Board Game News

Italian Game Round-up: Rebuild Buenos Aires, Avoid Disaster in Easter Island, and Race for Safety in Last Aurora

• Despite spending 3.5 days at the Spielwarenmesse fair in February 2019, I still missed seeing all the new games that were being shown there, and I know that only because I've just found out...

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

Editor's note: Game Market took place in Tokyo on May 25-26, 2019, and Saigo — who translates game rules between Japanese and English and who tweets about new JP games — has translated...

Designer Diary: Caravan

What Am I Going to Do With All of These Camels?Ideas for games can come from anywhere, at least in my experience. Often, when I learn about something new — when I visit a National Park Service...

Game Overview: Lift Off, or Leveling Up to Infinity and Beyond (Three)

Jeroen Vandersteen is a newcomer to game design, with Lift Off, his first published game, having debuted from German publisher Hans im Glück at SPIEL '18 in October. (An English version of the...

Designer Diary: How Tiefe Taschen Became GoodCritters

My first designed and self-published game Tiefe Taschen was released by Arcane Wonders in 2018 as GoodCritters. Here's how:In 2015, the first design of Tiefe Taschen was finished, and I was...

The BoardGameGeek Show: Origins 2019, BGG.Spring Recap, Tigris & Euphrates, The Wilson Wolfe Affair, and More

Time for another episode of The BoardGameGeek Show! We've been publishing them roughly every two weeks on BGG's main YouTube channel, and on Thursday, June 13, we'll livestream The BGG Show from...

Two for SPIEL '19: Tascini's Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula and Håkansson's Cities: Skylines – The Board Game

Time to dig into a few more SPIEL '19 releases that publishers have been unveiling 4.5 months ahead of that convention's opening date, starting with Trismegistus: The Ultimate Formula from...

Aftermath Reunites Jerry Hawthorne with Dangerous Mice

Plaid Hat Games has announced the third title in Jerry Hawthorne's Adventure Book Game series: Aftermath.Aftermath follows the formula of Stuffed Fables and Comanauts in that the game includes a...

Designer Diary: Dead Man's Cabal

There is a common question among board game designers when it comes to starting a new project: mechanisms first, or theme first?Oddly, the design for Dead Man's Cabal started with a component....

New Game Round-up: Robbing with Rosenberg, Drafting Monsters with Garfield, and Moving Wildly on Mars

• Wyrmgold GmbH is a new German publisher that will debut at SPIEL '19 in October with a new two-player title from Uwe Rosenberg. Yes, Rosenberg is so prolific that having relationships with...

Designer Diary: Filler, or Bakers, You Have 20 Minutes Remaining

I keep a journal handy with me at all times. One section is full of mechanisms I like, which I want to fiddle with and which sometimes result in full-fledged games. Another is full of "feelings"...

Game Preview: Tuki, or Stack Quickly to Quash Opponents

The 2019 Origins Game Fair opens on Thursday, June 13, and while BGG's Origins 2019 Preview lists 270 items for sale or demo (as of this date), few of those items are debuting at Origins itself....

Japanese Game Round-up: Profit from Fashion, Build a Numerical Pyramid, and Avoid Running Over People

• Tokyo Game Market took place on May 24-25, 2019, and while I wasn't at that show (as I attended our own BGG.Spring event instead), I've been following game haul pics on Twitter to spot which...

Mergers, Splits, and Distribution Deals: Changes at Lone Shark, Queen, Cheapass, and Asmodee

• Designer Mike Selinker has resigned from his position as president of Lone Shark Games for reasons he explains on his blog, with explanations of further changes of how the publisher will...

Game Overview: LAMA, or Handle Your Llamas with Care

My friend Ken Shoda attended BGG.Spring 2019 this past weekend, and he is undoubtedly the attendee who traveled the farthest distance to the show since he lives in Japan. Ken helps me out at...

New Game Round-up: Flip through the Foothills, Care for Cats, and Eat Fruit in Space

• We published an extremely rough video overview of Ben Bateson's and Tony Boydell's Foothills in February 2019 following a peek at the game during Spielwarenmesse 2019.Now you can get a much...

The Elder Scrolls Comes to the Tabletop, and Agatha Christie Brings Death to Family Fun

• UK publisher Modiphius Entertainment has announced the December 2019 release of The Elder Scrolls: Call to Arms, with the setting being based on The Elder Scrolls video game franchise from...

From Koryŏ to NINE and from GOSU to...Something with Sorry We Are French

• Designer Emmanuel Beltrando founded Moonster Games in 2010 and released Kim Satô's GOSU as its first title, with this engaging 2-4 player card game being followed in 2013 and 2014 by Gary...

Game Overview: Second Chance, or Fill 'Er Up!

Uwe Rosenberg's Second Chance debuted from Edition Spielwiese and publishing partner Pegasus Spiele in Germany in February 2019, with the game reaching the U.S. in April 2019 courtesy of...

Designer Diary: Tiny Towns, or A Short History of a Tiny Game

The idea for Tiny Towns stems from two key concepts and a love of games in which you build something. I wanted to create a game that was short without being too simple and that scaled well from 2...

New Game Round-up: Fight to Tell Weird Stories on Rival Networks

• Bandai has a pair of new interrelated games due out in June 2019 from Ryan Miller collectively titled Naruto Boruto Card Game — a name that doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but if...

Explore New Ways to Play Endeavor, Merlin, Inis, and Captain Sonar

• The new edition of Endeavor: Age of Sail released in 2018 by Burnt Island Games and Grand Gamers Guild has been a huge critical success, and in mid-June 2019 the publisher will launch a...

Keep the Death Star from Completion in Star Wars: Dark Side Rising

If you liked the sound of the co-operative dice and card game Thanos Rising: Avengers Infinity War, but didn't care whether Thanos snapped away a bunch of superheroes or not, perhaps you will...

More Titles at Tokyo Game Market in May 2019: Moon Base, Sinomilia, Elegantu, Natsumemo & Leiden 1593: The Beginning of Tulip Cultivation

Tokyo Game Market runs May 25-26, and if you plan to attend, you're probably already in Japan or on an airplane traveling there.While BGG is missing out on TGM this time due to us hosting our own...

Update on the Origins 2019 Preview and Publisher Preorders

In just three weeks on June 12, BoardGameGeek will launch its livestream broadcast from the 2019 Origins Game Fair, so if you can't make it to that show, you can turn to the BGG channel on...

Game Preview: Die Tavernen im Tiefen Thal, or Use Beer and Money to Lure Nobles into Your Bar

It would be time-intensive to carry out this challenge, but at a future convention, I'd like to see someone set up a gauntlet of mystery games, then invite people to play these games and guess...

Spiel des Jahres Nominations for 2019: Just One, LAMA, and Werewords; Carpe Diem, Detective and Wingspan Collect Kennerspiel Nominations

The Spiel des Jahres — Germany's "game of the year" award — turns forty in 2019, the award having first come into existence in 1979 with a list of nominees that included Sid Sackson's Acquire...

Designer Diary: Designing Backwards by a MegaGame Designer

I've heard it said that the easy way to start designing a game is to begin with a good base mechanism. The horrendous alternative approach that I most often follow is to start with a theme, then...

New Game Round-up: From Mountains to Oceans, and From Galactic Emperor to Empire of the Stars

• In 2008, designer Adam West released Galactic Emperor through CrossCut Games, which he co-owns. More than a decade later, he's revisited and reworked the design, with Empire of the Stars due...

Game Overview: Sushi Roll, or You'll Die for Another Serving to Go

I don't imagine that designer Phil Walker-Harding thought he'd be connected with sushi for the rest of his life when he self-published Sushi Go! in 2013, but here we are in 2019 with Sushi Go!...