Board Game News

New Game Round-up: Summoning a Genie Before Collecting Wood and Building a Habitat

Following the release of The Pied Piper in Q2 2016, Purple Brain Creations will publish its next Tales & Games series in September 2016: Tiago Damey's Aladdin & The Magic Lamp, a 2-5 player game...

Designer Diary: Goons of New York 1901

Picture a game jam. A month-long game jam. With three hundred designers. Under the age of 12.That's what we do at Brooklyn Game Lab every day.One of our endeavors in a recent semester was to...

Links: Leacock in Time, Awards in Passing, and Women Not in View

• Designer Matt Leacock was featured in a June 30, 2016 write-up in TIME in the magazine's "American Genius" section. The article gets a few details wrong — Leacock self-funded the...

Developer Diary: The Super Secret Story of Conspiracy! Exposed!

It's not surprising that Conspiracy! has an origin that is not only not straightforward, but is as shrouded in mystery as the Reptilian Overlords. It begins with my first game, Legends and Lies,...

New Game Round-up: Spiel 2016 — HUCH! & friends Challenges You to Build, Sail, Coerce, Fight, Destroy Dragons, Gain Life Energy, and Devote Years to a Mystery

• Time for another look ahead at late 2016 releases from a German publisher that will be highlighted at Spiel 2016, this time showing off a few of the items from HUCH! & friends, starting with...

Origins Game Fair 2016 — Part 1

The Origins Game Fair was held June 15-19, 2016, in the Greater Columbus Convention Center, Columbus, Ohio. (They finally moved it to a more appealing date! Yay!) The next convention will be held...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Treasures from Taiwan, and Pages from Pierô

• Let's lead off this crowdfunding round-up with a project that will probably expire before most people see it: Far East War 1592, from Imjin Creative, in which 2-4 players "are divided into...

Power Grid Gets Carded

The game industry has seen a wave of [Game Title]: The Card Games being released in recent years, with many popular titles being transformed into more portable games with smaller footprints...

New Game Round-up: Fighting with Spells, Battling with Chibis, and Rolling Like a Hero

• Cool Mini Or Not has gone old school with the look of Steve Avery's Ta-Da!, which will debut at Gen Con 2016 ahead of the game's Q3 2016 release date. Here's an overview of...

Friedemann Friese, 2F-Spiele and Stronghold Games Feature Fabled Fruit and Fuji Flush

German publisher 2F-Spiele and U.S. publisher Stronghold Games, who cooperated on the publication of Friedemann Friese's 504 in English in 2015, have announced a "Strategic Partnership" that will...

New Game Round-up: Spiel 2016 — KOSMOS Expands Andor, Invites Cunning, Revisits Luther, and Asks You to Leave the Room

Spiel 2016 is still more than three months away at this point, but some companies have started to reveal their late 2016 titles, so expect more such round-ups like these from now through...

Designer Diary: Americanizing Terra into America

Background: Publishing TerraIn early 2015, Bézier Games, Inc. decided to publish the English version of Friedemann Friese's Terra. This was an easy decision once we found out it was available as...

Crowdfunding Round-up: East to West and Lair to Nest

• A few years ago, the lone household name to emerge from the burgeoning Japanese hobby game scene was Seiji Kanai, but lately Hisashi Hayashi has been giving him a run for his money. Yokohama...

New Game Round-up: Sail an Angry Ocean, Prepare to Go Backstage, and Ascend Above and Below

Okay, I've posted all of our 2016 Origins Game Fair coverage — 162 videos in all — in one week (and less than two weeks after Origins ended!), with only the five uncut, day-long livestream...

Origins Game Fair 2016 X: Killer Snails: Assassins of the Sea, Seikatsu, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Board Game, and Love Will Tear Us Apart

• We featured many games on our 2016 Origins Game Fair livestream, and the one that excited me the most was Killer Snails: Assassins of the Sea from designer Nicholas Fortugno and publisher...

Origins Game Fair 2016 IX: Kung Fu Zoo, Kreo, Battlestations, Dark Souls: The Board Game, and Heroes of Land, Air & Sea

• Charlie Price's demo of Kung Fu Zoo — a dice-flicking game of caging animals and using special powers — in the BGG booth at Origins Game Fair 2016 ended with Aldie saying, "I want to back...

Origins Game Fair 2016 VIII: Wasteland Express Delivery Service, ManaSurge, Herbaceous, Salem, and Tau Ceti: Planetary Crisis

• I keep hoping that we'll get a wave of post-nonapocalyptic games — you know, games in which people do fun things and enjoy decades of a satisfied existence among neighbors who are equally...

Origins Game Fair 2016 VII: Defenders of the Last Stand, Fate of the Elder Gods, Shark Island, Superhero Solitaire, and Gloomhaven

• Designer Richard Launius turned up at the BGG booth three times during the 2016 Origins Game Fair to talk about upcoming titles, including his take on the post-apocalyptic genre with...

Origins Game Fair 2016 VI: Tyrants of the Underdark, Imperial Settlers: 3 Is a Magic Number, Catacombs & Castles, Sausage Party, and Betrayal at House on the Hill: Widow's Walk

• My lack of knowledge about Dungeons & Dragons is on full display in this overview of Tyrants of the Underdark, the first D&D board game from Wizards of the Coast publishing partner Gale Force...

Origins Game Fair 2016 V: Arkwright, Haspelknecht, Salvation Road, The Fog of War, and The Dragon & Flagon

• Sydney and Brian Engelstein — two-thirds of the design team of The Dragon & Flagon from Stronghold Games along with father Geoff — visited the BGG during Origins Game Fair 2016 to jump on...

Origins Game Fair 2016 IV: Mystic Vale, Dominion: Empires, Clout, Morocco, and Heir to the Pharaoh

• The Dominion empire that Donald X. Vaccarino and Rio Grande Games has constructed over the past decade is impressive, and it expands still further with, um, Dominion: Empires, which RGG's Jay...

Origins Game Fair 2016 III: Hero Realms, Fish Frenzy, Tin Goose, Swipe Out!, and Holmes: Sherlock & Mycroft

• Star Realms has been a big deal for White Wizard Games since its launch in 2014, and now co-designers Rob Dougherty and Darwin Kastle are trying to go even bigger with Hero Realms, which adds...

Origins Game Fair 2016 II: Adrenaline, Codenames: Pictures, Menu Masters, Hive Mind, and Running with the Bulls

• Let's keep rolling with our coverage of the 2016 Origins Game Fair, starting with an overview of Adrenaline from Filip Neduk and Czech Games Edition, which sounds like the most Euro-y...

Origins Game Fair 2016 I: The Networks, Liars' Dice, Trick of the Rails, Dreamwell, and Days of Ire: Budapest 1956

BoardGameGeek livestreamed game demonstrations, designer and publisher interviews, and ice cream taste-testing for five days at the 2016 Origins Game Fair, and despite that event having ended...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Falling Angels Meet Rising Hopes

• Sometimes I choose the game to be listed first in these c.f. round-ups by what I think will most interest readers; at other times, I'm simply searching for a game with a flat cover image that...

Cover the World in Ticket to Ride: Rails & Sails

I just launched the Gen Con 2016 Preview yesterday, and now Days of Wonder has obligingly added a new title to that list — Ticket to Ride: Rails & Sails, the next iteration of Alan R. Moon's...

Gen Con 2016 Preview — Now Live!

Phew! The 2016 Origins Game Fair is now in the can. The BoardGameGeek crew was on site in Columbus, Ohio for five days, livestreaming dozens of game demonstrations and interviewing plenty of...

New Game Round-up: Medici Gets a Little Brother, Millennium Blades Returns, and The Game of 49 Scores

• Australian publisher Grail Games already plans to release a new version of Reiner Knizia's Medici at Gen Con 2016 in August. Beyond that, Grail plans to release the spinoff title Medici: The...

Game Previews from GAMA Trade Show 2016: Munchkin: Trading Card Game, Arcadia Quest: Inferno, The Others: 7 Sins, and Mad Libs: The Game

• With the 2016 Origins Game Fair starting in but a day, it's time to finally close the door on our GAMA Trade Show coverage from March 2016 as I had not quite published all of the videos that...

New Game Round-up: Container Sails Again, and White Wizard Introduces Hero Realms

• After many years of being lost at sea, Franz-Benno Delonge and Thomas Ewert's Container is headed back to port — I mean, print — via Mercury Games. This publication is a homecoming of...