Also, Ryan Dancey was removed as COO of AEG for comments about AI

Continue reading on Board Game Beat LLC | W. Eric Martin

When your spouse is an Egyptologist, it’s hard to pass up an opportunity to play and review the newest Ra iteration—Ra and Write. Even harder when you’re planning a visit to see an art show about Ancient Egypt’s gods. Designed by Reiner Knizia with art by Ian O’Toole, the game pulls forward themes which will […]

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For the most part, the team at Mighty Boards has never done me wrong.

After a middling experience with their recent release Red North, I didn’t rush their other SPIEL Essen 2025 release, Pinched!, to the table until recently. But after doing plays at three, four, and five-player counts, I’m excited to share that Pinched! was a blast. Save for my thoughts on how the game’s random card draw can affect scoring and notes on a specific player count, I highly recommend giving Pinched! a look.

“I’ll Take That”

Pinched! is a hand management and set collection game of bluffing and thievery for 2-5 players. Over a series of turns, each player (taking on the role of a thief in a gang of them) will serve as the Mastermind for a given turn. Using a hand of location cards, the Mastermind will select a heist location from amongst the 3-5 locations available in that game.

The Mastermind plays this card face-down into the center of the table, then each other thief will play a card from their own hand of location cards in the hopes of matching the location selected by the Mastermind. During the reveal, two things could happen. If the Mastermind picks a location that…

The post Pinched! Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

I’ll admit it: my wife and I got a little too comfy.

After some of the best experiences in the one-shot, mystery gaming arena with the KOSMOS series Masters of Crime, I expected my fourth run to be another blowout. Masters of Crime: Vendetta, Masters of Crime: Rapture and Masters of Crime: Shadows are the height of the category; one of those titles was on my top 10 games of 2025, but all of them could have been, if I had just sprinkled the titles across the entire list.

What those games got right is why I recommend them to everyone I know. The scenarios are fantastic, you’re always placed in the shoes of the villains, not the cops, the puzzles are tough but fair, and the endings always made logistical sense after working through all the bread crumbs dropped during the investigation.

Masters of Crime: Incognito was the next game on my list. I created a draft for this review and had a 5.0/5.0 placeholder ready to go before I played the game. I was sure Incognito would be another banger; why wouldn’t I? My wife and I set up a date night for a Friday evening play. I made the cocktails; she grabbed our note-taking components, laid out the game, and read the…

The post Masters of Crime: Incognito Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

by Justin Bell

Hey hey folks! I’m excited to be a part of the team here at BoardGameGeek as a contributor on the BoardGameGeek News blog. You’ll see me here every week and I’ll pop up with extra content from time to time, between articles and via some of our other internal productions, such as episode 88 of The BoardGameGeek Podcast which posted a couple weeks ago.

A little bit about me: like everyone else who works here, I love games. It’s probably fair to say that I love what games mean to my life a little more than the games themselves—getting friends and family together to chuck dice, talk a little smack, and laugh a whole bunch. Certainly, those nights are more interesting when the games themselves are good, but any chance to sit at a table to experience something together is really hard to beat.

I have been—and will continue to be—a contributor at Meeple Mountain, a gang of gaming fanatics who contribute written content (and a smidge of video content) to the tune of more than 500 articles, reviews, interviews, convention roundups, and more every year. I’ve had the distinct pleasure of delivering material on Meeple Mountain for the last five years, and I’ve been playing hobby games of all shades for the last 40. In addition to appearances on The BoardGameGeek Podcast, I have also appeared on 30+ episodes of The Five By and individual episodes of Five Games for Doomsday, Tabletop Submarine, The Tabletop Merchant Podcast, and Board Game Times.

When I’m not thinking about games, I’m usually doing one of the following three things. I might be working my full-time gig, as a global program manager in the training, learning & development space where I travel a whole heck of a lot. I am possibly eating...and, while I love to cook, the job and the travel mean I get lots of chances to fulfill my personal life motto: “when in doubt, eat out.” I am hopefully spending time at home with my wife and two kids, ages 12 and 9, who seem surprised when I’m not hosting yet another game night.

Speaking of home, I’m based in the Chicagoland area, where I’ve been for most of the last 15 years. Before that, I’ve gotten around a bit: Rochester, NY; San Francisco, CA; Charlottesville, VA; plus, all the parts of the “DMV” (DC, Maryland, Virginia), from Mount Vernon Square to Rockville to Falls Church to Gaithersburg to Crystal City, even a little old place known as Buzzard Point, the area just west of the baseball stadium that the Washington Nationals call home.

And then, there are the games. Mertwig’s Maze holds a special place in my gaming heart, being one of those formative experiences from a billion years ago thanks to friends who were all about games in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons series. I played a lot of the titles in the “Gamemaster” series from Milton Bradley: Shogun, Axis & Allies, and my favorite from that batch of titles, Fortress America. But I was also playing a lot of the games my parents bought for me, from Monopoly, UNO, and Yahtzee to more specialized titles like Go For It!, Hotels (a Milton Bradley title previously known as "Hotel"), and Fireball Island.

Any chance I could get to play games—board games, card games, video games, baseball, basketball, football—I did it. In college, it feels like I was playing either Spades or Hearts every night before heading out for the evening. As I got older, I got caught up in the magic of Catan thanks to a friend in Chicago who showed me Settlers of Catan: Cities & Knights, which led me down a path of so many modern classics, such as Race for the Galaxy, Puerto Rico, San Juan, 7 Wonders, and a number of other titles that I was thrilled to discover.

That love affair continues today. I put in the work to build up a few different gaming groups—I do games every Monday with a “review crew” at my house, Tuesdays once a month with BGG’s very own [user=LindyBurger]Lindyburger[/user], most Wednesdays with a group of folks I’ve known since I first moved to Chicago, every Friday at home with my wife and kids, some Saturdays with a mix of the deep strategy gamers who I met during COVID, and Sundays once a month with my buddy [user=imaginaryforce]ImaginaryForce[/user] and some of his friends in the Chicago suburbs.

Thanks to this wide range of gaming networks and my industry relationships, I get the chance to play a lot of different types of games. While I would categorize myself as an “omnigamer”, I usually gravitate towards the kinds of games I know I can get to the table consistently. That might range from family-weight games, trick takers, light dexterity games, and straightforward “roll and move” games to your run-of-the-mill medium-weight Euro game (tracks, baby!) to heavier fare, such as strategy titles, 18xx games, and “rules for rules’ sake” games that land in that 4.0+ weight class here on the Geek.

My all-time top five? Man…that’s a moving target. Let’s go with these for now:
1. Chicago 1875: City of the Big Shoulders
2. The White Castle
3. Kingsburg
4. UNO
5. Tiletum

My top five of the last five years? Much easier:
2021: Beyond the Sun (the Geek says it was a 2020 release, but I didn’t play it until 2021)
2022: Tiletum
2023: Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory
2024: Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game
2025: Vantage

Here’s my goal for the BGG community: write engaging articles and share interesting industry discussions, aimed at both our core audience as well as folks just dropping by to say hello. I’ve got a bunch of ideas, but I’d still ask for your input: what kinds of discussions really get you excited? What parts of the tabletop business intrigue you? Which personalities in this space are you most interested in meeting? What mechanics are you most excited to explore?

I’ve got thoughts, but I have a feeling you do, too…let’s keep the dialogue open. I’m excited to engage with the members of this community!


(it's always brunch time...right?)

by Courtney Shernan

One day in the summer of 2019, I was sitting on the couch with my little loaf Trixie, watching her lick my hand over and over, so I would keep petting her. It made me think about all of the ways that she would get me to do things for her, like standing by the front door so I would take her for a walk or groaning at her food bowl, so I would feel guilty and feed her an early dinner. And then I thought, “There’s a board game here!”

I thought about different game mechanics and decided to create a deck building game with an inviting and accessible theme of being a silly, spoiled dog. I really enjoyed playing deck-building games, but I knew how intimidating they were for me at first and that a lot of my friends and family felt similarly. My goal was to make a game that introduced deck building as a mechanic and captured the strategy under the guise of a cute, light-hearted dog game where you “learn” new dog behaviors to build your deck. The behavior cards would be things like “Wag Tail” and “Sit on the Human’s Lap” that you could play to gain “cuteness”. With enough cuteness, you could complete objectives like “Get a Treat” or “Get Belly Rubs” as a dog trying to get their human to give them what they want.

I spent the whole weekend brainstorming, typing up cards in Word, and printing them out. There were going to be so many fun elements, like polka dot accessories and little rain booties you could add to your deck to make your dog extra cute. I got everything together for the prototype I envisioned, and then I just couldn’t play it. Not that it was unplayable (although it very well could have been) - I just couldn’t bring myself to play it. I thought to myself that there was no way I could design a board game, and I didn’t feel like I had anything even remotely new to offer. I shelved it, and I felt ridiculous for even trying.

A year later in the summer of 2020, my husband and I were quarantining at home and started playing Gloomhaven regularly. I love how the game makes you determine the optimal time to play specific cards from your hand while having the option to get your cards back by resting. I remembered the work I put into Treat, Please! a year earlier, and I thought it would be fun to implement a similar rest mechanic, where dogs could choose to “Take a Nap” to get their behavior cards back from their discard pile, rather than having to wait until they’ve fully cycled through their deck. At that point, I decided to eliminate the deck element of the game entirely, leaving players with just their growing hand of behavior cards and their discard pile.

At this point in my life, I was looking for any kind of creative outlet to focus my attention, and I figured there was no harm in trying to see this through. The idea of having my own board game on my shelf had been a dream for a long time. I went back to my old prototype and completely reworked all of the cards. I also added a board with a house layout to the game, where you could only play certain behaviors if you were in the corresponding room of the house (e.g., you had to be in the kitchen to “Lick the Dirty Dishes”), and the human was also roaming around doing different things, which impacted your ability to get their attention.

After many iterations of playtesting by myself, my husband happily agreed to playtest. His first piece of feedback: get rid of the board! He was totally right; it was completely unnecessary and overcomplicated the game. Instead, I created an event deck, so I could maintain the feeling of the human doing different activities with implications for you as dog. One of my favorites is "The human is putting away laundry", which gives you the option to "Run away with a sock" for attention.

From there, I had a very rough prototype that resembles Treat, Please! in the form it’s in today:

Playtesting
I knew I needed to start playtesting early and often, but without being able to see my friends and family in person, my options felt limited. My friends and I had been using a digital platform for virtual D&D sessions, and I realized that if I could make my game digitally, my D&D friends would be able to playtest too!

I started off playtesting with my DND friends in August 2020, and it really helped build my confidence with explaining the rules and listening to constructive feedback. I quickly realized that I would need to expand my playtesting circle if I wanted to continue improving the game. My friends suggested that I join the PlaytestNW Discord, the server for a local playtesting group that shifted to virtual playtesting during the pandemic. I was so nervous to join my first Sunday playtesting session and told myself that I would just go to playtest and observe the first time. I reassured myself that if I had a terrible time and felt unwelcome that I could find other opportunities elsewhere. But I couldn’t have been more wrong; I was immediately greeted by the most welcoming community of game designers and playtesters, and it was amazing to see games at all different stages of development. I started regularly attending and eventually got the nerve to sign up Treat, Please! for playtesting in October 2020.

After joining PlaytestNW, my design journey started accelerating, and I was eager for more opportunities to playtest. That is when I learned about the Break My Game (BMG) Discord server, with playtesting events almost every day of the week! After attending my first BMG playtest, I knew it was the perfect place for me. One of the things that stood out to me the most was how well-moderated their playtesting events are and how supportive the community is, which made me feel comfortable sharing my game and receiving feedback from complete strangers. After being a member of the community for awhile, I became a moderator and eventually a playtest event host. Hosting playtests was an absolute blast, and I loved seeing how other designers’ games would progress over time. These online groups also helped me find other opportunities to playtest and network, such as Protospiel Online, Nonepub, and the Tabletop Mentorship Program.

There are countless improvements that I made to the game thanks to input from playtesters, but here are a few of the highlights:
• Removing negative interactions and focusing on positive, communal effects to lean into the idea that this is a household full of dogs that are competitive but love each other.
• Shortening the game from 10 to 7 rounds and structuring it as a week in the life of a dog, providing the opportunity to ramp up gameplay during the last 2 rounds of the game (i.e., “the weekend”).
• Reducing the burden of taking a nap by allowing you to play one of your behaviors if you take a short nap instead of losing your whole turn.

Once it became safe to meet up with others, I was so excited to start playtesting in person. Local conventions like Dragonflight and OrcaCon were amazing experiences to connect with my desired audience: dog lovers!

Pitching
Initially, I planned to self-publish Treat, Please!. However, my plans changed when I was invited to participate in the “Feedback Frenzy” pitching event at the online Nonepub convention in January 2021. I never considered the possibility that a publisher might be interested in my game, so the idea of pitching hadn’t crossed my mind until then.

For the event, I pitched to a panel of publishers and game designers and got immediate feedback on my pitch - all of which was livestreamed during the convention. It was a terrifying but exhilarating experience, and honestly, it felt like I was in my element. It made me wonder why I hadn’t considered pitching previously, and I started to believe I had a chance to successfully pitch to an interested publisher if I could find more opportunities like this.

I sought out other opportunities to pitch directly to publishers, including a speed pitching event on Discord through the Tabletop Mentorship Program and other virtual pitch practice events. During a pitch practice event on the Weird Giraffe Games Discord server in March 2021, I pitched to Chris Solis of Solis Game Studio, who reached out afterward requesting to play. We quickly set up a time to play digitally, and then he requested that I send him a physical prototype. It was immediately clear that he understood what I was trying to accomplish with the game, and I was thrilled that someone believed in me and my vision. After some back and forth, I signed Treat, Please! with Solis Game Studio in May 2021.

Design Development
Once the game was signed, Solis Game Studio took the reins and formed an incredible team to take Treat, Please! from a prototype (with a severe lack of cute dog art) to a polished game. I was responsible for playtesting as we worked on some gameplay changes together. At this point, I was focused on playtesting in person, so I could get detailed feedback from playtesters about all aspects of the game, particularly pacing and how the physical components felt.

I was so fortunate that Solis Game Studio encouraged me to be actively involved in the final development of the game and that I was able to provide input on the art and graphic design as it was being worked on. It brings me so much joy to see many of the dogs in my life shine in the adorable artwork of Kiem Hollis.

A love letter to Trixie, and hello to a new friend…
Trixie crossed the rainbow bridge in February 2024 after a battle with cancer. The day we found out there was nothing else we could do to make her comfortable and that it was time to say goodbye was one of the worst days of my life. I don’t know how else to describe my love for her other than saying she was my doggie soulmate. I am so grateful for all of the memories we made together that will continue to fill my life with joy, and I’m grateful for this game that will always bring me right back to those times with her.

We welcomed a new friend, Louie, to our family last year, and we’ve enjoyed learning his quirks and the unique things he does for attention. Like how he growls quietly and stares at you until you lift up a blanket for him to go under or how he loves to jump onto the window sill and sleep in the sun. He is a silly, sneaky boy with a loving personality that has been so special to see as he has settled into our home.

Trixie and Louie have brought an immeasurable amount of joy and love into my life. One of my favorite parts of playtesting was hearing players talk about their dogs and seeing connections form between complete strangers over their shared love of dogs. My hope is that Treat, Please! will encourage players to reminisce about all of the fun and silly memories they have with the dogs in their lives.

I’m so excited to share that Treat, Please! is now available on Solis Game Studio's website here. And please feel free to share your favorite doggo quirks and stories below - I would love to hear all about your wonderful pets!

And lastly, I just want to say that if you’re toying with the idea of designing your own game, do it. I wish I could go back and tell myself in 2019 to stick with it. Even if Treat, Please! didn’t end up being published, I am so proud of the skills I’ve gained during this journey and grateful for the communities that welcomed me along the way. If there is anything I can do to help you on your journey, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

This spin-off of The Fox in the Forest changes things up a bit, turning a competitive game into a cooperative one. This is a trick-taking game for two players. You have a pawn moving along a track. There are markers placed next to the track. As you move that pawn back and forth along the track, it removes a marker whenever it stops, if there is one next to it. Your goal is to remove all

by Beth Heile

We've recently made some big changes with our Preview lists, and things kick off with this list for Festival International des Jeux (FIJ) and GAMA Expo.

Previously, publishers filled out a form and BGG staff and volunteers entered that information into Preview lists. Now, our Preview lists will be self-service and publishers will enter that information themselves. This will allow publishers to simply the Preview process by inputting information themselves directly into the Preview system. Each Preview list will then be moderated to ensure that entries are allowable under our Preview submission rules.

PLEASE NOTE - inaccurate entries on a Preview list will be removed! Please view the posting guidelines in the tutorial or below for submission rules.

If you would like to submit an entry for the FIJ / GAMA Expo Preview list, you can find written instructions HERE.

If you have any question, you can post a comment in this thread or email at news@boardgamegeek.com.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Sold initially at the Indie Games Night Market, Joseph Z. Chen’s Flip Stack Burger Shack has all the markings of an indie darling: its not-quite-smooth discs look great on the table, the gameplay is tactile and amusing, and it even comes in a bag. (All the best indies come in a bag.) But what I least expected from it was a cerebral puzzle that reduced my brain to onion jam.

Picture this. It’s your first day on the job. The burger shack down at the beach is your haunt, and there are already people lining up at the window. The orders are coming fast and hot. Classic burger! Tomato grilled cheese! Diamant deluxe! Lavender burger! Your assistant begins flinging ingredients your way. It’s all you can do to flip the piles onto the proper buns.

This isn’t quite how Flip Stack Burger Shack plays — nor does this particular shack deserve the highest food safety rating — but it’s close enough. Drafting from shared stacks, players take handfuls of ingredients, flip them this way and that, and slop them into something resembling an edible hamburger. Ideally before their coworkers can snipe the order out from under them.

Let’s get the quibbles out of the way. For a game about flipping burgers, Flip Stack Burger Shack is a strangely deliberate event. When you’re trying to assemble a particular sandwich — let’s say an Oklahoma — you’ll be staring at a diagram. In this case, a bun, patty, cheese, and onion, topped off with another bun. But building that burger is tougher than it looks, especially when the stacks begin to accumulate some elevation. At any given time, you might be staring at a single ingredient, some lettuce, the stack that was replenished right before your turn, but then ever-increasing stacks that might reach a half-dozen or more ingredients at the same time. Those slop piles can be useful, but they also tend to be tougher to use. This requires the titular flipping and stacking, often to separate out the necessary ingredients before they arrive atop the correct sandwich.

Or maybe you could chuck the whole thing into the composter and, via culinary magic, produce a more desirable ingredient from the bag. Sayonara, entire heads of wilted lettuce; say hello to a single sliced tomato.

Either way, this process is anything but rapid. More often, Flip Stack Burger Shack is thinky. Ponderous, even. With four players, the downtime between turns threatens to become bloated. Like unrinsed lettuce or a burger patty left too long in a surfer’s hatchback.

But with the right crowd of players or the right player count, whichever lets you move at a steady clip, that same thinky edge makes Flip Stack Burger Shack an unexpected treat.

I’ll give an example. Most burgers need buns. Easy. Most burgers also need patties. As a result, it’s a relatively safe bet to nab extra buns and patties. But what happens when the easy pickings have been nabbed? Now the game shifts into riskier territory. With some clever acquisitions from the ingredient counter, not to mention a few timely flips, it’s possible to head off rival sandwich artists.

Those flips, by the way, are handled with perfect ease. Any time you pick up a stack, whether from the market or your own plates, you’re free to grab some or all of the tokens, and then you’re also free to flip them as you see fit. This doesn’t solve every problem; indeed, it’s surprising how often you’ll need multiple maneuvers just to lever a tomato out from under an ill-placed slice of cheese. But it provides some truly pleasant tactility. It helps that the tokens are wood. One of the benefits of being a small-batch production is that the whole thing’s aesthetic is perfectly minimalist, from the painted tokens to the receipt-book burger diagrams. Flip Stack Burger Shack isn’t the most innovative title in the world, but it feels lovely to handle.

That handling is the core of the entire experience. Some games are about big ideas. Others are about sequences, or engines, or fancy math. This one is about the joy of moving things, shifting and rotating them, feeling their grain on your fingertips, and doing your darnedest to keep the right stack in your mind’s eye.

And, well, that’s all there really is to it. Flip Stack Burger Shack is another indie market title that, like last week’s Imps, will hopefully draw enough attention that it gets picked up for wider publication. Just don’t report the shack to the food inspector’s office. I’m pretty sure none of these burgers are gluten, meat, or dairy free.

 

(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 about which films I watched in 2025, including some brief thoughts on each. That’s 44 movies! That’s a lot, unless you see, like, 45 or more movies in a year!)