This weekend, just a few days before yesterday’s Braided Skies reveal, Stonemaier Games hosted its 13th annual Design Day. On Sunday, the Design Day itself featured designers, playtesters, and gamers from St. Louis and around the country for 12+ hours of playtesting and gaming at Pieces Board Game Bar and Cafe.
The purpose of Design Day is to bring together designers, playtesters, and content creators to give and receive feedback on game prototypes, expand their network within the gaming community, and learn from clever mechanisms in published games. If you’d like to know details about how the day is structured, you can read about previous Design Days here, here, here,here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Why We Run This Event
On paper, the event doesn’t make much sense. We’re not promoting anything. There’s really no focus on Stonemaier Games at all. To put it simply, Design Day is just something we like doing.
We like doing it for the designers, the playtesters and gamers, and the content creators. The creative energy is palpable and inspiring, and it seems to be a worthwhile, joyous experience for attendees. I’m also on the lookout for future Stonemaier products (so far we’ve published four games that appeared at Design Day), but I’m mostly just trying to be helpful to other creators and maybe help them find the right publisher.
How Does Design Day Work?
We opened most ticket sales in the spring to past attendees (around 80 tickets), then sold the remaining 30 tickets to people who signed up for a back-in-stock notification (you can use this year’s listing to get a notification for 2027). We added a few extra people this year, though there are space and noise limitations we are mindful of. We charged $45-55 per ticket, which accounts for about 40% of the total food/beverage/space cost for the day (Stonemaier covers the rest).
Joe sent an email each month containing new information and an actionable step for attendees. The most complicated step is creating the calendar of events, which requires us to consider game length, player count, table size, etc.
We share and participate in casual, optional activities on Saturday. People travel great distances to Design Day, so we try to offer a full weekend of activities for those who want it. One local attendee, Melissa, is always very kind to open up her home for a gaming evening, and some attendees visit friends or sightsee in St. Louis. It’s also become a tradition to introduce attendees to disc golf; this year around 30 people participated on a hot afternoon at Crestwood Park. Designer Ben Rosset also ran a Q&A about game design and manufacturing in the morning, and Paul Salomon (Gamehead Games) ran a playtesting event on Saturday evening.
Pieces Board Game Bar and Cafe provided the space, food, and drinks (and access to their huge game collection). This was our second year at Pieces’ new, bigger location, and it’s still great! The tables are much more spread out, and nearly every table is wheelchair accessible. Pieces serves their delicious homemade cookies throughout the day, and attendees optionally enjoyed their delicious gaming-themed mocktails and cocktails. Pieces has its busiest day on Saturday (and Saturday is a very busy day in that area of St. Louis), hence why Design Day is on Sunday. We use a buffet format for meals: Bagels and muffins for breakfast, poke bowls for lunch, and a nacho bar for dinner. There are veggies and gluten-free options at every meal.
The schedule of the day is preset. People sign up for tables in advance (we guarantee that each designer who signs up in advance will get to playtest their game at least twice, and we ask designers to share rulebooks in advance for attendees to peruse). It’s very structured. We never interrupt the day with announcements, and every game ran on schedule. Attendees were also flexible for games that ended early or when the designers didn’t show up–they simply picked another game to play.
A mix of unsigned prototypes, to-be-published/crowdfunded prototypes, and a few published games were played, with the intent being that each can inform the experiences of the other. There’s this great mindset of talking about game design from all angles throughout the day.
Playtesters optionally filled out a short form (created by Hilda Vazquez) after each playtest to give to the designer.
I spent most of the day observing various games, checking in with designers and playtesters, and trying to have a few minutes of quality time with each attendee.
How Were the Games?
I truly am inspired and awestruck by the creativity, innovation, and vulnerability of the designers at this event. Everyone puts a lot of work into these games, and I loved listening to the constructive interactions between designers and playtesters.
Design Day isn’t a competition, but as a way of helping designers see how far along their games are, we ask attendees to rate each game on a 1-6 scale indicating how close a game is to being publishable.
Based on this rating scale–basically, how close they are to being a successful publishable game–here are the top-rated games of Design Day 2026, with brief descriptions in the words of the designers:
Alchemists of Avalon by Tyson Gajewski (5.8): Mancala, resource manipulation, drafting, contracts
Among Mortals by Brendan Hansen (5.5): Card game with a shared board. Area Control, Hand Management, Variable Powers, Hidden Affinities
Puzzle Factory by Ben Rosset (5.5): Worker Placement, Puzzle-making, Partial Simultaneous Play
Moominos by Hilda Vazquez (5.4): Card/Tile drafting, Thinky-puzzle, Set Collection
Delvers of Deepgate by Clayton Smith (5.17): Tower Defense Dungeon Dive
The Royal Tent by Heather Dixon (5.17): Shared Engine Building, Rondel, Contract Fulfillment, Variable End-Game Trigger
Treat Street by Jacob Gentrup (5.11): Series of mini card games
Top Flight by Kyle Boyer (5.07): Push your luck racing
Aragonite by Wes Kendall (5.06): Pattern block-laying, trick-taking, bag-building, engine-building
Synchrony by Austin Bailey & Jason Jones (5.04): Ephemeral engine and tableau-building, asymmetric set collection, time-as-a-resource
Other games rated 5.00 on average were Dice Rogue (Joe Totherow), Franchise Wars (Pete Wissinger), Magic Tricks (Chris Porter), and Pips (Ben Morayta).
If publishers are curious to learn more about some of these games, I’m happy to talk to you about them and connect you to the designers (if they’re looking for a publisher)!
Next Year
If you want to attend Design Day next year, you can use this year’s listing to get a notification for 2027, and if there are any extra slots, we’ll likely announce them in our April e-newsletter.
Have you found value in running or attending events related to your industry? As alternatives to Design Day, there are Protospiel, Unpub, and other playtest events around the country, including some at Geekway to the West in St. Louis in May.
Huge demand for Asmodee‘s co-operative puzzle game Take Time has seen the publishing giant print more than 325,000 copies less than a year after release – outstripping even the company’s high expectations which surrounded its record-breaking launch.
Asmodee printed a massive 145,000 copies of Alexi Piovesan and Julien Prothière’s design for its worldwide launch last October, citing heavy enthusiasm from its distribution teams, board game media and pre-release playtesters.
Game line manager Auguste Lecoeur told BoardGameWire, “As soon as the game’s prototype was shown to us and signed, it became an internal priority, with resources and manpower being redirected from other projects to Take Time.
“Huge credit goes to everyone involved in the project for getting it done so quickly while maintaining such a high level of quality, especially considering that the game went through only around six months of visual development.
“When the game was first presented to Asmodee’s distribution units and partners, the enthusiasm was immediate as well, with Take Time being flagged as a key new release for Libellud.
“The same enthusiasm was shared by media outlets and players that were able to test the game prior to its release, so we had multiple positive signals ahead of launch.
“In that sense, we were definitely expecting a strong first print run, but you can never realistically expect to reach 145,000 copies. It was a very pleasant surprise and clearly exceeded our expectations, even though we were prepared for strong numbers.”
Every major reprint of the game since has topped 60,000 copies, Lecoeur said, with Asmodee currently planning another two to three global print runs of the same size each every year to keep up with demand.
Lecoeur said, “At this point, it is clear that Take Time won’t be a ‘one-hit wonder’, a game that enjoys a high initial print run but then quickly fades. Instead, the game is maintaining a strong sales pace and continues to perform well across markets.”
He added, “The game gained strong visibility and positive feedback at conventions such as Cannes’ FIJ and Spiel Essen, while also achieving higher-than-usual numbers online, thanks in part to its visual appeal and the buzz surrounding it.
“More broadly, the game was quickly validated by the core and specialist market, as well as by opinion leaders, critics and content creators within the board game community. It received strong critical acclaim – it is now ranked [in] the top 95 family games on BGG – and was nominated for multiple awards, which played a huge part in its success.
“Sure, we would have loved to win the As d’Or and Spiel des Jahres (who wouldn’t?), but I guess we’re being picky here!”
Success Story
Part of the game’s powerful performance has been down to it penetrating well beyond the specialist board games market, with Asmodee saying its distribution is now relatively evenly split between hobby stores, mass-market retailers and e-commerce.
Lecoeur said, “I’m convinced that this wouldn’t have been possible if the game hadn’t first been embraced by the core gaming community. Their strong support and enthusiasm for the game helped open the door to other distribution channels much more quickly.”
He added that part of Take Time’s wider appeal was down to the game’s compact size and “accessible price point”, as well as its “high level of replayability and substantial gameplay content”.
Those first two elements have become increasingly important amid ongoing financial strain for people in some of Asmodee’s core markets, such as France, Germany, the UK and US, with rising food and energy prices and ongoing economic uncertainty putting pressure on their purchases.
Take Time || Photo Credit: Asmodee
Other successful initiatives which helped boost Take Time’s appeal included what Lecoeur described as an “unusual” cardboard demo kit, with detachable cards and clocks, which could be ordered by distribution units to give players a taste of the game’s core mechanisms.
He said the kit “generated strong enthusiasm at launch”, but added that the format was not something which could be replicated for every one of its releases.
Award nominations also helped drive sales, especially in Germany and France, which Lecoeur said had been two of the strongest markets for the game from day one.
He said Take Time’s Spiel des Jahres recommendation was followed by a higher-than-usual reprint demand from Germany of 30,000 copies – and added that the impact of other ‘smaller’ awards “should not be overlooked”.
Lecoeur also believes Take Time benefitted from the success of Libellud’s previous release Harmonies, which also picked up a Spiel des Jahres recommendation and the Swiss Gamers Award, as well as a Golden Geek – and was highlighted by Asmodee CEO Thomas Koegler as having had a strong launch.
Lecoeur said, “The fact that Libellud’s previous release, Harmonies, had been a hit certainly helped. It raised expectations around the studio’s next title and put the spotlight on its launch.
“It’s clear that each publisher develops its own reputation and ‘brand’ image based on its releases (among other things) and that this plays a significant role in the confidence they receive from retailers and, to some extent, from players.
“The success or failure of each release will inevitably have an impact on the games that follow, particularly when it comes to forecasts and initial orders.”
Time After Time
Asmodee is now beginning to turn Take Time into a wider product line, with debut expansion Mirage set for release next month, and the company having “many more ideas we’re currently working on for the range”.
Lecoeur said, “As soon as we received the first feedback on the game and it became clear that the launch was going to be massive, the first discussions about an expansion began in April 2025 with Alexi Piovesan and Julien Prothière, the game’s designers, to explore the possibilities for additional content.
Take Time: Mirage
“They worked on it and presented an iteration that led to a contract being signed in November 2025, as the first market feedback started coming in and multiple markets were selling out.
“However, this timeline was only possible because the designers were fully confident that the game offered enough design space to support an expansion, and because they presented an idea that genuinely excited the team, both mechanically and thematically.
“We’re not releasing expansions simply for the sake of releasing them or to get a marketing boost. If an expansion is published, it’s because we believe it genuinely adds something to the game and offers players a meaningful new experience.”
He added, “Mirage’s format also played an important role. It is a compact expansion, with a €7.99 MSRP, that introduces a new chapter while also adding a new gameplay twist that can be used to replay the entire base game in a different way.
“It isn’t a large expansion that takes up a significant amount of shelf space in stores or represents a massive financial commitment; instead, it is designed to complement the base game and extend the experience without overshadowing it. Its difficulty is also carefully tuned so that players can enjoy the expansion even if they haven’t finished the base game.
“Regarding expansions and product lines, there is a balance to strike between fully trusting your game and not overcommitting. You want to anticipate demand for expansions and reprints in order to avoid out-of-stock situations or a lack of releases and support that could hurt a game’s prospects in the medium to long-term.
“At the same time, a game needs to demonstrate commercial stability before being turned into a full-fledged product line and treated as such.
“It’s no secret that overproducing a game is one of the easiest ways for a publisher to get into financial trouble, and we’re doing our best to avoid that. We want to support successful games and build on their potential while remaining disciplined about production and inventory.”
A Board Game Arena version of the base game is also due for release in Q4 of this year.
There’s a level of chaos that appears when a player’s turn is up in the new word-association party game Mind Sweeper (2026, Floodgate).
You see, players are staring at a table that has like 50 small cardboard tokens scattered here and there, from easy visuals (like one of those Egyptian-style pyramids, or a sword, or an apple) to some that are a bit opaque, like a single exclamation point. The active player is dealt a card with six words, and separately a number token forcing the player to illustrate a specific word (using those tokens) over the next 60 seconds.
Get your team to guess what the word is, and you score the card. Players can shout anything as soon as the timer starts, adding to the chaos. If they don’t get the word in those 60 seconds, the active player flips the word card in view of all players, then the team gets 60 more seconds to guess which of the six words was the original answer.
Across 10 word cards, you’re looking at a 15-20 minute experience, in a cooperative, high-score challenge that pushes players to get as many of the 10 words right as they can.
The keys here is twofold. Each card’s clue words are…
Surplus of Sloths (2026, Weird Giraffe Games) isn’t bad.
It’s a card drafting game where players try to build a hand of ascending card runs across five different suits of sloths. A market wipe mechanic pushes one leftover market card into a “surplus net” after each round, and players can view and gauge whether it is worth trying to score a suit at the end of the game.
I just gave you 75% of the rules, and designer Charlie McCarron (Skyrockets, the Kites riff I quite enjoyed) has given us a game so quick that my 12-year-old and I played it twice within a 15-minute stretch. Even winning one of those two games didn’t impress the 12-year-old, who shrugged their shoulders before admitting that the game was “only OK” before heading off to their room.
You’re right; that’s not an endorsement. My review crew joined me for a four-player game the following day, and the winner of that game also shrugged their shoulders and landed in the same rating range I landed on for this review.
Surplus of Sloths isn’t bad because its scoring mechanic is interesting. In an ideal world, you want to build up a run of three, four, maybe even five low cards of…
One of my favorite things about the games released under Carla and Nick Kopp’s Weird Giraffe banner: the games are often legitimately weird.
Here’s what I mean. I was explaining the rules to my wife and nine-year-old for our first play of Effervescent (a Carla design currently on crowdfunding, set for release in 2027), and when I tried to explain the main concept of placing sea-based creature tiles in such a way that the tail of a newly-placed tile must touch the head of a previously-placed animal tile, my wife openly balked.
“So, like, this way?” She used a large whale tile as an example.
“Well, sort of,” I began. “Each tile has a head area, a distinct tail point…then, every other part of the tile is a ‘side.’”
“Seems kind of weird,” she said. And our first play went that way, as players took tiles in one of three sizes to create scoring patterns that would trigger with a mix of scoring sequences, tied to “Drift” cards and Harmony cards, the latter of which were established before the game as public milestones that are always available to score.
Turns are simple. Place a tile, and if a placed tile meets a Drift card scoring condition, a player puts…
A fog lingers over our tree, and we are lost in our home. We need to set out and place the last lantern to fend off the fog. *Pause for dramatic effect* *Crickets chirp* *sighs* Last Lantern is a cooperative game with points of limited communication for two to four players that plays in about […]
Financially-troubled board game publisher CMON has secured a $19m injection of new capital as it battles to turn around years of heavy losses and dwindling cash reserves – which had left it with just $368,000 in bank and cash balances at the start of August.
But CMON’s balance sheet remained under pressure at the end of June, with $7.34m more in short-term liabilities than short-term assets, up from $6.89m at the end of 2025.
A significant part of CMON’s liabilities relates to eight crowdfunded games whose campaigns raised $14m from backers, but which the company has yet to deliver – including DC Super Heroes United, which raised more than $4.4m, and DCeased, which brought in over $2.5m.
DC Super Heroes United, designed by Andrea Chiarvesio || Crowdfunding image
CMON’s directors in its H1 report that the liabilities position had caused the company’s directors to give “careful consideration to the future liquidity and performance of the group and its available sources of financing in assessing whether the group will have sufficient financial resources to continue as a going concern”.
The directors added that they believed CMON would be be able to continue operating – but central to that assessment was the success of the planned share sale, which was designed to raise up to HK$150.5m, or about $19m.
Existing shareholders agreed to buy just 7.76% of the new shares offered to them by the August deadline, leaving CMON looking to raise more than $17.5m from other investors through the rights issue – a figure approaching 2.5-times the valuation of the entire company implied by its last share sale in February this year.
But the company has now revealed that placing agent Yuen Meta managed to sell every remaining share on offer, giving the business the full $19m it had been seeking – a significant mark of belief in the beleagured business.
That capital injection is more than 50-times CMON cash balance from early August, and almost double the $9.9m in revenue CMON generated across the whole of last year, although it pales in comparison to the $37m to $45m revenues it posted each year between 2021 and 2024.
CMON said it plans to use 40% of the newly-raised money to fund its day-to-day operations across the next 12 months, including staff costs, royalties, shipping and distribution, professional fees and other administrative and operating expenses.
Of that slice, about 30% – which works out to $2.28m – was set to go towards staff costs including salaries, bonuses and allowances, 30% towards selling and distribution expenses, and 35% towards general administrative and operating expenses, including its sales operation, utilities, insurance, government registration and filing fees, listing fee, repairs and maintenance. The the final 5% was earmarked for paying professional fees
That news could provide some relief to the tens of thousands of backers still waiting for their games via CMON’s heavily-delayed crowdfunding campaigns – although the publisher has not specified exactly how much of the capital will be used to deliver the overdue titles, or whether the capital is enough to ensure all eight will be fulfilled.
Zombicide: White Death
CMON has not completed fulfillment of a crowdfunding project since Zombicide: White Death in mid-2025, but did manage to deliver pre-orders for Cthulhu: Dark Providence, Marvel United: Witching Hour and Dune: Desert War in the first half of this year.
Latest delivery estimate (as of September 24, 2026)
Mordred
$669,976
5,687
July 2023
August 2024
Q4 2026
Masters of the Universe: The Board Game – Clash for Eternia
$719,664
4,182
January 2024
November 2024
Q1 2027
DCeased
$2,564,789
12,787
December 2023
April 2025
Q1 2027
DC Super Heroes United
$4,478,989
14,040
August 2024
August 2025
Q1 2027
God of War
$832,945
4,388
May 2024
June 2025
Q2 2027
Massive Darkness: Dungeons of Shadowreach
$2,854,553
9,842
February 2025
March 2026
Q3 2027
A Song of Ice & Fire: Tactics
$1,886,509
6,406
February 2024
February 2025
Q3 2027
Degenesis: Clan Wars
$339,742
1,232
June 2024
July 2025
n/a
Total Dollars
$14,347,167
About 20% of CMON’s newly-raised capital is earmarked for repaying debts and other outstanding liabilities, including $2.46m owed to a CMON director and $385,000 of unsecured advances from employees, as well as outstanding production, shipping, royalty and other operating costs.
CMON has slated 25% of the new money for expansion in existing and new markets, including strengthening the company’s presence in Europe through marketing and potential attendance at events including Spiel Essen and Cannes, as well as targeting growth in Japan and the Philippines.
The company added that it plans to put 15% of the new capital towards potential acquisitions as part of a push into digital gaming, although said it had not yet identified any targets.
CMON said it intends to look for between one and three businesses, primarily in Asia-Pacific, valued at between about $1.3m and $2.5m each, which could help it develop digital adaptations of its existing games, companion apps and other digitally-enabled features.
The publisher stressed that it intends to retain physical tabletop games as its core business, with the digital push designed to complement rather than replace them.
CMON’s capital raise has also radically reshaped the ownership of the company, with chairman and CEO Ng Chern Ann ceasing to be the largest shareholder after his overall stake was diluted down from about 20% to just over 5%.
The capital raise has made investor Yip Ka Ki Cherry CMON’s largest disclosed shareholder with a roughly 19% stake, personally and via her investment holding company Legend One.
Yip was already an investor in CMON before the rights issue, with a stake of about 4.8%. Her other previous investments through Legend One include Japanese entertainment business TryHard Holdings.
CMON has also strengthened its board following the capital raise, appointing two new independent non-executive directors – veteran financial management, corporate governance and audit executive Chan Ka Kit, and corporate communications, marketing and investor relations specialist Claire Luk.
If you have been following our blog for a while now, you know of my affinity for the history of the American Revolutionary War. I am a proud American, believe deeply in the principles of our land and the Constitution that governs it and am grateful to God every single day that our country was successful in our fight for its freedom in order to create a better society and to assist all peoples with protecting their “unalienable rights” endowed by a Creator, which include “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. I enjoy playing wargames on the American Revolutionary War and very much enjoy learning about the history and its key battles. There are many out there that feel the same as I do and they have designed lots of these type of games and with 2026 being our 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, there are events that are planned to celebrate it.
One of which is an event put on by GMT Games and Mark Miklos called Gaming the American Revolution – Camden 250 being held in Camden, South Carolina September 24-27th. The event includes 3 days of gaming centered on American Revolutionary Wargames produced and published by GMT Games but also includes several events, gatherings and historic tours of the Camden Battlefield.
We are attending and at the time of the posting of this are already on a flight on our way to Columbia, South Carolina via a short stop in Chicago, Illinois. We are very much looking forward to the event and have plans to play at least 2 games from the Battles of the American Revolution Tri-Pack II including Newtown and Oriskany, as well as any other opportunity that presents itself. We also are going to participate in the various tours of the Camden Revolutionary War Visitor Center and nearby battlefield and also plan to drive to a few others sites on our way home to the airport namely Waxhaws and Cowpens.
At the end of each day, I will be putting together a short summary of what we did that day at the convention. I would like to keep this to just a few paragraphs with several pictures to give you an idea of the games we played that day, people we talked with and other activities we participated in. We will still work on doing multiple videos as well that will be released on the YouTube Channel over the next few months but this written coverage will supplement the videos. This summary will most likely not be posted until near midnight EST each night so you might be checking it out the next morning which is fine.
Finally, if you are at the event please feel free to find us and say hello. I believe that we are very friendly and accessible and love to make connections with our fans and followers. In fact, we have TPA buttons and stickers to give away so just ask. We also would like to take a picture with you so we can document it in our writings.
Please check back each day for a summary of the days exploits. Thanks for following along.
Because this is a wargaming blog, I am going to share below some of our content we have made regarding AmRev War games for your review:
Enchanted Ivy Designer: Sarah Joshua Publisher: Allplay Players: 1 Age: 10+ Time: 15 minutes Played with review copy provided by publisher Take on the role of Ivy, the courageous new owner of a magical inn. Build your bewitching … Continue reading →
TOBE (Taiwan Original Boardgame Expo) will be held in Taipei 25-27 September 2026. By the time you read this, I will be in Taipei, probably setting up booth, and connecting with other designers and publishers around Asia. This is the first time my wife Michelle is joining me at my game booth. She will be my assistant for the three days. If you are in Taipei, come play with me!
Upland & Prairie is troublesome. Designed by the peerless Peer Sylvester, gorgeously illustrated and produced, and conceptually adjacent to certain Knizian disc- and tile-laying games, it has the makings of something wonderful.
The problem is that it doesn’t work. With some squinting, I believe I can see what Sylvester was going for. But it’s like looking directly at the sun: uncomfortable, fumbling, all its majesty blinded by sheer directness. I have worked to appreciate what is here. But the more I try, the more irritated I become.
Early moves. Also maybe mid-moves.
At a soil level, Upland & Prairie is about placing discs in three colors to link together either two or three objective spaces. When this happens — if it happens — the color of that space-linking chain determines which type of token becomes the game’s victory condition. Thus, linking rodents means rodent tokens become the game’s means of success. If the chain is composed of owls, you’re hopefully holding the most brown tokens. Predatory cats… you get the idea.
The game’s sole action is dead simple. On your turn, you draw three tokens from the bag. One of these gets placed on the map. Another gets hidden behind your player shield. The third gets tossed back into the bag. Even at its slowest, it’s snappy.
In theory, this exiles players to donkeyspace. If you’re holding the most red tokens, you want the final chain to be red. But placing red tokens means you’re not hoarding red tokens; hoarding red tokens means you’re not placing red tokens. Meanwhile, if an opponent sees you moving to complete the red chain, there’s nothing preventing them from hoarding their own red tokens. It’s a pickle.
Conversely, the game might end with the bag running dry. When that happens, now players are looking to build sets of red, green, and brown tokens. In such on occurrence, hoarding was exactly the wrong thing to do. Now it’s variety you’re after. Choices, choices.
And there certainly are choices. Constrained choices, to be sure. Choices dictated largely by the draw. That’s no problem. They’re still informed choices, and theoretically interesting choices at that. Every little tidbit, every placement, becomes a trickle of water on an arid prairie. When an opponent tucks a ferret (?) into a corner, is that because they’re trying to run out the bag? Or are they just trying to deplete those green tokens because they aren’t holding enough of them? Could this be an opening? Or is it so much static, not a coherent signal?
Now that’s one generous bag!
The foremost issue with Upland & Prairie is one of limitation. Not in the sense that it’s too limited. Rather, that it isn’t limited enough.
There are only three colors. Most of the time, this makes blocking a real problem. Now, in the game’s early stages, blocking is simple enough. If owls are threatening to end the session prematurely — a real possibility, given the tiny size of the map — then I might cut off your parliamentary incursion by placing a mountain lion. Easy enough.
But as the game progresses, other tokens might appear from the bag. These push up a tracker that increases how many tokens a space can hold. Where the game begins with each hex limited to a single disc, eventually it becomes possible to hold a second disc, and then a third. These moments, regulated as they are only by the draw-bag, are significantly harder to manage than ordinary token draws. It’s possible, as in a few of our sessions, that the game will open up its geography very early, in which case you might as well beeline toward the finish line with the color you’re holding the most of. If instead the game lingers a while, then the sudden appearance of a population-expanding token tends to favor the player upon whose turn it appeared. Now any bottlenecks can be pried open, and usually with ease.
Meanwhile, because the map is so small, these swings arrive with such suddenness that there isn’t much one can do to preempt them. Even if I’ve successfully walled off a particular species, a shift on my opponent’s turn — whether that’s one opponent or two, or perhaps two opponents and a partner, all depending on play count — can spell a very swift crumbling to that bulwark.
Hidden discs function as your score.
And then, when the game ends, there’s the very real possibility that it will end in a tie. There are tiebreakers, of course, and as in some of Sylvester’s better titles, The King Is Dead foremost among them, knowledge of the tiebreaker might be all-important.
Here, though, the tiebreakers feel more like concessions than objectives that can be shrewdly managed. In the case of a chain, tied players break their stalemate by who would go next in turn order. For an empty bag, it’s all about who holds the most animals of a single type. That might sound functional enough, but I’ve also seen that tally result in a tie. And the rulebook declines to address this possibility with either a second tiebreaker or a desultory “in this case, players share the win.”
This relates to my earlier issue. Upland & Prairie tends to end in a tie for the same reason that blocking is hard: the whole thing is simply too small. The map, the duration, the limits on placement, all of it. Sessions tend to end either swiftly or slightly less swiftly. There just isn’t enough time to build up a sizeable lead in any particular category. Nor is there room to suss out what an opponent is likely holding. The result is a game that presents pleasantly bite-sized decisions, but never enough of them to amount to a meal.
Big Sky. Tiny board.
It’s a shame, because I understand the desire to build a shorter tile-laying game. The famous Knizias — Tigris & Euphrates, Samurai, Qin, Babylonia — weren’t horrible time-hogs. But, sure, they could take a while to develop their board states.
Unfortunately, Upland & Prairie goes too far in the other direction. It prunes down not just the scope, but also the ability to stretch out, to take an opponent’s measure, to switch gears. Instead of coming across as a compact tile-layer, it feels like a novelty, like a mint-tin version of something more robust. And one that doesn’t succeed at compressing its subject matter, at that. This is no highland, no prairie. It’s a strip of lawn in a cookie-cutter suburb.
A complimentary copy of Upland & Prairie was provided by the designer/publisher.
(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)
After dealing with clunky gears and stuck cards, we ditched our cheap bargain shuffler for the Lotus V2 and we won't be looking back. Here is why the Lotus became an instant must-have for our game nights.
[imageid=9759680 medium rep]▪️ Capstone Games announced the release of Yin Yang, which was originally released from BGNations (Tang Garden, 12 Rivers). From designer DuGuWei (Jiangnan: Life of Gentry). This is a tight resource game to control the lands. for1-4 players that plays in 45-75 minutes. Also, the Metal Shell is simply awesome!
From the newsletter:
Yin and Yang is a concept of dualism in ancient Chinese philosophy, representing two opposite principles. Yin is the feminine while Yang is masculine, and this concept is embodied in all things around the world, such as winter and summer, male and female, and light and dark.
Yin Yang takes players back to ancient China during the Warring States period before the Common Era. At the time, China was divided into seven kingdoms, fighting each other constantly, and people were living in suffering. To pursue inner peace, every kind of fortune-telling method was then developed.
One of those fortune-telling methods involves taking a tortoise shell with copper coins inside, then shaking it to get indications based on which coins emerge and how they fall. This method is exactly what Yin Yang is based on. Players act as Taoist priests, traveling on an ancient Chinese map to retrieve the local specialty of different cities to unlock their own destiny. Additionally, players can also build temples in different cities to earn worship from seven kingdoms.
The new expansion introduces Story cards, a new type of faction card inspired by key moments from The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which add powerful new abilities, deck customization, and deeper tactical choices to the game. Along with the expansion, a new accessory will arrive: six Deluxe Playmats featuring iconic characters and Middle-earth locations, designed to enhance every game with dedicated card layouts and stunning artwork by John Howe.
Drawing on Tolkien's rich lore and the emotional depth of Middle-earth, the Story cards introduced by Hope and Despair represent the natural and supernatural forces that shape the fate of its peoples, offering new strategic options, greater replayability, and additional content, making every adventure in Middle-earth even more immersive. Unlike other faction cards, Story cards are played only to Reserve and remain there for the rest of the round, providing unique effects that can influence the course of the game. The expansion also includes additional cards for the Northmen, Easterling, and Ruffian factions introduced in the Fire and Swords expansion, for use in scenarios featuring those factions, dedicated Shadow Bot cards for solo and cooperative play, Story tokens, and rules for integrating the new mechanics.
Classic literature meets modern tabletop gaming in The Phantom of the Opera. Inspired by Gaston Leroux's timeless novel, players take on the roles of the Phantom and Christine in a strategic duel where every card played influences the unfolding performance. The Phantom and Christine compete over twenty tense tricks, with every victory or defeat influencing the progress of the Phantom's haunting composition. Its unique blend of thematic storytelling and strategic trick-taking makes it such a standout 2-player game.
Take Center Stage in 3 Easy Steps:
1) Set the stage: Exchange a card with your opponent, choose the Number on the Seal, and prepare for a dramatic duel of wits.
2) Compose the melody: Play tricks to advance the Phantom's musical masterpiece. Win black notes and lose white notes at just the right moment to keep the score moving forward.
3) Win the game: Complete the music sheet before the end of the second round to claim victory as the Phantom or as Christine. Disrupt the performance and prevent the masterpiece from ever being finished.
Golfie has players managing their own golf course to score as few points as possible!
Golfie is a card game that's easy to learn and perfect for the entire family, even if they never hit the green in real life! Each player tries to complete the course in as few strokes as possible. The mechanics are simple, fast, and fun: play your cards simultaneously, reveal or move your actions, and manage your game with a touch of strategy… and a lot of good humor.
Each player must take action on the 9 cards on his or her course in order to avoid scoring points. For a 9-hole, the game is played in 28 actions. Each action is determined by the 28 shuffled action cards. Take a swing and maneuver your cards to have the best golfing terrain!
The creation of Power Vacuum is a bit of a cliché.
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work," - Thomas Edison
It’s a story about how I struggled for years to design a game, ultimately gave up, but then with a stroke of inspiration came up with something in just a few days that worked. Weeks later the game was signed by Keen Bean Studio and just six months later we had a successful crowdfunding campaign. For all the work you put into something, even if the thing fails, the “work” is never lost - and that’s really the lesson I learned during this process.
With the retail edition of Power Vacuum coming out this fall from 25th Century Games, I thought it would be a good time to revist the making of my debut game.
The Back Story
I had been working on an overly complicated crime game (Crime Spree) for about four years. I saw the light at the end of the tunnel. The game was done, I had advertised, got my email list, spent thousands of euros, and launched a Kickstarter. I was close to funding but pulled the plug last minute, afraid to have only sold a handful of copies while the rest would live on in a storage unit somewhere. I was bummed out but decided to take the advice that all other designers had already told me - start on something small.
I decided to use just a deck of playing cards and a handful of pieces giving myself some restrictions. I have a background in filmmaking and was inspired by Dogma 95, a film movement where filmmakers have strict constraints on what they can use to make their film. I was tooling around with a stock market trading game while on a bike trip through Denmark with my brother when I was reminded of something.
A few weeks before my buddy Mal (designer of Roll Camera!) had me playtest a game he was working on inspired by the 2017 film The Death of Stalin. He wanted a quick card game of shifting alliances that felt like backroom politics. He loves puns and wanted to call it “Power Vacuum”, making the characters soviet appliances all vying for power after the supreme vacuum had died. As designers do, he was also struggling on getting the game to work and had shelved the idea. After a failed playtest together on June 13th, he mentioned that if I could ever crack the game he would sign it. On August 28th I sent him this.
Mal was pretty surprised after a few TTS sessions. He said, “Why don’t you come down to Ravensburg, we can climb a mountain, play some board games, and play Power Vacuum in person." I’m pretty sure that’s when I convinced him to sign the game.
The Initial Design
I had been implementing trick-taking as a base for my stock trading game and it hit me… instead of investing in “companies,” why not invest in other players? Secret agenda? Shifting alliances? I had the workings of Power Vacuum.
The initial game was nearly identical to Power Vacuum as it is today with a few small tweaks and one big component that went through many iterations. That component is now the power board at the center of the game.
It started as a deck of cards (because of my self-imposed restriction of just using a deck of cards). When a player played the lowest card in a trick (regardless of suit) they would take the action on the top card of the deck. The options included things like “move a power from you to another player” or “move a power from another player to another player”. It worked really well because players were familiar with the different cards and they only got recycled when they got used up. You could try to remember what had already been used to plan for future turns. But this also lacked a bit of agency by the players. Even when you had the low card to do something, the deck might not be offering the action you wanted to take. It was time for some experimentation.
Playtesting
I was feeling great about Power Vacuum. After years of slogging through my other game, I finally had a game that worked and people had a lot of fun playing. Like I said before, the deck felt a bit stale and it was when we played a game with our friend Kevin Privalle (co-designer of Almighty) that he suggested using dice instead of cards. It was much more unpredictable but I added a catch that a player had the choice of re-rolling the dice - it gave you a bit more agency. Do I keep the power transfer the same way this round or roll the dice and see what happens?
The game worked great. We got to make some cool dice and people enjoyed the unpredictable nature of the rolls. We kept this aspect of the design the same for a while we tended to other small tweaks. I came up with the idea of a hidden suit that was a “trump killer”: Spies. This helped both in offsetting a trump-heavy hand but also made the game more thematic. The fact that we had the suits visible on the backs of the cards made it an easy addition. There were “Spies hiding in plain sight!” We ended up with a small distribution of them, and only middle cards (3-6) to not make them overpowered, just one per suit.
Mal and I would play a two player version of the game almost every morning online over coffee. It was great exercise to play the game over and over again to find the weak points. He would give me pointers on what was working well and areas to improve. I’d go back, tweak, and redesign a few things and we would play again and again. These were things like hand size, initial power per character, etc. We worked out the system for revealing your agenda early and scoring more points or keeping it hidden and going for a risky reveal instead. It was really important that we always kept the theme in mind. But we also had days where we strayed pretty far out just because we could. There was even an area control idea that got tossed around at one point.
The Art
The artwork came together quite quickly too - this was at the same time as all of our play-testing (as you can see in the images). Things were moving really fast and SPIEL Essen was right around the corner. Mal wanted to preview Power Vacuum but wanted the game to be presentable and on brand. Keen Bean Studio is largely identified through Mal’s artwork. We began sending inspiration images back and forth. Here's what he had to say about it.
Mal: I started Keen Bean Studio fully intending to design, illustrate and publish all my own games. But as Kaleb mentioned, although I came up with the concept for Power Vacuum, I couldn't manage to crack the game itself, and shelved it. I was simultaneously in the middle of a protracted, years-long struggle with the design for my forthcoming game Almighty, so I was thrilled when Kaleb approached me with Power Vacuum. Having a smaller game to illustrate and publish while wrestling with Almighty's design was just the thing that could tide me over. Thanks again, Kaleb, you saved Keen Bean Studio!
Power Vacuum also arrived at an opportune moment with regard to my company's brand. My two previous published games were Itchy Feet and Roll Camera!, both populated with my trademark "bean-people", one of which adorns the Keen Bean Studio logo itself. Almighty would also utilize bean-people. This was quickly becoming my "thing." But what if, in the future, I didn't want to draw lumpy little bean-people? I needed a project to throw people for a loop, to prove that I wasn't quite so predictable, and buy myself some future wiggle room. Power Vacuum, with its anthropomorphic kitchen appliances draped in totalitarianism, was the perfect chance to escape the pigeonhole.
Being a trick-taking card game, my first attempt at Power Vacuum's artwork was quite abstract. I tried to evoke the classic card game aesthetic, using decorative designs and simple imagery to convey big ideas. This was a failure.
These images just didn't have any life, and I was bored even making them. I quickly understood why: my background is as a filmmaker and web comic artist. These are two mediums that rely on single-image scenes, storyboards, or panels. One image at a time used to tell a story. That is where I am more equipped to imbue an image with life. Power Vacuum's cards would need to each be a little self-contained scene.
This was also a chance to use the medium of board games to say something about the disturbing and unwelcome rise of fascist sympathies and populist strongmen, both abroad and at home. But I didn't want to make a somber, on the nose game - I was inspired by the 2017 film The Death of Stalin to use satire as my weapon instead. This was around when Vladimir Putin was furiously trying to squash the internet meme of him all dolled up, and I realized that the weakest point in a strongman's armor is that they have a terrible sense of humor about themselves. This was the key to Power Vacuum's theme.
Still, making fascism funny is a fine line to walk. One wrong piece of art could sour the entire thing as tasteless and insensitive. So I needed a few guidelines for myself.
First, I didn't want to draw guns. This is a general rule for which even today I make only the rarest exceptions. I didn't really want to depict direct violence at all; I would much rather imply it. This is anyway a much more powerful visual device than the depiction of actual violence, which tends to have a desensitizing effect. So it meant I had to think outside the box a little bit. What is deadly to a kitchen appliance? Water! This provided almost endless opportunities to mix menace with absurdist humor.
My second guideline was that I would try to blur historical and political lines as much as possible. Power Vacuum is not "Soviet Russia with Toasters;" that would have been too reductive. Rather, I pulled inspiration from iron-fisted regimes across time and geography, from the USSR and Nazi Germany to Maoist China, military juntas and guerillas of Central and South America, and of course the rampant political, military and economic overreach of the USA through recent decades. It was important to me that Power Vacuum did not target a specific group or ideology, but instead the general tendency of those with power to think they're better than everyone else. There's as much Dr. Strangelove as The Great Dictator in Power Vacuum's DNA.
Third, I quickly realized that although direct puns like Money Laundering and Drill Sergeant were home runs, some of the most delightful and funny illustrations came out of simply exploring the logical implications of this nonsensical world I had created. This led to some of my personal favorite illustrations like the printer handing out flyers, the paper shredders, and the phone tapper. It's just a fun world to try to imagine.
This would come later, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention that I had a ton of community input on the artwork and subject matter. During the Kickstarter campaign I invited backers to contribute their ideas for card art to this spreadsheet. I'm a big fan of sourcing concepts from the crowd, and it's thanks to the backers that we got cards like the hot air orator and the ballot blender.
One last thing I'll mention about the art is the color scheme. Because my first game Itchy Feet was based on my web comic of the same name, the card artwork has a lot of white. And because I wanted my followup Roll Camera! to resemble Itchy Feet as an attempt to win over some of Itchy Feet's audience, Roll Camera!'s art also has a lot of white, for which it did receive some not-unfair criticism. With Power Vacuum, I wanted colors. Knowing we'd have five suits, I picked five tones from authoritarian imagery that would be clearly distinct (red, black, off-white, yellow, and sickly green) and challenged myself to illustrate the entire game using only those colors.
I broke the rule in a few places, but even so, the end result is a game that has a very stark, disciplined, strictly unified aesthetic across all its components. This was a powerful lesson in art direction: less is more.
The Final Stretch
Kaleb: We had made it to SPIEL Essen and Power Vacuum was now in the eye of the public for the first time. We were getting great feedback and players of all ages were enjoying the game. It was also great to just sit back and watch people play. This is also incredibly helpful as a designer. You see when folks are engaged, tuned out, looking at their phones or having a blast. Overall people were excited and the plan was to run a Kickstarter in just a few months and have it ready for the following SPIEL.
It was just a couple of months before the launch of the kickstarter when Mal suggested that we try and get Cole and Drew Wehrle in on a playtest. Mal had met Cole at SXSW in Austin the year before where Cole had offered to play and give feedback on works in progress we might have . I was pretty stoked when they agreed to free up some time for us. They both enjoyed the game, but Cole pointed out that at times it felt like treading water, something I had noticed in some playtests but passed over due to the fact it just didn’t happen so often.
(I think) he meant that when the dice were rolled (or kept the same), the power could just go back and forth. I transfer it one way, you transfer it right back, again and again. It didn't always happen, but when it did, the game fell into a loop. We were at a bit of a crossroads; the game was nearly done but we had this lingering feedback from one of our favorite designers. Do we accept the game as is? It’s fun and only in rare cases it can be a bit of a dud? Or should we challenge ourselves to push it further?
We decided to push it further.
The Power Board
I went back to the drawing board and thought of all the ways power could flow back and forth between players. Cole had suggested implementing some sort of cable/microchip to keep things feeling more thematic than dice. I came up with a bunch of boards and the idea was to move the characters around, connecting them via circuits.
None of these really worked and they felt about as random as the dice. There was just too much going on and too much to think about with all the different connections. And that's when it clicked - simplify it. I can’t give this advice enough; so many designers will come up with whole new systems to fix issues in games and I learned right then and there that sometimes the best way is to just strip it back.
One cable and one move.
By getting rid of all the mess and reducing it to one cable, and specifically the timing of when you move that cable, made all the difference. We hit up Cole and Drew to play one more time and just after a few minutes they said, “no notes.” We of course continued playtesting, but the new system felt so good we knew we had found what was missing. With the Kickstarter just a few months out we needed to design the board, find some cool components, and make a solo version.
We kicked around a lot of visual ideas for the power board, but one reference just kept coming back up and that was the war room in Dr. Strangelove. The absurdity in the film is something we also wanted to come across in the game. The joke that always gets me in that scene was when a fight breaks out and Peter Sellers yells "You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
The Score Track
Who would have thought that making a score tracker could be so much fun? And just how much room there is for improvement in this space? We wanted something that was easy to see and manage but we didn’t want yet another boring run-of-the-mill score tracker. We wanted something unique and thematic that had table presence. One idea was to make a large pop-up Soviet staircase, where players moved up while scoring. Mal prototyped one out of cardboard that was pretty amazing.
While in SPIEL Essen I found a small meeple-like player piece that had a post that you could stack little rings on. I think both Mal and I looked at each other at the same time and thought “stackable scoring statues”. We workshopped it a bit and came up with making swappable statue pieces that counted as 10s so that when you hit 40 points you had a complete statue made up of 4 pieces. It was hilarious and super fun to work on. Getting the scale right was a challenge but having a 3D printer helped a ton.
The Solo Mode
Yes, it’s true that many publishers will demand a solo version of a game and many of these solo versions feel very tacked-on. I knew from the start Mal needed a solo version and in a weird way the solo game sort of fell into my lap. There aren’t a lot of solo trick-takers due to the fact it’s hard to get a bot opponent to play the right suit at the right time. But we had visible suits on the back and this was key.
It wasn’t enough to have the bots play the right suit; rather they needed to know what to prioritize when it came to moving power. That was easy too, just play with open agendas. I started with a single bot player but it felt stale and automated. You could tell what the bot would do and it felt like randomly flipping over cards. It was when we added a second bot the game really opened up. With open agendas the bots had something to shoot for, and by creating a flowchart of how the power should flow, they began battling the player and themselves.
When a bot manipulates the control board, it first tries to transfer power toward its own agenda, then against the player’s agenda, then against the other bot's agenda. Modifying difficulty was also really easy because of the open agendas. You adjust how much you and either bot can win each round. In this way a player could start playing the bots against each other in a very similar way to a game with real opponents. This was so important for me personally as so many solo games kind of feel like flipping a coin. There were now some good decisions and risks to take.
The Finish Line
We had made it to the Kickstarter and were blown away by the response. I couldn’t believe how much we accomplished in such a short amount of time. From the conception of the game to a physical copy in a customer’s hands was just over a year. It was really one of the most amazing artistic projects I have ever worked on and I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Mal. It's rare you get to work with someone who just gets it.
The biggest advice I can give is to just work on stuff; it’s never a waste of time even if the thing goes nowhere. You’ll find a use for what you learned somewhere else down the road, good or bad. I hear all the time from designers that say trying to work on some big unmanageable game at the beginning was a mistake and that you should start small, which I agree with to a point. I just find it funny that so many designers actually started on some big unmanageable game and had to learn the hard way. Maybe it’s a necessary step?
Mal (postscript): at the 2025 UK Games Expo, I ran into Cole and Drew again, and I thanked them for their role in Power Vacuum's success. The game had been a smash on Kickstarter, reviewers like Shut Up & Sit Down were having a great time with it, and I wondered aloud: why? Why was Power Vacuum doing so well, right when the market was being flooded with trick-taking games?
"Most trick-takers aren't about anything," Cole replied. "Power Vacuum is about something."
Which is maybe my favorite one-line review of anything I've ever made.
In Gulo Gulo, players compete to rescue a young gulo—a wolverine—from the evil swamp vulture. I say “evil,” but that’s unfair. The wolverine pup was trying to steal one of the bird’s eggs, after all. Is the vulture really evil, or simply a participant in larger systems that force us into binary rolesl? If the game were from the vulture’s perspective, would the gulos not be the evil ones? You could reframe Gulo Gulo as a tower defense game in which the vulture fends off a hoard of ravenous gulos and not have to change any of the facts on the ground. Games really can teach us things, if we have the heart to listen.
Philosophical implications of this exercise and its framing aside, Gulo Gulo is Candy Land with dexterity elements. To move to a new space, you pull a matching egg out of the nest, a wooden bowl full of the colorful ovoid ova. This wouldn’t be much of a challenge at all were it not for the tall and precarious stick that pokes out above the nest, its weighted end causing it to weave and wobble and constantly threaten to fall over. If the stick does fall or if you cause any eggs to fall out and hit the table, you move back to the previous…
To design a meaningfully thematic trick-taker is no small accomplishment. Other than Traveluencer, Daniel Newman’s Gachapon Trick is the only other one I can think of off the top of my head. In Traveluencer, the players are social media stars, and the cards they play represent both their posts and their view count. The trump suit is whatever topic is trending. The winner gains likes as points. It’s good. It’s thorough.
Mechanically, designers Ryo Nakamura, Zhonghao Yang, and Kai Zu have drawn from an unlikely source: Taiki Shinzawa’s 2019 charmer Inflation!. In both Inflation! and Traveluencer, you can play as many cards into the trick as you want, chaining them to create a single high number. If I play a blue 2, 5, and 7, I’ve played 257. There’s no limit to how many cards you can chain, but you do want to avoid both running out of cards too early and having any cards left at the end of the hand. Tricks missed due to a lack of cards represent periods of inactivity, death itself in the world of social media.
The risk of you running out of cards is minimal. Almost non-existent. There is no…
IV Studio’s first game Moonrakers, was the first game I ever crowdfunded. I was struck by their combination of old-school design ideology, paired with marketable and upgraded components and art. Unfortunately, I found Moonrakers too simple to be fine. Because of that opinion, I never really checked in with their output of the last dozen […]
Continuing along in this series devoted to the best looking boards found in the wargaming world where I will highlight the art and layout of a different board in a wargame that we have played to show you the various talents of the artists and graphic designers involved. In my humble opinion, a well designed and attractive board can make all the difference in the world to me enjoying a wargame. Don’t get me wrong, the game has to be good, but if it’s also good looking it always is a better experience. A board can draw me in. Can make me feel that I’m there. Can set the stage for the thematic immersion that we all crave. And I have found many of these type of boards and I want to make sure that I share them with you.
In this entry in the series, we will be taking a look at the fantastic looking board for Great Campaigns of the American Civil War: Thunder On the Mississippi: Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign, April-July, 1863 from Multi-Man Publishing. The board is illustrated by the very talented Charlie Kibler whose work on the Great Campaigns of the American Civil War Series dates back to its creation in 1992. He has done a ton of great looking boards including The Battle for Normandy (2009) from GMT Games, The Day Was Ours: First Bull Run (2021) from Revolution Games, Border Reivers (2023) from GMT Games recently as well as a slew of Advanced Squad Leader boards stretching back through the years and a lot of series games for GMT Games such as Great Battles of the American Civil War and Great Battles of the American Revolution. We have already highlighted a few of his boards in the past like Storm Over Jerusalem from MMP and Battles of the American Revolution Volume II: Brandywine from GMT Games. He is very effective at creating great looking terrain and weaving in very nice details to highlight the main functions of the board and I very much like the simplicity and accurateness of his boards.
The board consists of 2 separate 22″x 32″ full-color map sheets that when combined create a large playing surface. The borders of the board include off-board information that is related to the geography and locations in and around Vicksburg. When I first saw this, I wasn’t really quite sure how to take it but after playing and also thinking about this decision, I really like how it was used to frame up or provide a significant visual contrast to the main game board. The brown coloring really contrasts well with the colorful terrain features and create a clear distinction for the players. I initially thought this was a poor decision and felt that it was a missed opportunity but it works really well.
Here is a closeup of this part of the board so you can get a good feel for what I am talking about.
I always like to look at the game title box/area of the board and find these to be really great insights into the mindset and approach of the artist. On the board for Thunder on the Mississippi, we see Charlie used a washed out period look map for the background of this area. The really interesting part is how it transitions from the non-colored portion of the board title box to the game board itself. There is no connection between the 2 and the elements found on the board are not carried over or connected to the period map. I would maybe have liked to see there be a connection for an immersive approach but I understand that this was not the purpose of the use of the period map.
In Thunder on the Mississippi, there are 2 new terrain features unique to the Vicksburg region introduced including loess hills and coastal bluffs. Loess has not been featured before in GCACW Series games. Each loess hex is depicted with many small tan dots superimposed on an olive base color. This stippling gives it a sandy feel and I think really works well as loess is a fine-grained, powdery soil, a wide belt of which runs on the east side of the Mississippi on a southwest – northeast axis. Because loess is highly susceptible to erosion, it is marked by sharp, irregular ravines, many of which were so overgrown with vegetation as to be nearly impassable to military units.
In the game, loess hexes are identical to woods hexes in terms of Movement Point costs and MP penalties to enter a friendly-occupied hex. Also, loess hexsides untraversed by roads or railroads exert a restricted ZOC the same as woods hexsides similarly untraversed. I think that the type of terrain, and what it does to the units that enter, really mimics the soft soil type as it is always hard to run in sand. I very much like the color used as well and it serves to set this specific terrain type apart from the rest of the board. Here is a look at the western portion of the West Map that is up against the Mississippi River.
The other new terrain feature is that of coastal bluffs, which has also not been featured before in the series. Each coastal bluff hexside has a downhill side in which the light brown bluff line-pattern is uneven and an uphill side in which the bluff line-pattern is smooth. I know that it might be a bit hard to see in the below picture but the downhill side is found on the left side while the uphill side is on the right. Think of it this way…the uphill is simply a straight line border while the downhill side reflects the ravines from erosion and is made up of multi-length lines pointing out. I very much like this new terrain and also think that Charlie did a great job with the distinction even though it is a bit hard to distinguish from afar.
And that brings me to the portion of the board that I think is my favorite. Not because it is some revolutionary technique but because of the power and permanence that is offers the board, acting as an anchor and a framing of the action to be played out on it, and that is the Mississippi River itself. There is no real use of stylized marks or special features shown on the board but it is just a thick and dark blue line that meanders through the countryside. But the dark blue really gives a sense of size and scope and I very much feel that it is important to the board and what is to transpire on it.
I also very much like how Charlie decided to keep in the exact layout of the river and shows its many twists and turns and oxbows that are found along its length.
The board for Thunder on the Mississippi is really a visual masterpiece. It provides great transition from terrain type to terrain type, frames up the board itself very well and uses very smart and poignant color choices, including the loess terrain color and the dark blue of the Old Man, all to create a fantastic canvas upon which to play out this titanic struggle and key turning point of the American Civil War.
If you are interested, here is a link to our video review:
The next board that we will take a look at in the series is The Marianas Campaign: Volume One: Saipan – The Bloody Rock from Compass Games.
Here are links to the previous entries in the series:
Anmelden
https://boardgamewire.com/
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The Players' Aid
