Board Game News

Links: Sales Figures from Asmodee and Steve Jackson Games, and an Unrivaled Opportunity to Play to Win

• In mid-March 2017, French investment company Eurazeo posted a report (PDF) of its 2016 fiscal year, and that's of interest to gamers given that Eurazeo owns game publisher Asmodee, which...

New Game Round-up: Automata Comes to Noir, Witches Come to America's Aid, and Port Royal Comes to the U.S.

• People have been asking for months, if not years, when Alexander Pfister's Port Royal will be released in the U.S., and for nearly as long German publisher Pegasus Spiele has answered that...

New Game Round-up: Reliving the Middle Ages in Twenty Minutes, and Reading the Path of Light and Shadow

• German publisher Hans im Glück has (at least) two items on its release schedule for SPIEL 2017 in October, with one of them being an expansion for The Voyages of Marco Polo from designers...

New Game Round-up: Attract Visitors to Your Bear Park, and Be the Best Demon Lord in Halloween

• Dutch publisher Quined Games has announced the 20th title in its Master Print Edition series: Angelo de Maio's 2-4 player miniatures game Halloween, which will have a Kickstarter funding...

New Game Round-up: Evolution Goes Deep and Ticket to Ride Returns to Germany

• North Star Games has two items in the works related to its popular Evolution board game. First, as noted on the iOS Board Game blog, North Star is working on a digital version of the game and...

Game Preview: Reworld, or Shape the Ships into Shipshape Order

In addition to the previously announced Frogriders and Ghost Catchers (preview videos here and here), German publisher eggertspiele has a number of titles in various stages of development,...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Impulsively Rise to Peak Apocalypse

• Here's an odd situation to lead off this crowdfunding round-up: Polish publisher Czacha Games, which released a Polish edition of Carl Chudyk's Impulse in 2016 with fan-created art by Zak...

Designer Diary: New York Slice, or Today's Pizza Originated in San Marco

When the Moon Hits Your Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie…In this case, it wasn't a celestial object that struck me; it was Alan Moon. Fifteen years ago, I had officially entered the boardgaming hobby...

New Game Round-up: A Renewed Five-Year Mission for WizKids, and A Second One Deck Dungeon

• U.S. publisher WizKids has announced a "renewed multi-year license with CBS Consumer Products", and accompanying that announcement comes word of a wave of Star Trek items, such as card packs...

New Game Round-up: Going Deep with Leder Games, Gardening in Japan, and Moving Brass to New Cities

• U.S. publisher Leder Games has announced what might be considered a spiritual successor to 2016's Vast: The Crystal Caverns, a cave-crawling adventure for 1-5 players in which each player had...

Designer Diary: Heptalion, or Seven Steps to a Finished Game

Heptalion is a simple combinatorial tile-placement game (and associated set of puzzles) designed in 2011. This diary describes the various design problems that arose when trying to create a...

Kobe Game Market 2017 Report from Table Games in the World

To follow up the translation of Nicobodo's report on the 2017 Kobe Game Market, Saigo — who frequently translates game rules from Japanese to English and who tweets a lot about new JP games —...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Stop Greedy Cytosis to Dragoon a Dicey Thief Warp

• Designer John Coveyou of Genius Games has previously released games titled Covalence: A Molecule Building Game, Ion: A Compound Building Game, Virulence: An Infectious Card Game, and Peptide:...

Fragor Games Announces Wallace & Gromit License for Next Release

Gordon and Fraser Lamont of Fragor Games have issued this pictorial press release to announce their next title:While a Wallace & Gromit game — or perhaps a design based on multiple Aardman...

Links: Play Catan, Play with CMON, and Don't Play More Games Than You Ever Thought Possible

Let me lead off by stating that I hate April Fools' Day, so I have nothing tricky posted below. Everything is a legit link unless someone has uploaded new pages on me after the fact. I loathe...

New Game Round-up: Take to the Air in Scythe, Revisit the Red Scare, and Put Yourself in Big Trouble in Little China

• Jamey Stegmaier of Stonemaier Games has announced a new expansion for Scythe with The Wind Gambit including two modules that can be used independently or combined in any manner with the base...

Game Previews from GAMA Trade Show 2017 IV: Custom Heroes, Lovecraft Letter, Sorcerer, Stronghold Games, and The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game

Time for more game overview videos shot in the BoardGameGeek booth at the 2017 GAMA Trade Show, starting with a title that we previewed at GTS 2016 ahead of its Kickstarter campaign and which is...

New Game Round-up: Whistling to the West Coast, Shopping for Accuracy, and Reliving the Wars of the Roses

• While at the 2017 GAMA Trade Show, I noticed a second new title for 2017 from Bézier Games (aside from the recently announced The Palace of Mad King Ludwig), but we had no slots in our...

Game Previews from GAMA Trade Show 2017 III: Munchkin: Rick and Morty, Evil Dead 2, The Terminator, Nefarious: Becoming a Monster, and Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle – The Monster Box of Monsters

Let's continue with more preview videos from the 2017 GAMA Trade Show. We have 32 videos in our GTS 2017 playlist on YouTube, and I haven't even finished publishing everything from day one. We...

A Report from Nicobodo on the 2017 Kobe Game Market

In an attempt to bring BGG users coverage of the 2017 Kobe Game Market, which took place March 12 at the Kobe International Exhibition Hall, Saigo — who frequently translates game rules from...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Powering Through Space for Honorable and Tasty Mutant Queens

• Designer Corné van Moorsel of Cwali is hitting Kickstarter once again to fund his annual SPIEL release, this being Powerships, a new version of his (in my opinion) excellent racing game...

Links: Gamer Fatigue, Exploring Badness, and Undercover Design at the CIA

• CNN has a short article on how the CIA uses board games to train staffers, based on a presentation at the 2017 South by Southwest festival, with quotes from both senior collection analyst...

Game Previews from GAMA Trade Show 2017 II: Codenames Duet, The Godfather: Corleone's Empire, and A Song of Ice & Fire: Tabletop Miniatures Game

Time for another round-up of upcoming games that were on display in the BoardGameGeek booth at the 2017 GAMA Trade Show, starting with an overview of Codenames Duet, a cooperative version of...

Designer Diary: Ascension: Gift of the Elements, or Transforming Old Into New

Hello, BoardGameGeek! I've already written a "first look" article on Ascension: Gift of the Elements (which debuted on March 20, 2017) on the Ascension website, but I wanted to do a deeper dive...

Game Previews from GAMA Trade Show 2017 I: Dice Forge, Pyramid Poker, Dinosaur Island, Wasteland Express Delivery Service, and Legend of the Five Rings: The Card Game

BoardGameGeek was at the 2017 GAMA Trade Show for two days in mid-March 2017, and we streamed game demos over both YouTube and Twitch for nine hours one day and eight hours the next. Since you...

Blast Centipedes, Chase Cats, Fight Creeps, and Rebel Against Damned Dirty Apes

While in the BGG booth at the 2017 GAMA Trade Show, Bryan Merlonghi from IDW Games sprang a huge number of upcoming releases on us. You can watch a runthrough of those games around hour eight of...

Argentina's Premio Alfonso X, or How to Turn a Country into a Gaming Nation

What does Alfons X. of Castile, Galicia, and León (1221-1284) have to do with gaming? Well, he commissioned the "Book of Games" (Libro de los juegos), which contained game rules, chess problems,...

Flight Slack as Scott Pilgrim, Flip Ships to Defend the Earth, and Fend Off the Fox in the Forest

Non-final cover• Renegade Game Studios announced a trio of new titles ahead of the 2017 GAMA Trade Show, with the most media-friendly one being Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Card Game, a...

Designer Diary: Madness at Midnight, or How To Be An Evil Cultist

The pitch for Madness At Midnight is quite simple: What if you're not trying to stop ancient Lovecraftian horrors from entering our world, but rather actively working to make that happen? So...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Tricking Kings and Dinosaurs to Rebuild Ad-Heavy Hives

I've attended five conventions in the past six weeks, and plenty of crowdfunding projects have come and gone in the interim. I'd apologize for missing all of them, but in some ways you just have...