Board Game News

Days of Wonder Offers Public Services and A Ticket for Another First Journey

In addition to the new strategy game Yamataï (covered here), Days of Wonder has two other titles in the offing for 2017, one of those being a small expansion for François Gandon's...

The Board Room: A Retrospective Part 2 - Torres & Tikal by Wolfgang Kramer & Michael Kiesling

This is part 2 of my retrospective on The Board Room - an internet based video show that ran from 1999-2001. Check out my initial post for more info about the show.I'd like to feature two games...

Designer Diary: Light & Dark, or The Power of Constraint

Constraint breeds creativity, they say. Well how's this for a constraint? My five-year-old daughter regularly pulls games off my shelf — Kingdom Builder, Splendor, For Sale — and tells me she...

Following Trademark Conflict, Knizia Says Farewell to Ingenious and Introduces AXIO

In November 2016, designer Reiner Knizia tweeted this:Play our game AXIO online at https://t.co/Nre90mzIhz pic.twitter.com/M5Qs2hyyoX— Reiner Knizia (@ReinerKnizia) November 15, 2016Few...

Game Overview: C-Cross, or Get Into the Groove

The goal of Ludovic Gimet's C-Cross, released by German publisher Clemens Gerhards in late 2015, will be familiar to all who have played abstract strategy games: Connect opposite sides of the...

The Board Room: A Retrospective Part 1 - Tigris & Euphrates with Reiner Knizia

I'm starting a new article series here in the BGG News blog that is more of a retrospective than "news", but a lot of people will have not seen this before, so it will be new to them.When I got...

Pegasus Spiele Makes Old Games New, with Santo Domingo, 4 Seasons, Sheep & Thief, and Port Royal: Das Abenteuer beginnt...

• Large established publishers receive hundreds, if not thousands, of game pitches over the course of a year, but sometimes the farm league system — a.k.a. self-publication — is still the...

Game Preview: Mafiozoo, or Louis, Louis, Oh Baby, You Gotta Go

We're not even one month into 2017, and it already seems designated as "The Year of the Reprint", the year in which all the grail games come back on the market. There's a smidge of exaggeration...

New Game Round-up: Building Malta, Searching for Treasure, and Scooping Out the Goods

• Posts in this space were few last week as I've been chugging along in the background adding titles to the BGG database and keeping our early 2017 convention preview as up to date as...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Delving into Pockets of Supporters for Nothing Now

• It's time to enter the dungeons once again in Delve from Richard Launius, Pete Shirey, and Indie Boards & Cards. Delve is a tile-laying, dungeon-building that prompts the question: "How do so...

New Game Round-up: Two for 2018 — Seventh Cross and Street Masters

• With Millennium Blades expansions produced and heading to the U.S., designer D. Brad Talton, Jr. of Level 99 Games has been revealing info on that company's next huge release: Seventh Cross,...

New Game Round-up: Rhino Hero Soars Anew, Yamataï Is Revealed, and More Escape Rooms Await

• In an announcement that took Twitter by storm, HABA has said that 2017 will see the release of Rhino Hero: Super Battle, a new design by Rhino Hero's Scott Frisco and Steven Strumpf. Here's a...

Designer Preview: Jump Drive

Jump Drive is a card game for 2-4 players that introduces players to the Race for the Galaxy universe. Each round, players simultaneously place and then reveal cards to build their empires,...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Hitting the Levers and Bumping the Machine to Get a High Score (of Dollars)

• You are a ball — a pinball, in fact, and naturally you want to score by bouncing off as many things as you can. How are you going to make that happen? That's the premise of Diane Sauer's...

New Game Round-up: Terraforming Other Parts of Mars, and Heading Back Underwater with Captain Sonar

• Word is out about Terraforming Mars: Hellas & Elysium, the first of four expansions scheduled to be released for Terraforming Mars over the next two years. Publisher Stronghold Games tells me...

Party Like It's 1999: Stephenson's Rocket and Torres to Return in 2017

• In early January 2017, Grail Games announced King's Road, a reimplemented version of Reiner Knizia's Imperium from the Neue Spiele im alten Rom collection.Now the Knizia/Grail connection...

New Game Round-up: Tricks, Trades, Treasures, Traps, and Troy

• Fireside Games is best known for the cooperative game Castle Panic and its multiple spin-offs (Dead Panic, Munchkin Panic, Star Trek Panic). Now it has another co-op ready for airdropping on...

New Game Round-up: Building Civilization on Scales Large and Small in Gentes and The Pillars of the Earth

• German publisher KOSMOS has announced that in September 2017, it will release a new game based on the third novel in Ken Follett's "Kingsbridge" series, with that book being titled A Column...

Plan B Games Debuts with Century: Spice Road, Owns Pretzel Games

In July 2016, the Asmodee Group announced that it was discussing an acquisition of F2Z Entertainment, which at the time owned the publishing brands Z-Man Games, Filosofia Éditions, Pretzel...

New Game Round-up: Drafting Over Decades, Redoing Darien, and Riding Giant Frogs

• I already covered the new edition of Takashi Sakaue and Masato Uesugi's Twelve Heroes by Catch Up Games in mid-December 2016 — two-player game in which you choose twelve units prior to play...

New Game Round-up: Magnetic Partnerships, A Trio of Expansions, and New Editions of Fairly New Games

• Thames & Kosmos, the North American branch of German publisher KOSMOS, has passed along its schedule of 2017 game releases, and as with many U.S. publishers, their list is longer than it was...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Fishing for Adventure from an Infected Treehouse

• Let's kick off this crowdfunding round-up with a different kind of project — one that still rewards backers with games, mind you, but one that originates from different purposes than...

New Game Round-up: Spelling for Fame, Spelling for Shame

• The German branch of Mattel will continue its practice of adding hobby games to the market once per year with the late 2017 release of Wizards Wanted from Nick Hayes, with art by Djib. (Nick...

Roll-and-Write-and-Write Again with NSV's Twenty One and Qwinto: Das Kartenspiel

• German publisher Nürnberger-Spielkarten-Verlag releases family-friendly games that tend to have few rules, with their best known game being a toss-up between Qwixx and The Game, two Steffen...

Stack Numbers, Collect Antiques and Avoid Chickens, Courtesy of ABACUSSPIELE

• German publishers have returned from holidays and have started pouring out information about their releases, with ABACUSSPIELE announcing three new titles as well as a German edition of the...

New Game Round-up: Anniversaries for Beans and Fruit, Abstract Dragon Conflict, and Knizia's Khans

• German publisher AMIGO Spiel is celebrating a couple of anniversaries among its early 2017 releases, with Uwe Rosenberg's Bohnanza turning twenty years old. Twenty years of bean farming, with...

Asmodee Absorbs Heidelberger Spieleverlag, EDGE Entertainment and Millennium

With a new year comes the announcement of new mergers in the game industry, with Asmodee acquiring German publisher and distributor Heidelberger Spieleverlag, Spanish/French company EDGE...

Preview Now Live for Nürnberg, NYC, and Cannes Conventions

As I've mentioned already, I'm attending the trade shows in both Nürnberg and New York City in February 2017, but I'm also hitting the show in Cannes for the first time, so I've converted our...

What's Happening on the First Day of 2017 and Beyond

In early December 2016, I asked what people wanted to see in this space in 2017. Many of the answers were "more of the same" or "focus on new game releases", with lots of support for "more...

Ludonaute's Luma Looms Large on the 2017 Release Calendar

• French publisher Ludonaute appeared at SPIEL 2016 with Marshal & Prisoners, the newest expansion for Colt Express, but its booth featured something else as well: a tropical-ish atmosphere and...