Board Game News

New Game Round-up: Practice Clacks on Discworld, Teach Youngsters to Grow Beans & Discover Factions to Smash Up

• Designers Leonard Boyd and David Brashaw from Backspindle Games are taking preorders for Clacks: A Discworld Board Game, with the game scheduled to debut at the Irish Discworld Convention in...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Cars, Cows, Goats, and Xenon, Master of the Automotive Ruminants

Hi there. After the ridiculousness of February and March 2015 – I think I backed, like, six projects – I did not pay attention to Kickstarter much in April. By the time I write another one of...

Settle Atlantis, Then Watch It Sink with Portal Games

Portal Games has announced that an expansion for Imperial Settlers will debut at Gen Con 2015, adding the long-awaited fifth faction to the game. Imperial Settlers: Atlanteans allows players to...

Tokyo Game Market • May 2015 I: No Rest for the Restless

Whenever I visit a large city, especially one outside the United States, I want to walk it. I want to absorb all that I can about the landscape around me, not launching myself from one tourist...

Live-ish Coverage of Tokyo Game Market, May 2015

I'm headed to Tokyo Game Market in a couple of hours, and while I wish I could say that I'm well-prepared for the show, I have no idea what to expect beyond a whirlwind of hundreds of games being...

Making Games Look as Good as They Play

(Editor's note: This article first appeared on BoardgameNews.com on Dec. 29, 2008. My apologies for the watermarks on the images, but these are the only versions that I still have. Thanks to Paul...

New Game Round-up: Crysis Reborn, Traps from Bellinger & More Baseball Highlights from 2045

• Time to clean house a bit with announcements from a handful of different publishers, starting with the news that Sebastian Kreutz and Dominik Lau, the designers of Crysis Analogue Edition:...

Survive in Space, Survive with Dolphins and Survive Preorders from Stronghold Games

• U.S. publisher Stronghold Games has declared 2015 "The Year of Survive!", but I strongly suspect — and this might just be me talking through my hat but hear me out — that the declaration...

Battling Pirates of the 7 Seas from IDW/Pandasaurus and Portal Games

Pirates are like nitrogen these days, dancing through the air around you and eager to get in your lungs, despite not being good for your health. Witness the announcement from IDW Games and...

Crowdfunding Round-up: Adventuring with Orcs, Metagaming with Cards & Not Sitting with Ducks

• Time for another runthrough of an unpalatably large number of games undergoing crowdfunding at the moment, starting with the biggest boss in the room: Apocrypha Adventure Card Game from...

Roll onto the Seas with Ignacy Trzewiczek and Portal Games

Portal Games has already announced one new release for Gen Con 2015 with Tides of Time, and now it's launched another title toward a debut in Indianapolis with Rattle, Battle, Grab the Loot, a...

A New Launch for Mission: Red Planet from Fantasy Flight

In a March 2014 BGG News post, I included two images of Mission: Red Planet, one from co-designer Bruno Cathala and another (now missing) from co-designer Bruno Faidutti, but with elements in the...

New Game Round-up: Building in Antiquity, Solving Murders in a Dream & Fighting in the Soviet Union

• Here we go again? One of the many titles that Asmodee is bringing to market in 2015 in its role as distributor (and sometime publisher) is The Builders: Antiquity from designer Frédéric...

New Game Round-up: Experience Another Revolution for Junta, Dream of Being a Food Chain Magnate & Colonize with Dice for the Galaxy

• The publication history of Junta from designers Eric Goldberg, Ben Grossman and Vincent Tsao feels like a mini-lesson in the nature of juntas themselves, with the publisher name and graphic...

Links: Nominations for the Origins Awards and Dice Tower Awards, Card Smooshing & More

• Nominations have dropped for the 2015 Origins Awards, and arguments about which games have been overlooked or unjustly elevated are already underway. Here are the nominees from a few of the...

Designer Diary: Temple of Elemental Evil, or Crafting the Story of the New D&D Adventure System Game II

Dungeons & Dragons: Temple of Elemental Evil Board Game is the first major board game I've worked on in my career. Fortunately, I got to work with Peter Lee, who has been on the design team for...

Convention Preview for Tokyo Game Market • May 2015

Game Market takes place in Tokyo on May 5, 2015 — two weeks from the date of this post — and BoardGameGeek will have a presence at the show in the form of me running around to grab whatever...

Five Tribes Welcomes a Sixth Thanks to The Artisans of Naqala

Not long after Days of Wonder announced the replacement of slave cards in Bruno Cathala's Five Tribes with fakir cards, the publisher has announced an expansion for the game — the first...

Designer Diary: Temple of Elemental Evil, or Crafting the Story of the New D&D Adventure System Game I

I like everything I do to be an improvement on what I've done before. That means I study a lot, and often in directions that don't immediately apply to board games. For Dungeons & Dragons: Temple...

New Game Round-up: Predators in the Upper Deck, Horses Near the Train & A Prince Among the Stars

• Jason Brenner from Upper Deck Entertainment has released more details of Legendary Encounters: A Predator Deck Building Game, notably that the game is based on the first two Predator films,...

Designer Diary: Social Deduction Nirvana with One Night Resistance

 First off, One Night Resistance isn't a knock off of either One Night Ultimate Werewolf or The Resistance. It's a totally different game that stands on its own.If you love The Resistance,...

Links: How Not to Name Your Game, Why We Won't Back Your Crowdfunded Game & More

• On the Hyperbole Games site, designer Grant Rodiek laments past choices on the name of Hocus Poker and offers advice for other designers:Quote:Despite it being a key component of our origin...

Kevin Wilson Invites You to Be Awesome in His Kingdom

Mock-up coverEven with many other games already announced as forthcoming in 2015 — including designs based on Orphan Black and The Godfather — the publishing partnership of IDW Games and...

Game Overview: Ascension: Dawn of Champions, or (I Can't Get No) Matching Factions

Ascension debuted in 2010 as part of the first wave of deck-building games in the wake of Dominion's ground-shifting onslaught on the gaming public, with Thunderstone (Dominion in a dungeon),...

Upcoming Games Teased at the 2015 Gathering of Friends

For those who don't know, the Gathering of Friends is an invite-only game convention that designer Alan R. Moon started in 1990, and while the convention was indeed a gathering of friends when it...

Links: Legal Trouble for Cards Against Humanity, Thirty Years of Knizia & Haiku Winners

• On Bangor Daily News, Abigail Curtis reports on apparent zoning violations by the owners of Cards Against Humanity for "installation of a platform, shed and safe within 22 feet of the...

Days of Wonder Lays the Groundwork for City Mania

City-building is a common theme for game designers and publishers, and it's easy to see why: Due to their familiarity with the subject matter through its omnipresence in the world, players can...

Time Stories Is Waiting in the Wings

I've talked about Manuel Rozoy's Time Stories a lot since October 2012 — including four published previews — and during that time the publisher has changed from GameWorks to Space Cowboys....

Tides of Time to Flow from Portal Games

When you think of Portal Games, grandiose game designs tend to come to mind such as Neuroshima Hex! and Stronghold, Robinson Crusoe: Adventure on the Cursed Island and Legacy: The Testament of...

Alspach and Worthington Unleash One Night Resistance

 You know which game is super popular and has fans that constantly rave about its wonderfulness? Don Eskridge's The Resistance. You know another game that fits this same description? One...