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The Melodies Under the Leaves Came From the Citadels Duel Over Tea & Rum

boardgamersteph — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 17:00:01 +0000

[imageid=8636789 medium rep]▪️ Under the Leaves is now available from Grand Gamers Guild. From designers Trevor Benjamin (War Chest) and Brett J. Gilbert (The Guild of Merchant Explorers). A new charming world to discover with pattern buildings and tile-placement. Under the Leaves plays 2-4 players in 25-40 minutes. You can also play it now on BGA, if you just wanted to check it out.

From BGG:

If we are able to maintain the health and diversity of our garden, then it will fill up with life and become a refuge for fascinating creatures. Hummingbirds and bees are the first to arrive, filling the air with color and movement, but if we stop and observe with more attention, we will discover a hidden and unknown world: tiny inhabitants abound in the mushrooms, puddles, and foliage. They are under our feet, living out their lives without being perceived...until we decide to look under the leaves.

Each turn in Under the Leaves is played in two phases: the placement of a garden tile, then the possible arrival of new beings. Whoever gets the most pieces in total wins.

]]>▪️ Citadels Duel is a new release Z-Man Games & asmodee. From the Designers Guillaume Montiage (Kemet) and Manuel Rozoy (T.I.M.E Stories). Based on the classic Citadels, this is a reimagined game for 2 players and plays in 30 minutes.

From the asmodee website:

Scheme Your Way to Victory! Vie for control of the city in Citadels Duel, a strategy and deduction game for two players. Sway the council, build new districts, and utilize unique character powers to stay one step ahead of your opponent in this two-player version of the award-winning classic.

BUILT FOR TWO PLAYERS: Designed exclusively for head-to-head play, Citadels Duel delivers tense strategy, bluffing, and tactical choices in every match.
SCHEME & OUTTHINK YOUR RIVAL: Use clever deduction and timing to predict your opponent’s moves, disrupt their plans, and seize control of the city.
ICONIC CHARACTER POWERS: Sway the council by selecting characters with unique abilities, creating powerful combos and mind-game moments each round.
FAST, TACTICAL CITY BUILDING: Construct districts, manage resources, and adapt your strategy as the city grows—every decision matters in this streamlined duel format.
CLASSIC FEEL, MODERN TWIST: A refined two-player adaptation of the award-winning Citadels, offering high replayability and deep strategy in a compact experience.

]]>▪️ Melodies is a new release from Next Move Games & asmodee. From the designer of Decrypto, Thomas Dagenais-Lespérance. If you enjoy games like The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, this is similar in that it is a cooperative, campaign-driven game where you work through boxes and games together. A hand management game that will rock 2-5 players in 30 minutes.

From BGG:

Melodies is a cooperative card game in which players form a band and complete songs by playing cards from their hand.

Each turn, every player plays one or more cards or passes. The most played value becomes the Melody for that note and must follow the song's progression. A song is completed only when all notes are played correctly, and all players have emptied their hands.

Communication is limited: the group can discuss strategy but never reveal their cards or intended actions.

From Mom's Garage to the biggest stages, each new venue introduces new rules, instruments, audience members, and challenges that reshape the way the group plays together.

]]>▪️ Tea & Rum is a new release from Captain Games SRL. From the designer of Turing Machine, Fabien Gridel. This is a worker-placement game for 2-4 players and plays in 60-120 minutes.

From BGG:

In Tea & Rum, strive for victory by serving the Crown or by becoming the greatest King of Pirates!

Within 5 rounds, upgrade your resources and carefully place and unplace your workers to fulfill your ambitions.

Will you prove your allegiance to the Crown, or will you join the rebellion and rule the seas? Be careful to keep your intentions hidden: angering the Crown or the people could compromise your chances.

At the end of the game, only two players will win the game… and two will be defeated.

Illustrator Avenue: Villő Farkas, Mindclash Games

whenindoubteatout — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 07:00:01 +0000

by Justin Bell

Welcome back to Illustrator Avenue! In this edition, I spoke with Villő Farkas, the Art Director, Graphic Designer and Project Manager at Mindclash Games, the publisher of both casual and serious Eurogame titles such as Anachrony, Emberheart (via the more casual Mindclash Play line) and Voidfall.

Villő and I first met a couple years ago, and I’ve had the chance to spend time with Villő and the rest of the Mindclash team during a visit to their offices in Budapest last year.

Enjoy! And if you like this series and/or are an illustrator or graphic designer, please reach out. I’d love to chat about future features in this series.

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Justin Bell (JB): Villő! It’s always a pleasure. I’ve gotten to know you a little bit over the last few years but for the benefit of our audience, let’s learn more about you. When did you join Mindclash, and what were you doing before you joined the team there?

Villő Farkas (VF): 38 years ago...just kidding. In a nutshell, I have loved drawing since I was a child, as most of us did at that age :) but I continued diligently and during my high school years it became clear that I wanted to pursue further studies in the field of the arts. It's worth noting that, back then, I never would have imagined that I would one day become a board game artist. :) I graduated from Applied Arts Institute as a graphic designer in Sopron (Hungary) in 2012. During my final year of college, I interned at an advertising agency called Café Design (a division of Café Communications in Budapest), and I continued working there. I learned a great deal here about graphic design for advertising and useful tips for using Adobe programs, which is why I always look back fondly on my first job and the mentors I worked with. They were the ones who encouraged me to start working in digital illustration, and they were the ones who gave me my first Wacom tablet too (digital drawing tablet). I have gone through quite a few of them since then.

I joined Mindclash Games more than 12 years ago, no this is not true. :) I was already there back then when we became a publisher. One fine day around spring 2014, together with our former co-owner, Richard Ámann and our current CEO, Viktor Peter, we decided to quit our jobs (I know Ricsi from Café Communications) and devoted a year to developing and designing our first board game. In the fall of that year, I visited SPIEL Essen for the first time in my life. (Europe’s largest board game expo is held there every year). Yes, we went there by car approximately 1100 km and yes we brought all our equipment and our good spirits. The entire event and the industry as a whole made a deep impression on us, and we made an impression on them as well. (See the photo below of our first booth.) I remember that even Tom Vasel stopped by to check out what this game was all about. After that experience, it became clear that this was what we wanted to focus on in the future. Following our successful Kickstarter campaign in January 2015 for the game Trickerion: Legends of Illusion, we had no doubts left: we wanted to start our own publishing company - and the rest is history.

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JB: I first fell in love with your work, like many players, with Trickerion. The worldbuilding is part of why Mindclash has so many fans today, but it all began with Trickerion. What are some of your earliest memories about helping to create things like the board, the portraits of each magician, and the challenges of that first project?

VF: I know this interview is supposed to be about me, but I don't want to take credit away from anyone else - we really did create the world of Trickerion together with Ricsi and several other illustrators (Gergő Ádám, Csilla Biró, László Fejes, Márton Gyula Kiss, Attila Sáfrány, Ágnes Staudt), and the truth is, I’m at my best when I’m working as part of a team; I couldn’t be further from the lone-wolf artist archetype.

So how did I feel when I started working on Trickerion? I immediately realized I was taking on a rather ambitious project, but at the same time, it was incredibly exciting, and I wasn't alone. Perhaps other board game artists would agree that designing an entire board game - everything that fits in the box and the box itself - is an extremely complex graphic and artistic undertaking. Every element of the game is interconnected, and if I do my job well, I feel like a conductor who maintains harmony among all the game components and provides the audience with a lasting gaming experience - and that’s why I’ve always loved working on board games, especially in my role as an art director. Back then, we were perhaps among the first development teams (we weren't a publisher yet) dedicated to creating the rich worlds of Euro-style board games - and that has remained our trademark ever since. I can’t even imagine it being any other way. :)

How does it work? In our design process, world-building has been closely intertwined with the core of the game mechanics from the very beginning. In fact, the theme itself inspired this game; all three of us were deeply influenced by Christopher Nolan’s film The Prestige. And the guys started building the entire game mechanism around the theme of stage magic. (If you are interested in the whole game design process, you can read about it here). Then, at some point in the process, the third area - graphic design - comes into play. Yes, I know, we'll get to illustrations soon, too. For example: How big can the cards be? What components need to fit on them? Do cards need to fit on the main board? How can we help players remember the rules when they sit around the table? And many other important questions. I usually design user interfaces, game branding and icons at the same time, and I really enjoy using the icons to develop the game's unique language, but Ian O'Toole remains the uncrowned king of this genre. I typically say that if I can't express a certain “action” using our icon system, then perhaps that “action” still needs to be developed - much to the delight of our game designers. These three fields (world building, game design, graphic design) influence one another, shaping the game’s final form and its individual elements.

We've finally gotten to the illustration of the main board. This is the part of the game where I can best show the fantasy world we’ve built: The tale of Dahlgaard the Magnificent is entwined with Magoria, a sleepy town at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. I wanted players to feel, while playing, as if they’d been transported to a bustling city, and the user interface is an integral part of the overall design. I collected a lot of old photos of Victorian-era buildings for inspiration to draw the city, as well as photos of strange early 20th-century machines, which I also used to design the cityscape. So, when you place your worker (I have forgotten to mention but this is a worker placement game :)) to the “Downtown” space, you’re actually stepping there in the game world. That’s why I didn’t choose the usual bird’s-eye or isometric view for the cityscape, but rather a one-point perspective where you can see the details of the building façades and the people in the city.

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Even on the illustration created for the first edition, there are countless tiny details to discover while playing; in fact, if you look at both sides of the board, you can see the town is a little bit different - for example the renovation of “The Magnus Pantheon” is being completed and “Dark Alley” location is available with the fortune teller, and with her new mechanics were added to the base game.

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The biggest challenge was representing three theaters in the middle of town with just one enlarged Theater location on the board. The user interface also had to show which magician would headline at each theater and when, how magicians could appear in one another’s performances, and how everything would be scored. As I explain it now, the memories come flooding back. Whatever solution we considered, players still needed to use a little imagination and accept some abstraction.

As a first step, I tried to set this location slightly apart from the rest of the game board, so I changed the viewpoint to make it seem as if we were a spider sitting on the ceiling, watching what’s happening behind the scenes of a performance. We can see the audience, which also serves as a scoring scale, while a performance is currently taking place on stage; meanwhile, the crew (specialists) is working behind the scenes. Using the user interface, you can find out which magician is performing on which day over the weekend, and the various performance cards (not part of the main board) show you the actual theater along with the show’s schedule, where you can perform alongside others as the lead magician. If you’ve played the game before, you know the rules are more complicated than that, but I won’t go into any more detail here.

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To be honest, my career in character design came to a complete halt after Trickerion. I really enjoyed this aspect of illustration as well, but I focused more on developing other aspects of my skills. The reason I’m still attached to the character illustrations from the first edition is that I had the opportunity to sneak us - the creators - and those close to us into this world. I have to admit that I use photographs as a basis for character design, but not just any photos - we held special photo shoots to capture the best poses and take pictures of anything that even remotely resembled the outfits we’d envisioned.

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And finally I’d like to share an interesting detail about character design. In this fantasy world we’ve created, we set the rules - and while many things in the game don’t correspond to reality, the characters do. Even in the early 20th century, there were already female magicians and magicians from other ethnic groups. Now you’re probably wondering how I know about people from the Yoruba tribe. Through my dear friend Emőke, who served as the model for none other than the fortune-teller character. Regardless, the effort to ensure that everyone is represented has remained an important mission of ours ever since.

JB: It was fun to visit the Mindclash office to see what kinds of games all of you play during breaks in the work day. Outside of work, what types of games do you like to play? Maybe more importantly, how often do you find the time to play games? What do your playgroups look like? And what is your all-time favorite title?

VF: I have to admit that in real life, I’m not much of a board game player. I usually play with coworkers - Robin and Soma Gál always manage to find a game I’m happy to sit down and play. I love designing mind-bending strategy games, but I only like to play ones that are visually appealing, where world-building plays a major role, and where there’s someone to explain the rules. Usually, one of those three conditions isn’t met. Mindclash has ruined my taste forever. That’s why I prefer games like Harmonies, Azul and Hitster - my own group of friends tends to be more casual gamers, too.

JB: Who are some of your favorite tabletop artists? How about your favorite graphic design and UI work in the industry? I love learning more about what work other artists admire from afar.

VF: It’s not hard to guess that I’m a fan of Ian’s work; I look up to him for his expertise in both illustration and graphic design, but I don’t want to write about famous board game artists right now. I’d like to highlight that here at Mindclash Games, we have two amazing graphic designers, Atesz Kerek and Albert Bochnert, without whom we wouldn’t have so many beautiful games. I know that most of the time, it’s the illustrators who get the recognition, or artists who excel in multiple fields. But a beautiful illustration is worth nothing if the rest of the game’s graphics aren’t well-designed. When a board game’s graphic design works well, the UI almost disappears into the experience while making the game easier to play.

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JB: Let’s talk about a new project that you recently finished. With the release of Courtroom: The Noir Trilogy, I’m still quite surprised that Mindclash released a game based on a real-life period and not another fantasy world like the ones your teams created for projects like Cerebria: The Inside World and Ironwood. How much of the final game’s art is yours? What kinds of items are illustrated here? I’m curious about the scope of the work you completed for this project, and how long it took to finalize.

Walk us through some of the images from Courtroom, especially if there are a few that you are particularly proud of. How did this go from concept to what it looks like in the game’s final production?

VF: I’d like to put this game into context. A few years ago, we launched a sub-brand called Mindclash Play, which brings smart but less complex games to the retail market, and Courtroom is our fourth game. World-building plays a key role here as well, along with the visuals, but we’d like to reach new audiences with these games. Courtroom is a competitive, team-based investigation game where the case has no predetermined solution. Players pick a side - Defense or Prosecution - look for clues that support their side of the story, build a stronger case than the opposing team, and aim for victory!

Although I really love creating fictional worlds, it was a great experience to work within the framework of a specific historical period - though it was also more challenging. Robin Hegedűs and Tünde Máté, the two designers, put a tremendous amount of research into ensuring that the details of the stories were completely accurate. In a fictional world, any rule is possible, and with this type of game, it’s important to think in terms of that specific era. That was one of the reasons we chose a real historical era, but we made sure to list fictional companies and change the addresses of the official agencies.

I don’t consider any of our games to be entirely my own creation, and Courtroom is no exception. It’s the result of four people working together. Tünde and Robin shared what they had found in their research, and the three of us discussed it at length. I then looked further into the details of everyday life in that era.

What everyday items were in style back then, and what kinds of cars did people drive? Was the 911 emergency number in use in New York in 1936? I’ll let you in on a secret: not yet. In the meantime Barbara Bernát, our character illustrator, worked with Robin to research the clothing and hairstyles of the era, and she drew the witnesses based on that research. I took it a step further. I researched what fonts were in use at the time, what newspaper front pages, receipts, business cards, movie posters, official documents, and black-and-white crime scene photos looked like. And based on the information I gathered, I designed every single detail of the evidence cards. Although Art Deco was the popular style of the era, I used it mainly in the box design and not so prominently on the components. While I personally adore film noir aesthetics, we restricted that specific visual flair strictly to the black-and-white photography elements. I wanted players to feel as if they were stepping into a time capsule when they opened the case envelope. It would be nice to see them all at once, wouldn’t it? I’m very sorry, but I can only show a few details without spoiling the rest of the gaming experience.

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I worked on this project from August of last year through May of this year. There were some intense periods, but I think my craziest idea was the following: In one case, the suspect was a female painter, and I didn’t want to use an actual painting, so I spent 2 weekends stepping into the character’s shoes and created three surrealist images digitally. Robin liked them so much that he thought it wasn't enough for them to just appear on an Evidence card, so he came up with a separate mini-game called *The Postcard Mystery*.

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Unusually for me, the first step in the design process wasn’t the graphic design and illustration of the components - I always start with that and leave the box cover design for last. Yes, I know, most board game artists do it the other way around. So now I tried this path. I’m not giving away any big secrets, but this game should be viewed as part of a series, and the challenge was figuring out how to create a box cover design that would work with and tie together every member of the series, while still distinguishing them from one another. My solution was to use the statue of Justice as the central element, which is the same on all three covers, while the background illustration and logo are designed in a style appropriate to the respective era.

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As I began working on the sketch and continued painting the background illustration, I was even able to sneak in the iconic silhouettes of one or two skyscrapers from that era into the overall composition. One of my favorite discoveries during my research was that in 1936, they were still using the longer “Hollywoodland” sign. My latest project is always the one closest to my heart, but I really poured all my knowledge and love into this one.

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JB: One other question for you, since you have the same gaming headset that I have at home: are you also a regular video game player? What are some of your favorites?

VF: You're right - those are gaming headphones. I bought them so that when I had free time, I could play Horizon Zero Dawn on my PS4, but this year I've always ended up doing something else or just relaxing. Still, maybe it's time for me to return to that universe.

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A big thanks to Villő for spending some time answering my questions for this interview. Also, a big thanks to the Mindclash team for sharing some of the incredible imagery from their past and future catalog. You can check out the complete Mindclash catalog at https://mindclashgames.com/.

Are you an illustrator and/or graphic designer involved in the creation of images and iconography for the tabletop space? Please reach out! I’m building up a repository of people interested in contributing to this series. Just message me here on BGG and we’ll get to work. Thanks for reading!

Designer Diary: Kalypso

turbopix — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 15:00:01 +0000

by Gilles Turbide

]]>Origins
Hi, my name is Gilles, and I’m excited to share the story behind Kalypso, published by Inside Up Games.

The idea for Kalypso grew out of my lifelong connection with the ocean. Having grown up on an island, water has always been part of my identity, so the thought of building a floating city felt almost inevitable. Of course, the movie Waterworld left its mark on my imagination, but I wanted to steer the theme in a brighter, more optimistic direction—less diesel and grime, more greenery and hope. My vision leaned closer to Solarpunk or Ecopunk, where creativity and sustainability shape a better future.

From Notebooks to Prototypes
In the summer of 2020, my first sketches already hinted at what Kalypso might become: buildings, palisades, and resource tiles spread across a floating city.

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I’ve always kept notebooks for my ideas—sometimes it’s a mechanic, other times it’s just a theme that pops into my head. Over the years, I’ve filled nearly a dozen of them. They’re indispensable, because there’s no way I could remember every detail otherwise. And whenever I need inspiration, I can flip through the pages and instantly reconnect with old ideas waiting to be rediscovered.

Finding the Core Mechanic
In the earliest prototypes, floating buildings carried resources on their reverse side. When a player collected a tile, they first gained its resources from the supply, then flipped the tile to reveal a building that could be constructed if they had the right materials.

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It worked—but I’ve never been fond of games that rely on constant resource juggling: taking tokens from the supply when you gain them, only to put them back when you spend them. I wanted something cleaner, simpler, more elegant.

The breakthrough came when I asked myself: What if buildings were constructed directly on top of resource tiles? That single idea reshaped the game and gave it a clear identity. From there, two distinct tile types emerged: resource tiles (double-sided for flexibility) and building tiles (also double-sided, each offering different powers).

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Resources and Buildings
The game revolves around five types of resources, but I wanted plastic to feel undesirable. In the earliest versions, players lost points for every piece of plastic still visible at the end of the game. Even after I removed that penalty, plastic (red) remained the “bad” resource: unlike wood (yellow), rubber (black), seaweed (green), or metal (gray), it couldn’t be used to construct the four core building types.

Each building type required just one resource, making the rules easier to learn and the board state clearer. Since the game is played on a grid, constructing a building means forming a group of three matching resources in a 2x2 square, then placing the building tile on top. I also wanted Kalypso to be full of combos, so players would feel a sense of accomplishment every turn. The very first building I designed gave players an extra T-shaped tile with 5 resources to place immediately. Because that effect was powerful, I balanced it with a lower victory point value. In general, every building was designed with this tradeoff between power and points.

In the end, I settled on four main types of buildings: houses (yellow), workshops (gray), farms (green), and warehouses (black). The color of the building is also associated with the color of the resource required for that building. And since tiles are double-sided, I gave each building type two possible abilities, letting players choose which side to build.

Later, I introduced monuments—larger buildings that require a 3x3 area with at least five matching resources. Early versions also had oversized buildings for each type, but I streamlined everything into this single “big build.”

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Shaping the Tiles and Player Experience
During playtesting, I noticed that players often tried to “fill in” gaps as if they were playing Tetris. To break that predictable pattern, I switched to a more chaotic shape—the T-piece—which immediately gave the game its own character.

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I also wanted to eliminate downtime. Since the mechanics allowed it, I opted for simultaneous play. Combined with tile drafting, this created a lively dynamic: players would pass along less useful tiles to their neighbors, almost like dumping garbage. That imagery fit the theme perfectly and inspired the name of the shared drafting board—the “garbage vortex” that moves around the table.

In an early version of the game, players could send sharks to opponents each round, blocking certain spaces and forcing everyone to adapt while continuing to expand their floating city. Over the months of development, the shared objectives evolved as well. They shifted from a competitive race into a system where every player could pursue goals at their own pace, earning points only at the end if they succeeded.

Playtesting and Recognition
In the beginning, most of the testing took place within my circle of fellow designers, which we call the LAB. Because the game involved hundreds of tiles, online playtesting quickly became a lifesaver—it spared me from endless hours with an X-Acto knife and saved my arms from serious strain. Once I was confident in the results of the digital tests, though, there was no escaping it: I rolled up my sleeves and cut out hundreds of tiles for the physical prototype.

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By October 2021, I had a polished prototype ready to bring to public events around Québec City. The feedback was encouraging, so I entered two regional design contests. Kalypso became a finalist in one and won gold in the other.

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Buoyed by this success, I began pitching the game to publishers. In the fall of 2022, I reached out to several french companies, but received no positive responses. Winning contests is never a guarantee—every publisher has their own vision and priorities. I decided to try my luck in English instead, which meant translating all of my pitch materials, even though it isn’t my first language.

Signing with Inside Up Games
I only sent one email submission in English. My first step was to email Inside Up in early 2023. About a month later, they got back to me and suggested an online playtest. Over the following weeks, we ran several more sessions—I think Conor McGoey wanted full team approval before moving forward.

I’ll never forget my very first test with Conor. He was traveling through Europe with his family, and despite a long day of travel, he stayed up late to play Kalypso. It was around midnight, his family asleep, and there he was on his laptop, testing my game. At first, I wondered if it was really a good idea to play under those conditions, but Conor proved to be incredibly kind, generous, and enthusiastic.

Finally, in September 2023, the game was officially signed.

Small Tweaks, Big Impact
When Conor suggested adding a cooperative mode, I approached it cautiously. I didn’t want Kalypso to lose its identity or force players to relearn the game entirely—cooperative variants can sometimes feel like a completely different game. Fortunately, the team’s changes were subtle and thoughtful, refining the experience rather than overhauling it. The foundation I had built remained solid, and at its core, Kalypso was still the game I had envisioned from the start. I had experimented with a cooperative mode before, but I was never fully satisfied with it. Inside Up’s version, which even included a solo option, was far superior—streamlined, elegant, and much closer to what the game could truly be.

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Another major shift in the game was replacing the shark mechanic with Forecast cards. This change added a whole new layer of player interactivity, as each card introduced unique challenges that forced players to think strategically about how to build their floating city. Beyond the mechanical impact, the Forecast cards brought thematic richness to the game, introducing events that reflected environmental shifts and challenges in the world of Kalypso. They also greatly increased replayability, ensuring that no two games would ever feel exactly the same. I was immediately drawn to this new direction, as it brought both depth and narrative flavor to the gameplay in a way that the shark mechanic never could.

When it came to the look and feel of the game, the first glimpse I had was a teaser of the cover art. That alone was exciting, but seeing the full set of components later—the Forecast cards, the objectives, the tiles—was even more special. Amelia Sales’s illustrations bring the world of Kalypso to life in such a vibrant way. Every image reinforces the theme and makes the floating city feel real, colorful, and alive.

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A few months later, I learned that the team was working on a custom component designed to keep tiles from sliding around during play. It might sound like a small detail, but it really spoke to the level of care and craftsmanship Inside Up brings to their projects. That dedication reassured me that Kalypso was in the best possible hands.

After the success of the Kickstarter campaign last year, I’m really looking forward to seeing this game make its way into homes and stores. Thank you for following along with my journey in creating Kalypso. I hope you’ll find as much joy in building your own floating city as I did in designing it. Dive in, explore, and make the experience uniquely yours!

Gilles Turbide

From Greenwood to the Cosmos there was Harmony in the Chimerium

boardgamersteph — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 17:00:01 +0000

by Steph Hodge

[imageid=9564394 medium rep]▪️ Greenwood is now available from Capstone Games. from designers Christos Giannakoulas and Manolis Zachariadis, this is the next big box Euro game! This game plays 1-4 players in 40-160 minutes!

From the Capstone Website:

In Greenwood, you play as Primal Spirits and lead your companions to save Greenwood.

On each turn, you face the difficult decision of whether to use the abilities of your own companions, to use the abilities of other players’ companions, or to send one of your companions into the forest to improve your wayfinding and rescue mystical creatures.

In the advanced game, each clan has a unique ability – a small additional rule that has a major impact on the game. What makes this special is that players can use the unique ability of any clan currently in play, not just their own.

The game is played over the course of 3 nights, and whoever scored the most victory points wins.

]]>▪️ Chimerium is a new release coming in Q1 from Synapses Games. From the Designers of Encyclopedia & Museum, Eric Dubus and Olivier Melison. A new dice-drafting and area-control game. For 1-4 players and plays in 45-60 minutes

From BGG:

Chimerium is a dice management and area majority game that offers intense strategic depth in both competitive and solo modes.

During the game, players utilize their dice to Study creatures, Acquire Artifacts, or target specific locations in the Nexus to release their Chimeras.

Every choice influences your standing in the majorities—adapt your strategy, watch your opponents, and win the Guild’s favor.

]]>▪️ Cosmo is a new release from Helvetiq. Fromthe designer of Trio, 宮野華也 (Kaya Miyano). This is a new hand-management game to create the best poker hand! For 2-5 players and plays in 15-20 minutes.

From BGG:

Build your best poker hand by strategically recruiting the perfect crew for your Mission to Mars. Simply draw Cards from any of the six decks! The twist: Some of the players' cards are visible, others are hidden. Can you really be sure the others will end up with a better crew than you?! Once everyone has five cards, it’s time to shine. The strongest hand … uh, crew wins the ticket to Mars.

- Draw cards from any of the six decks and aim for the strongest poker hand.
- Bet on the best hand before drawing your last cards.
- Once everyone has five cards, it’s time to shine. The strongest hand wins.

]]>▪️ Harmonies: Crescendo from Libellud is a new expansions for Harmonies that was just released. If you are looking to expand your game of Harmonies, you can expect 3 new modules to mix in. From designers Johan Benvenuto and Mathieu Rivero. An easy gift for the holidays to that gamer in your life who already loves the base game.

From BGG:

The Crescendo expansion for Harmonies includes 3 new modules that can be used individually or in combination with other modules.

Sanctuaries: Build unique landscapes that can accommodate multiple animals.

New personal game boards offer new field layouts and ways to score points.

Whisper Creatures: Add new cards to your animal cards and create synergies between animals and Whisper Creatures.

Look, Another Remastered Edition!

whenindoubteatout — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 07:00:02 +0000

by Justin Bell

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I don’t typically back games on crowdfunding platforms. Usually, I’m happy to wait, especially on games that will be available at retail later. I am also hesitant to buy a game that I have not played before, which I have noted in earlier pieces here on BGG as well as the place where I spend most of my time reviewing games, Meeple Mountain.

Like some of you, I’ve been burned by campaigns in the past, be it games that never fulfilled or games that arrived and confirmed my suspicions: it really WAS all marketing, and the gameplay for that cool-looking game with all those fancy minis wasn’t worth the tens or hundreds of dollars I paid for the right to get the box two or three years later.

That script flips for one specific category: reprints and twists on games I already know. This extends to updates of games I’m pretty sure I know, with updates to the art, or maybe some of the mechanics, or nerfing some of the overpowered cards or player abilities, or anniversary editions of games long out of print.

If it’s a remaster of a game I already know, count me in.

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I do a lot of work with the team at Cranio Creations, and when news broke of the team’s plans to remaster Lorenzo il Magnifico, two of my playgroups were (and still are) buzzing with excitement.

Older versions of Lorenzo are certainly not hard to find; my copy sits patiently on my game closet shelves at the ready, and every time I do a math trade it feels like copies are made available by players looking to cull portions of their collections. Many friends own the base game, or the Houses of Renaissance expansion, or other promo items and cards, or all of it…heck, you can even play Lorenzo now on Board Game Arena if you need a hit, so Lorenzo is certainly not suffering from an accessibility perspective.

Now that the Lorenzo crowdfunding campaign has wrapped up, my personal excitement is spiking. The campaign offers a big box edition with the base game (now referred to as Lorenzo il Magnifico: Prima Lux) with new art and deluxe components, great for those who don’t already own the base game or want the base game with a new coat of paint and all the previously-released content in one spot.

I’m more excited for the game’s new edition, Lorenzo il Magnifico: Maiestas, and that’s the one I backed for this campaign. The base game does get a little predictable, and this new version seems to take into account thoughts from long-time players to balance some gameplay elements and freshen up others. And I like that there’s a separate add-on for solo if one wants to try the game that way, along with other extras that are purely cosmetic. (Yes, I “need” marble dice to replace my wooden dice from the base game.)

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Outside of Lorenzo, it feels like I’m seeing anniversary/remastered/deluxe/second/ultimate editions a LOT lately…you are too, right?

Many of you know that I am a huge fan of City of the Big Shoulders, so a chance to grab Chicago 1875: City of the Big Shoulders last year was a no-brainer. I got the chance to play someone else’s copy of Food Chain Magnate: Deluxe Edition a few months ago and now admit that I should have picked up a copy of my own.

The Trickerion: Anniversary Edition? Sold. I moved my copy of Unearth out of the collection a couple years ago after a long run of plays with my family, only to find that Unearth: 10th Anniversary Edition hit earlier this year. I got the chance to finally try Goa for the first time last spring…then was thrilled to learn that Quined Games announced a new edition. (It almost feels like the team at Quined is spying on me, because when I learned that they are launching a campaign for an ultimate edition of the Euro classic Troyes, I yelped with joy during the Novelty Show at SPIEL Essen a couple weeks ago.)

Reiner Knizia’s Samurai is exceptional, but it was another older title that was hard to find. Or, at least it was until Keymaster Games released Hanami, the Samurai remaster, earlier this year. Now, not only do you get a gorgeous production with cool cover art, but you get both OG Samurai and a slightly different version for play on the board’s reverse side. As abstracts go, I think Samurai is a must for any serious player, so Hanami gives everyone a chance to add this beauty to their collection.

There were so many other new releases of older titles the last couple years that it’s hard to remember them all. Euphoria Essential Edition. Innovation Ultimate. The Stefan Feld “City Collection” games from Queen. In just the last month, my groups are still buzzing about the launch of the second edition of An Infamous Traffic, the multimillion-dollar campaign for the Clank! 10-year anniversary, and a grail 18xx game that is infamously hard to find, 18Korea.

I don’t always bite, especially if I just bought copies of a game before I learned of an upcoming “all in” edition. I bought a copy of Concordia Venus just two years ago online, so I didn’t pony up for the recent deluxified version. I enjoy Ark Nova and added Marine Worlds a couple years ago, but didn’t bite on the Ark Nova: 3Dition campaign late last year…even though 17,000 other people did. The Castles of Burgundy is incredible, but I usually play that game’s digital version on my iPad, so I saved a few bucks by skipping out on the Special Edition.

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It’s fun to find so many publishers who are fans of these older designs, because I think 2027 is going to be even richer with these sorts of campaigns for older games mixed in with the hundreds of campaigns we already see for fresh tabletop experiences.

I was thrilled to find out that an English edition of Helvetia is making its way to crowdfunding next year from the folks at CrowD. Like CrowD’s work on Nippon: Zaibatsu, Helvetia: Second Edition will get a thorough round of development and playtesting to ensure the game fits for modern players…and if the result is anywhere close to what CrowD did on Zaibatsu, I will be first in line for a copy of the refreshed Helvetia.

I am following the campaign for the Marco Polo reprints from Board&Dice closely. They did great work with the La Granja Deluxe Master Set a couple years ago and getting my hands on new editions of both Marco Polo games has me fired up. (During my Board&Dice meeting at SPIEL Essen, they shared news of another game they will bring back for a deluxe edition in 2028…the future is bright, my friends.)

The more fascinating angle for me are games that were not in need of a 10-year anniversary edition or a second edition with fancy art. Sometimes, I see this with games that came out just a couple years ago getting fresh development work to make the original ideas really shine.

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Take Asian Tigers: A Story of Prosperity, for example. I noted in my review of Asian Tigers—a 2024 release—that my major issue with the game had nothing to do with the gameplay. That first edition was…I’ll politely say that it was pretty bland. Absolutely not a looker. That extended into the board’s layout, which was certainly “spreadsheet” in nature but also not very easy to parse in terms of execution. The rulebook was a major challenge. And the board came as jigsaw-style pieces that were attached in a way that left creases at critical intersections of the play area.

I met with Nuno Santos, the sales exec of PYTHAGORAS during SPIEL Essen, and during our meeting I noticed new artwork for Asian Tigers on a banner along one of the booth walls. “Are we getting a new version of Asian Tigers??” I asked excitedly. Nuno smiled as he confirmed my suspicions. People are going to feel like they have made a discovery if Asian Tigers shows up in a year or two with better all-around production elements, because the production of the original is the reason I donated my review copy.

Railway Boom is another example. The original game, self-published by Hisashi Hayashi (Yokohama, Circadia) under his OKAZU Brand just four years ago, got an update via development work by Hayashi and Simone Luciani, a fresh coat of graphic design from Ian O’Toole, and became one of the 10 best games I played in 2025. I C E: Second Edition is an updated version of I C E, which was only published by the team at This Way! three years ago and features a wide array of quality-of-life upgrades from the original design.

Publishers are increasingly finding ways to spruce up games that just hit the market a few years ago. I’m fascinated by this; games that were close, but maybe didn’t quite hit it out of the park are going back into the lab almost immediately, an acknowledgement that small edits to strong foundations can hit the market as something special even if the name is vaguely familiar to hobby players.

Fresh takes on older games help balance out the brand-new titles that reach us each year, creating a nice range of opportunities to celebrate the old and the new. For newer hobbyists, this is really important, and I think this helps people appreciate older designs in the same way fresh takes on old movies bring people closer to appreciating why some of those films are considered classics.

Designer Diary: Tea & Rum — Fabien Gridel

Krazey — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 15:00:01 +0000

by Fabien Gridel

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When you sit down to design an expert game, you have much more freedom than when you design anything else. Players will forgive convoluted mechanisms, longer rules, and above all a playing time longer than an hour.

That said, just like my last expert title (Path of Civilization), it still has to be easy to get into. It has to play smoothly, and it has to end at the right moment. I'm firmly in the European school of design, where chaos, luck and noise take a back seat to planning, management and strategy.

Where Do You Even Start?

I'm lazy. I'll think for hours before I actually do anything. I take almost no notes. And my thinking always circles around one idea I want to dig into: something new, or something I think board games haven't made enough of yet.

No, Tea & Rum isn't going to reinvent modern board gaming. But I did want to bring something new to the table. Little mechanical hooks, as I think of them: the kind that flip how players look at a game, and that get people interested the moment you describe them out loud. That was the brief from day one, do something new.

I. Standing on Other Designers' Shoulders

Designers are gamers first. Of course we feed off everything we've played. Tea & Rum is unconsciously the descendant of a hundred different games. But here are the ones that actually made me stop and think, and what I took from each.

Die Säulen der Erde (The Pillars of the Earth), and how you get your resources

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Die Säulen der Erde – Sonderausgabe – game box front (cropped) – Source: BGG
Every resource management game has two halves:

● getting the resources

● spending them
In a lot of games, getting them is the whole point, that's the engine. Tea & Rum turn it over. In Tea & Rum, what matters is what you turn them into: Captains, Contracts, Buildings.

So how do you make acquisition interesting without letting it take over the game?

Enter The Pillars of the Earth (Kosmos, 2006), by Stefan Stadler and Michael Rieneck. Their answer: a fixed resource draft. Which turned out to be exactly what I needed.
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Resource cards for The Pillars of the Earth - Source: BGG

● The rate is great. The cash-per-cube ratio is good enough that you always want to buy something.

● It's strategic, because you have to already know how you're going to convert those goods later.

● A draft is interactive by construction.

● Sometimes you're better off sitting on your money to grab a Captain at the top of the Round. You shouldn't be buying at any price, and that tension gives you plenty to chew on.

● Unlike Pillars of the Earth, every Ship card in Tea & Rum offers you several different options.

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Tzolk'in, and the Joy of Picking Workers Back Up

You can't talk about Tea & Rum without talking about Tzolk'in. Why? Because it's worker placement where you get to do the action when you take the worker off the board. The longer you leave it out there, the stronger the payoff.

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English second edition (2014) cover – Source: BGG
Tea & Rum uses that same idea, but uses it completely differently. On even Rounds you place workers. On odd Rounds you unplace them. Either way, placing or unplacing, you take an action.

Each of the four Action Boards in Tea & Rum has its own personality, its own perks, its own actions. Everyone starts with workers spread across the four of them, but nothing keeps you honest after that. Drop two workers in the port on Round 2 and take two actions there, and you've just committed yourself to two more port actions next Round when you pick them back up.

That's a big deal, because it hands the player real control: you can guarantee yourself actions where you want them. And in an interactive management game, where what's available to you depends partly on what your opponents just did, locking down that certainty is worth a lot. It also means planning ahead, because you'd better make sure those actions are still worth being taken when you play the next Round.

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Antiquity (2004)

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Antiquity, Splotter Spellen, 2017 — front cover (image provided by the publisher) – Source: BGG
In the early 2000s I was fascinated by Jeroen Doumen and Joris Wiersinga's games. In 2004 the pair put out a monster: Antiquity. Long, brutal, with upkeep that borders on unbearable AND it stuck with me, because nothing else looked or made you play like it. That modern feeling that every game is gorgeous and every game is the same rubs me the wrong way. Antiquity is ugly, and Antiquity is new.

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Of all the ideas crammed into that box, the one that stayed with me is that you pick your own victory condition by building your cathedral, a cathedral that also hands you a unique advantage. It's sneaky. It's fresh.

Choosing how you win. Now that's worth pulling on. But in a modern game, that choice can't be a trap. It has to be something a strategy leads you to, not something that punishes you for guessing wrong. So in Tea & Rum, the decision to play nice with the Crown and go for Governor got rebuilt around three ideas.

First, it's a draft: first player to 8 blue VP picks first its Allegiance Objective. That builds in a race, and the more you play, the more you'll notice that some allegiances are worth far more than others depending on how the game is shaping up. Second, you don't actually have to pull it off. Somebody is always crowned Pirate King, so failing your allegiance is nowhere near as fatal as blowing your cathedral in Antiquity. Third, the red VP attached to each allegiance are nothing to sneeze at anywhere from 1 to 5. Which opens the door to counter-drafting: taking an allegiance you are fully aware you'll never complete, purely for the red points and to keep it out of an opponent's hands.

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And finally, more on this later, it's one of the things that keeps the game from repeating itself.

II. The Co-op Wave, and the Second Winner

Since Pandemic in 2008, the co-op wave has been strong enough to swamp the hobby for a solid decade. There were great co-ops before it (Knizia's Lord of the Rings, Cathala and Laget's Shadows over Camelot), but I think that wave forced every designer to ask what kind of fun a game is actually selling.

A designer friend of mine put it well: sharing a loss takes the sting out of it, and sharing a win makes it sweeter. Win alone against everyone at the table and you have to be gracious about it. Win as a group, after a real fight, and you get to celebrate. So why does it have to be one winner or everyone? Nothing says it does. That's where the double victory in Tea & Rum comes from. Two winners means two players potentially walking away happy. And it costs you nothing in competitive tension along the way.

In other words: pure upside.

What it does for Tea & Rum is huge. For one thing, you have to watch what everyone else is doing. For another, the game can never end without a winner, because someone is always crowned Pirate King. And in the two-player game, knowing that nobody might win at all is honestly delicious.

III. Trying to Have It Both Ways

The victory point constraint was argued over for a long time.

In the final version, you can't finish with more than a 10 VP gap between your blue points (the Crown) and your red points (the Pirates). Without a constraint, the game simply doesn't work. Players would tunnel on one color and completely ignore the other. Make it too tight, let’s say 5 VP, and the endgame becomes a nightmare. Ideally, a player chasing the win in Tea & Rum should be riding that gap right up to the limit. 35 red and 35 blue is a weaker position than 40 red and 30 blue. After a huge amount of testing, and weighing up how it actually felt at the table, 10 VP turned out to be the sweet spot.

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IV. Nobody Gets a Playbook

You know that sinking feeling in a heavy game when someone at the table already knows exactly what they're going to do sometimes before the lid even comes off the box? They know the game, they know which line is too good, and off they go. Everything in Tea & Rum is built to stop that. Sure, one game you'll think: wow, this allegiance is a free win. Then next game that same allegiance is a slog, because the building you needed isn't in play. And since you never play with all the buildings (except in a two-player game), I wouldn't be surprised if groups start pulling specific ones on purpose, rather than randomly, just to try all the different strategies. You can't skip reading the Captains and the Contracts either, because in some setups they're worth far more than in others, and you'll want to adjust accordingly.

Maybe that's the one word behind the whole design: adapt. Constantly.

That 'infinite replayability' everyone claims as proof that a game will last is, most of the time, not true.

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V. Worker Placement, Or Action Draft?

Design-wise, worker placement is usually just an action draft wearing a hat. Here's what I mean: when you put a worker down, you pull an action out of the pool and nobody else can have it. Functionally, that's the same as holding every action card in your hand, taking one, and passing the rest along. Tea & Rum is worker placement, but it drifts a long way from a straight draft. Why? Because what your action does depends on how many workers are there.

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So instead of removing an action from the pool, you're changing one.

In most worker placement games, that kind of thing gets filed under indirect interaction. In Tea & Rum, you're not just taking an action somebody else wanted, you also have to think about which action you're handing them in its place.

VI. Interactive, Or Just Mean?

Anyone who plays expert games knows the deal: a lot of them are solo multiplayer, politely rebranded as "indirect interaction." The ship draft I mentioned earlier, the activation system that swaps one option out for another, the race for Allegiances, the sliding bonuses on the Contract board, all of it is there to put players in each other's way, and to make the game interactive without making it unpredictable or chaotic. No hidden information. No gotchas. You can see what your opponents are able to do. And YES ! This is fully intentional, and I'll happily own it. The game can be mean. Killing an opponent's shot at Governor by taking the last bit of Reputation they needed can be a genuinely great play. What's funny is how differently groups handle that. Some tables are vicious with it. Others just build their own engine and let an opponent run away with it, even when tripping them up would clearly have been the better move.

VII. Adding Insult To Injury

Kicking a player while they're down is a feeling I work hard to design out. You know the pattern: here's an objective hit it and you get a reward, miss it and you eat a penalty on top. Where does that come up in Tea & Rum? If you followed why the Ship phase and the start-of-round Resource choice matter so much, you'll see that having room in your warehouse is everything. Early versions had rigid storage. The result: any Round you failed to convert your goods as planned, you got hit twice, you missed out on whatever you were buying toward, and your warehouse was full, so you couldn't play the next Ship phase properly either.

We tried every formula to turn that into a management problem rather than a punishment. Sure, failing to cash in your resources on schedule should still hurt a little. But the fix we landed on is that you can pay to expand your Warehouse at any time. That kills the double penalty dead, because right after start-of-round income you can always afford enough space to take a normal part in the ship phase.

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VIII. The Two-Player Game

Wait?! there's a two-player mode for a game designed around two winners? Yep. And you know what? It's terrific.
The game was originally built for three and four only, and honestly, three is still my favorite. But right at the tail end of development with Captain Games, a two-player version went from "nice to have" to "we need this." Lucky break: a colleague of mine loves expert games and plays almost exclusively at two. Hundreds of games of Agricola, for example all two-player.

Even better, he'd never seen the prototype when I showed him the two-player draft. We played a three-player game first so the rules were rock solid, then I walked them through the two-player changes. I left the prototype with them for two weeks, and they came back with an incredible stack of play logs and notes 20 plus games and more than 30 suggested changes.

The result: 90% of their suggestions made it in, and several of them fed back into the three and four player game and made the whole ruleset more consistent.
So no, there's no double win at two players. Victory takes shape round by round, pulled between the pirates and the Crown, with a new kind of tension that keeps forcing you to adapt and yes, it can end with nobody winning at all. That's rare, and it takes two genuinely nasty players to get there.

IX. On Publishing, Illustration and Finishing Touches

The game design of a board game can never skip a long development phase carried out with the publisher, covering ergonomics, but also the illustrator, who brings the game to life visually. The work done on both the artwork and the iconography contributes enormously not only to the readability of the game, but also to its fluidity.

Adrien, Captain Games' in-house illustrator, spent an endless amount of time reworking every icon and refining every drawing. This is not only a matter of publishing and art direction. It is also slightly tied to the creation of the board game and to the game design it serves. Many gameplay elements came out of this shared development with Captain Games. The development team in charge of the project was particularly proactive in putting forward ideas to solve several points of friction and balancing issues, among them: the removable Action Board tiles, which prevent any one position from being too advantageous, the streamlined management of the Warehouse...

Tea & Rum is an expert game, and it required close collaboration between all parties involved: the designer, the publisher and the illustrator, in order to produce the best possible version of the game.

Last Word

Designing Tea & Rum was long and hard, and like every game at this weight, it's full of dead ends, backtracking and hours of staring at the ceiling. But it's here: Captain Games has turned into a real product a vision of a heavy game that doesn't quite want to be like the others. It'd be easy to call it a patchwork of borrowed ideas. I'd like to think it's a little more inventive than its ancestors, and a lot more modern.

Go find it, play it, and share it.

Designer Interview: The Jailbreak

TheArkAngell — Sun, 01 Nov 2026 15:00:01 +0000

by Karl Lange

]]>Welcome to The Jailbreak - a cooperative deduction game for 2-4 players where your perspective and clever communication are key to your escape!

When we were thinking back through the design and development of this game we realised the game had three very distinct almost independent phases of work completed throughout its life. Given this process, we thought it would be fun to frame this diary as questions from each of us to the others to give you all a sense of how the game progressed and evolved through each person's unique input on The Jailbreak!

An Idea is Born: Co-Designer Joel Kennedy

[heading]Can you give us an overview of the game?[/heading]
In The Jailbreak 2-4 players must work together, using double-sided tool tiles to make their great escape!

The game is a mixture of puzzle solving, deduction and different perspectives. Use the right tool, in the right place and the right orientation to defeat each challenge. Can you complete all 44 levels?

[heading]When did you start working on the game?[/heading]
I put together the first prototype all the way back in April, 2021. This game started its life as a solo design. Over the following eight months I tested and refined the game, before submitting it to the Cardboard Edison in January 2022 (under the name Double Jeopardy) - where it was selected as a finalist.

It was the first time I had entered that competition and it was pleasing to have such a promising result. It gave me a lot of confidence to not only continue to pursue this design, but also designing games in general.

The game was signed with Adam's Apple Games, LLC in 2025 and will be released at SPIEL Essen this year (2026).

[heading]Where did the original idea for The Jailbreak come from? [/heading]
I love seeking out designs that take something fundamental about games and flip them on their head. To do this, I often write out lists of all of the basic assumptions that I have about games - and then wonder how I could challenge those assumptions.

On this occasion (sometime in April 2021) one of the things I wrote down was the fact that cards have a front side and a back side.
It made me wonder what would happen if cards had two front sides.
At the time, it was just an abstract idea. I pondered on it a little and wrote it down, but I didn’t have much else to go on.

It was about a week later, whilst pairing a very large pile of socks, that I was suddenly struck with the urge to make a game about socks. Something felt interesting to me about the idea of a game where the cards were simply depictions of socks - and players needed to work together to find each sock’s pair card.

Inspired by the theme I began putting together a deck of cards for a game called Odd Socks.
And as I did, the thought bubble of double-sided cards re-appeared to me. Given the light-hearted theme and the unknown element of how to play with double sided cards, I decided to merge the two ideas into one.

Here’s what the first version looked like:]]>
Initially the socks came in three different types (striped, solid and checkered) and six different colours. That meant 18 unique sock designs. 18 cards meant 36 faces, which meant exactly one pair of each type.

Why 18 cards? Initially I thought that if the game worked I could enter into one of Button Shys' 18 card contests. And more generally, I am a fan of games with a small footprint (no pun intended). And it would be remiss of me to not mention the influence the game Love Letter has had on me.

[heading]How did the design progress through the testing process?[/heading]
From the very first test I knew that I had something worth pursuing.

The game was jam-packed with moments of dramatic irony. You would see the cards you needed on the back of someone else’s hand… but would you be able to effectively let them know about it? Would they accidentally play that card using the card’s other face first? This game felt puzzly and there was already some great tension at the table.

But something wasn’t quite right.

For the first test, I had constructed the deck such that there was no obvious connection between the two sides of each card. I had felt that I didn’t want players to be able to infer what was on the reverse side of their cards, but rather force them to rely on the clues from the other players to figure it all out.

In that first test, my long time friend and collaborator Matt Gleeson suggested that the game would work better if the two sides of the cards were connected - such that you could deduce something about the reverse side by looking at its front.
He was absolutely right and so I set about working out how to construct the deck such that the two sides were connected in some way. The solution was in having each card face tell you information about what was not on its reverse side. For example, if you were looking at a stripy yellow sock then the back of the card would not be yellow and not be stripy.

The next challenge was in figuring out how the players would be allowed to interact with one another.

I have played Hanabi quite a bit and it was clear to me this game shared some key DNA with it. As a result, I was keen to explore some different ways for the players to give clues.

The first, most logical option was to let players ‘flip’ a card - so they would now see its reverse face - and everyone else would see what they had been looking at. This mechanism was introduced very early on and became a cornerstone of the design. The card flip was always such a fun “aha!” moment at the table. To me it always felt like a little magic trick - that yellow stripy sock in your hand is now a solid blue sock. Ta-da!

]]>Above: An example of some of the early Action tiles players could use. At this stage the game had changed to a theme about Detectives investigating a crime. The actions in the final game are simpler than these. The Compel action exists in the final game almost exactly as it is here. The other actions shown here did not survive until the final version.
Early on - a week or two after the first few tests - I was doing a solo test of the game on Tabletop Simulator. Between each turn I would click to change my seat at the table, so I would then see things from the next player’s perspective. The thing that struck me was just how different every player’s perspective at the table actually was. Each player was looking at the same game - but seeing something different.

I wanted to lean really hard into that element of the game and that’s when I had the idea for clues that took into consideration all of the cards a player could see - both on the fronts of their own cards and the backs of other players cards. A player would announce, for example, “I can see four blue cards” and the other players needed to cross-check that information against what they could see.

This achieved exactly what I wanted, as it clearly highlighted to the players just how different each other's perspectives were. It was the ‘whack of the side of the head’ I wanted players to experience.

]]>(As an aside, the book ‘A Whack on the Side of the Head’ is one of my favourite books on creative thinking - I highly recommend it).

The game was coming together nicely, until I hit a road bump of a different kind - a technical challenge, unrelated to the game itself. Earlier I mentioned I was testing the game in Tabletop Simulator (TTS). April 2021 was smack bang in the middle of the covid pandemic and, living in Melbourne, we were living in hard lockdown for most of that year.

Testing online was the only option available to many of us during this time.]]>

The challenge was that in TTS the custom card component has two defined sides - a ‘front’ and a ‘back.’ When I uploaded the cards I had to define which was the front and which was the back (that part was fine). However, when a card is in a player's hand (a special ‘zone’ in TTS) it is hardcoded that the player in that seat sees the card ‘front’ and each other player sees the card ‘back.’

This meant when you flipped a card in a player’s hand - it would change the face that player could see - but not the face that others at the table could see. Other players would still simply see the image of the cards back - which made the game unplayable.

It took me several weeks to find a workaround, before I discovered card states. In the mod I set up each card to have two states: The first was a copy of the card showing A/B as the front/back and the second was the same card showing B/A as the front/back.

Now when a player flipped a card they would instead click on it and select to change the card’s state. It was a little bit clunky, but it did work, and the game was playable again.

By March 2022, I began doing a lot of testing in real life with my wife Sarah - who was a tremendous help with getting the game to where it is today.

By this time I had decided the game should have a modular set of challenge cards.

]]>Above: An early draft of the ‘challenge’ cards that players would be working to complete. At this particular time I was also dabbling with a theme of defusing a bomb (I do like to try on different themes to a game!) Many of the initial concepts have survived until the final game - although they were simplified and streamlined.
In June 2022, my friend Karl Lange, who had been helping playtest the game, approached me about being more involved with it - and I enthusiastically agreed. In particular, Karl had some great ideas about creating a campaign for the game and I knew he would do a great job.

Karl took ownership of designing the game’s 44 level campaign. He also added a compelling narrative structure to the game alongside some important tweaks to the way the player actions worked.

Since this game, Karl and I have worked on several other games together (one of which is coming out next year - watch this space!)

[heading]Were there any designs that inspired the design?[/heading]
Certainly Hanabi was an inspiration as mentioned.
Another inspiration was Hanamikoji. The action tiles in that game directly inspired the shared action tiles used in The Jailbreak.
The Crew was also an inspiration, especially in the sense that it had inspired me to want to work on more co-operative games and also a campaign-driven game.

[heading]How much of the original prototype survived to the final product? [/heading]
The game’s primary components and gameplay are mostly unchanged, although in the finished product they have been upgraded to tiles drawn from a bag (an update I’m very excited by).

The publisher - Adams Apple Games - has also added some extra tokens to make the final levels even more challenging which is a really great touch. Adam has been a fantastic asset for the game. He has been a pleasure to work with and seeing him put his own flair and design prowess into this game has been an inspiration for me.

The Teenage Years: Co-Designer Karl Lange

[heading]What drew you to want to be part of the game?[/heading]
I have known Joel for many years initially from Melbourne Incubator playtest meetups, then multiple times per week online through covid lockdowns, and always admire his ability to just throw new idea after new idea into a game. I often have a very product focused view when I work on games and when I first saw what became The Jailbreak I was immediately excited by the core of the double sided cards with a different state on each side.

When I first saw the game, it was two players only and had a mission system more akin to The Crew where you would draw cards to get different, random puzzles to solve. I know Joel and his wife Sarah play a lot of co-op deduction games, so are very very good at them. My first feedback on the design was if the difficulty could be toned way down to introduce players to the system and then ramp up the difficulty as players progress, and if he thought the design could accommodate four players.

After some back and fourth with feedback and changes implemented by Joel, I asked if I could come on as a bigger part of the game.

I could see this becoming a great game, taking Joel's current ideas and really diving deep and exploring what this core system would allow. I pitched a concept where we have missions of increasing difficulty, used to gently onboard players into the unique deduction of the game then give them some serious challenges once they understand the system.

From there I basically took over the game, working on it for about a year, with meetings every few months with Joel to show him my progress and direction.

]]>Above: the starting three decks of Escape Cards in my original prototype - Circles, Squares, and Crescent - Alarms, Padlocks, and Cameras in the final version. These introduce three core levers of the game - playing cards from the side you can't see, playing cards in a certain order, and playing a specific card.
[heading]Tell us about how you approached designing the campaign mode for the game?[/heading]
A lot of the work was around creating a smooth introduction and onboarding of new players into the game.

First step was expanding the set of what became the Escape Cards. I started by dividing the cards into six decks, each deck having variations of the same or similar objectives, each introducing a slightly more complex rule - this gave me six levers to introduce but kept each game unique from the last.

In my master spreadsheet™ I then assigned each deck a complexity value. I could then make new missions and have the spreadsheet calculate how difficult they were in relation to the other missions already created. From here I set to creating the 44 missions in the game, slowly introducing cards from new decks, new abilities for players, additional cards to increase the challenge overall, making sure each level was slightly harder than the last. This took many iterations to get correct, and many discussions with playtesters asking "did that level feel harder than the previous? or the other way around".

There were many changes to the complexity values, the makeup of the decks, and the costs on the actions (Whispers Cards in the final game) to make sure everything felt right.

Another element I wanted to introduce was grouping missions into a play session - one thing I felt was lacking in The Crew was a defined end point - should you play only one mission? Or all the missions? Finding the 'right time' to pause always felt like a negotiation with the other players. This led to being able to have each session (what became Days in the final game) being able to share mechanical similarities, while increasing the challenge for the players, and having larger elements introduced at the start of each day.

]]>Above: Prototype of the Square Escape Cards - Hand in the final version. This introduces the challenge of knowing what is on both sides of a card.
[heading]What is one of the key challenges you faced working on this game?[/heading]
There were a few challenges, mostly around ensuring players had a firm grasp of the game before they even began playing.

Making sure players understood the makeup of the deck of Tool Tiles and how the double sided nature of them worked (that there are three colours, and three symbols in the game, and the colour and symbol on the back of a Tool must be different from what you can see).

A big part of getting the game humming smoothly overall was getting the terminology and icons on the cards clear. This was much harder than anticipated and there were many iterations of front / back, seen / unseen, open / closed, etc. We finally settled on Public / Private with public being the side everyone else can currently see, and private being the side only you can currently see. The icons remained mostly unchanged to the final version of the game.

[heading]What's the moment in a play of this game you most want people to experience?[/heading]
My favorite moment when watching people play any game is when the strategy clicks in their head and you see their eyes light up - making players feel smart as they work out how to solve each new challenge. My hope with how the Escape and Whisper cards are introduced throughout the game, is that players will continually be rewarded with that feeling each session for their first run through of the game.

[heading]What is your favourite part about working with another designer?[/heading]
I probably experienced this less in The Jailbreak than some other co-designs due to the more segmented design process, but being able to go back and fourth with someone who has as much buy in to the game as you do is fantastic! Seeing their passion, and having it intertwined with your ideas and vice versa is just a really neat way to design, and I think you get a much better product, much faster than working on a game alone.

]]>Above: Prototype of the Star Escape Cards - Wall in the final version. This is my favorite deck, introducing some chaos to the missions. All these cards allow any card to be played to them, but you can easily corner yourself if you don't consider the more restrictive objectives first! This deck went through the most changes to make sure all the cards were roughly the same difficulty, and were all well understood by players.
[heading]Are you working on any other designs together? What can you tell us about them?[/heading]
In addition to working on The Jailbreak, Joel and I have quite a few other games in the works, with one other game signed together. Interestingly most of our other co-designs are also cooperative games. We have co-operative games with pick and pass drafting; sliding tiles from your perspective; and deduction using coloured glasses!

Older and Wiser: Adam's Apple Games, LLC - Adam Rehberg

[heading]What drew you to the game when you first saw it?[/heading]
I was instantly drawn to the concept because I thought it might contain some of the magic that I felt when I first learned Hanabi. In fact, the concept had me so interested that I immediately asked for a print and play because I knew the designers were from Australia and was assembling the prototype by hand within hours of receiving the pitch email.

[heading]What did you change from when you signed the design to the final product?[/heading]
The gameplay was super rock solid when we first tried it, so the development turned out to be pretty minor, but here is a list of the things we focused on:

- One of the main hiccups that needed solving was the method of distributing tools to each player. The pitch came with a deck box that helped obfuscate hidden information when drawing tools each round, and a method of randomizing that required a combination of shuffling and flipping cards underneath the table to preset the deck box. This is the type of player experience that would cause me to keep this game shelved more often than not, so this was the most important thing to solve. We tried some off-the-wall 3D-printed solutions and then eventually landed on a very simple and familiar solution, a bag with tiles.

- After plugging the logbook into the final graphic design template, we noticed there were some pages that had some blank space. This was a result of the game getting harder requiring more escape cards, but not introducing anything new. We used this blank space as an opportunity to sprinkle some additional thematic challenges and threats in the form of tokens to keep each mission fresh.

- Lastly, we spent some time on the insert to right-size the box and ensure good setup and storage experiences to make the game as easy to get into as possible.

[heading]Can you give us some thoughts around the theme and art direction of the game?[/heading]]]>Left to right: Artist Zak, co-designer Karl, and publisher Adam at Jailbreak public announcement - Gen Con 2026
One of our biggest decisions was whether to retheme this game or not. Internally, we bounced around on a few different theme ideas and eventually decided to invert the theme from a cooperative series heists (breaking in) to a cooperative escape (breaking out). With The Jailbreak, we knew we wanted a striking art style and chose to lean into one of the core game mechanisms to influence this style. The game system utilizes three icons across three colors to achieve imperfect information, so we naturally we chose three strongly thematic colors to bring the theme to life. Other than that, we really just let Zak Eidsvoog cook as the artist and graphic design lead, because we know he's very talented at both.

[heading]Who will this game appeal to the most? [/heading]
This game will appeal to people who like unpuzzling imperfect information with some moments of logic and some of luck. We think players familiar with Hanabi, The Crew, and The Gang could easily fall in love with The Jailbreak. Additionally, The Jailbreak plays extremely well at all player counts, including two-players which we're excited about as a must-have differentiator from the previously mentioned titles.

[heading]When and where will people be able to get the game?[/heading]
The English Edition of The Jailbreak launched at SPIEL Essen '26 with release to the US via FLGS from October 31st, and Australia and New Zealand through Ark Angel Games late 2026. Keep your eyes peeled for more news and dates which we cannot yet say!

Designer Diary - Greylune

wlam — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 14:00:02 +0000

by William Attia

]]>More than 20 years after it was released, Caylus is probably the game of mine which people are most likely to have heard about or played, but several years later, Ystari Games published another game of mine – one of the last games they would release – Spyrium. Although it has never been as successful as Caylus, either in sales or in ratings, I have always been quite proud of it and consider it to be a better design than Caylus.

Spyrium was out-of-print after a while and no further print run was planned, and that could have been the end of the story.

Meanwhile, Sorry We Are French, besides entirely original designs, had been releasing new versions of previously published games – starting with IKI in 2021. When Emmanuel Beltrando contacted me in 2023 to enquire about the status of the rights to Spyrium, they were preparing Zhanguo: The First Empire, the new version of Zhanguo, which they would release at SPIEL Essen that year.

Emmanuel and I first met about two decades ago, around the time when Caylus was released (2005). After some time at Asmodee, he created his company Moonster Games in 2010, then Sorry We Are French in 2017 – and during all these years, we met once in a while at various fairs such as Festival International de Jeux or SPIEL Essen, chatted and occasionally played a game.

What is Spyrium?

Spyrium could be described as a worker placement game. During each of the six rounds of the game, a market is built with 3x3 cards, then players take turns placing workers between two adjacent cards (which does not prevent further workers from being placed there) – or a player may choose instead to remove one of their workers to activate one of the adjacent cards. Once a player has started removing workers, they may no longer place workers in this round, but each player decides individually when the transition from the placement to the activation phase takes place for them.

]]>Image by @Ghost_Palm_Technique
To activate a card is a choice between two options:
- pay to use one of the adjacent cards (depending on the card, it will go into the player's tableau or remain for further activations) – where other workers placed next to this card will increase the cost of this use
- renounce the use of the adjacent cards, but collect money – where other workers placed next to a card will increase the amount gained

Playing a game of Spyrium requires making lots of plans and discarding most of them, as other players make the card you covet too expensive, snap a card which you did not expect them to go for, or maybe allow you to collect more money than anticipated.

These few lines try to describe what defines Spyrium – what the cards actually do and how the players score points is not very relevant. With Ystari Games, we had chosen a Victorian England steampunk setting, where players would collect green crystals of spyrium in mines and build factories or laboratories to convert these crystals into victory points.

Making a New Spyrium

At SPIEL Essen that year (2023), I met with Emmanuel and Matthieu Verdier (who was in charge of development at SWAF and would be working with me on this new version). They both shared a love of Spyrium and a conviction that the game would have deserved a better fate, but none of us had a clear idea about how far the changes would go.

I had prepared a list of ideas, possible improvements and directions to explore – and when I met with Emmanuel and Matthieu, we realized quickly that we were in agreement on a lot of these points.

I was not interested in making a game 95% similar to Spyrium, with only minor adjustments. And since it was clear from the beginning that they wanted to get rid of the steampunk England setting – which was fine with me, as I had no strong attachment to it – we could change as much as we wanted until we would be satisfied with the result.

In that case… maybe my original thought about setting this new version in the Ganymede universe (which they had used as a setting for several games), mining ores to convert them into victory points, was not bold enough. Maybe we could go further and completely remove the factories from the game, and have players do something different instead. We just had to find out what they could do.

Among the ideas which we considered for a while, Emmanuel had a thought about a possible license – which I happened to be familiar with – and we spent some time mapping the various elements of Spyrium into that universe and figuring out what it would be necessary to add and change. I was not entirely convinced, though, and felt more relief than disappointment when we stopped exploring that way.

Let's Go on an Adventure!

Heroic fantasy was one of the themes which we had mentioned, and the one I was the most tempted to explore – with reminiscences of the Dungeons&Dragons, Warhammer RPG and RoleMaster sessions in my teenage years – which is why I started exploring in that direction.

I try to be disciplined when I scribble down ideas or design notes about a game and do my best to always write down the date, but I still forget quite often – and that's why I cannot remember exactly when I wrote the three pages of notes containing most of the ideas which would end up being used in Greylune. I suspect these notes were written a few weeks after SPIEL Essen.

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First design notes about Greylune, mostly in French.
My first page of note (shown above) starts with the drawing of two tracks:
- an XP (experience) track, where the would gain new workers every few steps and a few Victory Points on the final steps
- a track for both STR (strength) and MAG (magic), starting at 1 and going up to 5

Further down the page are three actions, each of them using a worker:
- Go on an adventure
- Train
- Boast about one's feats at the tavern

I haven't written down how these actions were supposed to integrate into the game, which probably means that it was really obvious to me at this point – about as obvious as the current date.

The first page also describes the encounters, which have requirements and one among three colors (with the note: forest/mountain/plain) which is used for set collection. No rewards are mentioned, but the "Pack of wolves" card I have sketched nearby shows that there is one.

On the second page, I have noted down that encounter cards are placed in a row at the beginning of each round. A "Travel X" action would allow a player to move their "Adventurer pawn" up to X steps.

Another note points out that experience points and victory points are too similar and that XP should be removed. They did not last long.

The third page deals with new workers and introduces a new type of cards in the village: Companions. They are similar to items but do not take space in the backpack, they come with a new worker, have a special ability and a way to score victory points, and they reduce income by one gold.

Designing With Placeholders

Most of the ideas from these three pages of notes found their way in the final version of Greylune – even if I could obviously not know that at this stage. What mattered then, however, was that I had imagined enough of the game to prepare a very rough prototype of "the new Spyrium" or "Spyrium II", as it would still be named for a long time.

Of course, what made this first step much easier in that case, compared to working on a new game from scratch, is that I did not have to imagine everything – I could just use the corresponding parts of Spyrium, at least as a placeholder.

For instance, Spyrium has a random event each round, which each player can use at most once, as an action which they can take either in the placement or in the activation phase. I do not remember at which stage of the history of Spyrium these events were introduced, but since they are not part of the core system, they were probably not there right from the beginning. Here, my initial notes barely mention them: "events? keep about the same at first".

The events in Greylune ended up working slightly differently from the ones in Spyrium – in particular, the players now have to use one of their workers to benefit from the event, which is a more expensive cost than just using their event disk which serves no other purpose. That change means that the events in Greylune should be relatively stronger than the ones in Spyrium, but also introduced a way to use workers stranded in the market between two removed cards. In Spyrium, you had to remove them for nothing, which was punishing and made the players feel bad – whereas in Greylune, you can use one of the workers you have previously placed in the market to trigger the event. That provides a nice backup plan and opens some opportunities for clever play.

Two other elements which I liked in Spyrium and wanted to keep, as far as possible, in its reimplementation, were the tokens with values 1, 2 or 3 which were used in various ways to introduce variation in the effects or costs of some cards; and the immediate rewards which a player could select when they reach 8 VPs then 20 VPs (either money or an extra worker for the first threshold, then the other one for the second threshold). Neither of these was mentioned in my notes, but even my first list of cards in November that year uses tokens. It must have been obvious to me that they could be used in a similar way.

]]>
Tokens in Spyrium (left) and Greylune (right).
Successive Versions

My initial goal was to make a set of cards sufficient for the first two rounds of the game – the I decks. I filled a spreadsheet with basic ideas: a few buildings, a few items, a few companions for the Village deck, and then 4 encounters in each of the three terrain types.

The goal was merely to check that the game would still work if I kept working on it in the direction that I had in mind, and that was the case – to some extent. Playing in the village was still similar enough to Spyrium, but the new main part, the encounters, were a bit wonky at first, and the experience could be frustrating. The single row of encounters did not work well and was too frustrating, so that would have to change.

It was still early 2024 and the game was not the current priority for SWAF, but I was in touch with Matthieu regularly and we exchanged ideas. Also, whereas my usual prototypes are minimalist or very rough – much to the despair of playtesters – he provided me with a much better-looking version, including placeholder artwork.

There have been several main versions over the following few months. The encounters were improved by gaining a fixed distance. Since more encounters would be within reach, the players could plan alternative moves more easily – and the distance could be a factor to adjust when making the encounters more varied, but still balanced.

The second version still had only two decks of cards, and we only made the III cards in the third main version, although we had known all along that there would be three periods. What was clear to me as well was that – like in Spyrium – there should be only nine cards in the final period, so that players could know in advance what they could expect, without someone being at the mercy of an unlucky draw if the key card for their strategy would not appear.

Among the changes introduced in this third version, one of them is obvious, at least in retrospect: instead of having three available actions on their personal board, the players would have only one space and would have to decide if they wanted to use it to improve their skills, tell a story, or travel. Fewer villagers used on the personal board means that more of them are used in the village, where they interact with the other players.

The quests were also added in this version, as variable strategic goals to complement the mainly tactical play in the village and with the encounters. Each of them had its own VP value at first and it wasn't until much later that the reward was changed to depend only on the distance – a much easier solution.

How To Tell a Story

The fourth main version was the final one, when we finally changed the way encounters were turned into stories. The different types of encounters, corresponding to symbols which the players were collecting and turning into points, were replaced with a numerical value. I was not really convinced at first by Matthieu's proposal, as I feared that it would be too abstract, but I had to admit pretty quickly that it worked much better than the previous one.

That change also allowed us to provide much more varied tavern rewards, instead of only VP – and distinguish between the most mundane adventures (with value 0) which are not even worth telling, the anecdotes (with value 1) which would get you a small reward at the tavern, up to the epic stories (with value 3) which would attract a large audience and the biggest rewards.

Now we had reached a point where we were satisfied with the core system we had, and the following months saw a succession of minor changes. We playtested, took notes about the cards which the players liked and the ones they tended to ignore, sent each other post-game reports and comments, and discussed regularly to prepare a new version.

]]>]]>
Final versions of an Encounter and a Village card
Meanwhile, Ulric and David started working on the artwork – another major step towards the finished game, and another improvement to the prototypes used for the final playtests, just like the custom wooden villagers.

And once everything was ready, we just had to wait a few long months until the game was produced and finally ready for the players to go on adventures and tell their stories.

Battlestar Galactica was Spooky to the Unseen Mind

boardgamersteph — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 16:00:02 +0000

by Steph Hodge

[imageid=354500 medium rep]▪️ The moment everyone has been waiting for... The announcement of a reprinted Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game announced by Ghost Galaxy. In partnership with Universal and Fantasy Flight Games, Ghost Galaxy is set to publish a new version and will hit crowdfunding in early 2027.

From the press release:

The original Battlestar Galactica board game, designed by Corey Konieczka, was originally released in 2008 by Fantasy Flight Games to much acclaim. The game was bolstered by three expansions and taught a whole generation of gamers to ask the question: “Are you a Cylon?”

Ghost Galaxy has been working on an updated design of the classic game, which will be launched via crowdfunding in early 2027.

“I had the pleasure to oversee the publication of this phenomenal board game during its first lease on life”, said Christian T. Petersen CEO of Ghost Galaxy (and former CEO and founder of Fantasy Flight Games). “We’re having a lot of fun returning to the great characters and story of Battlestar Galactica, and we’re working hard to ensure that our new edition will make a great game design even better!”

“We’re thrilled to have Ghost Galaxy take on this classic game”, said Bill Altig, SVP of Narrative Games at Fantasy Flight Games. “We can’t wait to see it back in print.”

]]>▪️ Prague Unseen is a new release from Capstone Games. This city-building game is from designers: Jindřich Pavlásek, Michal Peichl, and Petr Vojtěch. Prague Unseen is a game for 1-4 players and plays in 120 minutes.

From BGG:

Set foot in mythical Prague back in the 19th century, when fantastical creatures walked the streets freely. Meet helpful Golems, amassing ancient knowledge, cunning Horned, controlling the city’s wealth, resourceful Robots, or eccentric Vodniks. Use their unique meeples to calm the river Vltava, rebuild the flooded centre, and control the city’s fate.

This euro-style worker placement game allows players to build their own action spaces, participate in four distinct “mini-games” based on retelling the myth-infused history of Prague, gain unique abilities, and fight over influence in four neighbourhoods.

]]>▪️ Spooky season is upon us, and it calls for a game like Spooky Bar from Edition Spielwiese that is set to release in a few weeks! From designer Benjamin Schwer (The Great Game Of Canada, Djinn). I see a similar mechanic here, where you bottle up ghosts, as I do with bottling up Djinns in his game Djinn. As for the rest of the game, it seems like a light card game that is for 2-4 players and plays in 15-20 minutes.

From BGG:

Rumour has it, ghosts have been stirring up all kinds of mischief in this mysterious little town, and curious thrill-seekers are pouring in to catch a glimpse of the paranormal action. Sensing a golden opportunity, you decide to jump on the trend and open your very own spooky bar! Ghoulish drinks, eerie vibes, and ghostly encounters? Yes, please! Just don’t let things get too spooky... If the haunt level gets out of hand, your terrified guests might run out screaming – without paying their tab!

At each of your bars, 5 guests are hanging out, ready to enjoy some drinks and maybe take home a spooky souvenir—ghosts trapped in bottles! Each round, everyone picks and plays 2 action cards at the same time. What you can do with them depends not just on your own cards, but also on what the others play! The game is over when the last guest leaves one of the bars.
Whoever has the most money at the end wins!

]]>▪️ Mind Sweeper from Floodgate Games is set to release this December at PaxU. Skyrockets: Festivals of Fire is another Floodgate title which was also designed by Charlie McCarron! Mind Sweeper is a new party game for 2-10 players and plays in 11-25 minutes.

From BGG:

Mind Sweeper is a cooperative word-guessing game where one player uses a tiny broom and a pile of tokens to silently guide their team to a secret word.

Sweep tokens together as your team tries to guess one of six suspiciously linked answers.

Designer Diary: DECKO

Haakon Gaarder — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 14:00:02 +0000

by Haakon Gaarder

]]>
The idea for DECKOcame when I played the fantastic computer game Balatro, a great experience of multiplying numbers and manipulating a bizarre poker slot machine with jokers that seem to hack the system. While I loved this, I felt inspired to create something different. Something a lot closer to real poker with all the betting and bluffing, combined with my own take on what the ultimate deckbuilder should feel like. Poker is a game full of moments that beg for some board game fun to be added to them. So I started making DECKO.

The Design Process
I started by playing a super simplistic version of the game in Tabletop Simulator. A regular deck of cards was in the middle to buy from, and all players had a small starting deck. Every round would be like playing a hand of poker, followed by buying new cards. Playing a too simple and boring version of a game idea is a great way of getting me inspired to figure out what a game design needs to make it fun. It was currently too random and too linear (no big moments, no spikes of excitement); it took a long time to see the effect of your deckbuilding and it could end before anyone had time to build a good deck. I had my work cut out for me.

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The first version of DECKO, the "minimum viable concept"
I knew I would be adding jokers and crazier poker cards (inspired by Balatro), and that alone would add a lot of fun to it, but before adding that, I wanted to challenge myself to improve it in other ways. I made the minimum bets go higher and higher from round to round; this happening in tandem with the decks improving would make the game have a nice dramaturgy of escalating stakes. Furthermore, I also changed the starting decks to be as weak as possible, making the deckbuilding feel much more impactful.

A gripe I have with every deckbuilding game I’ve tried is that they seem to be very restricted when it comes to letting players remove cards from their decks; apparently, this is something that must be done in a very small capacity. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could remove a card every round in a deckbuilder? I added that, and it worked really well; it just sped up the whole deckbuilding process, making it an express deckbuilder. A side effect of letting players trim their decks so fast is that inevitably players will be able to make very consistent decks, and one player will then probably have a deck that’s consistently the best. This is probably why most deckbuilders avoid this; they want to avoid an “early winner” spoiling the game before its end. In DECKO this problem is solved by embracing it as a feature; it’s a race to create the most broken deck and earn 60 chips the fastest, leading to the game ending just around that moment that a player gets unbeatable. I want to revisit this format of an express deckbuilder with frequent card burning in future games that are not about poker.

At this point the game already had some interesting balancing going on, as making something almost unbeatable like a deck that gets four aces or a royal flush consistently was hard and took a long time, while more “medium” decks that focused on getting the lower numbers could be made faster. So you could go for a mid deck that would give you lots of wins in early and midgame, spend longer trying to build something stronger, or first do the mid deck and then pivot to a stronger late game deck. Or make a medium deck while hate drafting high deck cards, at the expense of hurting your own deck. Several approaches were viable, and it all depended on what everyone else was doing. I now had a strong foundation, it was time to spice it up and add juicy twists, opening the game further.

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An early prototype of DECKO, now with card powers and jokers. At this point burned cards went to a shared burn pile, and there were victory point goal cards that didn't work well.
Adding the Cool Stuff
When adding special effects to all the cards in the market deck (then named flop deck), I used my experience with the simplistic version of the game to figure out which cards should have which powers. Initially the lower numbered cards got the stronger powers, otherwise it would simply be a no brainer to always go for higher cards. The twos got the Crypto mechanism for example, giving you exponentially more chips for collecting them, a hand of four Cryptos would award you 16 chips regardless of winning or losing for example. With more testing it felt like the higher cards were less good than lower cards. These cards are less attractive because you don’t start with any of them. Why would I buy a ten that I couldn’t even make a pair with, instead of an eight that would enable me three of a kind and probably full house soon? It turned out the higher cards needed really strong powers as well to be attractive. Aces were so good by default they didn’t need much help, but you would often be stuck with a single Ace or get very few as all players would buy them. The Assisting Aces were born out of this, now we had aces that would help your other cards by adjusting their number, so they would be useful even if you didn’t get several. The royal cards were in a similar position to the aces, and got all kinds of powers that worked with other cards.

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A playtesting session in Oslo, shoutout to Brettspillskaperlauget. This version of the game let you get jokers when folding (bad idea), and could end when someone got to 40 chips (too soon).
Dealing With Luck
A game about poker and deckbuilding is inherently lucky. I had no ambitions of making this a game with no luck element, in fact I think a little luck and randomness is essential in games. But I wanted to make the game as low luck and strategic as possible, and also make it possible for players with bad luck to catch up with luckier players. I approached this directly from both ends. First of all the winning player of each poker hand would not be allowed to buy new cards. The players winning lots of chips (which are victory points in this) would stagnate in their deckbuilding, while those who lost lots chips would be buying more cards and getting better decks. Secondly, the players who folds (that’s when you forfeit a bet) would be able to get any one card in the market display for free. This would be a great boon particularly in the earliest rounds where the luck factor is at its peak. A side effect of this system is that losing or folding can feel better than winning in early rounds, particularly if bets are low. Further adjustments were made in the game to make winning early rounds better. A core part of it is that you need to have a good chip economy to do well in the mid and late game. Jokers are bought for chips, you can’t get jokers when folding and the increasing starting and maximum bets mean you need quite a few chips to be in the bets. The wildcard rounds also have antes (mandatory bets) players must pay. Players who win much tend to get smaller decks as they remove (burn) a card every round while not buying any. This is good because your deck becomes smaller so that buying a few cards can have a big impact and instantly power up your deck. In the end winning and loosing felt just about right. In the first round losing is kind of good (though winning isn't bad either), then as the game progresses winning becomes more and more important, and at the same time who wins is increasingly determined by whoever built the best deck and joker engine, to the point where it usually feels very deterministic in the final rounds.

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A playtest session where the game was voluntarily played two times back to back, a positive sign! Shoutout to Spilloteket, Oslo's finest board game bar.
The Jokers
I knew from the start the jokers would be in tableaus next to the players and have ongoing abilities or special actions instead of being mixed into with the decks. Initially the jokers were in one big deck full of random abilities. I used these to add a lot of complexity and twists to the game, and really take a stab at subverting what goes on in regular poker. Like what if someone has a reason to raise their bet even when they have a bad hand? What if someone earns chips by prolonging the round? What if someone can earn more from folding than raising? Could you win the game without winning bets? I had a ton of ideas and made a deck of jokers. I noticed quite early I needed a better system than having them all in one deck. A player that was behind on the deckbuilding could really use a joker that triggers when folding, or a joker that discounts card buys. But if they were randomly buried in the joker deck, tough luck. Something had to be done.

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The joker shop, in the final prototype that was very close to the final product. Cards were ordered from makeplayingcards, the mat was sourced at a shop for mats, poker chips from a fancy poker chip brand.
The joker abilities had trigger points, some were used when folding, others when raising, some when drawing cards and so on. Sorting the jokers into separate decks based on their triggers was the obvious thing to do. Not only did it solve the problem mentioned above by giving players constant access to the joker types they might want, it also made the game easier to learn and parse on the table. Instead of reading all the joker text all the time, a player could learn at the start that the blue jokers work when folding, the red ones work when raising and the teal ones are for buying. A quick glance at the opponent’s joker tableau would tell you if they likely benefited from raising, calling or folding the most. Making the jokers anchored to the trigger points made them a really cool feature of the game, making them a core part of the strategy. Will you be a player who folds half your hands with great rewards, or someone that keeps raising bets to repeatedly trigger an effect and win bets?

Adding a Big Twist
The game had really shaped up, but I felt like I could make it more interesting. Something that would make each game different from the last, something that would make you deckbuild differently in every game. Imagine a deckbuilder where you must build your deck not only for one ruleset, but for two rulesets. Or what if you had to build for three rulesets? Originally an expansion idea, I added the wildcard rounds. For two rounds in every game, there would be a random special rule really changing how you win, and a much higher pot. These rules would be visible from the start of the game, so that players could plan for them. As an example there is a wildcard round that only lets you score one card, another one makes you draw your hand from your burn pile. As you can imagine, this will affect how you build your deck. I found one could do really well by focusing on the wildcard rounds at the expense of doing slightly worse in regular rounds. At the same time deliberately ignoring them could work, if you did really well in the rest of the game.

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Some of the wildcards in the close to finished version
Artwork and Graphic Design
For all my games I make the art and graphic design myself. I really think of how the product is going to work as a whole when I do the visuals. I see it much like being a UX designer, creating an interface for players to interact with the game system. It’s also like being an art director focused on creating a viable commercial product.

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Figuring out the look for DECKO involved a lot of sketching and testing out different designs. I usually have to draw things many times before I get to a good result.
DECKO needed to look like a regular deck of cards (to communicate it’s a poker game), but it also needed to look like something more. If it had regular card icons and artwork it would probably look too cheap and not sell well. What I came up with was symbols that represent meta items from the world of poker, the clovers are made of poker chips, the spades are two cards, and the hearts are poker tables. For a while the game was going to be named Meta Poker, but I changed it as I didn’t want it to be mistaken for just being another home made poker variant. Part of the look of regular decks of cards is having a very restrictive color palette. Usually there’s mostly black and red, and small amounts of blue and golden/dark yellow. I decided to make a restricted palette a core part of the design (a limited palette usually makes graphic design better anyway!). I went with red and gold for diamonds, black and teal for clovers, blue and black for spades and red and black for hearts.

In the beginning I was thinking of having a hell theme for the game, it had the tagline “13 clowns gather in hell to play poker”. I pivoted away from this, choosing a more whimsical theme of just having random poker and clown related stuff. In the end the game has more of a style and vibe rather than a theme and story, which felt refreshing and liberating to me as I usually work with a lot of worldbuilding in my head. The presence of flames on the cover and burn board is a remnant of this original theme, which I kept in because burning cards is a major part of the game. The graphics were given a raster dot texture and some white specks imitating chipped off paper as if the game is already well used, adding to the meta theme and suggesting something is slightly off (something strange is going on with this poker deck!).

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Making the artwork for the royal cards proved the most challenging, as I had to teach myself how to make characters that are like mirrored conjoined twins. It became easier with some practice. I first sketched them out fast to test the concept, then created the final art in vector graphics. I worked within the boundaries of the strict color palette I had established, only allowing myself to use the suit colors and sticking with dark/golden yellow skin and black hair for all the characters (making them look ethnically ambiguous). The queens each have unique abilities that are hinted at in their artwork, and the kings have beards and some sort of fake or proxy crowns.

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Some of the fold jokers, identified by their blue coloring. Most of them have a catch-up mechanism theme, fitting well with folding.
The jokers were the most fun to draw, as they could be all kinds of things that vaguely represented their abilities. Also here I went with a color scheme limitation. Each joker type would have one color that would be the main color on the artwork, that could be combined with colors from the other joker types in small amounts, as well as black and golden yellow. It was important to have the main color prominent to let the players easily identify their type.

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The final production of the game with it's deluxified components
Crowdfunding and Reception
The game had a successful crowdfunding campaign offering a deluxe product with a playmat, gilded cards and some very heavy poker chips. The stretch goals were presented as glossy booster packs of jokers that were opened when they were unlocked. Backers have received their games, and from looking at the BGG ratings this is my most well received game this far. I’m very grateful for all the backers who believed in this project and took a chance backing it.

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Some of the booster packs the stretch goal components were marketed with.

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Promotional picture of the base game and upcoming expansion.

What’s Next for DECKO?
This autumn a new expansion for DECKO will launch on Gamefound! It will add what backers have wished for the most, lots of new cards! It introduces the Pistachio deck, which can be used separately or together with the vanilla (base game) deck, massively increasing the replay value with 52 new cards. New jokers and wildcards will also be introduced.

I hope you enjoyed reading this designer diary, and that you want to give DECKOa try! Feel free to ask any questions you may have here.

Thanks for reading!
Haakon

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SPIEL Essen 2026—22 Many Things About the Show

whenindoubteatout — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 06:00:02 +0000

by Justin Bell

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If you missed my roundup of the pre-fair Novelty Show, click here.

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“Man, this thing is HUGE.”

I was talking to someone on the second day of SPIEL Essen 2026 and we were talking about the sheer scale of a thing we had both been to a number of times. Even for those of us who have been going for five years (me), 13 years (this other person), 25 years, or just this show, it felt like the first day of SPIEL Essen 2026 was the most crowded I had ever seen the show.

“Felt like a Saturday,” said another show veteran I spoke to. “And that’s sort of shocking, given that there’s an entirely new hall that was also jam packed all day.”

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Over the course of my four days at SPIEL Essen, I have to think that the people at Merz Verlag (the people who run the show) are at least considering the fact that Messe Essen is getting a bit tight. Walking space in some of the halls was really jammed at times, with no offender worse than Hall 3. Hall 3 (the main hall dedicated to "expert" and strategy games) was often so crowded that I could swear I saw people having actual panic attacks as they tried to navigate the halls with their new toys, and I’m not making light of the situation at all. (Saturday featured more families than Thursday, and the mix of stroller traffic alongside parents letting their toddlers walk in Hall 3, or the Galleria / food truck area at lunchtime, was quite often a challenge.)

So, space is an issue…and the show organizers say that SPIEL Essen won’t get any bigger, with a cap of the 230,000 visitors who can attend the four-day show now. I will politely respond with: we’ll see.

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I’m editing this article in the evening after the fourth day of the show, in part to try to capture as many of my thoughts as possible before I board a flight back to Chicago Monday morning.

In no particular order, here are 22 things I thought about during the fair; apologies for the length and a few too many pictures. A big thanks to every person who agreed to spend time with me, or make silly faces at the camera, or include me in their drinks / dinners / evening booth parties, or let me store my big orange bag (aka “Ol’ Bessie”) as I parked it in various places to avoid moving it around through the halls. Enjoy!

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1. I’ve met a lot of people in the tabletop space, but never someone who manages a publisher, designs games, and is a classically-trained singer. Although I think the catalog of inPatience is quite interesting and has a clear goal of providing interesting, small box, solo and two-player hobby productions to the community, I was much more intrigued by the personal story of Shadi Torbey, the designer of Onirim and an opera singer based on Belgium. Games are cool, but opera? Dope.

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2. The best booth of the show belonged to the team behind Magic: The Gathering Star Trek…because these people put together a Starship Enterprise booth complete with stairs that lead up a flight of stairs into the main play area. The artwork for the various Star Trek captains over the years was cool as well, but man, the look of that ship made people stop in their tracks. Or treks. (I’ll see myself out.)

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3. For the first time in my five years attending SPIEL Essen, I played a game outside the Messe with friends. We played Qork, a game so simple that I could use the next 30 words to tell you all the rules. (Instead, just go out and buy a copy, it’s great, 10 years old, and offers solid, dumb fun.) After Qork, we played Hitster, and laughed as we learned that my very deep but narrow focus on 80s and 90s hip-hop doesn’t seem very helpful when you're trying to win.

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4. Chris Whitpan is the man! I met Chris at TraXX (a small but mighty 18xx gaming convention in Colorado) a couple years ago, and we usually run into each other randomly—at or near the Lonny Games booth, to say hi to Leonhard “Lonny” Orgler and talk train games. Then I came to realize that Chris runs the PAX tabletop events. Across breakfast one day and a couple cab rides together during the week, Chris and I spent enough random snippets of time together that I now wish he lived in Chicago so that we could toss him into our other game nights. Not surprisingly, Chris is the guy that knows everyone, so he’s not a bad guy to slide up to at a local drinking establishment.

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5. At one of the booth parties on Friday night, I met a guy from Spain who does a podcast and is just generally a gamer. Walking out of a publisher presentation, I ran into Giulia Amici, an Italian content creator I met last year, and she had some interesting opinions about the booths she had visited. Another person I met wanted to chat about the quality of the pretzels at one of the food stands. A community manager for an exhibitor had pointed opinions about the curry on sale outside of her booth’s hall. This is why I love chatting with people who I don’t know—everyone has an angle, something interesting to say about a demo, or the food, or an old game they snagged from a used game booth. You only get that kind of thing at conventions, and I love it.

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6. Superstar designer run-in #1: While I was standing in the Devir booth on the show’s second day, I got to meet Isra and Shei, the designers also known as Llama Dice. The White Castle is in my personal top five, and many of the other Llama Dice titles remain in my collection. I might have yelped out loud when I met those two and it was a pleasure to chat about a bunch of things not related to games during a second run-in the next day. It’s always fun to chat with the designers of your favorite games…it’s even better when you get to share a laugh.

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7. More Hegemony? Yes please. The best game I played in 2023 has a third expansion launching on crowdfunding next year titled Hegemony: Shadows of Authority. The addition of new action cards, new elements on the Politics Table (including crime and the environment), and a couple new mechanics mean that one of the biggest table hogs in recent memory is getting a little bigger…count me in!

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8. There’s a spot outside of the Galleria, at the Messe where the line of food trucks indoors turns into a line of trucks outdoors, that has a vendor with a red tent and an extra-long smoker. That tent does pulled pork, but pulled pork in a few different shades: a pulled pork sandwich, fries topped with pulled pork, pulled pork a la mode. (I made at least one of those up.) In general, I think convention food is never better than fine. But that pulled pork was solid. Tasty, interesting, juicy but not quite juicy enough, a good amount of flavor. This point is here mainly to remind myself that I’m hitting that puppy again next year.

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9. I had never met Zev Shlasinger in person before this year’s show. Zev used to run Z-Man Games and now leads Play to Z. It’s pretty hard to out-energy me, but by the show’s second day, Zev looked like a man who was the living embodiment of “always be selling.” Super high energy. Big laugh, bigger than my own by a mile. Customers kept coming to the Play to Z stand, and he greeted each and every person like they were a friend of the family. I don’t know a lot of people who I would call “personalities” in the tabletop space, but Zev absolutely fits the bill. If you haven’t met him, I highly recommend stopping by Zev’s booth at a future show…it will be time well spent.

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10. Devir made a big announcement at the fair: the next game in the “Kemushi” saga (games that include Bitoku, Sand, and the recently-released strategy game Shugendo) is Kaiju, War of the Yokai. The major selling point: the three-person design team includes the people who made War of the Ring: Second Edition (currently #8 on BGG’s overall rankings) and Dune: War for Arrakis. The gathered audience for this announcement produced audible gasps when this was unveiled at Devir’s booth party. I have a feeling that now is a great time to double down on my imaginary Devir shares.

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11. The random run-ins you get with designers of all shades at SPIEL Essen is an absolute thrill. I bumped into Simone Luciani three different times on the first day of the fair. I met up with Cardner Babakitis to grab her new games. During a meeting in hall 2, I made eyes with Fabio Lopiano, and after we exchanged pleasantries, he stopped to sign autographs by other fans. (Fabio, can we get more corporations for Shackleton Base? Call me.) I had an interesting conversation with Daniele Tascini outside of the Board&Dice booth. Martin Wallace and I had drinks at a booth party one night. Liz Davidson and I…well, Liz Davidson and I did what it seems like we do each time we run into each other, which is laugh a lot.

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12. I demoed four games this year. One is already available: ICE Second Edition, from This Way!. The other three are inbound, either through retail soon or crowdfunding in the next few months: Chimerium, from Synapses Games (possibly the world’s first chimera crafting game?), Ports of Call: The Board Game from Game Inventors (the supply and demand mechanics were very interesting, and it is based on a video game from something young people won’t recognize: the Amiga!!), and Foundation: Isaac Asimov, based on the Foundation novel series. I had a blast sitting through all the games; this is why I believe so much in the idea of “try before you buy”, and SPIEL Essen is an excellent opportunity to do that before backing or buying a new game.

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13. There were massive queues everywhere during the fair, but the line I will remember is the one that built up each day in front of the Combo Games booth for their new release Queen Alice. Around 10 AM on the show’s second day, I heard a small stampede coming my way, then looked up to see geeks of all shapes and sizes making a beeline for the Combo booth. (A few hundred copies of Queen Alice were available to buy from the booth each morning. They never lasted long.) When combined with the lines for CGE’s Kingdom Come: Deliverance—The Board Game, situated near Combo in Hall 3, there were some nasty lines snaking around a number of nearby stands. Look, you can’t blame or penalize a vendor for selling games, and this gets back to my concerns about Messe Essen being able to handle the increasing size and scale of this event. There will always be hot games on display!

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14. I made a point to meet with a lot of small and/or “new to me” vendors at this year’s show, and even though I booked almost 40 meetings, there were dozens of vendors I still wanted to meet. Every time I find myself getting down about games feeling too “samey” or serving as safe bets from established brands, I meet a publisher who worked on a single game for the last six years with a really original idea. I’m actually loving where things are from a variety perspective in tabletop…for every large, or even medium-sized, publisher, there are shops with 1-5 employees who are crushing it right now with fresh ideas and a very steady output of games with top-notch art, production, design, and development in place.

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15. Starstruck designer run-in #2: after lunch on the third day of the show, I strolled the Messe with my friend Danni and spent some time catching up. At each show, I only buy one game; it’s fair to call out that this is a first-world problem, the admittedly-privileged life of a game reviewer. This year, I decided to hit the Saashi & Saashi booth to buy Railway Porters. As I was paying for my copy, I noticed a man standing near the booth’s business/storage area and realized that I was staring at…Saashi Takarai himself! A moment later, I was getting a picture with the designer of some of my favorite games, including Come Sail Away!, Let’s Make a Bus Route, and my favorite Saashi & Saashi design, Photograph (Wind the Film!).

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15a. As I was snapping a picture with Saashi, I looked to my left and saw a woman whose nametag got me even more excited: Takako Takarai! Takako is the artist for all of the Saashi & Saashi games, so I asked Saashi and Takako to join me for a picture and I did my best to not lose my mind that the moment was really happening. Saashi and Saashi! At the Saashi & Saashi booth! They even autographed my copy of Railway Porters!!

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16. Every time I go to SPIEL Essen, one thing really shocks me, as a man in his early 50s trying to imagine what gaming life will look like as I age: there are a bunch of people at SPIEL Essen in their 60s, 70s, and maybe even older who are walking the halls to pick up new games. I love it. I’m not saying that other shows discourage older players from attending; everyone loves a customer, regardless of age. But at SPIEL Essen, the wide range of ages is quite noticeable and I embrace it.

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17. The thing that everyone fights when they go to a convention: trying as hard as they can to NOT lose their voice. This is particularly true for any kind soul who agreed to demo a game dozens of times across a multi-day show. I have to pound cough drops all day to even come close to having a voice by a show’s final day. At one of the booths, a distributor provided mics and small speakers so that their demo teams could be heard at each table without straining to be heard among the crowds in hall 2. That’s the only way to fly!

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18. At three different meetings on the show’s third day, a marketer or a publisher used the word “deluxify” in a sentence. “We’re still not sure which components we’ll deluxify for the next version of _____, but we’re working on it.” I have been saying for years that “deluxify” would have its time in the sun, and I was on the cutting edge of this significant change in the way we talk about games. The edge, baby!

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19. I can only comment on the meetings that I attended, but I was surprised how often a theme emerged, unsolicited, around a focus on releasing fewer games in 2027 and 2028. Sometimes, this came from publishers that already make just one or two games a year, and these same publishers are excited to see those with larger catalogs consider making fewer games. In one case, a publisher planned to come down from six games in 2026 to 4-5 games (including expansions) next year. I love games, but the rapid rate of releases means I go to a fair with 1,800 games and have no shot of seeing any real slice of that total…and that’s only the publishers who have a booth at SPIEL!!

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20. The afternoon on the show’s final day, Sunday, felt like a Saturday at past shows in terms of foot traffic. I was still ducking and diving out of the way of people at 4:45 PM on Sunday. Even at SPIEL Essen last year, I spent time wandering the relatively quiet halls late in the day talking with publishers who were beginning to break down their booths to get out as soon as they could after 6 PM. This year? People were still buying games, demoing the hottest titles, and waiting in long restroom lines late in the show’s final day.

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21. I was forced to ship two boxes from the fair this year—a large box Saturday, then a medium box Sunday. In total, I shipped 97 pounds of games (44 kgs) back to Chicago. That was expensive—about 600 euros—but I’m more obsessed with what the number will be when I get the bill for the tariffs back to the US. The shipping operation at the fair? A mixed bag. On Saturday, it took 56 minutes for me to navigate box packing, a wait in line, then some work with a slower agent. (I tried my best to be pleasant.) Sunday, I was in and out in 17 minutes, well in advance of the 6 PM hall closing time.

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22. There’s a level of sadness when I leave the Messe on Sunday afternoon, and that kicked in again for this year’s show. Some of that is the genuine love I have for the people, but some sadness was linked to regret: I didn’t make enough time to try out more games. There’s not nearly enough time across four days unless you really commit to a battle plan to hammer two, maybe three of the halls. Hitting every stand and demoing games as much as you can is critical, but just talking to the people who love talking about their games with players is a thrill.

SPIEL Essen is still my favorite show of them all. My feet are thankful that the show has ended…but I’m already fired up for SPIEL Essen 2027!

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Designer Diary: Brushwood

filippolandini — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 14:00:02 +0000

by filippo landini

]]>I first started thinking about a game that could recreate the experience of walking in the woods back in August 2021, right after returning home from summer vacation.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve spent part of August in the Italian Alps, as my mother was born in Val di Fiemme and we still have my grandparents' house there.
Even now that I have a family of my own, I love going hiking in the mountains with my wife and kids. Those moments are deeply relaxing and peaceful, and I thought it would be wonderful to capture that exact same feeling in a board game.

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When designing a game, I don't always start with the theme or the atmosphere I want players to experience. Often, I'm drawn to the idea of making a mechanic I came up with work, or tweaking a system I tried elsewhere and found interesting.
For Brushwood, however, the spark came directly from thinking about the beauty of the mountains and the tranquility of those walks.

The core idea—building the journey of a walk by laying down forest cards side by side—was the very first building block, and it remained completely unchanged all the way to the published version.

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The rest of the game, on the other hand, went through a major evolution between the first prototype and the final edition. Unless I’m miscounting, I think I went through as many as 16 different versions, tweaking everything from the cards to the main board. Initially, I wanted to include as many forest elements as possible to capture everything that makes a hike enjoyable and exciting. On top of what’s in the game today—like birds, mushrooms, and squirrels—the early cards also featured butterflies, beetles, and bees.

As is often the case with me, I tend to start designing by overloading the game with options. Maybe out of fear that it will feel too simple, maybe to offer more choices, or to create deeper strategic layers... Whatever the reason, during development, I also experimented with lumberjacks, rangers, scouts, and explorers.

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But as the design progressed, I realized the importance of stripping away the excess and keeping only what was strictly necessary. The goal was to ensure a lighthearted, pleasant gameplay experience that still offered just the right amount of tension in the player's simple decisions.

The card drafting system—a square board with two draw piles on each side—also remained identical from the first prototype. Originally, though, berries were placed in pairs in the center of the board, corresponding to each card stack. When a player moved the shared pawn, they had to choose whether to pick the berries or draw the card from the space where it stopped. While this structure created an asymmetry in the number of cards players finished the game with (which I really liked), it forced players to constantly refill berry tokens and caused way too much analysis paralysis.

On top of evaluating the next three available cards, players also had to consider three possible pairs of berries—an overload of information that didn't fit the relaxed vibe I wanted to convey. So, I redesigned this dynamic by placing a designated space for berry tokens on the board between the cards. This allowed players to choose a forest card to add to their tableau and, alongside it, take one of the two berries located to its left or right.

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While this solution worked better than the first, it still wasn't quite there. I remember testing the game during a meetup with other Italian designers, where Paolo Mori gave me a few invaluable suggestions to simplify the berry collection. His feedback helped shape the definitive system that I eventually presented at the SPIEL Essen fair in October 2023. At SPIEL Essen, I pitched the prototype to several publishers, and almost all of them asked for a review copy. Korea Boardgames was the fastest to offer a contract, even though another publisher had requested to be notified before I signed anything.

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When I accepted Korea Boardgames' offer and informed the other publishers that the game was no longer available—asking if they’d like me to arrange the return of their prototypes—I received a response that I still look back on with great fondness. One publisher wrote back: "One final personal question: If it is not needed, may I keep the prototype to play it with my mother-in-law once in a while? That would be great." The mother-in-law in question was over ninety years old and enjoyed playing Brushwood so much that she wanted to keep the prototype. That little anecdote filled me with immense pride!

Development with Korea Boardgames took a bit of time, not because of the game mechanics—which ultimately saw minimal changes—but rather to find the right art direction. In December 2023, an illustrator had initially been selected, but a few months later the team decided to entrust the artwork to Matt Sanz, who hit the nail on the head and did a fantastic job. We heavily focused on designing a card background sequence where the trees weren't repetitive, but still formed a seamless forest panorama no matter the order cards were placed next to each other.

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The goal was to create three or four variant backgrounds with varying tree layouts whose left and right edges connect seamlessly in any sequence. The end result came together perfectly and looks fantastic on the table.

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The game was originally slated to debut at Nuremberg in 2025, but due to these artistic updates, we decided to push the launch back by a year and officially present the game at the 2026 Nuremberg Toy Fair, in the final form you can finally enjoy today.

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Designer Diary: Final Titan

Phelddagrif — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 14:00:02 +0000

by Richard Garfield

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The Origin

I forget the exact chain of events that lead up to Christian sharing an early prototype of Final Titan with me. We were talking about autobattlers, a digital game form that I think is particularly good for board game players. My early attempts to make autobattler board games felt clumsy; like they would be more fun on computer than around a table. We were also talking about making an analog to Magical Athlete – a simple battling game with warriors that have special powers rather than a simple racing game where the racers have special powers. I am not sure if I realized, at that point, that Magical Athlete was effectively an autobattler.

Christian: An amusing fact is that at that point, I had actually never played Magical Athlete, though I had a vague idea of how it worked. This was one of those designs where the initial prototype was already working extremely well and though many mechanisms changed, the feelings and excitement of the players remained from those initial plays.

Marvin from Nerdlab participated in those very early playtests and immediately offered to sign the game. Despite it being in a rough and very early prototype state, he immediately saw huge potential in it. Nerdlab had knocked it out of the park with Mindbug. But they were also a small company. We considered if a company of that size could really pull it off. I remember Richard had a strong vision for the game, and he really wanted it done right. He agreed to go with Nerdlab on one condition: There should be 100 Titans in the game. This is an absolutely crazy and wildly ambitious number. I think most companies would do 20-30. But Marvin agreed and we are all extremely proud to have delivered on that promise.

The gameplay, described briefly: Each player drafts a team of Titans. These take turns fighting 1-on-1 in the middle of the table. When one Titan wins, it stays in the middle and the other players spend resources in a No Thanks way, to avoid having to go in and fight it. The fights themselves are resolved through rolling a single die, which in turn triggers all kinds of attacks, rerolls and crazy abilities. It sounds dumb, and it kind of is. Yet also strangely exciting once you try it.

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The Interaction
The thing that most excited me about Christian’s design was the interaction, which he described as a No Thanks! style auction. I am always interested in the interaction in games – I enjoy many low interaction games but feel that higher interaction games are often underrepresented. Being able to interact more with another player can bring a host of problems – and I have a big virtual toolbox for ways to deal with that, and this felt like something new.

To illustrate what I mean, consider my game King of Tokyo, which was originally an exercise to make Yahtzee more interactive. In King of Tokyo, I use a king of the hill style interaction; players can generally only affect a player who is on the hill (in Tokyo), and a player who is being attacked can always retreat from the hill. This makes it so you can have a highly interactive game but aren’t constantly needing to choose who to pick on, and can limit how much people can pick on you.

With Christian’s No Thanks! interaction, you have a champion and players bid for the right not to challenge them. Eventually someone will have to challenge the champion, but players aren’t choosing which other player to pick on, and, they have some agency in what battles they are involved with; it serves a similar purpose to the interaction in King of Tokyo but feels fresh. It also reminded me of Poker; even though Poker is usually played with many people, the interaction often ends up being two players with other players saying “No Thanks!”

This idea is powerful – in a game where you want to be the last standing the best position to be in is always watching other players fight. Bidding for that position rather than, say, the right to fight makes a lot of sense.

Christian: Players of Final Titan will probably never think of it as an auction game, but indeed one of the central mechanisms is a no-thanks style auction, where players are spending upgrade-cards to avoid going in and fighting the blood thirsty Champion that is waiting in the middle and probably totally overpowered.

Evolving the Interaction
Originally the bidding was done with chips, each player had some chips and could spend them to avoid a fight. Early on, however, we felt we could use cards instead of chips and give the cards some play value. This would give players some more decision making with the card play, and with figuring out which cards to spend to avoid a fight. As anyone who has played No Thanks! would expect, the chips were already much more interesting than they seemed at first since the value of the chips changes based on what the current distribution of chips are. Making it so that the chips were different from each other gave us another layer of interest.

This wasn’t an easy transition, however. We were all on board for adding these cards, but what cards to add and how powerful they should be? I would guess, in fact, that this was the biggest design challenge in the entire project. I believe the main issue always came back to power level. We wanted the cards to be spent to avoid fights, not just played to win fights.

If the cards become powerful enough to reliably swing a battle then the dynamic is more about collecting and spending cards than it is about ducking dangerous fights, particularly since we wanted to give a bonus card to the victor each time. At its extreme, no one will spend cards to avoid fights – the next person in line will challenge rather than give up a card and the dynamic becomes one focused on the cards rather than the hero match-up. A good game can be made this way – and in fact I think we went through several – but it is much more pedestrian… you step up on your turn and decide how many cards it is worth investing, rather than spend cards to duck the fight and possibly get a big haul of cards when you choose to fight.

I remember many iterations where alarms were going off in my head as players became too attached to their cards and would always step up to avoid spending them. This sort of thing is sometimes difficult to spot as a designer, because we know how the game is ‘supposed’ to be played and we tend to play it that way. If we aren’t actually in the game though, and people choose – correctly or not – to play in this way the entire game can suffer.

Final Titan worked fine, in fact, I think it worked great with the cards just being blank. That emphasized everything we wanted the game to be about, finding the right matchups and only being able to avoid the wrong ones so many times. However, we couldn’t simply make the cards weak – there were some versions we played where the cards were so weak and uninteresting that I stopped paying any attention to them. At this point we would be better off going back to chips, which felt like a lost opportunity. The cards had to be strong enough to consider and compare, but not so strong that you wouldn’t look at a fight and say… “nah, I think this should be someone else’s problem.” To me, it was that particular decision that made this game special.

One approach that worked pretty well was making cards that were situationally good, or good for particular characters or matchups. These could be relevant and potentially game changing, and yet clearly worth pitching to avoid the wrong fight.

The other problem facing the cards was keeping them from slowing down the game. If you have cards that you can play during the fight, then you risk slowing the game down a lot. Cards like ‘reroll an attack’, or ‘dodge an attack’ will inevitably lead to the game slowing down as players stop to make sure there is no card play, or barrel ahead and hear “wait – go back, I didn’t get a chance to play this card!” There were some natural windows to keep the cards in which wouldn’t slow the game down much – like – cards that are played before you roll, or before the fight starts, or after the fight ends.

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Christian: Ah yes, figuring out the right way to do cards was definitely the trickiest part of development. I was particularly sensitive to the occasional occurrence of “Oh don’t roll your die yet, I was considering playing a card”, despite it generally having very good gameplay. In the end, we went for all card plays happening before the start of each fight, to make the fight flow as smooth as possible.

Evolving the Fights
The way the fights worked also evolved over time. At first we threw everything into the game to get a sense of what worked well and what didn’t. This is often a technique I use, rather than carefully prescribe a domain which I know will work, I try it all then cut back as needed.

One of the most important features added was a critical hit, which eventually lead to a fun, distinct ultimate power for each fighter. This came about in part because situations could often feel hopeless, and it gave the player a way to win.

The other side of the coin was the fail, the miss, the blank side of the die. The presence of that along with the ultimate power meant that every roll, in general, could succeed or fail; which kept the matches alive and with the possibility of surprise far longer than when these were not a baked in part of every character. There will still be hopeless situations, like with poison, but their rarity makes them special.

There were some times where we experimented with giving the standing champion a disadvantage in order to make the turnover more reliable. I think there was one character in particular that made us consider that – maybe it was a well-known Barbarian – who had a bit of difficulty winning the first match but would heal and get stronger after each victory. I always came down on the side of wanting the champions, if anything, to have more defensive power because it is the entrenched victor that has an epic battle to oust that stands out as the most exciting sort of story that can come out of Final Titan. The standing champions usually have a disadvantage anyway since they often have diminished life points, and always have the disadvantage of their opponent being able to choose the best matchup from those available. I think the game just tends to become more exciting as a champion notches up a few victories; and if they can ride that all the way home? Well, it is a short game, play again!

Christian: For a while, all characters had the same “ultimate attack”, which was simply a KO. The guys at Nerdlab really wanted each character to have its own Ultimate attack. I remember fighting this for months as I did not for a second believe that there would be enough design space to make this a reality. In the end, mostly to finally shut them up, we gave it a shot giving each character their own ultimate attack. It immediately worked super well and I kick myself for having fought against it for so long.

The Flavor
Final Titan was a battling game, a game in which players drafted and then fought some sort of character in a series of 1v1 battles that would leave a single champion. But, what were those characters? Where was that battle? The first draft was a collection of characters taken from public domain books, including, for example, King Arthur, Alice (of Alice in Wonderland), Frankenstein’s Monster, Sherlock, the Artful Dodger, and even Moby Dick. It was meant to be a placeholder flavor, but its charm helped guide it to its final place.

As champions were added to the mix, many were not public domain – which we intended not to use but to inspire us for mechanics and tone – like Conan and Shelob. As we understood and explored the mechanics more we began to make champions from the mechanics – for which we often used a faux-superhero flavor.

To this point we hadn’t really decided what the flavor was going to be, and there were many places it could have gone. I remember one approach in particular was kids battling toys in a toy grand melee; so all the champions would have been Dolls, Toy Cars, and Stuffed Animals, for example. The merit of such an approach is that it looks fresh, unlike, say, generic fantasy. The problem with such an approach is that a potential player doesn’t really understand what is going on immediately, and when they are picking the champions they often can’t read much into the images. You have some idea of what a dragon or an ogre might represent in a battle, but, a rocking horse and a football?

In the end we chose to go with Superheroes. It was easy and fun to translate what we had into superheroes, and the origin of the characters from its public domain roots often gave them an original, but plausible presence. Tying them together with art from their comic books really gave the game a cohesive feeling – one in which any onlooker could tell what was going on. Also, it felt endlessly expandable – so we could make as many as we wanted, and any fans of the game could easily add their own if inspired to do so.

Christian: As a little anecdote, I wanted to have a character representing my home town of Odense, which is probably most famous for being the birthplace of author Hans Christian Andersen. We chose one of his characters, The Ugly Duckling, though of course it was represented in an over the top crazy muscular version which felt fitting to the game.

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The Name
During most of the game development we called the game G.O.A.T. We all liked the name; I even mocked up a box cover complete with a goat bursting through the background. However, it turned out that there are legal claims to the name and we would be better off choosing a different one.

As usual, this process was difficult. When my games have had to be renamed, they often end up being unable to stand up to the original name, at least in the minds of the people who had lived with that name for so long. Sometimes you end up with a worse name, like I think happened when "Fat Dracula" got changed to The Hunger. Occasionally a better name, like when "Inconceivable" got changed to Half-Truth. Sometimes we give up and go back to the original as happened with Magic, which changed to "Mana Clash" briefly before we went back with Magic: The Gathering.

With G.O.A.T. we couldn’t find anything that pleased us all in the same way. We worked on it quite a while and it felt like we weren’t ever going to find something with the feel we wanted – light humor with something of the nature of the game reflected in the title. It was undoubtedly not helped by the fact that we had people from at least four different countries weighing in who saw, for example, different connotations for the word Titan. For a long time my favorite name was one of Christian’s (I think), 100 Titans. I liked it because it felt humorous and would also force us to deliver at least 100 characters – which was the sort of epic number of champions I wanted to see. Also, leading with a number felt distinctive.

Not everyone cared for 100 Titans, though. One reason was quite legitimate, which is that it did commit us to 100, and also it might look weird if we added more. We ended up with Final Titan, and for me, this name works quite well. I liked that it told you something about the game, and felt a little cheesy but was still, to me at least, pretty cool. I hope that the rest of the team has grown to like it as much as I have.

Christian: And here we are, at the end. Development was long as this was one of the most ambitious projects I have been a part of. But we are very happy with where it ended: A box of 100 cool, different, weird, and wonderful Titans to keep players excited and engaged for a long time (actually more like 140 if you include expansions and promos). While development is a lot of hard work, we also got the pleasure of continuously seeing new and exciting artwork from the super talented team of artists that worked on the game. Seeing our ideas turn into these amazing comic-book-like characters was such a thrill, it is just the best feeling.

Final Titan is now being released into the wild. I actually expected the game to be quite divisive, but so far it has been extremely well received from reviewers and players, who really seem to feel that same weird excitement of rolling a die and seeing what happens. I will end with a quote I really liked from a comment here on BGG:

“I was a doubter. I watched some videos. Heard the rule summary. Draft dudes, then roll until someone wins. How could that be fun? Where's the crunchy decisions? Really, where's any of the decisions? But then I saw the a demo on TTS, so why not? I tried it out... and then immediately late pledged.

I think you need to see it to believe it.”

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SPIEL Essen 2026—The Novelty Show

whenindoubteatout — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 23:00:02 +0000

by Justin Bell

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On the day before SPIEL Essen opens to the general public, the fair hosts a media session and awards activity to show off the latest and greatest data. Part of the press conference includes an awards announcement for the Deutscher Spiele Presse (German Games Prize); the main category for family and adult gamers was won by the game Artengarten (Sanctuary), the lighter Ark Nova release designed by Mathias Wigge and published in Germany by Feuerland in 2025.

In a release shared by the events and PR team behind SPIEL Essen, Merz Verlag, lots of fun info was included:
* The show’s first three days are already sold out; assuming Sunday also sells out, more than 230,000 visitors will stroll the eight halls of Messe Essen this weekend, a new record.
* The fair has broken its attendance record for four years in a row.
* 997 exhibitors will have wares on display this weekend…and, you can tell even from the release, everyone wishes that the number topped a thousand. (Next year? Probably, although I’m not sure where else Merz Verlag will be able to accommodate more booths!!)
* Those exhibitors call 53 different countries home. While Germany, the US, France, China, and Poland lead the way, even Iceland has a booth this year. Kuwait does too! The people who make these games, toys and puzzles come from everywhere, so it is a delight to have the opportunity to meet people from so many different places.
* There are more than 1,800 novelties repped by those exhibitors this year. It’s gonna be tough to see everything, but you can’t argue about one thing: gamers of all shades should be able to find SOMETHING they like!

Of those 1,800 new products, about a thousand of them were on display at the press event that opened up for a few hours after the press conference, known as the Novelty Show. In essence, press members get to snap photos of the show’s hottest games up close, before the masses descend on each publisher’s booth and get in the way of my very amateur-looking photos taken with my Pixel phone’s camera. (I kid…sort of.)

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The other great thing about the Novelty Show is the access to a range of each publisher’s representatives, to chat about the games or the things they have coming up soon. That might mean anything from a conversation with a marketing rep about plans for upcoming crowdfunding campaigns, to a studio head excited to talk about their 2026 results, to game designers who can provide a brief overview of a game you have never seen before.

I’m always fascinated by what each exhibitor decides to do for the Novelty Show. In limited cases, a smaller exhibitor might have someone who sits in all three of these roles, like Leonie Grundler, the founder of Lioness Games who also designed Biome and struck me as the lead marketer for the items in the Lioness catalog. (She is also one of the tallest people in tabletop, so it was a little shocking to meet someone at the Novelty Show who was noticeably taller than I am.)

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The Novelty Show is so large that Merz Verlag organized the event in the Grugahalle, a multilevel event and stage space in between the Messe and the Atlantic Congress Hotel Essen. A funny tagline surfaced among the gathered media/content creator community during the Novelty Show: “wait, there’s a downstairs, too?” Those who entered from street level saw an entire floor’s worth of games…and then learned that the morning press conference that took place upstairs had another whole floor of games, but there wasn’t clear signage for anyone who skipped the initial press conference.

So, there’s an opportunity for next year. The other ding: the exhibitors on the first floor had lighting that was poor in certain parts of the space. That meant many of my pictures required flash photography and/or professional equipment to really shine. A number of media members get away with using mobile phone cameras for their images; some exhibitors suffered a bit from the lack of better overhead lighting.

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Strolling the Novelty Show took a couple hours. Hugs and high fives were available everywhere I looked, and everyone had their full, normal-sounding voice for what is likely the final time of the weekend.

There were a number of highlights, outside of the catch-ups and the networking on display.

For the first time, I met designer Friedemann Friese (2F-Spiele, and the designer of many “F”-titled classics over the years, such as Findorff, Fishing, and Funkenschlag, which is the first edition of the game now known as Power Grid). Friedemann is hard to miss, not only because of the bright green hair but more because of the big, hearty laugh.

He was the person manning the 2F table, on the Grugahalle’s upper level. We had a brief conversation about tabletop celebrity status that resonates, now that I have met other popular game designers over the years.

At SPIEL Essen, Friedemann is a celebrity; making great games for 20+ years will do that for you. But he was so excited to meet players from around the world, something he gets excited for every year. “I only have to be a celebrity for five days, then I can go home and not be a celebrity for the rest of the year!”

At the Czech Games Edition booth, I ran into Eleni, a member of the CGE marketing team who handles teach and promo videos for the company (and who you usually see running around doing CGE vlogs at SPIEL Essen and Gen Con). Eleni had a busy morning, including putting the finishing touches on the edits for the now-live teach-while-playing video for Kingdom Come: Deliverance—The Board Game. I’m still shocked by how many people I have met or know through my networks who have been anxiously awaiting a rulebook, so this teach video will probably have thousands of views by the time I wake up Thursday morning.

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I also ran into Branislav Berec at CGE’s booth, the man behind the Nithrania—Game in a Nutshell video series of board game instruction videos. I love Branislav’s work, and it sounds like we’ll be seeing more content from him in the very near future. The teach space for medium- and medium-plus strategy games is crowded, and for good reason: there are so many providers of great content right now, in a category that seems to be getting bigger every year.

The best part of that stand visit was getting a picture with designers Vlaada Chvátil and Tomáš Holek, dressed in costume for their appearances tied to Kingdom Come: Deliverance—The Board Game. They’ll be at the CGE booth all weekend signing autographs and taking pictures with fans.

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And, even though I thought I had a long journey to Essen from my home in Chicago, the reality is that many people come from outside of Europe to attend the show. Two of my favorite people in tabletop are Maggie and Amy, the Australian couple better known to their community as Thinker Themer. I ran into them while running around the Novelty Show.

It sounded crazy to me when I heard it, but it felt even crazier after talking to them at the show: they are doing a multiweek round-trip tour that launched in Australia, then went to Tokyo Game Market in Japan, then arrived in Germany for SPIEL Essen, then they’re flying back home to Australia. I love board games as much as anyone, but I could feel my body weight shift when they shared the flight pattern. I’m turned over just by flying to Germany…imagine doing that across so many more time zones. Thinker Themer, we salute you!

I’ll let the pictures do the rest of the talking. But first: a big thanks to the people who stopped me at the Novelty Show to say thanks for the work I’m doing here at BGG. It means a lot, but it also helps to know that for some, the work is resonating in ways I was hoping for when I joined this team. It’s pretty cool to meet people from all over the world who read BGG to get some of their tabletop news. From the BGG folks behind the scenes to the community here and abroad, it’s great to be one slice of the news pie you bite into every time you need it!

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Take Time to Rage about the Hunt for Ring in the Castle!

boardgamersteph — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 16:00:02 +0000

by Steph Hodge

[imageid=9603186 medium rep]▪️ Libellud Just released Take Time: Mirage. You will need Take Time to play as this is a small expansion that includes one more envelope to play and a new mechanic to include in past envelopes to increase the difficulty. from designers: Alexi Piovesan & Julien Prothière. This expansion plays 2-4 players in about 30 minutes.

From Asmodee:

This first expansion explores a different facet of the experience by moving away from the chapters of the base game. Featuring a fresh theme and brand-new mechanics, it introduces a surprising standalone twist that can be enjoyed independently. Designed to welcome both newcomers and returning players, it expands the Take Time universe while remaining true to its core identity.

STANDALONE EXPANSION EXPERIENCE: Enjoy a fresh Take Time adventure that can be played independently from the base game.
NEW MECHANICS & GAMEPLAY TWIST: Introduces innovative systems and surprising gameplay elements that expand strategic possibilities.
FRESH THEME & DESIGN: Explores a new facet of the Take Time universe with a distinct theme while maintaining its core identity.
ACCESSIBLE FOR ALL PLAYERS: Designed for both newcomers and returning fans, offering an easy entry point with added depth.
EXPAND YOUR GAMEPLAY OPTIONS: Adds variety, replayability, and new ways to experience the Take Time series.

]]>▪️ Another game that just released last week is Star Trek: Space Hunt from Matagot. From designers Roberto Fraga, Yohan Lemonnier, & Delphine Lemonnier. This game reimplements Captain Sonar and Sonar. It plays 2-4 players and takes 25-40 minutes. Buckle up, we are jumping into wapr speed for this!

From BGG:

Star Trek: Space Hunt is a real-time, hidden movement game that uses the Captain Sonar system, for 2-4 players that demands intense coordination and sharp deduction.

Players are divided into two opposing crews, each commanding iconic starships from across the franchise’s history with each vessel featuring unique builds for asymmetric gameplay.
The game covers several generations of the saga, allowing players to step into the roles of legendary duos such as Captain Kirk and Spock, Captain Picard and Data, or even the formidable Khan and Joachim.

]]>▪️ Blood Rage: Valhalla from Tycoon Games is set to release this November. From designer Eric M. Lang (Blood Rage). This is a whole new game that plays 3-5 players and takes 60-90 minutes.

From Asmodee:

Rage into the afterlife in Blood Rage: Valhalla! Occurring after Ragnarök ends the world, take up arms and empower your clan beyond their mortal limits, competing against your rivals for glory, honor, and the favor of the Gods.

RAGE INTO THE AFTERLIFE: Take your Viking conquest beyond the mortal realm! Blood Rage: Valhalla shifts the action to the afterlife, where players empower their clans and compete for eternal glory, honor, and the favor of the Gods after Ragnarök has ended the world.
DYNAMIC GOD POWERS: Experience a fresh challenge every time you play. The Gods shift each game, drastically changing the powers and strategies available to players. You must adapt your tactics on the fly to remain the most powerful clan in the afterlife.
DEEP STRATEGIC DEPTH: Master the art of war with refined card drafting and intense simultaneous combat. Valhalla challenges you to outthink your rivals in a high-stakes environment where every decision and card play is a test of your strategic foresight.
THE RAINBOW BRIDGE MODULE: Connect your games! This expansion includes the iconic Rainbow Bridge module, which allows you to link your Blood Rage base game and Valhalla sessions into one epic, long-form match that starts in Ragnarök and ends in the afterlife.

]]>▪️ The Lord of the Rings: Circle of Conflict from Office Dog is set to release this November. From designers Stephen Buonocore & Geoff Engelstein. An epic game for 2-4 players that takes 60-90 minutes to play. Many tough choices to make in this dice game.

From BGG:

It is the Third Age of Middle-earth, and a great war between the many nations is unfolding. In The Lord of the Rings: Circle of Conflict, you simultaneously command both The Shadow and The Free Peoples armies; your Free Peoples will fight the Shadow of the opponent to your left, and your Shadow will fight the Free Peoples of the opponent to your right.

As the dice are rolled, you will decide how to apply the results. Will you recruit iconic characters for The Free Peoples or perhaps muster the troops of Mordor to fight for The Shadow in one of two pivotal battles? Will you hunt your opponent’s Fellowship with your Nazgûl or secretly move your Fellowship to evade Sauron’s watchful Eye?

To win as The Free Peoples, get The Fellowship to reach Mount Doom or defeat The Shadow in battle. As The Shadow, you must fully corrupt The Fellowship or defeat them in battle.

]]>▪️ For those who enjoy digital games on your phone, there is a new app for Castle Combo from Catch Up Games and Mantita Games. This is currently available for both Android and iOS. New additions to the game, like a 12-chapter campaign solo mode!

The People Behind Coffee Rush: Winter

leftmin — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 14:00:02 +0000

by River Kang

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]]>Hello everyone, I’m River Kang, the developer and editor of Coffee Rush: Winter. I’m happy to share some of the story behind the game with you.

Coffee Rush: Winter is a standalone version of Coffee Rush. We wanted to preserve the fun and flow of the wonderful original game while capturing the atmosphere of a cozy café in winter. That led to many discussions about everything from new drinks and a modular ingredient board to the shape of the mugs and the light spilling out of the café windows.

To share some of that process, I’ve adapted an earlier interview with Coffee Rush designer Euijin Han, graphic designer Sooyeon Lee, and myself into this post. Here’s a look at the ideas we explored, the challenges we faced, and the details we refined along the way.

Q. Why winter?
]]> Sooyeon Lee (Graphic Designer): There were two reasons. One was that the seasonal feel of the base game was yellow-green, in other words spring and summer, so we wanted to present something completely different. The other was that we felt cafés in winter had a distinctive atmosphere.
]]>Euijin Han (Designer): We drink all sorts of beverages in spring, summer and autumn too, but winter has so many drinks with real character, such as hot chocolate and vin chaud.

Q. How do the rules differ from Coffee Rush?
Euijin Han: A lot of the feedback we received was that people wished they could rearrange the ingredients on the board. So we made the board modular and let players assemble it themselves. We also added more drinks suited to the winter theme. We tried not to stray too far from the original Coffee Rush. The basic principle was to keep most of the core structure and make only minor changes. The two biggest changes are the modular ingredient board and the new drinks.

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River Kang (Editor): We wanted to make a game that people who had been enjoying the original Coffee Rush could play this one in much the same way, while also offering extra options for those who want a little more freedom.

Euijin Han: Oh, and upgrade tiles were added as well. There are six in total: four from the base game, one from the Piece of Cake expansion, and one newly designed for Winter. Players choose four to use.

Q. What changed in the design?
Euijin Han: Design was what we paid the most attention to while preparing Coffee Rush: Winter, so quite a lot changed. First, we changed the shape of the cups. The original cup is a round cappuccino cup, but we turned it into a mug for hot winter drinks such as hot chocolate and added an engraved snowflake. We thought this style of cup fit the winter theme well.

River Kang: We also took the aprons off the pawns and gave each one a differently shaped scarf. We had heard that some players with color-vision deficiency had trouble telling which pawn was theirs. Even in the base game, we used different shades of red and green to make them easier to distinguish for players with color-vision deficiency, but we heard that players were still getting confused, so we decided to give each pawn a different scarf.
We made a similar seasonal change to the ice, shaping it like a snowman. The most important change, though, was switching one of the ingredients from caramel to fruit. The fruit piece itself is shaped like an orange slice. There are a lot of citrus drinks in winter, so we wanted to make that change.

Sooyeon Lee: We also redesigned the rush tokens as cookies, with three different shapes. The shapes make no difference to the rules, but they are cute.

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Q. What Did You Focus on the Most?
Sooyeon Lee: The visual side, above all. We changed the various components to suit the season, and we redrew all of the artwork. Illustrator Siwon Hwang created the artwork for Coffee Rush in 2022, and her skills have developed even further over the past three years. So while we were at it, we redrew almost everything: the package, the board, the drinks. Other than the existing drink and ingredient icons, almost everything was redrawn.

River Kang: You could say that our main focus was bringing the winter theme to life through the artwork and 3D components.

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Q. What was difficult, or what did you worry over?
Euijin Han: The biggest challenge was how little time we had between the initial idea and the completion of the final version. We also debated whether to change the rules more boldly. We thought about adding something like an obstacle to the board, or introducing variations to the tiles. We explored changing the rules in various ways. But it felt like it did not suit the cozy, playful feel of Coffee Rush, so we took it out.

Sooyeon Lee: On the art side, finding the right color palette for winter was a bit difficult. From the beginning we wanted the feel of winter at night rather than winter in daylight. We wanted the artwork to convey the feeling of winter: a slightly dim world, light spilling out of buildings, cold outside, and warmth inside. So we asked the illustrator to capture the feeling of a winter evening. But when the art came back, it was much darker than we had expected, and the overall mood felt gloomy. Many of the reference images we had found showed dark exteriors with warm light glowing from inside, so we had not anticipated this problem. Once we saw the artwork, however, we realized that the box art was too dark overall.

After a great deal of discussion, we finally asked: “Please aim for a level of brightness somewhere between 5 and 6 p.m. on a winter day.” We wanted enough light to be visible inside the shop so that players could feel its warmth. After all, the coziness of winter comes from being indoors. Finding that middle point, giving the feel of a winter night while keeping the Coffee Rush look from seeming too drab, was a little hard.

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River Kang: Getting the component sizes right was another challenge. We made new 3D components, and when we received samples made to the dimensions we had initially envisioned, there were problems: some pieces were too large, and the cup was too deep. The cup in the original Coffee Rush is round and narrows toward the bottom, so the ingredients settle in naturally and the wide opening makes them easy for players to see. But a mug is deep and not wide at the top, so the ingredients became difficult to see. So we solved this by adjusting the size of the ingredients and raising the bottom inside the mug. If you look closely, you can see that the cup’s interior base is about 3 mm higher. We adjusted it so the ingredients look full whether you look from above or from the side.

Euijin Han: Balancing the proportions of the drinks was also a major challenge. When the ingredient changed from caramel to fruit, every drink that used caramel had to be reworked. That meant new drinks had to come in, but simply replacing caramel with fruit in the existing recipes did not work. Caramel drinks mostly contain coffee and milk, and if you put coffee and milk together with fruit, wouldn’t that be a drink that is hard even to imagine? So we had to readjust the proportions of all the ingredients.

Coffee Rush has four regular ingredients and four special ingredients, and the ratios of cold drinks to hot drinks, milk to coffee, and regular drinks to specialty drinks are all carefully balanced. To match those proportions in Coffee Rush: Winter as well, we made a table comparing the new and existing drinks so we could keep the ingredient ratios as consistent as possible.

Q. How did the ideas for the new drinks come about?
River Kang: As soon as designer Euijin Han proposed fruit tea, I wanted to include vin chaud (editor's note: French mulled wine). The broader idea was to include warm drinks with fruit flavors that fit the winter theme. Korea has many kinds of hot fruit tea, so we wanted to include drinks like those as well We researched fruit-based drinks from various sources and asked people for suggestions. As we built the ingredient list, we selected the ideas that seemed like the best fit.

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We also created a few new drinks that suit winter even without fruit in them. One of those is the white chocolate latte. Snow is white, so the drink naturally feels wintry. The combination is identical to that of the chocolate latte, but we created new artwork for it. We added an affogato as well. It is a distinctive drink that contains both a hot ingredient and a cold ingredient. Since the ice is snowman-shaped, we thought, “Let’s make an affogato with a snowman in it.” We came up with a combination in which milk plus ice makes ice cream, while steam plus coffee makes espresso. That is how the first drink in the Coffee Rush series to contain both ice and steam came about.

We also included a drink called bicerin. It is visually appealing because it is made in three layers. We had also received a request to include an unusual drink, so we decided to add it.

Q. What do you think people will like about it?
River Kang: I think the greatest strengths of the Coffee Rush series are its beautiful artwork and components, which players can now enjoy in a fresh winter setting. From an experienced board gamer’s perspective, another strength is the modular ingredient board. You can arrange the ingredients freely, somewhat like in Catan, which means you can have a different experience every time you play.

We also redesigned the ingredient trays so that all the ingredient tokens can be divided evenly between the two trays. This lets players place the two trays in separate, easy-to-reach spots around the table during play. I also put a lot of care into the box insert, which holds all of the components. It was designed to keep everything neatly organized, so packing the game away should be much easier.

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Q. Any fun stories from development?
Sooyeon Lee: The snowman ice originally had a nose. But the nose was so small and pointy that someone might get hurt during play, so we had to remove it. Sadly, the snowman ice became a little less cute.

Q. This is the first spin-off. What are your hopes for it?
River Kang: We set out to remake the game while preserving its original fun and flow as much as possible. At the same time, we tried to address some of the shortcomings of the previous release in a different way, so I hope people are satisfied with those changes. In fact, I think the most important thing is for people to enjoy the game without being particularly conscious of what has changed. I think that if someone finds themselves thinking, “Why did they change it this way?” or “This is inconvenient,” then we have failed. That is what concerns me most.

Euijin Han: I hope people can choose the game according to the mood of the day. Shall we play Coffee Rush today? Or Coffee Rush: Winter today? I hope people can enjoy both like that. The best thing for us would be for people to love them both. One of the reasons we made Coffee Rush: Winter is our wish that people enjoy a version with a different, more wintry look. One of the most rewarding experiences after the release of Coffee Rush was seeing a child at a board-game demo event who, without knowing the rules, put whatever ingredients they wanted into a cup and excitedly said, “Dad, look, look at this! I made this.” That is why we put so much effort into the artwork and the components. I hope people have a good time playing it together.

Sooyeon Lee (Graphic Designer): If I hear people say, “I bought it because it’s pretty,” or simply, “It’s so pretty,” I’ll feel like we’ve achieved what we set out to do.

Q. Will more titles in the series follow?
Euijin Han: The Coffee Rush series will continue. It may not be about coffee, though; the next game could involve a different kind of food. I cannot say for certain that every future title will be called Coffee Rush, but the Rush series can definitely continue.

Q. Finally, a word each for the people who will play the game.
Sooyeon Lee: It’s cold in winter, so people tend to stay indoors more, and I hope they have a good time indoors with Coffee Rush: Winter. You don't even have to go outside!

River Kang: When you line up the three boxes on a shelf, their colors look really nice together. You can choose between Coffee Rush and Coffee Rush: Winter according to your preference, and if you’ve played the original, you can enjoy winter in a slightly different way. I hope you get to enjoy the whole series.

Euijin Han: I hope Coffee Rush makes its way around the world, so that even people in countries without winter can experience winter through Coffee Rush: Winter.

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It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

whenindoubteatout — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 06:00:02 +0000

by Justin Bell

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I’m a huge movie fan; before kids showed up on my doorstep, I used to see 50-100 movies in theaters every year, including 160 flicks in 2013. Part of my junkie status is tied to film festivals; I have attended the Sundance Film Festival twice, including the fest in 2007 when prices were not completely ridiculous. (Fun fact: when I went in ‘07, a Sundance single film ticket cost $15, about $24 in today’s dollars. The 2027 Sundance Film Festival price for a single ticket is $37 a pop. I love movies, but I don’t love movies quite that much any more.)

Sundance is a blast, mainly because there are hundreds of movies being screened and you get to escape with other cinephiles, enthusiasts who wouldn’t dare do something like pop open a phone or have a full volume conversation with two friends during the trailers. (In part, that’s because films at Sundance don’t begin by showing 25 minutes of previews.)

At Sundance, you get movies from all over the world, and all genres—documentaries, art-house dramas, a few mainstream movies, and animated films seeking a distributor. You’re there with film junkies like me, sure…but you are also at Sundance to sit side-by-side with other industry players, studio heads, PR types, and actors, trying their best to hide their celebrity status by wearing sunglasses, knit caps, and heavy jackets (all indoors).

But the main reason why I love going to Sundance is because I get to see a bunch of flicks before (almost) anyone else. Many of the movie rights at Sundance are negotiated and sold at the show, with some popping up the following summer or fall in theaters or on streaming platforms thanks only to their appearance at the festival.

And I think that’s why I love going to SPIEL Essen, the biggest tabletop convention in the world kicking off this Thursday, especially as an American. I love the chance to get some of those games before anyone else. If Gen Con kicks off games season here in the US, SPIEL Essen is what makes fall the most wonderful time of the year, and it’s the reason why I always play the Andy Williams holiday song of the same name on my flight over to Dusseldorf.

I love the term “world premiere.” And SPIEL Essen has a whole lot of world premieres, making the convention my personal favorite.

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“Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.”

That line from 1999’s The Matrix still resonates…especially when I think about attending SPIEL.

“What’s it like at SPIEL Essen?” someone will ask when they want to know more about the show.

I usually respond with something like this: “Have you been to Gen Con? SPIEL Essen is like Gen Con, but with an expo hall space five times bigger.”

Now, that’s not completely accurate; in terms of expo hall square footage, SPIEL Essen is “only” about three times the size of Gen Con’s expo hall, not five. SPIEL Essen is spread across eight separate expo halls in a single building in Essen. (That building, Messe Essen, isn’t exactly a looker. I’m still not sure I love Essen, the city, as a place to visit. But the chance to be surrounded by other hobbyists, games in every direction, collectibles, and apparel for four days? Count me in.)

There’s something special about attending a global trade show that features such an exceptional mix of large publishers and many much smaller businesses from anywhere you can think of. SPIEL Essen is the opposite of a “play con”, with no dedicated play area and demo tables serving as the only spaces you can find to sit down and play games on site. So, I almost never play any games at the show, with days that stretch into the 12-14 hour range because of transit to and from the Messe along with parties that run into the night.

The months leading up to SPIEL Essen are such a thrill. That’s because the hype machine is in full effect!

“When do you fly to Germany?” dozens of friends will ask in the weeks leading up the late October show. “I’m seeing a lot of news about some of the new games debuting at the show. You must be getting pretty hyped, right?”

Guilty as charged; I’m pretty fired up. That said, I get pretty excited in the lead-up to Gen Con too, in part because it’s such a short stroll to get down to Indy from Chicago. But for someone coming from North America, SPIEL Essen is a bigger endeavor. Flights aren’t cheap (flights aren’t cheap anywhere any more, right?), hotels aren’t cheap, Germany is a distant journey, etc. So, there’s a minor amount of mental fatigue as I imagine the process I need to take to get all the way to my Essen accommodations.

But then the game news starts to flow, with updates every single day. The SPIEL Essen Preview here on BGG builds every day for months, and watching new titles enter the preview gets me more and more excited to arrive. About a month before the show, I start reaching out to publishers for meetings, industry contacts for breakfast, and other creators for dinner.

A week before I fly out, I start prepping all the things I need, from board game shirts (ahh, THERE’S my bright red EXIT: The Game—CATAN t-shirt that I only wear at shows) to board game business cards to board game-themed meeple skull caps to board game pins to board game convention pass badge holders. Geek prep is vital! I chuck it all in the luggage, with enough bags to ensure I can haul as many games home as I can.

The people part is probably why I get most excited about SPIEL Essen, because some of my friends in places ranging from Tokyo to Budapest to London to…well, even Chicago are hard to catch between shows. But, I know I can count on seeing them in Germany. (Yes, one of my Chicago friends is a guy I’m going to see at the show but I can never seem to find in Chicago! Life is crazy.)

The games are the reason we all show up in Essen. And I’m excited to share more about some of those games in the weeks ahead.

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The day this post went up, I wrapped up all my game tracking plans. I loaded up my SPIEL Essen app with the booth locations for the 140-ish games on my personal SPIEL Essen preview list, all the publishers I want to visit, all the after-hours booth parties, and all the special events I want to experience during the show.

Like many of you, I’ve got all of the most thumbed games on my hit list too, from Queen Alice to -60° to Kingdom Come: Deliverance—The Board Game, the game I will likely table first when I get back to the US. But because it is the most wonderful time of the year, all the games I bring home from SPIEL Essen are going to be great because it is just like opening presents for the holidays. Some friends have “SPIEL Day” game events already set up for the days immediately following their return home, and I’m hoping to host a couple game nights back home in the days just after I return, to get those treasures onto the table.

I’m fired up to just walk around the eight halls of the Messe to soak it all in. (And I WILL be inside, because the weather for SPIEL week looks atrocious.) Board games, everywhere. I know some people hate crowds; I’m the opposite. Bring on those massive crowds full of nerds. I love watching people make a run to get in line for the game they most want to bring home from the fair.

(I learned recently that the German word for nerd is…”nerd.” I validated this with a German co-worker, and I’m still bummed that there’s not really another word for this. Then I asked this same co-worker what the German word for “geek” is. “Geek,” she said. This is a travesty.)

The huge signs at each booth with the hot games and the fantastic box art? Can’t wait to share the pictures. Promo cards that you can only get at conventions? I already have a list. Running the halls on the final day of the show to try and score a deal or three? My track shoes are ready. German convention hall chow in the Galleria breezeways? Obviously.

Let’s have some fun folks! It’s the most wonderful time of the year!!

Designer Diary: The Journey of The Great Harbor

Serdarot — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 14:00:02 +0000

by Milan Tasevski

]]>The Great Harbor has had quite an interesting journey since it first arrived on our table.

The game originally came to us from designer Matteo de Nardis, under the working title Lubecca. At its core, we immediately saw something we liked: a clever dice-placement system built around constructing your own engine, with plenty of interesting decisions packed into a relatively straightforward structure.

But as we started developing it, we also began seeing just how much further we could take the idea.

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From Lubecca to Carthage

One of the first major changes was the setting.

Around the same time, we were looking to expand the world we had created with Magna Roma, and it felt natural to explore another part of the ancient Mediterranean through a very different type of game. This felt even more fitting because Matteo is also the designer of Magna Roma, making the connection between the two projects feel very organic.

That eventually brought us to Carthage and its incredible harbor.

The Great Harbor of Carthage was one of the most impressive engineering and commercial achievements of the ancient world. It gave us exactly the setting we were looking for: merchants, ships, colonies, trade, construction, and a city whose power was deeply connected to the sea.

And once we made that decision, the game started changing with it.

This wasn't simply a case of changing the artwork and names. The setting inspired new systems, new interactions, and new ways of connecting the different parts of the game.

Simplifying Without Making It Simpler

A big part of our development philosophy was to make the game easier to understand without reducing the number of interesting decisions.
One example was the way dice interacted with harbor tiles.

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Originally, dice were placed at the corners where four different tiles could meet. In addition, in order to place a die, you were required to match its number. This created plenty of possibilities, but it also meant that every placement required players to process quite a lot of information.

During development, we changed this so that dice are placed along the edges between two tiles instead, and that you were free to place a die with any number - the number would just affect how much you gain from the placement.

It sounds like a few small changes, but these changes had a surprisingly large effect. The board became easier to read, turns became quicker, and the decision of where to place the die remained just as important.

And these were exactly the kinds of changes we wanted to make. Fewer rules to process, without losing the decisions behind them.

Building More Than a Harbor

As development continued, the game gradually expanded beyond the Great Harbor itself.

The placement of dice in the Great Harbor board remain at the center of everything you do, but they now connect to a much larger economic machine.
You draft dice. You place them in the harbor and gain resources and cards. You develop your colony. You construct buildings. You attract useful people. You build and crew ships. You trade valuable goods. You prepare voyages and send those ships into the Mediterranean, sometimes having to deal with pirates along the way.

All of these systems feed back into each other, and that interconnectedness became one of our favorite parts of the game.

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The Icing on the Cake - Trading

During the final stages of development, we introduced a push-your-luck trading mechanic, and this ended up being the icing on the cake for us.
It added something we don't see very often in Euro games: a moment where careful planning suddenly turns into tension, risk, and everyone around the table watching to see what happens.

Do you take the current successful trade and walk away, or do you push for something better and risk losing the opportunity? It sounds simple, but it created some of the most memorable moments during development.

We had so much fun playtesting this in the office that we were literally screaming whenever someone pulled off a successful trade at the far edges of the Mediterranean! Every time somebody decided to push their luck one step further, everyone stopped what they were doing to see how it would end.

For a game with so much planning and strategy, having these sudden bursts of excitement gave The Great Harbor a personality we really loved!

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Keeping the Game Moving

We also paid a lot of attention to pacing.

The Great Harbor contains plenty of strategic possibilities, but we didn't want it to feel slow or overly procedural. The game lasts only five rounds, so you rarely have enough time to do everything.

Do you develop the colony? Build more ships? Push trade? Prepare voyages? Focus on prestige? Or try to build an engine connecting several of those things together?

And because the dice available to you are never exactly the same, you constantly have to adjust.
That tension between building something long-term and reacting to what is available right now became one of the defining parts of the game.

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A Game That Changed a Lot

Looking at The Great Harbor today and comparing it to the first prototype of Lubecca is quite fascinating.

The foundation is still there. You can still see the original idea that made us interested in the game in the first place.

But around it, almost everything has been examined, questioned, adjusted, simplified, expanded, or rebuilt at some point during development.
And these are only a few examples. There were many other changes along the way, from ships and voyages to the colony, economy, and the different ways players can build prestige.

For now, we are incredibly happy with where the journey has taken the game.

What started as a clever dice-placement prototype has gradually become The Great Harbor, a strategic Euro game with its fair share of planning, building, and engine creation, but also those wonderful moments when somebody decides to risk everything on one more trade and the entire table suddenly erupts.

Thanks for reading this!
- Milan, Archona Games

Illustrator's Diary — Turning Myth into Reality

SuperMeeple — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 14:00:01 +0000

by Charles Amir Perret

]]>Super Meeple is posting this diary on behalf of the illustrator of Mythologies Arthur Boccard. If you haven't read the Designers' Diary for the game, you'll find it HERE.

From Concept Artist to Illustrator

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@boccardarthurWho am I? I originally come from the video game industry. I started working in the field in November 2022, and during that time I had the opportunity to contribute to two productions as an environment and character concept artist, at Artefacts Studio and Microids Lyon. Being a Concept Artist is first and foremost about listening, adapting to an artistic direction, thinking in terms of process, and staying creative under tight deadlines. From my perspective, it is closer to design than illustration.

Still, I wanted to try stepping into the world of board games. I believe it is vital to move between different creative environments. It helps me change my perspective.

“Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.”
— Paul Klee, The Theory of Modern Art

Illustrating a Game

When I embarked on this adventure thanks to Igor Polouchine (Origames), I had very little idea of how much work would be involved or what processes would be used. I was in for quite a surprise. For this game, I had an average of just one day per card, including feedback and revisions.

So I knew I had to focus on efficiency, because I simply wouldn’t have much time to spend on each illustration. I started by putting together a reference board, exploring different colour palettes and technical approaches.

My main reference was the work of Yohann Schepacz, both in terms of colour and his painterly approach using Photoshop’s Round Brush.

I wanted to see what I could achieve using this technique. I started with the Egyptians, and they set the direction for everything that followed. I began with one card, then repeated the process to see whether I could make it consistent and stable. There weren’t many iterations — it was more or less a case of going full speed ahead. As soon as I had an idea, I ran with it.

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I took a risk and came back to Igor after ten days with the first seven Egyptian cards, giving him a much clearer idea of what I wanted to explore. For me, the best way to work was by blocks or families of cards, so we could consolidate the feedback. I was given a great deal of freedom, and I’m still grateful to Igor for that trust. First block delivered. I was still working with the idea of a flatter art direction, closer to Eliot Baum’s style.

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First test: Ra.

The main challenges that emerged when illustrating the game were the framing dictated by the UI, distinguishing gods from creatures — which I struggled with at first — and giving each family its own identity.

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Reference image provided by the art director, giving me a quick indication of the UI placement

Giving Each Mythology a Strong Identity

As mentioned earlier, my main reference was the work of Yohann Schepacz.

I wanted this game to be an opportunity to immerse myself in the way he approaches his work. It is highly graphic, uses very little colour, features strong lighting, and is created entirely with Photoshop’s Round Brush.

Here, the brush itself becomes central to the visual identity. There is nowhere to hide behind gradients or soft blends. Every transition has to be painted.
What I find interesting is that you can see the struggle in every one of these cards. Little pieces of me emerge through them. I think that makes them feel very alive.

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Quick photobashing using my references. This allowed me to see whether the approach could work from a colour perspective → Result for the associated families
I established a few simple rules to guide me through the first productions:

• A background with a dominant flat colour and a secondary pattern

• Gold, white and black shared by all cards

• One dominant colour and one secondary colour for the characters of each family

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I also tried to give each mythology its own theme to help guide the design process. I didn’t always have time to think things through properly. Sometimes, I simply had to start without having found a solution yet—things had to move forward, and I couldn’t really afford to get stuck. The Chinese mythology is a perfect example. Working with porcelain helped me enormously when developing the shapes of the characters.

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Environments

I have rules, but I don’t always follow them either. When it came time to tackle the landscapes, I hesitated — and it shows.

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Normally, I make extensive use of textured brushes. They allow me to fake detail and add complexity while keeping the amount of time spent under control.
Here, it’s a mixture of both approaches.

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textured brushes used
For the creation of the boards, I wanted something calm. If there was architecture, I didn’t want it to dominate the image. I wanted the sky or a body of water to take centre stage and echo the family’s dominant colour.

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The whole thing had to contrast with the density of the cards. It all comes down to where you cut the horizon.

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Landscape composition diagram
Checking and Making Changes

Replayability and Endless Possibilities
The changes were made in blocks: minor adjustments here, a few cards redone there. Overall, the process was fairly efficient. The revisions often came down to problems identifying a creature or a god. For example, the Draugr originally had horns. I liked the graphic solution, but it didn’t fit the idea of an undead creature. Freya had a helmet and a shield. I had been misled by the references I was given. Mamacocha also went through a lot of changes. I struggled to find a clear visual reference to the sea. The Hindu family had its fair share of changes as well. I admit I struggled quite a lot with this one. I couldn’t get far enough into its world or create figures that felt clear enough.

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Reference provided → First version — too warrior-like → I wanted to bring her back towards the fishing deity. It wasn’t exactly very sexy. → Finally, I added a much clearer marine element, as if she were emerging from the sea foam. Final version.

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We hope you’ll enjoy playing Mythologies as much as we enjoyed bringing its world to life. If you haven’t read it yet, don’t miss the Designers' Diary, and discover how this whole adventure began. And this is only the beginning: we look forward to expanding this rich universe with new mythologies in the future. After all, there are still plenty of gods to draw and quite a few more worlds to explore.

Designers' Diary — The Making of Mythologies

SuperMeeple — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 14:00:01 +0000

by Charles Amir Perret

]]>Super Meeple is posting this diary on behalf of the designers of Mythologies, Maxime Babad and Mickaël "Froh" Garcin, and we invite you to read the illustrator's diary for the game HERE.

Genesis
The origins of a unique game, according to the two designers who made it…

]]>Mythologies — or Mythic Mashup, as we called it in the beginning — did not exactly spring fully formed from the heavens. It went through a long and sometimes winding development process before becoming the game you know today. What began as a journey for two people was sometimes complicated, often exciting, and always enriching. A collaboration that could be restrictive at times — and, on more than one occasion, a genuine lifesaver.

In these notes, we invite you behind the scenes of Mythologies: a game born from the unlikely combination of strategy, ancient myths (obviously!) and an almost unreasonable amount of replayability. Discover how two distinct visions gradually came together to create a gaming experience unlike any other.

The Primordial Spark
The meeting, the first spark, the initial chaos.

Fun fact: After two and a half years of development, Mythologies came to life. Yet its two designers had only ever crossed paths once… briefly, at Cannes.

It all started with a fan-made project based on Blood Bowl Team Manager, for which Mickaël designed around twenty additional teams. Maxime, already the designer of Saint Seiya Deckbuilding, joined the dream team, also being a passionate fan of BBTM. Then Mickaël joined Maxime’s playtesting team for his second game to be published, Death Note.

Little by little — or rather, through tackles to the carotid and more than a few unfounded suspicions — our duo of passionate gamers came together, united around a shared vision: a game built on replayability, interaction, originality, and a strong theme.

The Mythic Mashup project was born.

Woven Destiny
Key dates and the first divine choices.

October 18, 2018 First contact. Maxime offers to help with the Blood Bowl fan-made project. Mickaël tries to score a free game (spoiler: he fails).

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[Mickael waves hello! Click to wave hello too]
"Hello, I thought you’d be all over this ;)"
"Hola. Welcome. Feel free to ask any questions if needed, but also feel free to send me a free copy of Saint Seiya*."
*the deckbuilding game designed by Maxime
2020 - Max takes advantage of lockdown to recruit playtesters for Death Note.

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- Hey Mickaël, how’s it going? (Well, within a reasonable radius of your home, with the required paperwork.)
- Could be going better, but I’m surviving.
- Would you be interested in testing my next game, Death Note, sometime?
- Absolutely.
Max is still owning his questionable jokes five years later. Mickaël, meanwhile, prefers to forget them.

Late 2021
Max suggests to Mickaël they move on to a “real” project, in order to finance Mickaël’s solid-gold swimming pool (filled with normal water, since liquid gold is rather impractical). They decide to create a game together. Max wants a drafting game. Mickaël wants a swimming pool. The project is launched.

The Founding Myth
Civilizations, creatures, and the sacred foundations of the game.

When Mickaël came up with a historical Civilizations theme, Maxime suggested reusing the universe of a prototype modestly named Gods Pantheonic Battle, in order to use its templates.

It was not far removed from the concept of Civilizations, but it gave the game a more epic dimension, while allowing us to reuse the card files already prepared for the prototype and adapt them.

At that point, we had a foundation of six mythologies, each containing four Deities and three Creatures. More than enough to test the first mechanics of Mythic Mashup and its famous carousel…

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The six mythologies were already quite diverse, including the Hindu and Inca mythologies alongside much better-known cultures such as Ancient Egypt and Greece, the Norse, and Japan.

With a few exceptions, these 36 Deities and Creatures are still present in the final version of Mythologies. Among the Egyptians, the Criosphinx and Hieracosphinx were replaced by the Mummy and the Scarab. And the Norse Berserker became the Draugr it always should have been.

The Carousel of Souls
From a curse to the resurrection of a concept.

The foundation of the game was meant to recreate the experience of a carousel found in autobattler video games (Dota Chess, Teamfight Tactics, etc.). In other words, each round would begin with a Selection phase during which everyone would try to grab units from a rotating board, with units passing by as it turned. Depending on their position, players would try to quickly claim the ones they were interested in before they slipped past them and were taken by the next player.

We quickly developed a prototype of a mechanically rotating board, on which players could select a card from a mythology whenever the arrow on their section of the board pointed toward that mythology.

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Unfortunately, this choice created several problems:

• Card readability on a moving platform: this required the cards to be extremely simple.

• Stress and lack of time to rethink your strategy when a coveted card was taken by an opponent: making it difficult to strategize.

• Mechanical boards that were too complex and expensive to produce for a publisher: possibly the number-one issue. It was simply impossible within a limited budget, and represented a major publishing risk.

We had to find an alternative solution. But we wanted to preserve two key ideas:

• Open drafting, allowing players to anticipate their choices and their opponents’ strategies.

• Simultaneous selection, making for fast games and sudden reversals.

Goodbye carousel, hello Destiny cards. These are drawn at random during each Selection phase and determine the random order in which players can select one of their two cards — or choose not to — from each area of the board, one after another.

We kept our key ideas, but introduced a new source of tension through uncertainty: Which mythology will I have access to next? Should I pass up an available choice in the hope that the next one will still be there? The stressful tension imposed by the rotating-board mechanism was therefore replaced by the tension of dilemmas and “bets” on our own choices and those of our opponents. “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” as they say… You’ll be the judge.

Offerings and Gems
Personal Pantheons and sacrificial strategies.

Alongside the selection system, we needed these mythological entities to serve a purpose. Rather than having gods beat the living daylights out of each other with superpowers, something other games already do very well, wouldn’t it be more interesting to combine them in order to create a unique culture?

How could we measure the relevance of our choices without direct confrontation and without repeatedly comparing values, while still keeping the game moving at a good pace?

From the outset, building an original and unique Pantheon seemed to us to be the more interesting approach, and a great promise of depth and replayability for players. What if the positioning of these Creatures in our Pantheon could give us more than simply collecting them?

That is the whole point of the tableau-building system we wanted to create.
To do this, we needed to identify ways for players to move toward victory. Different paths to renown? Resources with different values? Offering tokens to collect or spend? We knew we were starting with a game rich in combos and depth, where every choice would have an impact, while absolutely wanting to maintain the goal of short games.

The Tablets of Ancient Knowledge
Design choices: text or symbols, tradition or modernity.

Defining a game’s mechanics starts with clearly identifying the experience we want to offer, then trying to stick to it — to keep it as a guiding principle throughout the game’s development. There are multiple dials to adjust and just as many points of balance to find: the length of the game versus the feeling of growing in power, depth versus accessibility, richness versus complexity, and so on. Finding effective and enjoyable gameplay is the foundation of game design, and the more criteria you set, the harder it becomes to find something that meets all of them.

Board game design has evolved considerably over the past two decades, favoring short games, clear rules, and another particular feature: cards with as little text as possible (or even no text at all). This is the case for many modern games aiming for the same playing time as ours.

We stuck to the first two constraints (short games and clear rules), but chose to embrace text on the cards. This gives us greater versatility in terms of effects, and therefore more thematic depth. Likewise, we chose to move away from the constraint of dynamic drafting, which only introduces new cards each round. It may seem like an insignificant choice, but it is often one of the points players come back to after their first game.

Our game offers a feeling of growing in power, not because the cards in Round 2 are stronger than those in Round 3, but rather because they combine with one another, while the Deities come in to add those spikes of power.

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A completely sourced and impeccably formatted graph depicting a typical game of Mythologies.
Here, the tension can be felt from the very first round, thanks to a drafting mechanism that is both simple and tactical. During this phase, players can take risks, anticipate what their opponents will do, but also react to their choices and adjust their own strategy accordingly. The game is driven by opportunities and highly varied card combinations, with effects that can be extremely versatile depending on the situation.

This choice also brings several benefits:

• Beginners have fewer cards to read in later turns, since some cards have remained available.

• More experienced players can rely on those remaining cards to guide their combinations.

All of this takes place in a game where every card has several uses (effects, immediate gains, and value toward objectives). In other words, a card that may initially appear bad often really isn’t — and may not remain so from one game to the next. This is the discovery aspect that means no two games will ever be alike.

The Epic of the Pantheons
Romans, Chinese, Celts, Zulus: the chosen ones of the expanded Pantheon.

]]> After various iterations and major changes to the gameplay, we reached the point where we felt that our mechanism was the right one. At the very least, it was solid enough to serve as a foundation for developing more content.

We started by expanding the bestiary with a fourth creature for each mythology (and later a fifth, then a sixth). But above all, we realized that we had a concept that was perfectly suited to modularity and replayability. With six mythologies, we had 15 possible combinations of four mythologies, and 180 different setups, with these setups defining the objectives of the game.

Since the heart of the game was mixing mythologies together to constantly discover new synergies, we quickly wanted to expand the number of mythologies, with each new mythology increasing the number of possible combinations exponentially.

Mickaël always developed projects with 30 factions or more, while Maxime wanted to make games that could be played hundreds of times and have each game feel different. So we immediately launched into the design of four additional mythologies at once. That brought us to 210 mythology combinations and 2,520 setups!

For our additional mythologies, we chose the Romans and Chinese on the one hand, as they seemed like obvious choices.

The Romans: A culture that is both rich and well known, with plenty of material for introducing new Deities while avoiding duplicates with the Greeks. The Creatures were a little more difficult, as we had to find ones that were more characteristic of Roman legends than Greek ones.

The Chinese: Probably the best-known mythology in the world that we had not yet included in the game. Here, choosing the Deities was the difficult part. Not only because there are so many of them — which is also true of many other mythologies — but because we struggled to determine which ones were considered the main figures.

By cross-referencing different sources of information (encyclopedic references, specialist websites, AI and native speakers), we settled on the final cast, which we felt both represented the major Deities of the Chinese Pantheon and met our game-design constraints.

For the other two mythologies, our goal was to explore cultures that are less frequently represented. We wanted to move away from Antiquity and the Mediterranean basin, which are often favored in cultural works. Since our game highlights historical and cultural knowledge, we chose to reinforce this aspect by giving players the opportunity to discover as many new cultures as possible — cultures that many of us are not very familiar with.

We chose the Zulus, with their mystical and wild bestiary, as worthy representatives of the African continent.

We had to dig through the depths of the internet to cross-reference enough reliable sources to properly identify the Deities and Creatures that could be highlighted in the game. The sources were much rarer and more scattered than for any of the other mythologies we had incorporated.

Finally, our last choice was the Celts, whose beliefs turned out to be much darker than we had imagined.

It is a mixture of different cultures, and the Deities are not as clearly established as those of the other mythologies. Their bestiary, on the other hand, is truly unique, with a strong focus on sometimes rather sinister legends (the Headless Horseman, for example).

Although the game is highly mechanical, we made sure to give each mythology a particular influence, expressed through one or two major themes for each of them.

Thus, the Incas focus on sacrifice, the Greeks on movement and interaction, the Hindus on summoning, the Norse on aggression, and so on.

And individually, wherever possible, each card has an effect related to the role that the corresponding entity appeared to play according to our current knowledge. Thus, Anubis rules over the abyss, Valkyries strike down Deities, Râkshasas are shapeshifters, and so on.

The Eternal Return
Replayability and infinite possibilities.

One of the most important aspects of Mythologies is its unparalleled replayability for a tableau-building game, and even more broadly for a game of this format.

Its high degree of modularity comes from the fact that the game was designed with this goal in mind from the very beginning (those who know us are aware of how important replayability is to both of us). We very quickly incorporated key elements into the heart of the game’s design. They became the core of the game design, and we never questioned them afterward.

The starting point is that you have to choose four mythologies for each game — or draw them randomly; that works too. What matters is that every combination works. Since each mythology has its own particularities, levels of interaction, key mechanics, and so on, each combination of four mythologies will give your game a different feeling. With eight mythologies in the box, that already gives us around 70 different experiences, along with all their synergies to explore.

And that’s without counting the fact that you will not see all the cards from each mythology in a single game. You can get your full dose of gaming pleasure by playing several games with the same configuration.

Seventy different experiences is already a significant amount. To go even further, the central board is assembled from the boards of the 4 mythologies in the game. This assembly, which we call the Sanctuary, serves in particular as the market from which players obtain cards. But the order in which it is assembled is crucial, because each board is double-sided, with the beginning of a sentence on one side and the end of that sentence on the other.

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The way you assemble the four selected boards will therefore create two unique sentences, which serve as the objectives for the game. That gives us a grand total of 840 unique pairs of objectives!

Each pair of objectives creates genuine choices: emptying your Pantheon, placing Creatures in ways that may be less than optimal, filling certain columns…
This focus also provides a degree of predictability for player interaction. And it creates genuine dilemmas during your turns, even when you know the game very well.

A card may therefore not necessarily be interesting because of its effect, but may be extremely interesting because of what it provides toward an objective.

Obviously, some objectives are similar — for example, if one objective asks you to fill one row or another. Except that the cards you play will not have the same effect, provide the same gain, or have the same usefulness depending on which row you play them in.

The value of each card will therefore vary from game to game, but also over the course of a game depending on how it develops. The same very powerful synergy in one situation may be far less profitable in another configuration. In Mythologies, it is impossible to rely on your usual strategy for winning. The key word is adaptability. You will always have to adapt your choices to the objectives of the game, its development, and the opportunities available to you. And who knows? You may discover new horizons with cards you would not normally have played.

As for synergies, we worked extensively to ensure that the mythologies combine with one another rather than each operating independently.

Do the Egyptians reward crushing? You will be able to find effects in other mythologies that interact with crushing. Do you have a card that generates significant gains? It may require the presence of different mythologies in your pantheon. This allows us to avoid the pitfall of “mono-faction” games, where the optimal way to play is to dive headfirst into a single color, sometimes competing with other players doing exactly the same thing.

So we leave behind the routine of following the usual plan, because you will have to consider every card available to you — which will inevitably maintain a certain amount of tension during the drafting of those cards.

The Oracle’s Quest
Finding a publisher, or how to read the signs of the gods of the market.

]]> Finding a publisher is easy.

Finding a publisher who will actually sign is more complicated. You have to understand the timing: publishers are overloaded, have projects planned for the next three years, and have absolutely no room left in their schedules. Then along comes our UFO of a project, with significant graphical demands (lots of illustrations!), and a game aimed at experienced players that nevertheless only takes 30-minutes to play. That is very rare.

Quite a few publishers saw our project, and we thank them for the time they spent on it. Some may have gone through the pitch a little too quickly, and the feedback we received from physical prototypes showed us that not everyone really engaged with the game, with feedback that was sometimes strange and sometimes very interesting. But that was fine. We persevered.

After a year of back-to-back meetings, Charles-Amir from Super Meeple, having tested different iterations of the game throughout its development, increasingly appreciated its specific qualities and understood the direction we were heading in. He probably realized that his inbox was going to receive this project every month until his death, and therefore, out of sheer desperation, accepted.

The work did not stop there. Hundreds of games and countless pieces of feedback had to be taken into account. Directions to pursue, and others to abandon. What makes a game project interesting is maintaining a direction. Because a project that tries to please everyone will ultimately please no one.

The Fleeting Apex
The Wheel of Time cannot be stopped.

One aspect that is somewhat unusual for this type of game, which focuses heavily on combos: Mythologies is NOT an engine-building game.
The more powerful combos we create, the more tempting it becomes to repeat them and improve them in order to extract the maximum benefit. We absolutely did not want players to feel as though they were repeating the same sequences over and over, with the additional risk inherent to engine-building games that the gap between players simply keeps growing as the game progresses. On the contrary, we wanted players to reassess the situation and their options every round, with no automatic moves. This is truly a mantra for us, burned into our philosophy of what makes a game engaging and captivating all the way to the final scoring.

Although the open drafting aspect contributes to this, other, less mechanical elements also help keep players engaged until the very end. We made sure that the game did not contain too many permanent effects that could be reactivated every turn. We adjusted the timing for completing objectives, imposing certain constraints on players at specific moments, even if that meant rearranging their Pantheons just before or after in order to optimize their cards in a different way.

The fact that the game ends after four rounds also contributes to this. In only four rounds, well-optimized one-off effects can be far more profitable than permanent passive bonuses.

Player interaction adds another layer to all of this. The more we allow players to throw a spanner into their opponents’ plans, the more we force them to adapt. But don’t worry about this last point! It is obvious that some players do not like having their plans disrupted, which is why the level of interaction is modular. Each mythology is more or less focused on interaction, and this level of interaction is clearly indicated. It is up to each player to choose more or less interactive mythologies for each game.

The Heroes’ Pact
Working as a pair: synergy, balance and shared faith.

]]> There are several advantages to working as a pair, especially when you complement each other. One of the main points was to determine, from the outset, the objectives we wanted to set for the game: accessible rules, fast games, high replayability, and good depth.

These objectives guided most of our design choices. If an idea went completely against one of these four pillars, poof, it was gone. It sounds simple when presented this way, but each idea was often beneficial in one respect while detrimental in another. We therefore had to take the time to weigh the pros and cons. An unavoidable task, for which two perspectives are better than one — even if it can easily lead to lengthy debates.

Even with clearly defined objectives, even with important shared references, and even when we have a fairly similar vision of what makes a good game, disagreements are bound to arise from time to time. Most of the time, they stem from a misunderstanding. It is therefore important to take the time to listen to each other, put yourself in the other person’s shoes, and get to the root of the problem or disagreement. What is the other person trying to achieve? What exactly is bothering them? Which part of the proposed solution is bothering you? It requires genuine introspection to silence our egos and move forward.

But there you have it: disagreement is the art of compromise.

An art… that is rather verbose, since our discussions on even the smallest subject can require an enormous number of paragraphs filled with pseudo-justifications, all in the hope of being right.

Pulling the Threads of the Fates
Where we talk about destiny.

If the game finds its audience, we obviously have plenty of things planned. Even before Super Meeple took the project under its wing, we had already worked on expansion concepts and additional mythologies (yes, they already exist). And because we are (perhaps a little too?) passionate, we have also continued working on them alongside the development of the final game. But for all these great ideas to become reality, that cannot depend on us alone.

It depends on you, dear players, who will have embraced our vision and our gaming proposition — which we hope will convince you of its merits as you play more and more games.

Thank you, valiant players.

If you’re heading to SPIEL in Essen, come and find us at Hall 6, Booth F301. Come and talk to us about the struggle, the excitement, the brilliant ideas, the questionable ones, and all the compromises that somehow turned into a game. We’ll be delighted to delve deeper into the joys and tribulations of game design — and, if necessary, explain how two perfectly reasonable people managed to spend so much time arguing about ancient gods.

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Mickaël & Maxime

Discover the Illustrator’s Diary as well: PART B — Making Myth a Reality
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Designer Diary: Kano - AN AMAZING JOURNEY

PabloJimenezRoman — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:00:02 +0000

by Pablo Jiménez

]]>Editor's note - an artist diary for Kano was published at the same time, which you can read HERE.

Part 1: Early Concepts and Thematic Shift

I remember the first time we met with Pablo Jiménez. He had a simple but incredibly fun and efficient mechanic to capture colorful gems. They were just placed on the board and some scoring would happen. General patterns that we would share or not. The first exciting thing was to repeat a well-known movement from games like Candy Crush: switching to adjacent gems. And it was a fantastic start.

But the problem was that all the gems were left on the table, with the bag getting empty, and when the objectives were common, the luck of the draw was driving too much of your score. But we agreed that there was something there and that we would work on this game together. This was the start of a long adventure. We tried many ways to make the combinations interesting and varied—pick up contracts, perform specific ones—but nothing really clicked.

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He took the best part of a year and nothing significant had happened. At the same time, the mechanic was still quite fascinating and we decided that "Gems of Saqqara" was something we were so excited about we could not give it up.

And this is when it came to its first massive turn: One friend who’d been looking. At the prototype maze a version drawing on their passion for Japanese culture and the school of painting that used ink and gold. Gems were replaced by paint pots and a tatami mat was use to show them. It was rolled out to serve as a board. Extremely cute handmade pots were produced. The game had a direction, and unbeknownst to us, our main problem was essentially solved because from there it would be a smaller leap to be making a Kano-style painting.

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Some people believe that substance is superior to form. I believe the form gives a guide for substance. Playing with pots, trying to solve a mathematical abstract problem, I realized I was going nowhere. There was no real soul in the game, and so it stayed for another year, always in the back of my mind while other projects based on themes were making progress.

Part 2: Refining the Mechanic and Balancing

It was Christmas vacation time and we, of course, played games at home. After a frustrating experience playing another game, I realized the problem: the game was promising an experience, creating an exciting picture, but it was just purely an optimization problem with bits and pieces placed in position without ever trying to deliver the promised experience. It was like building a town just by putting together cubes and numbers in the way that caused a high number of points.

That’s when it hit me: if the paint pots combinations were representing a painting, then we should actually see your painting in the end. I reset my computer and printer and, after eight hours spread over ne and a half days, I had built the first version of what would become Kano. It didn’t work yet, but I knew all the right paths and started to share them with Pablo.

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I created fixed objectives and scoring rules. I had to go quickly because our best friends and board game fans were coming over to spend a few days with us for New Year’s Eve. The size of the board was made smaller to make the experience around 30-minutes instead of 45 and, more importantly, create some space constraints. Removing eight squares made a big difference. I found a discarded plastic tray that would hold all the pieces in place and in order. It was so convenient that we later insisted that it should be part of the final game.

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When our friends came and the testing began, I quickly observed that whilst the game was designed as a race to score points faster, they would play it just for the enjoyment of completing the puzzle and creating a picture. The masterpieces in particular were played more than anything. I realized it was needed as a guide to first plays, something clear and simple to do while learning how to play the game. I also quickly had to make sure they were balanced and did not score too many points. Interestingly enough, even in the final version, despite not being the highest scoring option on average the masterpiece remain the favorite of new players.

Our friends love for the game was real, and we played many times. They were eager to get their hands on a final copy. There was so much to do and we were far from finished.

The great news was that at this stage Matagot was ready to commit and find an artist to illustrate the game. It was through a board game miracle, with the help of a friend publisher recommendation they eventually got in touch with Jun Sato.

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With this news came another one, and that is that the beautiful pots could not be manufactured at costs that would keep the game accessible. There were simply too many of them. So once again, it was form that pushed substance. This constraint gave us a choice: get rid of the beautiful pots, or have a fully functional game with fewer pots. Of course, we chose the latter, and this is how we made the calculation that if at any point in time every player had a maximum of five of them on the board, we could reduce significantly the total amount: 16 on the mat and 20 on the player boards made 36.
And since we have five colors, our target was 40 pots.

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That seemed correct, but after a lot of testing, we realized that it didn’t quite flow properly. Too many pots could be stuck of the same color and the balance of colors was off in the central board. And since we really wanted that pool of five available colors to represent inspiration and therefore create interesting puzzles and constraints we removed one more from the bag, and this led to the limit of four on the board and seven of each color. Now players could not just wait for the color they wanted they had to change their plans, it just didn’t work if they stuck to the one or two pots of the color they hoped for.

The cost constraint led to a better gaming experience. Creativity it seems was at its best when challenged.

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Part 3: Final Touches and Player Experience

From this point onwards, the theme drove almost all the rules decisions. For starters If there was a limit on the players’ board that’s because naturally the paint would dry. Dry paint would not be removed it would be made messy and cloudy, not scoring any points because it’s a mistake from the painter.

During advanced testing, somebody asked if they could paint over, and the obvious thematic answer was yes.

More testing brought up the question about claiming a picture on the following round instead of right away. Again, all the paint had been positioned on the canvas. It made no sense not to claim the picture, so the rule was obvious.

As we played more and more, and after many iterations, the initial listing of all things that could be painted started to move into something different that would become the red, white, and blue objectives. Red would be variety, White would be position on the board, and Blue was the position of paintings one next to the other. The puzzle had become quite crunchy; you constantly had to choose between speed and point efficiency. It eas impossible to complete all objectives. As we played more and more, people enjoyed the balance between the three types of objectives.

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In order to reinforce the feeling of a race, we also had an intermediate scoring which pushed players to go faster right from the start. Competition was fierce and we loved it.

This is where a new problem appeared. As Matagot was getting art pieces from Jun Sato and cultural advice from Tomoko Sato, they were also running tests with a larger audience. It quickly appeared that we had created a great game for us. Not for new gamers. We had played it a lot, and enjoyed the additional challenge, we relished the frustration of never being perfect, of not finishing the painitng. So we had to go back to the drawing board. It was tough expanding so much, besides deciding what we would remove.

Another piece of advice that was provided to us was that people really enjoyed playing casually and were not so keen on the competitive aspect we enjoyed.

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This led to a realization, we had a rule that gave negative point for empty squares. To ensure maximum impact of this rule the game ended at the end of the round following the round where at least one player had five or less empty squares. You read that right. It was hard. Only exceptionally good players would have a full board and complete painting at the end of a game. Frustrated casual gamers would carry on playing after game end. So the theme came to the rescue, clearly in a race to paint, someone had to cross the finish line.

Obviously, the negative scoring is also something that changed. The penalty led to ending the game one full turn after the board of any player had fewer than five squares open. Quite a lot of things to count! But players were frustrated because the painting was often incomplete. The end-frame rule was redesigned to please the casual Zen gamers. For gamers wanting competition, a bonus was awarded to whoever finished the board.

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It is always a difficult decision once you’ve worked on developing balanced elements to remove them. This is where a friend, an extremely humble and talented designer, made a big difference. After playing the game a couple of times, he told me that the game had an expansion built In. The blue objectives. That framing was a perfect way to look at things. We didn’t have to abandon this design lifeline.

While the blue objectives were put it aside as an expansion that may or may not see the light of day, At first we also excluded the competitive mode, now accurately named Samurai, it seemed coherent to remove this harsher part of the game. We were getting close, but as things happened, Matagot realized—thanks to one of their contacts and a YouTuber—that the Samurai mode was truly a very short rule and that gamers who wanted to increase competition actually enjoyed it a lot, and it made its comeback into the game.

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That simple rule really changes the way the game felt and I’m glad it was kept in the end, opening the game to a wider range of gamers.

That rule actually changes the game curve completely with the intermediate scoring. It also increases the balance between the red objectives and the white and Masterpieces. Everything is more balanced; mistakes are paid for faster.

To some degree the game can adapt to the audience. If no one wants to win, but rather enjoy the process of playing, it’s a simple Zen experiment with players often choosing what is pretty over what is point-efficient. If players want competition, it’s an exercise in speed and adaptability that runs with them, as fast as they can or want. Change your plans for a high pace or stick to your guns for a higher amount of points per square. But of course, keep your finger on the scoring trigger unless you want the others to decide when to score.

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Jun and Tomoko Sato, who had played the game and came up with the wonderful idea of the clouds, provided incredible moral support. They adjusted some elements to be more accurate culturally but also accepted some core principles of the gameplay. The game really felt Japanese and we hope you’ll also feel like you are painting.

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At this stage, we are after close to five years of a journey that started in the sands of Saqqara and ended in the cobbled streets of Kyoto.

We hope that this account of our journey was somewhat interesting and informative. Thank you for reading.

Thank you, Merci,
Angel & Pablo

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Artist Diary: Bringing KANO to Life Through Japanese Art

matagot_contact — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:00:02 +0000

by Matagot Contact

]]>Editor's note: a designer diary for Kano was published at the same time, which you can read HERE.

Jun Sato first connected with Matagot via an Instagram DM. That short message revealed possibilities in an industry still unknown to us. At the same time, however, based on my past experience, I was convinced that the task would be extremely difficult for him. The reason for this is that, particularly over the past few years, he has focused his activities exclusively on creating purely original works rather than commercial illustrations.I was worried that having to follow specific color schemes or draw prescribed characters and buildings might stifle his creativity.

After a long discussion with Jun Sato, he expressed a strong determination to see this project through to completion. Accomplishing the task required an assistant―much like Sherlock’s Watson and although he already had several professional partners, he concluded that I was the ideal choice for this role, given my expertise in both painting and traditional Japanese styles. Initially, I suggested that he create the artwork digitally to facilitate the workflow, but he strongly preferred to paint on paper. When using an illustration drawn on paper for commercial purposes, the biggest issue is color specification.

With digital data, colors are assigned numbers, making them easy to recognize. It required some ingenuity to ensure that the colors drawn on paper were perceived accurately by both the workshop in Kyoto, Japan, and the company Matagot in Bordeaux, France.

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In the early stages of illustration production, communication with Matagot was not yet fully established. However, it was necessary to align our understanding regarding the game's primary color palette.I painted candidate colors onto a paper board and shared them with Matagot through numerous videos and images. Maxime, who handled my case, was very polite, prompt, and kind in our email exchanges, which put me completely at ease. The creation of art always remains within Jun Sato in a mysterious form, never to be revealed to the outside world. However, in this job, I had to share information accurately and in a way that was easy for others to understand. Jun Sato kept notes to accurately track every color used in the illustration, but the volume of these notes eventually became enormous. The work proceeded with him recording the specific color mixtures and quantities of paint used in handwritten notes.

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Another concern was grasping the rules of the game. We weren't very familiar with board games, so we felt uneasy about not knowing the rules. However, there was a wonderful opportunity to put those concerns to rest. Arnaud Charpentier, the CEO of Matagot, visited Japan and gave us the chance to play a demo version of the game. It was highly significant that Jun Sato met Mr. Arnaud Charpentier in person at that time. For an artist like Jun Sato, who creates original artwork, a dialogue with a client not only stimulates his creativity but also serves as a catalyst for pouring even deeper passion
into his work.

Grasping the game's rules was also a great help to him in shaping his ideas for the designs of the characters―such as the animals and people―that appear in the game, as well as for the design of the main animal. The puzzle pieces included "T" and "L" shapes, which gave Jun Sato a great deal of trouble. However, because he was accustomed to creating original works, he was able to devise and propose a way to harmonize them. He was particularly particular about the lines of the clouds. He paid meticulous attention to ensuring that the clouds in the background connected seamlessly.

In traditional Japanese painting, clouds represent time and space. In a game, even if you place a randomly acquired graphic element in a location that might seem unnatural at first glance, separating it with clouds allows the entire composition to come together as a unified painting.

In his original works, he consistently depicts a world where biodiversity is preserved and all forms of life pursue happiness together, cooperating with and understanding one another. Ultimately, in creating the illustrations for KANO, we succeeded in bringing to life a world where humans and nature coexist a defining characteristic of Jun Sato's work. I feel as though each of those pieces is a small miracle.

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While Matagot (France) and Jun Sato (Japan) differ significantly in their values―stemming from the distinction between Western and Eastern perspectives―they were able to share a common goal for this project: giving form to themes of greater significance to humanity, such as humanity itself, nature, creativity, and sensibility. In artistic collaborations, it is rare to reach a state of mutual understanding that transcends nationality and identity. We are grateful for this valuable opportunity.

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Furthermore, I have deeply moving memories associated with this project. After finishing the illustration work, Jun Sato and I reunited with Arnaud Charpentier at Tokyo Game Market and shared the joy of holding the completed KANO in our hands. After that, we traveled to Bordeaux, France, and visited Matagot, where we had the opportunity to interact with Maxime and the people involved in this project. An autograph session for Jun Sato was held in Bordeaux, where he was able to meet people who had been eagerly awaiting KANO. And the trip to Paris after Bordeaux became an unforgettable memory.

In his twenties, Jun Sato visited Paris repeatedly while dreaming of becoming an artist. Holding an autograph session for KANO in that city he had long admired gave him a wonderful opportunity to reflect on his original aspirations. Through this project, I was able to discover a new and different side of the artist Jun Sato. Jun Sato's existing fans likely feel the same way. A work of handmade art has transcended time (time zones) and space (national borders) to become a finished board game.

It is truly wonderful that people who play this game can enhance their sensitivity and enrich their hearts through the creative experiences it offers. We hope that many people will play KANO again and again, savoring the joy of collecting and arranging pieces each one a small miracle in itself.

JUN SATO Office
Art Director
TOMOKO SATO

The Jailbreak Questline had Gaudi plotting with Drops of Evil

boardgamersteph — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 16:00:02 +0000

by Steph Hodge

[imageid=9200434 medium rep]▪️ Devir is releasing Gaudí this month both at Spiel and at retail. New game design from Dani Garcia (Barcelona, Windmill Valley...), this new title will surely look stunning on any table. For 1-4 players and plays in 60-100 minutes.

From BGG:

Step into a world where art defies gravity and stone becomes dream. Shape forms, balance light and nature, and bring to life the visionary style that redefined architecture.

Antoni Gaudí was a visionary Catalan architect born in 1852, renowned for his imaginative and distinctive style that blended Gothic and Art Nouveau influences.

Players will travel through Gaudí's life and work, earning Victory Points in the three pillars that shaped his works: Nature, Catalonia, and Religion. To succeed, players must keep their progress balanced—only their two lowest VP scores among the three pillars will count toward final scoring.

]]>▪️ Thunderworks Games released Questline recently from designers Marc-André Lavoie and Martin Lavoie. This game plays 1-6 players and takes 15 minutes. Small box card game with a real-time element.

From BGG:

Questline is a fast-playing, simultaneous play card game for 1-6 players. Compete to earn the most reputation stars (points) by chaining together a sequence of seven cards that tell your hero’s most compelling story, all in about 15 minutes.

Refine your hand swiftly in secret as you search for compatible numbered cards, each depicting events paired with icons and effects that play off of each other. Form these cards into an ascending numerical sequence, optimizing the reputation stars gained while avoiding numerical gaps.

Draw, discard, and swap cards with one another in real time. Discard cards you don’t want face up, where your neighbors can see them. Obtain new cards from the face-down decks, from your discards, or from your neighbors' discards! Keep an eye out for them to discard the perfect card for your hand.

Once you’re satisfied with your questline, remove your discards from play and claim an epilogue card. The first to finish claim the most valuable epilogues, so don’t take too long. But don’t be too hasty and find yourself with an unmemorable tale full of plot holes, either!

]]>▪️ Drops of Evil from Horrible Guild is available this Spiel! From designers Hjalmar Hach and Lorenzo Silva (The King's Dilemma, Railroad Ink: Deep Blue Edition...), I was told this has been brewing for a while! Perfect release for some October fun. Drops of Evil plays 2-4 players in about 60 minutes.

From BGG:

In Drops of Evil, players take on the role of witches competing to brew the most powerful poison.

Gather ingredients from the forest by sending out your Familiars, then combine them in your Alchilab, a powerful device used for the synthesis of lethal mixtures.

Place Ingredients strategically to improve their toxicity and unlock bonuses. Recruit shady Assistants and follow grim Recipes to make your draught even more wicked. Can you brew the deadliest poison?

]]>▪️ The Jailbreak is a cooperative scenario-based game from Adam's Apple Games, LLC. From designers Joel Kennedy & Karl Lange, this is a small box card game for 2-4 players and plays in 20 minutes. Great for those who love to work through missions that ramp in difficulty as you play! This game will have limited supply at Spiel and is set to be released in Q1 2027.

From BGG:

The Jailbreak is a cooperative deduction game where your perspective and clever communication will be needed to carry out your escape.

Work together with your teammates over 44 challenges broken up across 11 pivotal days of your jailbreak. Each day gets more challenging as you take on more risks in planning and executing your escape.

During the game, each player holds a hand of double-sided tools, and each tool has a non-overlapping front/back pairing. Your perspective at the table may help you give clever clues to your teammates to help them, with some deduction, play their tools to the right spot and complete the challenge.

Be careful - if you get it wrong, you risk being caught by the guards.

Designer Diary - Nature: Climate - Redesigning a Classic

domcrap — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 14:00:02 +0000

by Dominic Crapuchettes

]]>The Nature system currently has a BoardGameGeek rating of 8.6 - well beyond my wildest expectations! This designer diary tells the story of its most recent module, Nature: Climate.

The first five modules introduced entirely new material, but Nature: Climate takes a different approach: it's a redesign of an Evolution expansion. I saved it for last because I knew it would be the most challenging module to create.

Evolution: Climate is widely regarded as the pinnacle of the Evolution series, so its successor was going to face intense scrutiny before it even shipped. It had big shoes to fill, and I was daunted by the challenge.

So I started with the people who know the game best: the players.

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I reread every review, comment, and forum thread I could find, then surveyed nearly 500 Evolution: Climate fans with two simple questions: What should we never change? And what would you most like us to change?

The answers from that poll became my guiding principles.

What to Keep
Evolution: Climate is a highly thematic game, generating epic stories about how how life on Earth evolves over eons of time. That core concept was the sacred cow I could not tamper with.

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Another aspect that stood out immediately is the extra trait slot. People loved the extra variety a fourth trait slot provided for their species, so Nature: Climate keeps it. And fans wanted more traits overall, so Nature: Climate doubles the number of the base game, making it the largest module yet. Since Nature allows duplicate traits, the number of possible species combinations grows far beyond a simple doubling.

What to Change
This was harder to solve: players wanted the climate to swing more dramatically, but they also wanted the game to feel less random. Those goals sound contradictory — more movement should mean more chaos, not less. But things are not always as they seem...

Looking closely at Evolution: Climate, we realized the problem wasn't how far the climate moved. It was when the movement took place. You adapt your species first, then learn which way the climate moves. You could make the smartest possible decision and still get punished by a threat you couldn't mitigate against.

So we flipped the sequence. In Nature: Climate, the climate moves first, then you adapt in response.

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That single change allowed us to make the climate swings much more dramatic while giving players more strategic control. You know where the climate will end before deciding which deck to draw from and how to adapt your species.

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The Climate Movement
Perfecting the climate movements took real work. One of my goals for the module was for it to tell a different story every time you play. I want players to think they've mastered the strategy, play again, and land in an entirely different ecosystem. One game might start in a temperate ecosystem and slowly slide into a blizzarding ice age. Another might spike into scorching heat immediately. Another might swing hard in one direction and then reverse course.

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I would roll five times and plot the climate movement for a game, then do it again for 30 games
I have more than 20 tabs of systems I modeled by hand to see how the climate would move. Then I color coded the cells to help visualize the movement. It was a painstakingly stupid method.

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Then Jared Cleary, one of the Nature playtesters, offered to model them in a statistical program. He could spit out 200,000 games in ten minutes!

Together, Jared and I modeled more than a dozen candidate systems and ran hundreds of thousands of simulations on each, tracking how fast the climate reached its extremes, how long it stayed there, and how often it reversed. The system had to move in a way that felt dramatic, but it also had to stay simple enough to explain at the table.

Here is a visualization of the system we decided upon.

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With this model, once every two million games, the climate will march straight into an Ice Age, and then march immediately back, ending the game in a Scorching Age. It might never happen, but if it does, it will become the kind of story your group still talks about for years.

We weren't just balancing numbers. We were designing stories.

The two extremes are also deliberately asymmetric to increase the number of different stories that get told.

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In an ice age, large, round animals have an advantage because they retain heat more efficiently. Think mammoths.

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In extreme heat, the advantage reverses: smaller animals and heat-dissipating traits become valuable.

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Those differences ripple through the ecosystem. Predators need to be at least as large as their prey, so cold climates can support large predators in ways that extreme heat cannot. Food availability changes, too. Warm, humid environments can produce enormous amounts of plant food, supporting far more animal life.

We also wanted the extremes to actually hurt. If an ice age could support as many thriving species as a lush rainforest, the simulation wouldn't feel right. The rules become deliberately more punishing at the edges of the climate track. That's where the world should feel like it's closing in.

So the climate track isn't simply a difficulty meter. It changes what kind of game you're playing. Different traits become valuable. Different species combinations work. Predator-prey relationships change. The synergies change.

That's exactly what we were after: enormous variety, real drama, ecosystems that transform as the climate does, and extremes that feel genuinely extreme, but underneath all of it, skill still had to matter.

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