Bleasdale's On the Underground in 2019, with the game featuring new art and graphic design (as one might expect of...

Game Preview from Origins 2019: Letter Jam, or Piecing Your Words Together One Clue at a Time

 What's the longest, most specific word you can create with the letters E, I, M, R, T, and a joker, with each of these letters being available to you as many times as you want and with the...

Steph's Photo Guide to Origins 2019!

Origins Game Fair 2019A Photo Guide by Steph HodgeBGG team plays some JawsAt the BGG booth![Editor's note: We corrected the name to "Le Havre" before Origins opened. —WEM][center]Gem HensEra:...

Game Preview: Black Angel, or Technicolor Trials in a Not-Too-Distant Future

In my coverage of Origins Game Fair 2019, I previewed Ishtar and Caravan, both of which will be available for purchase at Gen Con 2019, and I wrote up Copenhagen: Roll and Write, which will be...

Horrible Deals for Luma and HeidelBÄR Games

Italian publisher Horrible Games has announced two new partnerships, with North American-based Luma Games now having exclusive English-language distribution rights for the Horrible Games...

BGG's Gen Con 2019 Preview Is Now Live!

With Origins Game Fair 2019 coming to a close, it's time to kick off plans for Gen Con 2019. Admittedly, we at BoardGameGeek have been planning for this convention already, with lots of stuff...

New Game Round-up: Capture the Past in Escape Tales: Low Memory, and Make Louis Smell Sweet in Aqua Mirabilis

• The 2019 Origins Game Fair might still be underway, but SPIEL '19 looms on the horizon, even more than four months out thanks to the continued game announcements from publishers around the...

Game Preview from Origins 2019: Roll and Write Your Way Through Copenhagen

The originalAnother day at Origins Game Fair 2019, another preview of a Gen Con 2019 release SPIEL '19 release that will be demoed at Gen Con 2019, with the game in question being Copenhagen:...

Game Previews from Origins 2019: Ishtar and Caravan, or Stationary Camels in a Shifting Desert

Thanks to a larger BGG staff presence at Origins Game Fair 2019, I've been able to get out of the booth more than I usually do at such events in order to talk with publishers about future...

Take the Role of Woody, Buzz, Bo Peep, and More in Toy Story: Obstacles and Adventures

With Toy Story 4 due to open in theaters on June 20, 2019, U.S. publisher The OP has announced a tie-in game of sorts, a co-operative deck-building card game called Toy Story: Obstacles and...