Board Game News

Interview: Kwanchai Moriya

[Editors note: This interview, conducted by Neil Bunker, was first published on Diagonal Move in February 2022. —WEM]DM: Hi, Kwanchai, thank you for joining us today. Many readers will be...

Before Dune, Try to Survive Arrakis: Dawn of the Fremen

After releasing a revamped version of Dune in 2019 and the scaled-down Dune: A Game of Conquest and Diplomacy in 2021, publisher Gale Force Nine plans to release its third Dune title in June...

Save Earth from Aliens, Explore the Mysteries of the Loop, and Revisit Post-Apocalyptic Worlds

• Earth Under Siege: Flashpoint is an upcoming, 1-4 player co-operative, sci-fi themed, dungeon crawler with miniatures, which is being crowdfunded on Kickstarter (KS link) in March 2022, from...

Put Winning Pairs Together in Twin Palms, and Spot Birds of a Feather...Again

• Designer Teale Fristoe released the card game Birds of a Feather through his own studio, Nothing Sacred Games, in 2015, and new U.S. publisher Snowbright Studio plans to release an updated...

Enter the World of Thorgal Aegirsson, and Try to Survive Dead by Daylight

• Polish publisher Portal Games has announced a 2023 release date for Thorgal: The Board Game, an adaptation of the long-lived comic series that started in Tintin magazine in 1977 and that...

Designer Diary: Living Forest, or Roots Growing on Crumbling Walls

Sometimes people discuss whether they start designing games with a mechanism or a theme in mind. For me, it is usually a mechanism that pops into my head, and from there, I zig zag between the...

Game Overview: Genotype, or Pinpointing Protean Pea Parts

U.S. publisher Genius Games debuted in 2014 with Peptide: A Protein Building Game, and since then the company has maintained a focus on science-based games, with founder and CEO John Coveyou...

Gale Force Nine Challenges You to Survive Against Angels, Rum Runners, and Fantasy Fighters

Starting in December 2021, U.S. publisher Gale Force Nine has announced several upcoming titles in 2022, with Doctor Who: Don't Blink from Dylan Birtolo, Josh Derksen, and Thomas M. Gofton taking...

Links: Steve Jackson Games, a Potential Hasbro/Wizards Split, and a Shift to September for Toy Fair New York

• Phil Reed, CEO of U.S. publisher Steve Jackson Games, has posted that company's "Report to the Stakeholders" for 2021, and it's always an interesting read, both for its perspective on SJG...

Rule the Animal Kingdom in Awimbawé, and Avoid Peppers in Jalape-NO!

• Two-player trick-taking games used to be a sometime thing, but following the success of The Fox in the Forest and Claim in 2017, they seem to be appearing more frequently — or perhaps it's...

Fog Rises over Carcassonne in New Co-operative Game

German publisher Hans im Glück has announced a new version of Klaus-Jürgen Wrede's Carcassonne for release in Q4 2022: Nebel über Carcassonne ("Fog over Carcassonne"), with this being the...

Advance to the Rhine, Recreate the Mexican-American War, and Gain Support in the South China Sea

• In February 2022, Old School Wargames, the hex and counter division of Worthington Publishing, launched a Kickstarter campaign for Dan Fournie's latest release, D-Day to the Rhine 1944. D-Day...

Teasers for G.I. JOE Mission Critical, Dying Light: The Board Game, and Betrayal at House on the Hill

• U.S. publisher Renegade Game Studios has given a bare-bones announcement for G.I. JOE Mission Critical, a 1-5 player co-operative game due out before the end of 2022.Here's all the publisher...

Play with E.T., Boba Fett, Goofy, Ted Lasso, and the Bride of Frankenstein Thanks to Funko Games

To continue with game announcements from the Toy Fair New York that wasn't, U.S. publisher Funko Games has revealed a huge roster of releases for 2022, with all of the games being licensed from...

The Microchip in The Wizard of Oz's Dungeon: Ravensburger's U.S. Releases in Early 2022

Toy Fair New York 2022 would have taken place this past weekend, but the event was cancelled in mid-January 2022. That won't stop the release of game info, though, with many publishers that I...

Designer Diary: Phantom Ink

Mary Flanagan and I are longtime collaborators and co-designers at Resonym. We've worked together on Visitor in Blackwood Grove, Mechanica, Surrealist Dinner Party, and now our spooky party game...

Kickstarter Answers(?) Questions about Its Blockchain Protocol Plans

In December 2021, Kickstarter announced a plan to fund and adopt a decentralized blockchain-based protocol. From my perspective, the plan did not effectively explain why Kickstarter plans to do...

Game Overview: TA-KE, or Chomping on Japanese Chips

Designer Arve D. Fühler has had a wide range of games published since his debut in 2014 with Pagoda (written overview), El Gaucho (video overview), and Scharfe Schoten. His heaviest game to date...

Grab Animals and Fruit — and Don't Go Bald — in These 2022 Releases from Zoch Verlag

German publisher Zoch Verlag has announced three new titles for release in the first half of 2022, down from its usual four, a reduction similar to what some other German publishers are doing.•...

Party with Strange Objects, Secret Identities, and Turing Machines

With the 2022 FIJ game fair due to open in Cannes, France on February 25, I thought I'd celebrate by highlighting a quartet of party (or party-ish) games from French-speaking publishers:•...

Build Waterlines and Mining Colonies at Home, Then Hit the Hermagor Market

In November 2021, designers Matthew Dunstan and Rory Muldoon launched new publisher Postmark Games with a Kickstarter campaign for the roll-and-write game Voyages, a game that would be available...

Knizia Game Round-up: Craft Longboards, Dive Into the Blue, and Build a Cable Car Network in San Francisco

Is it time for another round-up of designs from Reiner Knizia? Isn't it always?!• Polish publisher Rebel Studio will become another notch on Knizia's belt with the Q2 2022 release of San...

Enmesh Yourself in the Story of The Snow Queen

I haven't done a crowdfunding round-up in a while, so I plan to zip through a half-dozen titles quickly in this post, but before we get to that, let's dive deep into...well, I'm not even sure how...

Manage a Roman Port in Ostia, and Get Cracking on Your Stacking

• In 2020, Japanese publisher uchibacoya ran its first Kickstarter campaign for the enticing-looking game Aqua Garden from designer Totsuca Chuo.Now the designer and publisher are back with a...

Designing Eyelet, or Knot Your Typical Roll-and-Move Game

Eyelet is a roll-and-move game in which you thread shoelaces through holes in a board. Each turn you roll two dice, and for each die, you must thread a lace through an empty hole that number of...

Game Overview: Riftforce, or Elemental Domination

Riftforce doesn't look like much: cards bearing artwork and numbers, along with a smattering of other cards and a few dozen tokens. That said, most card games don't look like much. The components...

Michael Kiesling Takes You to The Border

As seems to be the case with several other German publishers, Nürnberger-Spielkarten-Verlag, a.k.a. NSV, has scaled back its schedule for the first half of 2022, with only two new titles being...

Links: A Disappearing Pandemic and Opportunities for Game Designers

• In mid-January 2022, Game Rant published an article from Daniel Deangelo titled "Pandemic Digital Board Game Removed", with the article drawing mostly on a Reddit post that quotes an Asmodee...

Gain Power with Worldbreakers, Build Your Kingdom, Destroy Rival Camps, and Deal the Highest Attack

• Worldbreakers: Advent of the Khanate is a new, fast-paced, 1-2 player customizable card game created by Elli Amir, coming to Kickstarter on March 1, 2022. Worldbreakers is set in an...

Ravensburger Announces Investment and Partnership with Gamefound

This announcement — which is summarized in the subject line of this post — wins my "most unexpected" prize of the month because as far as I know Ravensburger has not been involved in...