Board Game News

Links: Balancing Designs, Testing Art, and Staying True to Your Work

• On League of Gamemakers, designer/publisher Jeff Siadek offers advice on the topic of balance in game design: "Our first task is to recognize that balance is unattainable. Our second task is...

Lang, Cormier, Lim, McNair and Murray Present 2016's The Godfather Trilogy

• At GAMA Trade Show 2016, U.S. publisher Cool Mini Or Not revealed one of its many upcoming games in 2016: The Godfather, by designer Eric M. Lang. Lang visited the BGG booth during GTS to...

New Game Round-up: Everything Returns — Troyes, SteamRollers, Beer Empire, Diamant, and More

Time to clean out more notes to myself from the inbox. You might know some of the news below already, but if not, consider yourself now informed:• Sébastien Dujardin from Pearl Games has...

New Games at GAMA Trade Show 2016: Wasteland Express Delivery Service, Guilds of London, Crazy Karts, Tentacles of Time, Imperial Settlers: 3 Is a Magic Number

• BoardGameGeek is at the 2016 GAMA Trade Show and ready to broadcast (at least) seven hours of game demonstrations on Wednesday, March 16, starting at 10:00 PDT (GMT-7). I say "at least"...

Ra to Return from WindRider Games

At the 2016 GAMA Trade Show, Asmodee North America CEO Christian T. Petersen ran through a long history of the game industry from a publisher's perspective, all to lay out why ANA is adopting the...

Links: Hippodice Winners for 2016, Stinging Criticism & Escape Room History

• The winners of the 2016 Hippodice game design competition have been announced, with Fabio Lopiano taking first place for Calimala, Veli-Matti Saarinen second for Sapa Inca, and Sean Rumble...

New Game Round-up: Get Clowns Dirty, Welcome More Thunderbirds, and Refight Dixie: Gettysburg

• Clown Standoff is a tiny game from designer Ludovic Barbe and publisher Artipia Games that reimplements Barbe's 2013 Pan T'es Mort (although the games seem identical to me, so I'm not sure...

New Game Round-up: Small Titles from Cool Mini Or Not, New Master Prints from Quined, and Smitten by Schotten Totten

• Perhaps in a nod to Steve Jackson Games' long-running practice of publishing an annual stakeholders report, Cool Mini Or Not has published its own "letter to stakeholders for 2015", noting...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Lovable Rogues and Expanding Universes

• Although the first release from Action Phase Games was a big-box release with a $65 MSRP, since then it's been quickly building a library of SBBF (small box, big fun) titles, including...

Links: Researching the Past, Sabotaging the Present, and Pricing Games for a Successful Future

• Randy Hoyt from Foxtrot Games details why a game's MSRP should be five times the cost of the game and why violating this rule could jeopardize the future of your publishing efforts. An...

Robo Rally Returning from Hasbro in 2016

1995, 2005 & 2016 modelsHasbro has announced that it will release a new version of Richard Garfield's RoboRally on August 1, 2016. (Note that the press release refers to "Robo Rally", and I'm...

New Game Round-up: Fighting with Naruto, Flooding with Slime, and Freezing with Zombies

• Naruto Shippuden: The Board Game from designers Nicolas Badoux and Cyril Marchiol debuted at the Cannes game fair in February 2016, and now Japanime Games has announced a deal with French...

Stronghold Games on Bear Valley, Stellar Conflict, and Working with Publishing Partners

• Unlike at Spielwarenmesse, at NY Toy Fair I record only a few videos because (1) I'm on my own, which makes it tougher to record things, (2) publishers at the fair tend to focus on...

Game Preview: Loot N Run, or Desecrating Pyramids for Fun and Profit

Explorers entering a pyramid is an adventure trope that appears over and over again in books, movies, and games, and now designer/publisher Christian Lemay of Masked Scorpion has taken his own...

New Game Round-up: Lifting a Flagon with the Engelsteins, Fighting for Power in Tallinn, and Crossing Streets in Japan

• Stronghold Games has a reputation for publishing serious games, at least in my mind, but the company has also released wackier stuff such as 2013's Going, Going, GONE! With that in mind,...

New Game Round-up: Stefan Feld Consults the Oracle, Aaron Haag Scores an A, and Faidutti and Lang Want to See Your Hands

• Game developer/publisher Ralph Bruhn of Hall Games has dropped details of Stefan Feld's next big new release, The Oracle of Delphi, with Bruhn noting that the title is intended for an October...

New Game Round-up: Becoming a True Messiah, Opening Someone's Head, and Noshing on Marie Antoinette's Leftovers

• Osprey Games debuted in 2015 with The King Is Dead, a new version of Peer Sylvester's King of Siam, and in August 2016 it will release the original Peer Sylvester title Let Them Eat Cake,...

Bézier Games Founds New Colony in the Future

It might be early to start cranking out the Spiel 2016 announcements, but Ted Alspach at Bézier Games apparently feels the time is right as he's dropped word of his big release for October 2016:...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Tiny Games in a Post-Apocalyptic World Built on Too Many Bones

• In 2015, designer/publisher Chris Handy of Perplext released eight tiny games that took up less space that one copy of a pocket game from most other publishers. Now Handy is back with Pack O...

Links: Publisher Get-Togethers, Games in Mainstream News, and Bandsaw Catan

• Okay, this is old news — something that took place while I was in Germany — but worth noting anyway: On January 29, 2016, Cool Mini Or Not announced that it had "secured US$5.3 million...

Cartoons, Comics, Cake, Cards, Cryptomium and Kitsch from Cryptozoic Entertainment

I attended two trade fairs at the start of 2016 to survey games coming from publishers located all over the world, including Cryptozoic Entertainment, which has now released more images and...

Ares Games Welcomes Campers, Conspirators, Dungeon Explorers, and Psychopaths

• The 2014 card game Stay Away! from designers Antonio Ferrara and Sebastiano Fiorillo took inspiration from the classic horror movie "The Thing", with players working together to eliminate a...

Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Dragon Ball Z Are Coming to the Game Table in 2017

In the category of "news I overlooked because I'm clueless about video games", a trio of miniatures titles is coming from Jasco Games in 2017 — Street Fighter: The Miniatures Game, Mortal...

New Game Round-up: Hunting Treasure with The Goonies, Revisiting Vanuatu, and Crafting Cards in Mystic Vale

• We've already seen 1980s nostalgia at work in the excitement expressed for Ben Pinchback and Matt Riddle's Back to the Future: An Adventure Through Time, which is coming from IDW Games and...

New Games at Cannes 2016: Forging Dice, Raiding Tombs, Fighting Meeples, and Saving the President

Let's continue my coverage from afar of the Festival International des Jeux, the annual game convention in Cannes, France that ran Feb. 26-28, 2016.Libellud had probably the best game fair that a...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Immersion, Subversion, and New Versions

• When I was just a kid, I spent a lot of evenings with my dad working on 3D puzzles of famous landmarks like Big Ben, the Taj Mahal, and Mount Rushmore. That memory was the first thing that...

New Games at Cannes 2016: More for The Grizzled, New Looks for Tikal and Amun-Re, and New Kimonos for the Emperor

Believe it or not, I am not at the Festival International des Jeux, the annual game convention in Cannes, France. I'm hitting most of other large conventions in 2016, but I still haven't made it...

New Game Round-up: Rosenberg Returns to the Moor, Ronin Move to the U.S., and Tyrants Become Epic

• After working with Uwe Rosenberg on the Viticulture Essential Edition, designer Jamey Stegmaier asked him whether he'd be interested in making a few visitor cards. In Stegmaier's words:...

Game Preview: Quadropolis, or Building Blocks One Tile at a Time

Memory is a funny thing. While recording an overview of François Gandon's city-building game Quadropolis — which debuts from Days of Wonder at the game festival in Cannes at the end of...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Exploring the Past in All Eras, and Adventuring in Lands Old and New

• Let's start this round of crowdfunding projects with a glance toward Evolution: Climate, a standalone design from North Star Games that features a mammoth(?) standing alone. BGG recorded an...