Board Game News

Unpacking from SPIEL: How to Double Your Games in Minutes!

After SPIEL 2015, I posted a video that showed how I had nested boxes inside one another to save space when shipping them back to the U.S. I had shipped games home that year since I was traveling...

Game Preview: Pandemic Iberia, or Riding the Rails to Research Disease

Matt Leacock's Pandemic is one of the four cornerstones of the modern game industry, the others being Catan, Carcassonne and Ticket to Ride.While the original Pandemic design might not have been...

New Game Round-up: Escape the Goblins, Direct the Dwarves, and Commandeer a Crew

• Designer Dennis Hoyle has released The Princess and the Goblin through his own Bellwether Games. Here's an overview of this tile-laying game for 1-4 players:Quote:When the young Princess...

New Game Round-up: Blue Orange Adventures, Stacked Pandas, and Z-Man Releases

Even though I'm looking ahead to Spielwarenmesse and other conventions starting in Feburary 2017, we still have more than a month to go in 2016, so let's dig in the inbox for items that I haven't...

New Game Round-up: Daviau's Mountains of Madness, Burm's Growing GIPF, and Looney's Ever-Changing Math

• I've already posted about a few titles due from IELLO in 2017 — the Cthulhu Monster Pack for King of Tokyo, the bidding-and-fighting game Arena from Maxime Rambourg, and Richard Garfield's...

Designer Diary: Body Party, or Vanishing Right Before Your I

Body Party exists due to industry contacts and false memories.Right after I posted a selfie with the game in August 2014, I was sorry that it had been published and wanted nothing to do with it...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Vast Backpacking Ogres Fish for Ice Cream in the Shadows of Lisboa

• In the "when life hands you lemons" department, Leder Games has started a Kickstarter project for the second printing of Vast: The Crystal Caverns, something not desired by company owner and...

Game Overview: Dream Home, or Home Is Where the Points Are

City-building is a common theme for board games for obvious reasons: Players can easily grasp the setting and goal, you can apply simple rules to building or resource acquisition that create the...

New Game Round-up: Shooting Superhot Cards, Phasing Past to Present, and Reduxing Three Kingdoms Redux

• SUPERHOT is a highly stylized first-person shooter video game in which, as the tagline reminds you constantly, "time moves only when you move". Think of The Matrix, but with red and gray...

Game Previews at BGG.CON 2016: Room 25 Ultimate, Fugitive, Moa, One Card Wonder, Munchkin Collectible Card Game, Batman: The Animated Series Dice Game, and Much More

• Let's continue a run-through of some of the forthcoming games available for a look-see at BGG.CON 2016, starting with one looked at and seen only by the press, this being Steve Jackson Games'...

Game Previews at BGG.CON 2016: Mole Rats in Space, Pyramid Poker, Automobiles: Racing Season, Notre Dame, and In the Year of the Dragon

• In the closing hours of BGG.CON 2016, designer Matt Leacock showed off Mole Rats in Space, a cooperative design due out in 2017 from Peaceable Kingdom, a U.S. publisher that specializes in...

Game Preview from BGG.CON 2016: Alien Artifacts

I played a number of forthcoming games at BGG.CON 2016, some of which cannot yet be revealed and others of which have been announced loud and proud by the publishers in question, with one of the...

Game Preview from BGG.CON 2016: Yamataï

BGG.CON 2016 is over — or at least it is for me as I'm no longer in Dallas surrounded by hundreds of games and gamers. No matter as I can reminisce over the many games that I played during the...

New Game Round-up: Dividing Spoils of War, Terminating Timelines, and Celebrating Ten-Year-Old Feld

• Every gamer knows, whether true or not, that Vikings were all about pillaging, and now in Spoils of War — due out from Bryan Pope, Jason Medina, and Arcane Wonders in April 2017 — 3-5...

Designer Diary: Dexikon, or A Postmortem Analysis

In the world of video game development, there is the concept of a postmortem: an analysis of a finished project that examines how the different parts of the project came together, what worked...

X-Men to Join the Munchkin Universe in 2017

The X-Men might not be able to share the screen with Captain America and the other Avengers due to licensing agreements between Marvel Comics and Fox, but they will be able to share your gaming...

SPIEL 2016 XVII: Mythic Battle: Pantheon, Unlock!, Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, Tokyo Ghoul, and B-Movie Showdown

• We're nearing the end of game preview videos at SPIEL 2016, with this one being one of the longest we shot, but given all of the material in Mythic Battles: Pantheon — not to mention the...

New Games to Explore at BGG.CON 2016: Alien Artifacts, Sagrada, HOP!, Mega Man Pixel Tactics, and The Blood of an Englishman

I realize that not everyone can attend BGG.CON 2016, which starts Wednesday, November 16 in Dallas, Texas, but since a number of publishers will debut titles at that show or have upcoming games...

SPIEL 2016 XVI: Previews of Justice League: The Boardgame, VIRAL, Wibbell++, Lanterns: The Emperor's Gifts, and The Blood of an Englishman

• I've finally finished posting the game demo videos shot in the BGG booth at SPIEL 2016, so now it's time to roll through preview videos shot elsewhere during the convention, such as this...

SPIEL 2016 XV: Inis, Millions of Dollars, The Perfumer, Round House, and Rory's Story Cubes

• I posted an overview of Christian Martinez' Inis from Matagot a few days before SPIEL 2016 opened, but should you not care for the sound of my voice or want to compare presentations of the...

SPIEL 2016 XIV: A Feast for Odin, The Colonists, Papà Paolo, Lisboa, and Nautilion

• One of the most anticipated titles of SPIEL 2016 was Uwe Rosenberg's A Feast for Odin, which Feuerland Spiele had showed at SPIEL 2015. U.S. publisher partner Z-Man Games had initially...

SPIEL 2016 XIII: Barcelona: The Rose of Fire, Crisis, Pax Renaissance, Bios: Genesis, Russian Railroads: American Railroads, and First Class: Unterwegs im Orient Express

• This overview video of Barcelona: The Rose of Fire that BGG recorded at SPIEL 2016 is under eight minutes long, but co-designer Francesco Nepitello runs through a lot of information and...

New Game Round-up: CMON Welcomes Lorenzo and Council of 4, Antiquity Returns Anew, and Richard Breese Announces a Keyper

Time for a break from the continuing wave of SPIEL 2016 game demo videos — only ninety more to go! — to post about other things:• Cool Mini Or Not, now using the handle "CMON Limited", has...

SPIEL 2016 XII: IELLO Yarns — Kanagawa, The Mysterious Forest, Around the World in 80 Days, Welcome Back to the Dungeon, and Tales & Games: Aladdin & the Magic Lamp

• Kanagawa from Bruno Cathala and Charles Chevallier highlights French publisher IELLO's strength as a publisher: Doing whatever it takes to make a game as beautiful as possible. The game board...

SPIEL 2016 XI: The Oracle of Delphi, Istanbul: Letters & Seals, HOP!, Argo, and SHOOT Card Game

• Stefan Feld blanketed the game market with four titles from four publishers in 2013, followed by a light 2014 with only two releases before taking off 2015 altogether. Well, that's how it...

SPIEL 2016 X: Portal Games Portfolio — First Martians, Alien Artifacts, Imperial Settlers: Aztecs, Robinson Crusoe, Stronghold: Undead, Cry Havoc: Aftermath, and Neuroshima Hex! Death Breath

• Portal Games had a phenomenal booth at SPIEL 2016 that was probably three times the size of its booth the previous year, and in addition to celebrating the opening of a division in Germany...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Spell Deities Smartly to Win Your Day in Court

• You know what probably doesn't need any attention in this space? Mythic Battles: Pantheon, the new version of Benoit Vogt's Mythic Battles from Monolith and Mythic Games that has already...

SPIEL 2016 IX: Railroad Revolution, Rhein: River Trade, The Flow of History, Fold-it, and Legends of Andor: The Last Hope

• One of the most anticipated titles at SPIEL 2016 was Marco Canetta and Stefania Niccolini's Railroad Revolution from What's Your Game?. This German-Italian publisher typically releases one or...

SPIEL 2016 VIII: Cottage Garden, Quartermaster General: 1914, Raise Your Goblets, Steam Park: Play Dirty/Robots, and Colt Express: Marshal & Prisoners

• If you're going to launch a game company, you could hardly do better than to launch with a new Uwe Rosenberg title, which is just what Edition Spielwiese has done with Cottage Garden, which...

SPIEL 2016 VII: Ave Roma, Armageddon, Glüx, Deus: Egypt, & 7 Wonders Duel: Pantheon

• One of the interesting challenges about pulling together these SPIEL 2016 game demonstration video round-ups is deciding what makes the cut. In my first years of publishing such things, I'd...