Board Game News

New Game Round-up: Race to Dig the Chunnel, and Try Not to Die in the Forest

• Yesterday's post featured a new title from AEG that folks will first see at SPIEL '19 in October, so let's continue along those lines with even more games that most people will first...

Reform the Earth, Then Raid Islands with John D. Clair and AEG

• Designer John D. Clair and publisher Alderac Entertainment Group have worked together on several designs, starting with Mystic Vale in 2016, then continuing with Custom Heroes in 2017, Space...

Bézier Games Offers Silver Amulets, Bullets and More to Ward Off Werewolves

In how many game designs can Ted Alspach place werewolves? The answer, apparently, is all of them.Alspach's Bézier Games has announced a new line of games that could be dubbed the "Silver line",...

Adventure Games: A Choose-Your-Own Designer Diary

[1]You find yourself back in Sydney, Australia, around Christmas in 2017. You enjoy being back home and escaping an English winter, as well as seeing your family. You have some spare time one day...

New Game Round-up: Claim Battlefields with Anthropomorphized Weapons, Then Participate in a Board Game Cafe Frenzy

• Let's look at another batch of games that will debut at Tokyo Game Market in May 2019, with these titles joining the others on BGG's TGM May 2019 Preview. For every game that I add to that...

New Game Round-up: Fight for the Eternal Throne, and Stay Current with Dragon's Interest

• Paul Dennen, designer of the Clank! line of games from Dire Wolf Digital and Renegade Game Studios, has a new title due out from that pair of publishers in August 2019. Here's a teaser...

New Game Round-up: Manipulate Dice, Find Insects, Create Towns, and Create Tricky Lines

Let's sample another batch of games that will debut at Tokyo Game Market in late May 2019, with all of these titles and a few more appearing on the Tokyo Game Market May 2019 Preview that I've...

Game Preview: Die Hard: The Nakatomi Heist Board Game, or Welcome to the Party, Pal!

At long last our final game overview video recorded at the 2019 GAMA Trade Show in mid-March can be published. The game in question is Die Hard: The Nakatomi Heist Board Game, a design by Sean...

The Origins 2019 Preview Is Live — Now With Publisher Preorders

After a couple of days delay, the Origins 2019 Preview is now live on BoardGameGeek, kicking off with 120 titles, which is nearly half of what was listed in 2018 (263 titles), so it seems likely...

Game Overview: Nagaraja, or It Didn't Have to Be Snakes, But It Is, So Get Over It

Because of the number of conventions that I attend, I sometimes feel like I'm previewing the same games over and over again — and sometimes I am.We first recorded an overview of the two-player...

Designer Diary: Bugs on Rugs

There's an old saying that I'm sure you've heard: "It takes a village to design a game." I'm about a dozen games into my career, but I don't think any of my designs has been quite as...

Designer Diary: Foggy Island, or New Life for an Old Mechanism

If you add a new and good game design, old mechanisms can be revived and get a new lease of life. The best example here is Kingdomino by Bruno Cathala.•••Let me begin by saying that Foggy...

Welcome Viruses, Mutants, Monsters, and A Surprising Amount of Water in This Quartet of Post-Apocalyptic Games

• I posted about a couple of games with post-apocalyptic settings the other day, but apparently we just need to make that a category of games in the BGG database as here's another one in the...

New Game Round-up: Building a New Pathfinder, Reworking Coffee Roaster, and Waiting for an Elevator

• The Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, which debuted in 2013 from Paizo Publishing with the Rise of the Runelords base set, is being rebooted in May 2019 with the release of Pathfinder Adventure...

Links: Nominees for the 2019 Origins Awards, and Voting for the 2019 Deutscher Spielepreis

• The Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design has announced the nominees for the 2019 Origins Awards within a variety of categories, with the winners of each category scheduled to be...

Take a Slow Trip to SPIEL '19 for Fast Sloths from 2F-Spiele

Are you planning for SPIEL '19 yet? Even if you aren't, game publishers are, with German publisher 2F-Spiele announcing its main title for that show: Fast Sloths, which will be titled Faultier in...

Game Preview: Wacky Races: The Board Game, or Riding Nostalgia to the Finish Line

My lack of video game knowledge has bit me once again. In my overview video for Wacky Races: The Board Game, an Andrea Chiarvesio and Fabio Tola design that was released on the U.S. market on...

Links: AEG Publishes Less, Hasbro Earns More, and Asmodee Preps Paperbacks

• Alderac Entertainment Group's John Zinser has stepped away from his role as the company's CEO to become its Director of Development, and in this new position he's started a blog on the AEG...

The BoardGameGeek Show: The Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle-earth, Black Angel, and Origins 2019 Preview Preorders

Scott Alden, Steph Hodge, Lincoln Damerst, and I are back in a new episode of The BoardGameGeek Show, with all of us talking about somewhat long games that we've played in the past couple of...

New Game Round-up: Roads and Boats and Pandas and Brains!

• In 2017, Dutch publisher Splotter Spellen released a new edition of KIEK to celebrate the company's twentieth anniversary. In 2019, the company is publishing a new twentieth anniversary...

Links: Kickstarter Reaches $1 Billion in Games Backed, and Steve Jackson Reports on Sales in 2018

• Phil Reed, CEO at Steve Jackson Games, has published that company's annual "Stakeholders' Report", a summary of the year's successes, failures, and lessons learned. SJG grossed US$5.3 million...

Mergers, Splits, and Distribution Deals: Winsome Stops Laying Track, HeidelBÄR Leaves Asmodee, and Heidelberger Returns to Business

• In January 2017, the Asmodee Group acquired German publisher and distributor Heidelberger Spieleverlag, with the publishing part of that company being broken out into HeidelBÄR Games.Now...

Indie Game Studios/Stronghold Games Sues Plan B Games over Great Western Trail

The Indiana Intellectual Property Blog serves as a marketing vehicle for intellectual property and business attorney Kenan Farrell of KLF Legal — no, not that KLF — and he notes on the blog's...

New Game Round-up: Place Animals, Collect Mana, Deliver Pizzas, Keep the Peace, and Provoke Your Girlfriend

• Let's check out more teasers for games that will debut at the Tokyo Game Market in May 2019, as well as games that have appeared from independent Japanese designer/publishers in the past...

Game Overview: Grab All the Animals You Can to Populate Your Planet

Urtis Šulinskas' Planet isn't a new game as Blue Orange Games debuted the title at SPIEL in October 2018 — and yet Planet is indeed a new game as (1) October 2018 was only six months ago and...

New Game Round-up: Fight in BattleLands Until Daylight

• I'm not sure how many global disasters we'll encounter in the next few decades, but if they do occur, we'll have had plenty of practice surviving their effects thanks to all the co-operative...

New Game Round-up: Watch Your Back in Hyde Society While Golfing on Revised Buses

Time to round up more game announcements and pseudo-announcements from the past few months that have slipped by me while I was focused on conventions:• Designer Mike Selinker announced in late...

God of War: The Card Game, Bloodborne: The Board Game Coming from CMON

CMON Limited has announced a new video-game-to-tabletop-game in its line-up — God of War: The Card Game, a 1-4 player game from Fel Barros and Alexandru Olteanu that's due out Q3 2019. Here's...

The BoardGameGeek Show: Golden Geeks, Sorcerer, Measuring a Game's Shelf Life, and More

I haven't posted an episode of The BoardGameGeek Show recently, but they've been rolling out on a fairly regular schedule every two weeks on BGG's main YouTube channel. Thankfully I managed to...

Designer Diary: Aerion, or Disguised Deck Management

The Cruelty of Solo Game DesignersAerion started with a simple (and rather mean) idea: Create a solo/two-player co-operative dice game in which you had to acquire resources by rolling different...