Board Game News

Indie Boards and Cards Acquires Action Phase Games

Travises unite! Oakland-based Indie Boards and Cards — which started in 2009 with a one hundred-copy release of owner Travis Worthington's Triumvirate and has now sold more than one million...

Crowdfunding Round-up: A License to Print Money and Rob Banks

• In crime fiction, heists tend to either be executed perfectly or end disastrously. In Perfect Crime, a Henry Jasper design by way of Grublin Games Publishing, the players are fighting for one...

New Game Round-up: Deus in Africa, Tricks and Tweets, and Old-School Quests, The Tiny Epic Way

• The tiny epicness of Scott Almes and Gamelyn Games will continue in 2017 with the anticipated release of Tiny Epic Quest, with 7 Wonders artist Miguel Coimbra illustrating the design....

New Game Round-up: An Elder God Sandwich from Launius, Kirkman, Louder, Cathala and Maublanc

• Richard Launius can't leave those Elder gods alone, which is a good thing for gamey Lovecraft fans since it leads to the creation of new games such as Fate of the Elder Gods, which is...

New Game Round-up: Giants Come on Board Dungeons & Dragons, and Players Drop Ship in Island Hopper

• WizKids Games and Wizards of the Coast are extending their board game partnership — which started in 2015 with the Temple of Elemental Evil board game — into 2017 with the announcement of...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Long Shots and Hail Marys

• For years people wondered whether Martin Wallace's Princes of the Renaissance would ever be available again. Now Mercury Games is Kickstarting a new edition of the game, and the response has...

Links: DaVinci's BANG! Lawsuit Shot Down, Gender in Munchkin & Mark Rosewater on Twenty Years of Magic

• In 2014, DaVinci Editrice — which publishes games as dV Giochi — filed suit against Yoka Games and ZiKo Games. DaVinci, which has published Emiliano Sciarra's BANG! (along with many...

Designer Diary: The Looter's Guide to Looting Atlantis

InspirationInspiration can come from the strangest places. I had just gotten my first working prototype of another game called Born to Serve — a game in which players are out-of-work...

King of Tokyo Scrubbed Clean, Dressed Anew for Fifth Anniversary

For the fifth anniversary of Richard Garfield's King of Tokyo, a.k.a., Yahtzee King of the Hill, which has had editions in thirty languages and has racked up more than 750,000 copies sold, French...

New Game Round-up: Revisiting Hogwarts, Making Fake Art, and Going Loony in the U.S.

• For the most part, USAopoly has released themed versions of existing games — Clue this, Monopoly that, Yahtzee the other thing — but the company has taken efforts to expand its product...

Mayfair Games Acquires Twilight Creations

In January 2016, Asmodee announced that it had acquired the worldwide English-language rights to Catan from U.S. publisher Mayfair Games, leaving some to speculate that Mayfair would die off soon...

Designer Diary: It's All In The Past Now, or Designing Guilds of London

All of my children have attended Pauntley Primary, a tiny school located in the Gloucestershire countryside with views of the Malvern Hills. The village is typically-rural with its farms,...

BGG.CON Spring 2016: Games Played — Guilds of London, Imhotep, Karuba, Sea of Clouds, Codenames: Pictures & Simon's Cat: Card Game

BGG.CON Spring 2016 isn't quite over as I write this, but since I'm at the DFW airport waiting for a flight home, the con is over in my eyes.For the first time in a long while, I mostly stuck to...

New Game Round-up: Old Games Made New — Acquire, RoboRally, Order of the Gilded Compass & Ghostbusters: Protect the Barrier Game

• In what might be seen as a perfect branding opportunity, Brian Yu's Ghost Fightin' Treasure Hunters — the 2014 Kinderspiel des Jahres winner that's finally due out in English from Mattel in...

Designer Diary: World's Fair 1893, or Everything Affects Everything Else

It's probably important to mention up front that World's Fair 1893 started as something entirely different. The whole process from end to end, inception to initial production, was about two...

Giochi Uniti Offers Guilds and Murderers for Your Entertainment

 • Everywhere I look, I keep coming across games that I feel I should know about, but which were announced by their publishers months ago and about which I know nothing. Perhaps this is...

Origins Game Fair 2016 Preview — Now Live!

Given that BGG.CON Spring 2016 is wrapping up — and I plan to post a wrap-up of that experience in the near future — it's time to publish our Origins Game Fair 2016 Preview. Right now the...

New Game Round-up: Exploring Gaslands, Adding Corruption to Stockpile, and Hosting Another Festival in Kingsport

• From board game to card game — that's seemingly the trend these days, with the latest example of this being the announcement of the June 2016 release of Kingsport Festival: The Card Game...

New Game Round-up: French Ticklers — Kanagawa, Hop!, The Inventors, Schotten Totten, and Welcome Back to the Dungeon

I've run across a lot of teaser images and videos recently for games coming from French companies, so I thought I'd drop them in a single post to highlight all of this artistic goodness in one go...

Tokyo Game Market • May 2016 III — Game Overviews of Gaijin Dash!, Trick of Spy, Rummy 17, Mushroom Mania, Same One!, Genie's Banquet & Matadoon!

Filming at the Tokyo Game Market is tough. The event lasts only seven hours, tables are small, few people speak English (and I can only count a bit in Japanese), and most JP designer/publishers...

New Game Round-up: Sweets on the Streets, More Zombie Fighters, and Team Spirit for Cash 'n Guns

• The weather's getting hotter — at least in the Northern Hemisphere — so Green Couch Games is preparing a game filled with cool treats that, um, won't be delivered until the end of 2016...

New Game Round-up: Aliens Battle, Rats Return, Blocks Ship Early, and Ants Want Your Money

• Upper Deck Entertainment's unwieldily named Vs. System 2PCG expands once again on July 20, 2016 with the release of Vs. System 2PCG: The Alien Battles, which consists of two hundred cards...

New Game Round-up: Welcoming Tides of Madness, Succeeding Alexander, Revisiting Barony & Eating Fresh Fruit

• In mid-March 2016, I posted about a sequel to Kristian Čurla's Tides of Time titled "Tentacles of Time". Turns out that info had leaked early as the final title of this Portal Games release...

Spiel des Jahres Nominations for 2016: Codenames, Imhotep and Karuba

In Germany, the Spiel des Jahres and Kinderspiel des Jahres juries have announced their nominations for the largest awards in gaming in terms of publicity and generated sales, and as usual the...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Digital Games Hit the Table in a Bevy of Nightmare Worlds

• Another day, another post-apocalyptic survival mission, this time in the form of Grégory Oliver's Outlive from La Boite de jeu, with you fighting against others for survival in a radioactive...

New Game Round-up: Surviving the Oregon Trail, Maximizing Your Harvest, and Driving Away the Competition

• In addition to announcing that it has picked up licenses for Jesse Li's Ponzi Scheme and Hisashi Hayashi's YOKOHAMA, Tasty Minstrel Games has revealed the basics of two titles in the works...

Tokyo Game Market • May 2016 II — 88 Lines About 44 Images

I noted in my first report on the May 2016 Tokyo Game Market that my wife, son and I took more than four hundred images at the show — then I posted only a dozen pics in that report, and at that...

Game Preview: Tak, or Retroactive Winner of the Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge

I've long been enamored of The Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge that Daniel Solis and his wife organized in 2010. The goal behind that challenge was simple: Create a game to be enjoyed by...

Tokyo Game Market • May 2016 I — Going Small to Get Bigger

Attending Tokyo Game Market is like taking a trip through the looking glass. For the most part, I feel like I have a handle on the U.S. and European game markets — not that I know everything...

New Game Round-up: Flicking Plastic, Building Spires, and Outlasting the Competition

• As noted in Feb. 2016, Z-Man Games plans to release a mass market version of Gaëtan Beaujannot and Jean Yves Monpertuis' Flick 'em Up! with plastic components instead of the wooden ones, and...