Board Game News

Designer Diary: The Making of Greedy Greedy Goblins

I first started working on Greedy Greedy Goblins in about 2004 under the name "Greedy Greedy Dwarves" and later a playtester pointed out that I was missing an obvious alliteration.I was...

Throwback Thursday: What Fresh Alchemy Is This? Element to Return in 2017

Kalmbach Publishing Co., which acquired Rather Dashing Games in January 2016, plans to release a new edition of Mike Richie's Element on March 1, 2017.In this game, first released in 2008 by...

New Game Round-up: Running Rebooted Robots in Robo Rally, and Expanding Mysterium and Haspelknecht

• Richard Garfield's new version of Robo Rally from Avalon Hill and Hasbro is slowly leaking out into the marketplace, which is something of a surprise to Garfield himself as he notes in this...

Pics from Tokyo Game Market, December 2016 II

Time for another round-up of photos from the December 11, 2016 Tokyo Game Market, courtesy of Jon Power, who attended the show with a press pass on behalf of BGG.For those who don't know, Jon has...

New Game Round-up: WizKids Brings You Farmers, Ravens, Knights, Robots, Giants, and Undead Creatures of an Unspecified Nature

• In October 2016, I published an item about WizKids partnering with Lookout Games to create upgrade kits for the revised edition of Agricola.These kits, which are due out May 2017 and carry a...

Pics from Tokyo Game Market, December 2016 I

I missed out on the Tokyo Game Market that took place December 11, 2016 due to family obligations, but BGG adminion Jon Power — who has been overseeing the addition of Japanese games to the BGG...

Fleeting Flickers of a Flick 'Em Up: Dead of Winter Trailer

Is everybody filled with the holiday spirit? If not, perhaps this teaser video from Pretzel Games for Flick 'Em Up: Dead of Winter will help you embrace the spirit of the season, that is, one of...

New Game Round-up: Renegade Game Studios — Avoiding Flatline, Slapping Monsters, Building Doghouses, and Collecting Books

• Renegade Game Studios and designer Kane Klenko have worked together previously on FUSE and Covert, and in April 2017 they will partner again for Flatline, a cooperative dice game set in the...

New Game Round-up: Going Crazy over Lovecraft Letter and Miscolored Letters

• In April 2016, Arclight Games released a new version of Seiji Kanai's Love Letter — yes, another one! — titled Lovecraft Letter, thereby tying together two of the most common trends in...

Throwback Thursday: Splicing Past to Present in Gene Pool

In November 2016, designer Mark Goadrich announced that a new edition of his card game Gene Pool was available through The Game Crafter, with new artwork by Ariel Seoane. Goadrich first released...

New Game Round-up: Cutting Throats for Thrones, Bamboo for Pandas, and Jungle Trails for Survival

The inbox is filledWith messages about games;Not too old, I hopeI've been paring my inbox down to almost nothing in order to prepare for 2017 and respond to certain people — you know who you...

New Game Round-up: Hand of Fate Comes to the Table, and Le Havre Returns in 2017

• Australian publisher Rule & Make has signed a deal with Defiant Development to make a tabletop version of Defiant's multi-platform, storytelling deck-builder Hand of Fate. The game, currently...

Designer Diary: One Crisis, Two Diaries

Part I from Sotirios Tsantilas:I should have kept real diaries. Crisis is not my first game, after all, so I should have known better. There comes a time when you want to write a designer's diary...

New Game Round-up: Hunting Anew for the Ring, Folding Around the World, and Rebuilding Thanos

• Old news to some, but this has been in my inbox for three months and is only now coming to light: Ares Games is working with designers Marco Maggi, Francesco Nepitello, and Gabriele Mari on a...

BGG.CON 2016 Wrap-Up, Part 2

Be sure to check out BGG.CON 2016 Wrap-Up, Part 1 if you haven't already done so!Board Game Bazaar (Formerly the Flea Market)The Board Game Bazaar was held Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m....

SPIEL 2016 XIX: Guilds, IKAN, Creature College, Gobbit Angry Birds, and The Game: Extreme

• Yes, I have still a few more game overview videos from SPIEL 2016, such as this one in which designer Steffen Benndorf explains The Game: Extreme from Nürnberger-Spielkarten-Verlag. What's...

New Game Round-up: Heroes by the Dozen, Haikus by the Chosen, and Heaviness from Brazilians

I email myself tons of notes and links, partly because my memory is bad and I need to have something in writing in order to take action and partly because I see so many games that I need...

SPIEL 2016 XVIII: LudiCreations — Alexandria, IUNU, Long Live the Queen, and Mr. Cabbagehead's Garden Game

So I was cranking along with the game overview videos from SPIEL 2016, publishing them at a decent clip right up to the point that I left for BGG.CON 2016 in mid-November, then I fell through a...

New Game Round-up: More Power for King of Tokyo, The Return of Targi, and More Battling Bots

• Following the release of a revised King of Tokyo base game in 2016, IELLO will release similarly revised King of Tokyo: Power Up! in April 2017, with this second edition including evolution...

Designer Diary: Black Orchestra, or the Art of Patience

Black Orchestra has probably taken longer than any of my previous designs, yet I feel like all the hard work has finally paid off. I have been thrilled with the level of excitement from the...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Prepare to Abandon the Planet with a Thousand Games in Tow

• I just finished reading Neal Stephenson's Seveneves, so the theme of Don Eskridge's Abandon Planet from his own newly formed Orange Machine Games is an eye-grabber: Escape from Earth before a...

BGG.CON 2016 Wrap-Up, Part 1

BGG.CON was held November 16-20, 2016 at the Hyatt Regency DFW Airport, Texas. This will be the location for the next two years. In 2019, BGG.CON will move to the Hyatt Regency Dallas where...

New Game Round-up: Fighting Aliens, Adventurers and Freaks, Then Waking in a Coma Ward

• Andrew Parks, designer of Core Worlds and co-designer of Star Trek: Attack Wing, has a new title coming from his own Quixotic Games in 2017, a big game for 1-4 players that takes 1-3 hours to...

New Game Round-up: Constructing Highways, Erecting Pyramids, Snapping Pics, and ReCURRRing Cards

I have failed in my attempt to create a convention preview for the Tokyo Game Market on December 11, 2016, starting the list in late October following SPIEL 2016 but then getting busy with...

Restoration Games to Release New Versions of Stop Thief, Top Race and Dragonmaster

In mid-2016, designer Rob Daviau and attorney/designer Justin D. Jacobson joined forces to create Restoration Games, a publisher dedicated to taking games released from the 1960s through the...

Game Overview: Tintas, or Five Easy Pieces (and Two That Are Much Harder to Get)

Abstract strategy games don't get a great deal of coverage in this space, not because I dislike them — this is true only in Bizarro World — but because it's hard to talk about them in any...

New Game Round-up: Gloom Beyond Earth, Balloons Beyond Their Capacity, and Grossness Beyond Belief

• Time and space mean nothing to the power of gloom as is evidenced by Atlas Games' plan to release the latest addition to Keith Baker's Gloom empire — Gloom in Space — in January 2017....

Game Overview: Jeju Island, or Walking the Beach and Picking Up Souvenirs

I first saw Jeju Island, then called only Jeju, in 2014 in a crowdfunding campaign on Korean site Tumblbug, with designers Gary Kim, Yeon-Min Jung, and Jun-Hyup Kim trying to fund the publication...

Plans for 2017 — What Do You Want to See?

I had originally intended to publish my SPIEL 2016 unpacking pictorial today, but I forgot to move its publication date when I queued the recent links round-up, so instead I double-posted on...

Links: Taking Stock of CMON Limited, Flattening Cards, and Reviewing the Women, er, Woman of Conan

Wow, I haven't done one of these in a long time! Too many games swirling around us, each pecking our eyes for attention and keeping us from looking at other things — until now, that is...• As...