Board Game News

Designer's Diary: Slide Blast, or A Blast into the Designing World!

The first time I worked on Slide Blast was when I was designing game projects that were called "games for beginners". These projects were created specifically for people who didn't have...

Game Preview: Photosynthesis, or The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Tree

In January 2017, I received the cover for Photosynthesis from the European branch of Blue Orange Games while preparing for the Spielwarenmesse fair and was stunned: "Whoa, this thing is fire!"At...

Designer Diary: Scratch That 13 Days Itch in 13 Minutes, or How Far Can We Push It?

13 Minutes: The Cuban Missile Crisis is a two-player microgame with tough decisions released in early 2017 by Ultra PRO and Jolly Roger Games.When the big brother to 13 Minutes — 13 Days: The...

Fantasy Flight Games Welcomes Fallout in 2017

U.S. publisher Fantasy Flight Games loves to unveil surprises prior to Gen Con, the largest board game convention in the U.S., and it's unleashed a doozy in the form of Fallout, a "post-nuclear...

New Game Round-up: After Centuries, A Golem Emerges Through the Desert

• With Gen Con 50 opening in just over a week, publishers are flooding out game announcements — or teasers of game announcements — ahead of that show. Plan B Games, for example, has...

Designer Diary: Custom Heroes, or Tricky Climbing and Crafting

For many players, the core game of Custom Heroes will be familiar. This is a climbing (or ladder-climbing) trick game, and there are many versions of this type of game; "President" was what my...

Latin American New Game Round-up: Thirsty Mages, Bustling Beaches and Exploding Potatoes

As my previous round-up was received somewhat well, here's the promised sequel:[Editor's note: Hilko submitted this article in mid-May 2017, and somehow I have neglected to publish it until now....

Designer Diary: Head of Mousehold, or Winning in Third

Sometimes a game just comes together. Sometimes from the very first germ of an idea, it's all there, just waiting for you to make it. That's how it was with Head of Mousehold.This is a game that...

New Game Round-up: Students Make Calls in Zendo and Bricks Make Walls in Amun-Re While Night Falls in Dominion: Nocturne

• U.S. publisher Looney Labs has been working on a new version of Kory Heath's well-loved and long out of print Zendo, and now the company has finally spilled the beans on the new edition....

For Late 2017, AMIGO Spiel Prepares Greed, Druids, Beans, Fish, and More Fish

German publisher AMIGO Spiel has unveiled its line-up for the second half of 2017, and as you might expect if you are familiar with the company, many of the new titles are pocket-sized card...

Designer Diary: Sidereal Confluence, or A Trade Empires By Any Other Name

IntroductionSidereal Confluence: Trading and Negotiation in the Elysian Quadrant is an oddly-named trading and negotiation game. Chris Cieslik wrote an extremely flattering description of how it...

Designer Diary: Yogi, or The Game Formerly Unknown as In A Bind

Yogi is a game due to be published by Gigamic, and their page for the game suggests it'll be launched on September 1, 2017. I hear there will be early copies at Gen Con, though.As you may have...

New Game Round-up: Queendomino to Reign at SPIEL '17, and Is Friese Finished?

• I've already written about three forthcoming titles from Friedemann Friese due out from his 2F-Spiele at SPIEL '17 in October — FLEE, FEAR, and FORTRESS — but believe it or not, he still...

Preview of BoardGameGeek's New Convention Preview Tool — Now Live!

When I joined BoardGameGeek in 2011, one of my responsibilities was to continue assembling convention previews for SPIEL, something I'd done on BoardgameNews.com since 2007. In that first year, I...

Designer Diary: From Medieval Traders to Indian Zamindars to Old Western Trains, or The Long Winding Journey of Whistle Stop

How did a game originally about medieval merchants bringing tributes to various kings become a game about Old Western trains traversing the USA, supplying goods to boom towns? It's been quite the...

Game Preview: Sonar, or Battleship for a Brand New Era

In 2016, as part of an effort to introduce exclusive new games for its customers, the U.S. retail chain Target partnered with Days of Wonder and its owner Asmodee to produce Ticket to Ride: First...

Game Preview: The Chameleon, or Hiding in Plain Sight, Sometimes Terribly So

In recent years, a number of hobby titles have made their way into mainstream markets, whether directly through distribution deals as with Catan, Ticket to Ride, and Pandemic or indirectly...

Friese Facilitates Fast Forward Franchise Featuring Flee, Fear & Fortress

If I've learned one thing about designer Friedemann Friese, who publishes his designs under the 2F-Spiele label in Germany, it's that he loves to experiment with game design simply to see what's...

Game Preview: Bob Ross: Art of Chill Game, or Happy Painting in the Almighty Mountains

Nostalgia is a powerful force.Weeks after the end of the 2017 Origins Game Fair, I'm still uploading the game overview videos we shot there, but a funny thing I've noticed is that the videos for...

Two Robotech Board Games Prepare for Launch in 2018

Strange Machine Games was founded in 2011 as a publisher of role-playing games and print-on-demand items, launching with the crowdfunded RPG Age Past.Today at San Diego Comic Con, SMG announced...

New Game Round-up: Produce Cloth in Florence, Chase Rabbits in the Field, and Roll Dice in Hexes

• Gen Con is the next big convention in the offing, with SPIEL following two months after that, but in many ways the conventions have an increasing amount of overlap, with designers and...

Designer Diary: Sherlook, or Not Sherlock — Spot the Difference!

AlmostEverything started back in 2013, at the end of October, soon after the yearly SPIEL game fair in Essen, Germany. I was chatting about Dobble's great success with Roberto Corbelli, CEO of dV...

Game Preview: How Does Your Garden Grow?, or Cursing Raccoons While Praying for Carrots

Yesterday I previewed Rüdiger Dorn's Vegas Dice Game, one of nearly two dozen games that will appear exclusively at Target when that U.S. retail chain refreshes its game section at the end of...

New Game Round-up: Drafting Garfield's Monsters, Reissuing Clowdus' Small Boxes, and Importing European Dojos

• To encourage retail stores to sign up for CMON Play and hold gaming events for its titles, CMON Limited has put together two new "game night" kits that each contain exclusive material for the...

Game Preview: Vegas Dice Game, or Looking to Score at the Tables (and Shelves)

Rüdiger Dorn's dice game Vegas was a departure for the alea line when the game was released in 2012. A pure dice game? That rates only a 1 on alea's difficulty scale? What's happened to our...

Kingdomino Wins 2017 Spiel des Jahres; EXIT: The Game Escapes With Kennerspiel

Nearly two months after announcing its nominees, the jury for the Spiel des Jahres — Germany's annual game of the year award, which is the game industry's largest prize as it typically leads to...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Legendary Ascended Cats of the Serengeti Realms: Thy Will Be Done

• White Wizard Games debuted in 2013 with Star Realms, and it's been making small, addictive, quick-playing card games ever since. Now it's launched a new standalone expansion for that game...

Game Preview: Codenames Duet, or Searching for Agents in All the Right Places

We've already published two preview videos about Codenames Duet: one from the 2017 GAMA Trade Show when the game was still being developed, and another from the 2017 Origins Game Fair when the...

New Game Round-up: Campaign for The Grizzled, Lay Palace Tiles in Azul, and Speak English in Kashgar

• Australian publisher Grail Games has announced that it will release an English-language version of Gerhard Hecht's Kashgar: Händler der Seidenstraße in Q1 2018 under the name Kashgar:...

Game Preview: Sentient, or Dieing to Assemble Awesome AIs

Renegade Game Studios had advance copies of a number of upcoming releases at the 2017 Origins Game Fair — Flip Ships, The Fox in the Forest, and the game I'm talking about today, J. Alex...