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Our hobby has conjured the niche word 'replayability' to describe how well a game cultivates a desire to return to it. A game that is highly replayable is one that players want to explore repeatedly. It's something we value because every prospective purchase exists conceptually as our next favorite game. Every title is graded out the same way, expected to stand up to endless plays and continue blowing our mind over and over again, indefinitely...

Now, often replayability is appraised through the lens of content. Strategic depth and system exploration has retired, phased out like a horse being run into the ditch by an automobile. In modern times, content discovery is the primary factor associated with replayability. A game's capacity to be re-experienced with satisfaction is framed around each play seeing a new piece of content. A new setup. A new set of tiles to bid on. Dozens of variable player powers. A fresh asymmetric faction for each of the 23 plays we imagine for the future. A campaign with at least four branching narratives. Four extra expansion boxes so every time you encounter a foe, it's a one you have to dig out of its tray and find the matching ability card...

Dominion ruined us.

Donald X. Vaccarino's influential 2008 title changed the game. I'm not talking about the mechanism of deckbuilding, but the notion that setup was entirely variable. It's the essence of Dominion's strategy landscape. You look at the set of Kingdom Cards in the center of the table and devise a rough shopping list and hierarchy of purchases. There's more to it than that, of course, but that's irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion...

Hundreds of games came before it with variable setup, but none presented it as such a crucial element of the play experience. Dominion's structure requires variable setup in order to experience it anew. This is significantly different than a game like Cosmic Encounter which would stand up to many plays using the exact same alien powers. In many ways, Dominion is defined by variable setup in order to vary the strategic puzzle, as the bulk of decision making is front loaded to the moment before play begins.

Pure children's games account for about a fifth of the sales pie, while family and adult games make up about a third. Puzzles and card games approx. 15% each. After years of boom in escape games, they lost momentum in 2022. In return, puzzle and crime games gained in importance.

This curriculum is designed to guide children through the process of inventing, from ideation, prototyping, and play testing to pitching and marketing. The curriculum is hands-on and encourages children to think critically and work collaboratively, providing them with valuable skills that will serve them well in their future careers.

The lockdowns we experienced in 2020, both in France and for our production partners in China, caused us to take on huge delays. This effectively bottlenecked our production schedule, blocking the projects that we had been about to produce at the time (Museum: Deluxe and Titan) as well as drastically slowing the development of our subsequent projects (Museum: Pictura, Dominations Deluxe and Rallyman: Dirt). These delays wrought havoc in our editorial calendar, worsened by our team struggling to cope with quarantining and working from home. We were unable to produce and release our games at our usual pace, resulting in the loss of a lot of our retail revenue for almost two years.

For some projects such as Titan, the increase was as high as +400%. The problems continued with increased postage costs for shipping packages to our backers, which went up by 20-40%. Fuel surcharges for logistics also went up by 200%.

Each time one of these new price increases occurred, we made the decision not to transfer any of these costs onto our backers, as we felt that we were able to absorb them by taking from our profit margins. We continued to hope that we could weather the storm.

As all of our productions are paid for in dollars this was particularly damaging, causing us to lose around 200,000 euros. Once again, we decided to absorb the cost to get the games delivered to our backers. This left us in a very fragile position, but we were confident that with the growing success of Encyclopedia and other retail releases coming very soon, we could make it through.

We had worked with them before on two previous projects, and while things didn't go perfectly, we had extensive meetings with them afterwards and they assured us that this time, they would get it right. We had no reason to doubt a company of their size and reputation.

Unfortunately, that turned out to be a huge mistake on our part. The problems began almost immediately. Once our stock arrived in their warehouses in September, they took months to start sending it out, causing massive delays. They also lost tens of thousands of euros worth of games by sending out the wrong packages to the wrong people (sometimes to individuals who hadn't even backed the campaign) and doing little to nothing to correct their mistakes. Backers waited months to have shipping errors corrected, and in many cases, we ended up sending things out ourselves from our spare parts stock just to get things moving.

Bolloré continued to promise that they would speed things up, agreeing that the delays were not normal. We passed this information on to our backers in good faith. Each additional delay worsened the situation for us, as our backers were understandably furious, causing untold damage to our reputation. We received over 2000 messages on our Kickstarter inbox and Helpdesk between November and January. Our small team struggled to keep up with the volume of messages, forcing us to hire freelancers which drained our finances even more.

Our next Kickstarter campaign (Copan: Dying City) didn't do anywhere near as well as we'd hoped: we knew that the situation had cost us the support of a large part of our community. The delays also caused us to miss key retail release dates and sales periods such as Black Friday and Christmas.

The final straw came last week, when we found out that key distribution partners would be delaying their next orders by six months or more due to the current economic situation. Their orders were the last thing that would have kept us going.

This has left us with no choice but to shut everything down.

Holy Grail Games has now entered the bankruptcy process, meaning that all of our assets have been handed over to a government official who will use them to pay our creditors. As of this week, we will lose access to all our email and work accounts, and our team will all be laid off.

Despite strong growth in Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming, Hasbro Pulse, and our licensing business, our Consumer Products business underperformed in the fourth quarter against the backdrop of a challenging holiday consumer environment.

We are focused on implementing transformational changes aimed at substantially reducing costs and increasing our growth rates and profitability. While the full-year 2022, and particularly the fourth quarter, represented a challenging moment for Hasbro, we are confident in our Blueprint 2.0 strategy, unveiled in October, which includes a focus on fewer, bigger brands; gaming; digital; and our rapidly growing direct to consumer and licensing businesses. Through this strategy, we are putting the consumer at the center of everything we do, and our Operational Excellence program is on track to drive significant cost savings across the business and improve our overall competitiveness. These strategic pillars helped to improve our results, particularly operating profit margin and revenue growth in key categories, in a challenging fourth quarter, and lay the groundwork for continued progress in 2023.

There's a certain kind of customer who will want to complain and argue about how horrible Wizards of the Coast is. The big bad corporation is an easy target, and it feels kinda good to fight the man and talk about how awful they are.

I would whole-heartedly encourage you to not engage with these conversations...

I maintain that the vast majority of D&D fans are mercifully oblivious about the recent OGL drama. But guess what happens when those casual D&D players are in your store and you’re grumbling about how Wizards is awful and D&D is ruined? You've created an environment that is decidedly not welcoming to that person.

Pearl Games, located in Frasnes-Lez-Buissenal, in Belgium, has been publishing board games since 2010. The beginning of the adventure was just a simple hobby that gave birth to my first published game: Troyes, created with my friends Alain Orban and Xavier Georges. The success of this first game, especially during the Essen show, allowed me to continue the adventure with 11 games (Tournay, Bruxelles 1893, Deus, Bloody Inn, to name a few). That's 11 games in 13 years, a few by today's standards, but I am happy about it, my credo being to develop each title as best as possible.


In 2014, the French group Asmodee bought Pearl Games and made it an Internal Studio of the company. The confidence associated with the new organization allowed me to work more calmly. My strength is as a creative editor more than a business manager, so this collaboration offered me many new tools: openings to new markets around the world, competence in quality and manufacturing, logistics, after-sales services, etc.

All good things must come to an end, and Asmodee has decided to end this collaboration. Asmodee will close the Pearl Games studio as of the end of March. Why? It seems to me that the most important reason is the evolution of Asmodee, which has become bigger and bigger, to the point that Pearl Games has struggled to keep its place by remaining faithful to its editorial line. Also, the game market has exploded in recent years, in quality and quantity. You have to take this into account and adapt to it, and that's what I will do!


At the end of this adventure, the most difficult part to manage is the human aspect and the dismissal of Anaëlle, Martin and me. The most important are the moments spent with the players, my direct colleagues (Renaud, Martin and Anaëlle) and those further away from Asmodee, but also with the designers, illustrators, graphic designers, translators, demonstrators, manufacturers, etc.

A question obviously arises: what about the future of Pearl Games? We are making arrangements with Asmodee so that I can retain the brand and catalog of Pearl Games, moving forward as an independent publisher. The challenge will be great, and it will take time to gather the funds, organize the new ideas, find new partners, finalize these game projects. For this project to be successful, a transition period without new releases and reprints will be necessary.


Managing to create, develop, and publish games as soon as possible is an extremely exhilarating challenge! Several games are already under development, at very different levels, and I will do what is necessary to ensure that these ideas come to fruition, regardless of the organization to be put in place. Let's continue to have fun creating and playing!

With over 15,000 backers already delivered for Darkest Dungeon (and counting), we're proud to announce that Darklands [an expansion for Enchanters] is in the final stages of delivery as we speak. 6: Siege and Rise of the Necromancers are already scheduled for 2023 delivery.

Mythic Games has set a goal to deliver, one after the other, the other pending games that were successfully launched on Kickstarter, of which HEL and Anastyr are the flagship projects the company plans to build on in the future.

Mythic Games' first major decision for the end of the year is the rationalization of its games portfolio (brands, licenses, games in development, etc.). With more than thirty games in its catalog, it was becoming very complicated for all the development teams to achieve a work corresponding to the quality standard we have always wanted. In fact, we proceeded to sell a certain number of IPs to different publishers in order to focus on the three main ones: Darkest Dungeon, HEL and Anastyr.

Reichbusters is a universe we loved since day one. Here, players cooperatively fight against an alternative nazi reich full of occult, weird, and alien technology. This board game will be back, but with a different, fresh and streamlined set of rules, enhanced with additional content.


Concerning Solomon Kane...it is way too soon to talk about it in details, but as you saw on our last Conan RPG announcement, we have many, many plans going on in the Robert E. Howard universe.

Note that Monolith has no connection with the Solomon Kane pre-orders made on Mythic Games store.

Matthew John, Conan Board Game Developer for Monolith added "For eight years now, Conan, Heroic Signatures, and Monolith have been treading the lands of Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age, finding grand inspiration for our products. Our board game, which rallied tens of thousands of players, was soon joined by a great role-playing game, thanks to Modiphius, who did a fantastic job diving deep into this exciting setting. As fans, we'll be forever grateful to Modiphius for their work and our collaborations on Conan.

We've said it before, Howard's stories are part of Monolith's DNA, and so we happily accepted Heroic Signatures' offer to develop our own Conan roleplaying game — one we can infuse with our passion and unique creative vision. While we prepare our next Conan board game project, which will offer new, long-awaited features next year, we wanted to let fans know it is not the only Conan game we're bringing to the table — or rather, your tables.


So...Monolith will bring back the Conan board game, then an all-new role-playing game! And who knows — it's certainly possible that our admiration for Robert E. Howard's work will lead us beyond the borders of the Hyborian Age.

Researchers from Alphabet-owned DeepMind...say they've created a new AI agent capable of playing Stratego at a "human expert level". The AI, called DeepNash, won nearly all of the matches it played against other AI's and had an 84% overall win rate when competing against human players in online games. DeepNash, which learned to master the game by playing against itself, was able to make complex decisions and consider tradeoffs in "extraordinary" ways previous AI systems couldn't.

To win, DeepNash mixed both long term strategy and short term decision making like bluffing and taking chances. It's rare that two of those things can be done at the same times so well by an AI agent. Stratego's combination of long, strategic thinking and making decisions based on incomplete or limited information have mostly thwarted past AI models.

When asked about all these course corrections, Childres said, "You're not perfect. You don't have complete information. Sometimes you need to listen to other people, and change." As Childres introduces Frosthaven to his waiting fans, he's learning that even the most calculating board-game players can be surprised — or even upended — by a move. Frosthaven is dedicated to Isaac's older brother, Joseph, who died two years ago in a drug-related accident. Childres lives closer to his parents now; sometimes he takes his kayak to the ocean and hopes to see an otter. It is difficult to minimize randomness in a life on this Earth — but you can adapt to it, take steps. Frosthaven started shipping earlier this month; on B.G.G., it had an initial rank of 4,034.

Nascent production company Cobalt Knight, which was founded up by video game executives Christopher Kaminski and Christopher Knox, has optioned the screen rights to the game, which has sold over 1.5M copies.

The company is leaning towards a series but is also open for a feature take on the strategy game, which sees players compete to use resources and innovative technology to make the red planet inhabitable...

It hopes that the Terraforming Mars narrative can highlights the game's themes including existential tropes like class struggle, colonialism, and ecological collapse.

Despite much progress in training AI systems to imitate human language, building agents that use language to communicate intentionally with humans in interactive environments remains a major challenge. We introduce Cicero, the first AI agent to achieve human-level performance in Diplomacy, a strategy game involving both cooperation and competition that emphasizes natural language negotiation and tactical coordination between seven players. Cicero integrates a language model with planning and reinforcement learning algorithms by inferring players' beliefs and intentions from its conversations and generating dialogue in pursuit of its plans. Across 40 games of an anonymous online Diplomacy league, Cicero achieved more than double the average score of the human players and ranked in the top 10% of participants who played more than one game.

Cicero uses a strategic reasoning module to intelligently select intents and actions. This module runs a planning algorithm that predicts the policies of all other players based on the game state and dialogue so far, accounting for both the strength of different actions and their likelihood in human games, and chooses an optimal action for Cicero based on those predictions. Planning relies on a value and policy function trained via self-play RL [reinforced learning] which penalized the agent for deviating too far from human behavior in order to maintain a human-compatible policy. During each negotiation period, intents are re-computed every time Cicero sends or receives a message. At the end of each turn, Cicero plays its most recently computed intent.

Although Cicero is shown to be effective at cooperating with humans, it occasionally sent messages that contained grounding errors, contradicted its plans, or were otherwise strategically subpar. Although we reduced errors with a suite of filters, Diplomacy poses an interesting benchmark for studying this problem. We suspect that these mistakes did not raise further suspicions that Cicero was an AI agent due to the time pressure imposed by the game, as well as the fact that humans occasionally make similar mistakes.

"The research shows that AI systems that seem to perform at a human level are often doing so in a very alien way, and so can fail in ways that are surprising to humans," explains [Adam] Gleave[, who co-authored a paper on this project]. "This result is entertaining in Go, but similar failures in safety-critical systems could be dangerous."

Role-playing can be especially helpful for people who've experienced trauma and oppression. Cassie Walker, a clinical social worker and trauma specialist, sees games and role-playing as a valuable way to connect with clients and demonstrate that therapy doesn’t have to be serious or painful.

"Trauma disconnects us from ourselves, and one of the first things we get disconnected from is our imagination and creativity," Walker says. Tabletop games allow their clients to reconnect with their imaginations, as the structure of the games provide some comfort and encourage people to start thinking about what could be rather than what is.

Tagesspiegel developed BVV-Planspiel, which translates to "experimental game," in partnership with the German game design agency Planpolitik. The project is managed and funded by the city's public libraries and, after an initial pilot phase, the partners plan to fully launch the game in the spring of 2023...

Planspiel centers around the made-up Berlin district of Biberfelde. The game requires at least 10 players to serve as members of the district's assembly and discuss a range of local issues. Each player is assigned to a fictional political party that's loosely based on a real one. They get a short description of who they are, what kind of values and ideas they hold, and who their character represents.

At the end of 90 minutes, the players have to come to a resolution on the issue that serves the interest of the district's residents. Hosting the game at public libraries — there's one in each of the 12 districts — makes it accessible to all residents for free.