Board Game News

Game Preview: SPIEL 2016 — Picassimo, or Hip to Be Square

In 2015, HABA introduced a family game line amongst its familiar tidal wave of yellow boxes, and these three titles — Karuba, Adventure Land, and Spookies — were such a success, especially...

Designer Diary: How Traveling the World Gave Birth to Scuba

My name is Martin Looij, and I'm a board game designer from the Netherlands. I love scuba diving, traveling, and board gaming (in that order). From July 2014 until May 2015, I was traveling...

Designer Diary: Honshu, or An Idea That Blossomed Into a Game

The journey of Honshu begins in the first quarter of 2014. I had played Patchistory twice in January 2014 and really liked the patching aspect of the game. The rules were not very clear, but what...

Designer Diary: Solarius Mission, or Dice for the G*****, or Solar 3X

I still remember the day when I first came up with the idea for Solarius Mission: It was in summer of 2011 and I was working on the facade of a house. I mused about various mechanisms and...

Designer Diary: Flamme Rouge, or How Magic: The Gathering and Dominion Inspired a Racing Game

I've always been drawn to racing games, and my favorites include Snow Tails, Ave Caesar & Tales & Games: The Hare & the Tortoise. The simplicity of the goal is something everyone intuitively...

Designer Diary: Fields of Green, or If You Build It, It Will Come...

Back in 2012, Among the Stars was published by Artipia Games. It was a card-drafting game with a sci-fi theme in which players tried to build space stations. It ended up going very well, having a...

BGG's SPIEL 2016 Broadcast Schedule

I've been sick the past five days, so I've worked far less than I would have liked (boo!), but the SPIEL 2016 Preview now totals 735 titles (with more still to be added) and the broadcast...

Game Preview: SPIEL 2016 — Sail Away, or Carry Me and My Coconuts on the Waves

Marc André nearly took home the Spiel des Jahres award in 2014 for Splendor, a quick-playing game in which players collect gem tokens to purchase cards and (eventually) impress nobles with their...

Designer Diary: Oilfield

BeginningSince I started playing Eurogames, I had the idea of creating a game related to the oil industry. In 2011, I started developing Oilfield. The initial concept was intended to focus on a...

Game Preview: SPIEL 2016 — Sherlock 13, or What One Man Can Invent Another Can Discover

A bevy of games featuring Sherlock Holmes have been released in the past few years from publishers around the world — let's call it the "Cumberbatch effect" — and naturally most of them...

Designer Diary: Colony — A Strategy Game

In the middle of 2015, Doug Garrett (of Garrett's Games and Geekiness) mentioned the Japanese game Age of Craft to me. He had just played it at his West Coast MeepleFest invitational (brought by...

Game Preview: SPIEL 2016 — Goths Save the Queen, or Scatter Her Enemies and Make Them Fall

If ever I suspected a game of originating from a title, it's Goths Save the Queen, which sounds like a name created by bored high schoolers, but as folks like Reiner Knizia and Magic: The...

Designer Diary: Germania Magna: Border in Flames, or Rome Is Falling!

Germania Magna: Border in Flames was supposed to be published in 2015 by Wydawnictwo Alter. This didn't happened, but we heard stories about it, saw the artwork, played the game...and we couldn't...

Game Preview: SPIEL 2016 — Garden of Minions, or Three Shall Be the Number Thou Shalt Count

Kuro, who self-publishes games under the label Manifest Destiny, creates games that — despite having few components or rules — are complicated to play, most notably with The Ravens of Thri...

Game Preview: Conan, Unchained and Unboxed

Frédéric Henry's Conan from Monolith is a massive beast of a game, made even larger when funded on Kickstarter to the tune of $3.3 million, and now nearly a year after the original expected...

Game Preview: SPIEL 2016 — Cat Town, or Oh, Won't You Please Take Me Home

After years of wading through zombies, pirates, ninjas, zombie pirates, pirate ninjas, zombie pirate ninjas, and European men holding maps, I think we might now be nearing the time of peak-cat in...

New Game Round-up: Riots for Mechs vs Minions, Revisions for Dominion and Dominion: Intrigue, and Rules for The Game

• I've been swamped trying to keep up with announcements related to SPIEL 2016 — check out the SPIEL 2016 Preview here! — but plenty of other happenings have been going down in the game...

Designer Diary: Gentleman's Deal, or Where Game Design Meets Game Theory

Hello! My name is Yan, and I am the author of Gentleman's Deal, a new boardgame from GaGa Games. Here is my story...BackgroundAs a boardgame designer, I am very interested in game theory....

Designer Diary: When I Dream, or A Dream Come True

Once upon a time in a kid's movie, I heard an amazing quote:No dream is too big and no dreamer too small.And it is so right! Never stop dreaming. But what are dreams really? And how do they...

Double Designer Diary: Mission Impractical and Débrouille-toi

It's a bit unusual that I can remember exactly when the first idea for a game popped into my mind, but in this case I can — or rather, for two games. But first things first.On Thursday, June 7,...

Game Preview: SPIEL 2016 — Master of Orion: The Board Game, or Belting Your Opponent in Space

In January 2016, I tweeted the following from the Spielwarenmesse trade fair in Nürnberg, Germany:The Master of Orion video game is being transformed into a 2-4 player, 40-60 min. board game by...

Designer Diary: Pax Renaissance — Part II: The Birth of the Modern World

My son and co-designer Matt has described the tortuous process by which Pax Renaissance was forged as a game. Now I want to describe how philosophy has shaped this game, as well as my own life....

Fragor Games' Title for SPIEL 2016 Is...

Non-existent, and no, that's not a game titled "Non-existent" but the actual lack of a game.Each year since 2004 brothers Gordon and Fraser Lamont have released one title through their Fragor...

Game Preview: SPIEL 2016 — Cottage Garden, or Cornering the Flower Market

Uwe Rosenberg's Patchwork debuted in 2014 to thunderous approval, with most players enjoying the challenge of managing their money and fitting together polyomino tiles to create an aesthetic (and...

Designer Diary: Pax Renaissance — Part I: Birthing Pains

RootsPax Porfiriana was an experimental revamp of The Lords of the Sierra Madre. The goal was to take my father's game — in all its sprawling, turbulent, cutthroat, and ethically-dubious glory...

Game Preview: SPIEL 2016 — What's Up, or Everybody Knows That The Bird Is The Word

Publishers send me a fair number of review copies, and while I understand the reason why — the possibility of publicity! — sometimes I appreciate receiving the game simply so that I can play...

Zev Shlasinger Suing Dan Yarrington for Fraud and Breach of Contract

On June 29, 2016, Zev Shlasinger and Paul Gerardi filed suit against Dan Yarrington and Myriad Games, Yarrington's game retail operation in New Hampshire, alleging that Yarrington committed...

Fantasy Flight Games and Games Workshop Parting Ways

In early September 2016, PDF files for titles like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay disappeared from DriveThruRPG, leading some to speculate that Fantasy Flight Games had lost the license to material...

Game Preview: SPIEL 2016 — TimeBomb II, or Looking for Bombs in All the Wrong Places

In August 2015, I presented an overview of Yusuke Sato's TimeBomb from New Board Game Party, a hidden role game of terrorists versus SWAT team members in which the latter need to defuse a bomb...

Game Preview: SPIEL 2016 — Pocket Madness, or Collecting The Great Old Cute Ones

These days everyone needs to design a Cthulhu game, but for the ever-smiling Bruno Cathala and his frequent co-designer Ludovic Maublanc, a juicy slime-encrusted Cthulhu just wouldn't do. No,...