Board Game News

Episode #8 of The BoardGameGeek Show — Watch It Played Joins BGG, Does Kickstarter Hurt Regular Games?

After a week's hiatus due to travel that interrupted the filming schedule, the newest episode of The BoardGameGeek Show is now live, with Scott Alden, Lincoln Damerst, and I talking about the...

New Game Round-up: Tokyo Game Market — Resting, Wrestling, Brainstorming, and Grabbing Coins from Others

Lincoln Damerst and I are heading to Tokyo Game Market on May 5-6, 2018 to record game overviews of titles new at that show and titles that will likely be available at SPIEL '18 in October. To...

New Game Round-up: Collect Coins in Megaland, Become Most Wanted, and Prep for the Eurovision Song Contest

• Red Raven Games typically releases only one or two games a year, but for 2018 it's going for three, with the newly announced Megaland being distributed exclusively by the U.S. retail chain...

New Game Round-up: Madeira and ZhanGuo Return, and Expansions Galore from Plaid Hat and Fantasy Flight Games

• What's Your Game? has announced that new editions of Madeira (a 2013 title from Nuno Bizarro Sentieiro and Paulo Soledade) and ZhanGuo (a 2014 title from Marco Canetta and Stefania Niccolini)...

Game Previews from the 2018 GAMA Trade Show: Starship Samurai, Robotech: Attack on the SDF-1, Imhotep: A New Dynasty, Teotihuacan: City of Gods, and Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger

• Let's run through more game preview videos that BGG recorded at the 2018 GAMA Trade Show, starting with the timely Choose Your Own Adventure: House of Danger from Prospero Hall and Z-Man...

Designer Diary: The History of Coal Country

Coal Country is the second prototype I developed, starting work on it immediately after the 2012 Origins Game Fair and first showing it at Gen Con 2012.The first prototype I developed, the one...

New Game Round-up: Travel to Tokyo to Pick Up Passengers, Collect Cats, and Fight With Dominoes

In May 2018, the BGG crew will be at Tokyo Game Market to record game overviews with designers and publishers and to gawk at the huge number of new and unfamiliar games on display.In preparation...

Designer Diary: Decrypto, or Coco Chanel – Anne Frank – Alan Turing

I often like to compare the creation of a game to that of a living thing:First, the mind of the game designer is inseminated by an idea, a feeling, a need; then, the idea gestates in the...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Crisis! Rescue Street-Fighting Tour Operators from a Star-Crossed Fireball Heart

• As happens all too often, I am stunned by both the quantity of board game projects active on Kickstarter and the support that they have received. Fireball Island: The Curse of Vul-Kar from...

Game Previews from the 2018 GAMA Trade Show: Nyctophobia, Senshi, Wonderland, Star Trek Fluxx, and Much from WizKids

• Time for another batch of games previewed at the 2018 GAMA Trade Show, starting with the Gen Con 2018 release Nyctophobia from Catherine Stippell and Pandasaurus Games. This title needs to be...

New Game Round-up: Old Games Made New — Taj Mahal, Chase, 8bit MockUp, and Kill Doctor Lucky

• Time to look at new editions of old games in this round-up, starting with Tom Kruszewski's Chase, which is more than thirty years old. The title was first released by Blue Dolphin Games in...

New Game Round-up: Trade on the Tigris, Pit Union Soldiers Against Confederate in Lincoln, and Dogfight in Battlestar Galactica: Starship Battles

• Ares Games has announced that at Gen Con 2018 it will demo Battlestar Galactica: Starship Battles, a new game from Sails of Glory designers Andrea Angiolino and Andrea Mainini that at present...

Designer Diary: Pioneer Days, or Dodging Dysentery on the Game Design Trail

Some game designs come together easily, while others do not. For every back-of-a-cigarette-packet mechanism that just goes from theory to ironing out the details, many, many more are years in the...

Osaka Game Market 2018: Report from Table Games in the World

Editor's note: Game Market took place in Osaka on April 1, 2018, and Saigo — who translates game rules between Japanese and English and who tweets about new JP games — has translated this...

Designer Diary: A Behind-the-Scenes View of Endless Pass: A Viking Saga

Endless Pass: A Viking Saga is a competitive card game for 2 to 6 players inspired by Norse fantasy that releases in April 2018 from Wizkids (with art by Craig Petersen. To win the game, in...

Game Previews from the 2018 GAMA Trade Show: Robotech: Ace Pilot, Istanbul: The Dice Game, Mystic Vale: Conclave, Whistle Stop: Rocky Mountains, and Magic: The Gathering – Heroes of Dominaria

• Let's check out more video previews recorded at the 2018 GAMA Trade Show for titles that will be released in the near future, although I'm going to kick off with a game that's near only in...

Kick-Ass: The Board Game Hits the Streets in August 2018

At Gen Con 2017, CMON Limited held a press preview event where it showed off several games in the works for future release, including this item:In 2018, @CMONGames will release Kick-Ass: The...

New Game Round-up: Changes to Race for the Galaxy, First Details Down for Football Highlights 2052, and Claustrophobia Returns in 1643

• At the 2018 Game Developers Conference in March, designer Tom Lehmann presented an hour-long talk on how to design a strategic card game, using Race for the Galaxy for reference. The talk is...

Game Preview: Gizmos, or Getting into Zany Machines One Summer

At the Spielwarenmesse 2018 trade fair in Nürnberg, Germany, I ran across this item in the CMON Limited booth and tweeted about it:Can I share anything less about Phil Walker-Harding's...

Episode #7 of The BoardGameGeek Show — The City of Kings, Fireball Island Reboot, and More

BGG owner Scott Alden, Director of Media Lincoln Damerst, and I are back with a new episode of The BoardGameGeek Show, one that arrives during a brief lull in convention activity, with all of us...

Game Previews from the 2018 GAMA Trade Show: Space Base, Funky Chicken, Monster Match, The Networks: Telly Time, and Button Men: Beat People Up

• Button Men: Beat People Up is a new version of the nearly twenty-year-old Button Men from James Ernest and Cheapass Games. This new version, which was released in February 2018, features...

New Game Round-up: Recruit Robots, Collect Animals, Then Relive the Finnish Civil War

• With so many Kickstarter campaigns out there, I'm not surprised to learn of one or eleventy-one that pass me by. In March 2018, for example, Atlas Games funded Matt Haga's Cogs and...

Game Previews from the 2018 GAMA Trade Show: Shards of Infinity, Kung Fu Zoo, Kontour, Stumblewood, and Bohemian Villages

We have twelve game overview videos in our 2018 GAMA Trade Show playlist right now, with about ninety more still to be published...and a few dozen videos from FIJ 2018 in Cannes...and a handful...

Game Previews from FIJ and GAMA 2018: Welcome To..., Get the MacGuffin, Anatomy Fluxx, and Thanos Rising: Avengers: Infinity War

• Today's post includes preview videos from two recent shows that BGG attended — FIJ 2018 in Cannes, and the 2018 GAMA Trade Show — to highlight games that are hitting the market in the...

Gloomhaven: Forgotten Circles Introduces the Aesther Diviner, Includes Twenty Scenarios

For many people, their SPIEL '18 shopping list begins now, with news from Isaac Childres of Cephalofair Games that Gloomhaven: Forgotten Circles — the first expansion for mega-hit Gloomhaven...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Awful Gothic Heroes Flower in a Golden Dreamscape

• Now that the clock has rolled over to April 2, let's dispense with the feeble bogus creations of yesterday and check out crowdfunding projects that are 100% real — or at least projects that...

Game Previews from FIJ 2018 II: CIV, Badass Force, Fairy Tile, Edgar & Lucien, and Penny Papers Adventures

We've published 43 videos from our coverage of the Festival International des Jeux in Cannes, France at the end of February 2018, and I feel like we're just getting started. Many of the games...

New (Old) Game Round-up: Jump into the Pool, Bid for Buildings, and Welcome Zombies to World War II

• Among the hundreds of new games that have been announced since the start of 2018 are several games that aren't new at all. No, these games are reprints or revamped editions of older games...

Mario Kart Invades Monopoly Gamer

Taking a cue from the success of Monopoly Gamer in 2017, Hasbro has now released Monopoly Gamer: Mario Kart, with this game featuring a quartet of character from various Mario Kart titles. Here's...

New Game Round-up: Visitors for Viticulture, Deadpool for Dirty Jokes, and Harry Potter for Codenames and Munchkin

• On June 1, 2018, Stonemaier Games invites you to invite new visitors to Viticulture with the Visit from the Rhine Valley expansion, co-designed by Tido Lorenz and Jamey Stegmaier. This set of...