Board Game News

New Game Round-up: Avoid a Cat, Stretch the Animals, and Clear Your Name

• Have you seen Simon Tofield's animated shorts of Simon's Cat on YouTube? I have not, but millions of others have, including Samuel Mitschke and Randy Scheunemann from Steve Jackson Games, who...

Links: Efficient Production, Forgotten Games & Better Terminology

 • On League of Gamemakers, designer/publisher Christian Strain gives examples of how to design "board games efficiently for cost". An excerpt:Quote:Every punchboard component for every...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Is Big Plastic Lying to You About the Addictive Properties of Minis?

• It's been three years since a trio of ex-BioWare video game developers ran a KS campaign for The Banner Saga, an award-winning RPG set in Viking culture. The game's now made the leap to...

Game Preview: Glaisher, or Parting Hex By The Numbers

At Tokyo Game Market in May 2015, I was introduced to many Japanese designers, publishers, and other game industry folks by Ken Shoda, who served as both guide and translator. I had met Ken at...

Links: Don't Hate the Player or the Game, The Five Stages of Grief, and Eurogames on the Couch

• Designer Kelsey Domeny explains why gamers should stop hating on Monopoly:Quote:I think we gamers and game designers can jump too quickly to scoffing at mainstream games. But we owe a lot to...

BGG.CON 2015 Announcements: Stronghold Games Picks Up Villages; Split Second Welcomes Patient Zero

• On the opening day of BGG.CON 2015, two U.S. publishers have announced new additions to their game lines, with Stronghold Games having picked up the Village series of games from Inka and...

Game Preview: MountTen, or Nude Bears Descending a Numerical Staircase

As a preview for Tokyo Game Market, which opens on Nov. 22, 2015 and which I'm covering for BGG, let's take a look at Yoshihisa Itsubaki's MountTen from publisher/retailer Ten Days Games, which...

Tokyo Game Market Nov. 2015: Visiting Yellow Submarine

Tokyo Game Market takes place on Nov. 22, 2015, and my family and I have arrived in Tokyo a week early in order to get adjusted and tour the area before attending the show. (I'm writing this post...

Designer Diary: Ticket to Ride Map Collection – United Kingdom & Pennsylvania

In 2013/2014, I designed several Ticket to Ride maps that I hoped would be the new products for 2015 and maybe 2016. I know it's a tease, but I can't tell you much about them except to say the...

Designer Diary: One Night Ultimate Vampire

Back in the Day...After Daybreak (the standalone expansion to One Night Ultimate Werewolf) was completed in mid-2014, I figured that I was done with the One Night series for a while as the base...

Links: Modern Games in the Media, Ideas for the Stealing, and Authors Honored by Dau Barcelona

• Owen Duffy has been writing about board games for sometime on The Guardian, and one of his most recent articles covers the happenings at Spiel 2015 for a mainstream audience:Quote:For over...

Designer Diary: The Unsung Heroes of Healthy Heart Hospital

The year was 2007, and Pandemic had hit the streets like a bull in a china shop. As a game designer does when they enjoy a game, they try to make their own of a similar genre as if it is a...

New Game Round-up: Three from AEG — Goblins Get Greedy, Birds Get Flighty & Animals Get Eaten

• Alderac Entertainment Group has released details of three forthcoming titles, with one of them being Richard Garfield's second goblin-related title in a row, the first being Treasure Hunter...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Attacking Two-Player Abstracts, Rolling A Characteristic Victory, and Delivering Us Cave Evil

I normally post crowdfunding round-ups on Sundays, but I'm hitting the road soon for another trip and since in the past I've seen c.f. campaigns cancelled between the time I scheduled a post and...

New Game Round-up: More Mythic Battles and More Marvel Games from Upper Deck and WizKids

• Wow, I've missed a lot during my post-Spiel recovery period, such as the announcement of a reboot of Benoit Vogt's Mythic Battles, a two-player combat game between armies in mythic Greece...

New Game Round-up: Pyramids Rebuilt, Zombies Return & Cold War Covertly Revisited

• Looney Labs will release Pyramid Arcade, a new "Looney Pyramids" compilation of games, in 2016. This collection of 22 games, most of them from Pyramids creator Andy Looney, will include...

Spiel 2015: Reiner Knizia on Thirty Years of Game Design

BGG recorded more than two hundred game demonstration videos at Spiel 2015, and while I'm glad that we were able to cover so many different titles in so little time — with dozens of videos...

Crowdfunding Round-up: The Sands of Time, They Are A-Runnin'

• I spent a not inconsiderable chunk of my Saturdays as a child sequestered in the local library poring over dinosaur encyclopedias. Thanks to designer Scott Almes, folks like me — whose...

Spiel 2015 XXII: Watson & Holmes, Big Brain Bang, Midmoon, Evolution, Ekö, & Swords and Bagpipes

• The deduction game Watson & Holmes from Jesús Torres Castro and Ludonova was a quiet sell-out at Spiel 2015; I didn't hear that many people mentioning the game, but those who did seemed...

Spiel 2015 XXI: Tales from Taiwan — Joraku, Burano, Dadaocheng, Kitty Paw, Falling Coin, and Runes & Ruin

• Taiwan Boardgame Design (TBD) works along the lines of Japon Brand by representing a number of self-publishers and helping them to have more of a presence than if everyone went off on their...

The Ravens of Thri Sahashri to Return from Osprey Games

Osprey Games has announced that it will release a new edition of Kuro's self-published two-player cooperative game The Ravens of Thri Sahashri, with this item being scheduled for a May 2016...

Spiel 2015 XX: Not-So-Ancient Greece Edition — Project: ELITE, Amphipolis, Crazy Bullets, Mess Machine, OMG, Sing it!, Oath of the Brotherhood & The Pursuit of Happiness

 • "We begin each round by spawning aliens on the board." That phrase tells you a lot about Project: ELITE from Konstantinos Kokkinis and Sotirios Tsantilas, which was co-published by...

New Game Round-up: 7th Sea Sails to New Owner, Tak Comes to Life & New Battles in the Horus Heresy

• U.S. publisher Alderac Entertainment Group has sold the publication rights for its 7th Sea game line to John Wick Presents, John Wick being "part of the original AEG development crew",...

Conquer the Galaxy — Or Liberate It — in Star Wars: Rebellion

U.S. publisher Fantasy Flight Games has already given gamers plenty of options for playing in the Star Wars universe, from card games (Star Wars: The Card Game) to miniature games (Star Wars:...

Spiel 2015 XIX: Food Chain Magnate, Poseidon's Kingdom, Area 1851, Crabz, Dr. Eureka, Poulettes & King's Forge: Apprentices

• A new title from Splotter Spellen at Spiel is always a highly anticipated event, and Food Chain Magnate from Jeroen Doumen and Joris Wiersinga was teased in advance at the Gathering of...

Spiel 2015 XVIII: Japon Brand Blitz II — Minerva, My Fair Princess, Vanquish Sky, Air Alliance, Village of Familiar & More

• Hisashi Hayashi's Minerva from OKAZU Brand is a puzzley tile-laying game that has you managing money in order to afford the tiles you want, then trying to line them up in the right way so...

Launching the Nov. 2015 Tokyo Game Market Preview

Many gamers on this site are prepping for BGG.CON 2015, which starts in just over two weeks with more than two thousand people signed up to play games over five days on Nov. 18-22, but not...

Spiel 2015 XVII: Japon Brand Blitz — Sheep & Thief, Eight Epics, Vampire Radar, Tank Hunter & More

• Japon Brand brings a wide variety of games to Spiel each year from many Japanese designers/self-publishers, and while I've covered a number of those titles in previews on BGG News, I was...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Fleets Abound, Dr. Lucky Is Eternal, and Colorful Fleas Also Persist

• New games fly on and off the shelves with barely a pause these days, with any game older than a few months seemingly past its sell-by date, but that's simply because we BGGers are in our own...

How to Pack Games at Spiel: An Introductory Lesson

Let's take a breather from the game demonstration videos that BGG recorded at Spiel 2015 — dozens more still to come! — to present that convention from another angle, namely the one in which...