France’s highest-profile board game prize, the As d’Or, has unveiled Paolo Mori and Alessandro Zucchini’s Toy Battle as the winner of its main award for 2026.

The family weight, toy-themed wargame fought off competition from Flip 7 and Rebirth to scoop this year’s prize, while Stefan Feld design Civolution won out against Arcs and Ants to win the expert game award.

Zenith, from Grégory Grard and Mathieu Roussel, picked up the intermediate award ahead of First Rat and Take Time, while the children’s category was won by Florian Sirieix design Mooki Island in a contest with Archeo and The Twisted Spooky Night.

This year’s As d’Or saw a significant change to its rules, with organisers requiring entries to name artists on the game boxes for first time.

Paul Mafayon was the artist for Toy Battle, while Civolution was illustrated by Dennis Lohausen, Zenith by Xavier Gueniffey Durin and Mooki Island by Mélanie Bardin, also known as Seppyo.

The award, which traces its history back to 1988, has required entries to show designer names on their game boxes for several years, in addition to requirements for the game to be published in French and available in the French market during the preceding year.

A statement from Philippe Mouret and Julia Marcelin, both heads of studio at Toy Battle publisher Asmodee, said “Tonight’s recognition first belongs to the authors and illustrator whose talent and vision brought Toy Battle to life.

“We also want to thank all the teams involved for their dedication, as well as the Festival’s jury for this distinction. This award is a wonderful acknowledgment of the creativity and vitality of today’s tabletop industry.”

French board game website Ludovox noted in January that a long-held belief around the As d’Or was that two-player games could not be nominated – a premise which crumbled this year with the nomination of three such games.

It added, “It also reflects the current trend: playing games as a couple, and smaller-format games are appealing to the public, and publishers are offering more and more of them.”

Viking-themed card shedding game Odin won last year’s As d’Or, while city-building eurogame Kutná Hora triumphed in the Expert Game category at the 2025 awards, Operation Noisettes won the children’s game prize, and Behind scooped the “Initié” award – which targets regular board game players ready for more challenging mechanisms.

The As d’Or was launched 38 years ago to highlight the best games available at France’s Festival International des Jeux in Cannes. The award was merged with the Jeu de l’Année in 2005.

More than 100,000 people attended this year’s FIJ between February 25 and March 1, down on the record 110,000 admissions across the five-day event last year.

The 2026 As d’Or Awards

As d’Or

Winner: Toy Battle, designed by Alessandro Zucchini and Paolo Mori, published by Repos (Asmodee)
Flip 7, Eric Olsen – Catch Up Games
Rebirth, Reiner Knizia – Lucky Duck Games and Mighty Boards

As d’Or-Jeu de l’Année – Enfant / Children

Winner: Mooki Island, Florian Sirieix – Le Scorpion Masqué
Archeo, Thomas Favrelière, Adrien Pédron – Gigamic
The Twisted Spooky Night, Wolfgang Dirscherl, Wolfgang Lehmann – Drei Magier Spiele

As d’Or-Jeu de l’Année – Initié / Intermediate

Winner: Zenith, Grégory Grard, Mathieu Roussel – PlayPunk
First Rat, Gabriele Ausiello, Virginio Gigli – Pegasus Spiele
Take Time Alexi Piovesan, Julien Prothière – Libellud

As d’Or-Jeu de l’Année – Expert / Expert Game

The supreme discipline for all strategists and frequent players.

Winner: Civolution, Stefan Feld – Grail Games, Deep Print Games
Arcs, Cole Wehrle – Leder Games
Ants, Renato Ciervo, Andrea Robbiani – Cranio Creations and Intrafin

The post Toy Battle triumphs in 2026 As d’Or, Civolution collects expert game prize first appeared on .

Here’s a quick recap of Chapters One, Two, and Three:

Someone introduced me to Magic. Someone taught me how to play the wrong way. I sucked. Someone taught me the right rules and how to build a deck. I got good. I went broke. I got out. Then, Commander arrived. I got inspired by a Commander deck my wife bought me for Christmas and decided to build a deck of my own. I identified a potential commander amongst my plethora of cards. I made a few suppositions about what types of cards I might need in my deck. I realized the state of my card collection was in total disarray. So, I decided to get organized, and I did.

With my organizational woes out of the way, I can finally turn my attention to actually creating my deck.

But first, some ground rules.

Magic, as I’ve stated in previous articles in this series, is an absurdly expensive hobby. My intention with this deck is to only use whatever I already have at hand. I feel that, over the course of three decades, I have donated enough to the Magic coffers that I never want to spend another cent on this game ever again. That’s why I’m excited to build this deck. With access to over 8,000…

The post Let’s Build a Magic Deck – Chapter Four: And We’re Off appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Calico is a game that looks deceptively cute and cuddly, possessing an adorably floofy kitten on the cover atop a pastel quilted backdrop. Inside the gameplay, however, is a brutal brain-burner of a puzzle where players are challenged to optimize among 36 unique tile types within a slew of overlapping scoring opportunities that all seem […]

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The post Dreadquarters, a New Supervillain Tabletop Game from Headlock Games launches in April appeared first on Graphic Policy.

Dreadquarters, a 1-4 player strategy game of villainous cooperation and tactical defense, launching on Kickstarter April 7, 2026.

by Felix Sonne

I have been hearing that wargamers are getting “extinct” because nobody has the time to spend half a day playing games anymore and no one wants to play on a sad looking paper map. The thing is, it does not need to be that way. Wargames can be engaging, deep, fun, and yet modern-looking and quick. So I took it as my mission to make a free PnP hex-and-counter wargame that looks decent enough for non-wargamers to try, and simple enough for them to craft and try out.

This undertaking brought us into The Ground Between. It is a free, low complexity, Print and Play (PnP) wargame on the Western Front of World War 1 (WW1). Now that it is done, I can share that it was harder than I expect it to be. It is a whole circus act. I am juggling between fun factor, aesthetics, and educational value, while balancing on simplification and realism.



Cut, Cut, Cut Until There Is No Fat In the Meat
It is easy to do more: do more work, spend more money, use more components, create more rules. But I disagree with this approach because it creates bloat. My principle in design (and perhaps in life) is “to do more in less,” by cutting unnecessary parts and emphasizing what is really important.

1) PnP? Make it easy to craft. I learned this from the Designer Diary of David Thompson (Tactic Skirmish Apocalypse, Warchest, Undaunted). PnP games should be easy to craft ideally, and it has stuck in my head ever since when I designed games intended for PnP. I have crafted a PnP wargame from other designers that has a hundred small size, two-sided counters. I enjoy half of process, but the other half of it just feels like chores, and I do not want to impose this to players. While the game is designed with WW1 theme top-down, it is also designed bottoms-up from component consideration. Since D1 it has been set that the game shall only have large, 15 counters per faction, which can fit in one sheet of paper (actually half).



2) Cards? KISS it! You may have heard of it, it stands for “Keep it Simple and Short.” I had a tendency to make my initial design with a deck of 54 cards, since it fits nicely with a deck of playing cards, it seems to be the “industry standard”, and it takes exactly 6 sheets of paper to make. During the development I managed to halve it, with one sheet of paper per faction (which includes Tactic Cards for Advanced Mode and Solo Mode as well). I tried to eliminate the Command Cards completely, but I ended up keeping it because it gives a better reflection of the battle where each side is trying to maintain a balance between firing and maneuvering.

3) Where are the war machines? Not here! WW1 was the advent for Tanks and Aircraft, they are game changing (pun intended) and may seem like a “must have” in a WW1-themed game. However, sticking to the original intention of making a low complexity introductory WW1 wargame, it is refocused to the 1914-1915 period, where the tanks were still on drawing board, and planes were still mainly used for reconnaissance (machine guns were only equipped into airplanes on the later part of the war). So no killing machines, just good old shooting and hand-to-hand combat, which delivers the extra grit as intended.

Reduce, Reduce, Reduce Until It Is Streamlined
Streamlining is slightly different from cutting. It is about reducing exceptions, steps, and variants with the intention to make the game “flows” better and faster. There is no sane reason to move 20 different pieces 10 times (move active player marker, move turn tracker, play a card, move a piece, spend resources, flip a piece, tap a card, etc.) if we can get the same enjoyment by moving two pieces one time.

1) Secret Deployment. Realistically, on a battlefield you would not be able to tell exactly what Unit your opponent has 5 miles behind the bush. In the original Advanced Mode, Units were supposed to be deployed secretly face down. As much as it raises the excitement and realism, it also raises the fiddliness. So in one stroke to maintain the fidelity to simplicity and suppress the fiddlyness, the secret deployment is secretly deployed to the bin.



2) Blocks variant. As you can guess from the previous point, my absolute favorite games are block wargames where you can keep some fog of war without the fiddliness. Naturally I tried to make an option to play the game with blocks. In such case, it is inevitable to have exceptions and variants, which adds to one page in the rule, which may intimidate some people. So there goes the block rules to the chopping block.

3) Morale Checksss. For those who are unfamiliar, ‘morale check’ is a mechanic to determine the effectiveness of a Unit in some conditions (e.g. retreating, being barraged, etc.). I actually like the concept because it adds realism to the game, but some popular games take morale checks for a lot of things. I shall not name the game, but IFKYK. I adopted the same morale check system, but after a series of playtesting with non-wargamers, the morale checks are reduced to only when you are taking casualty. Works like magic.

True To the Theme
1) Translation. To facilitate immersion, originally the Units are named according to their native names. There were Mortier, Médical, Flammernwerfer, and so on. This looks and feels nice, but apparently it confuses some playtesters and it creates distance to players who do not speak the language. As such, I scaled back the local names only for the Advanced Units and Tactic Cards where they are unique to the country, whereas everything else is reset to English for functionality consideration. Worked like a charm.

2) (Mostly) Symmetrical. Some gamers are obsessed with symmetry, emphasizing for equal chance of winning, and some others are asymmetric who want something uniquely theirs or have different ways to play. This is not the the time to talk about it, but if you look at all the conflicts in the world, you would see that none of them are symmetrical. If everything is in perfect symmetry, there is no reason to start a conflict.

3) Variable Player (Country) Power. The majority of conflicts are won before it started, and in an armed conflict, arms race hold a pivotal role. Before the USA and USSR started their nuclear race, the arms race in WW1 was about machine guns (before tanks and airplanes). This is reflected in the game with a token difference between the German Machine Gunner Unit. The French had a lead in the machine guns race, which ironically causes the German to work harder and surpass the French machine gun development both in quantity and quality. Again, to keep things streamlined, the variable power of Flamethrower and Mortar is cancelled. For those who likes unique units, there are unique Units in Advanced Mode, just like in reality. The Germans were experimenting with Shock Troops, while the French is bringing their Foreign Legion to make up for numerical advantage.



Ready, Cut, Shoot!
New to wargames? You could try this. Just one hour to craft the component, 4 paper for maps, 2 paper for cards, card stock for counter, 2 dice and some tokens from your existing games.

The latest version (v1.2) is just uploaded recently in its BGG file page.

by Roman Zadorozhnyy

Some games begin with mechanics.
Some begin with prototypes.
And some begin with a place.
For Hnefatafl: Valhalla, everything started with a journey.

Norway, Gods, and a Feeling That Never Left

A few years ago, my wife and I traveled to Norway. Like many people, I had always loved Viking stories: the gods, the sagas, the ships, the battles. But reading about a culture and experiencing it are two very different things. We spent a wonderful week in Oslo. We walked the city, visited the Viking Ship Museum, took a water trip on an old ship, and simply absorbed the atmosphere. Everything felt heavy with history—but alive at the same time.

Yet the moment that truly changed something inside me was our visit to Oslo City Hall. If you’ve ever been there, you know what I mean. The walls, the sculptures, the murals—so many of them depicting Nordic gods and mythological scenes, carved and painted in a way that feels ancient, powerful, and deeply human. Standing there, surrounded by these images, I felt something click. Not excitement. Not inspiration in the usual sense. Something deeper. I bought Viking-themed souvenirs, books, and small artifacts. During the long flight back to the U.S., I couldn’t stop thinking. About Vikings. About gods. About games. And then, somewhere above the Atlantic, I had a clear Eureka moment. I didn’t want to create a new Viking game. I wanted to add new meaning to an old one.

Why Hnefatafl?
Hnefatafl is one of those games that feels eternal. Simple rules. Deep strategy. Easy to learn, hard to master. An abstract game that survived centuries. And that’s exactly why it felt right. The question wasn’t “How do I redesign it?” The question was “How do I respect it and still add something new?”

Exploring the Paths Forward
At first, I explored several possible directions. One idea was to create a solo mode, similar to scenarios in chess puzzle books where players solve positions with specific goals. Interesting? Yes. Exciting? I wasn’t sure. Another idea was to introduce clans, each with special rules or capture conditions. But that approach felt… limiting. Too rigid. Too mechanical. Then I realized something important.

I didn’t want factions. I wanted blessings. Not gods fighting instead of Vikings. But gods guiding, influencing, and rewarding them. And suddenly everything aligned.

Valhalla as a Mechanic
I dove deep into Norse mythology: stories, legends, and symbolism. And that’s when Valhalla revealed itself not just as a theme, but as a mechanic. Valhalla is the place where fallen warriors go after dying in battle: to feast, to celebrate, to stand among the gods. And that solved the entire design puzzle. What if fallen pieces weren’t just removed from the board? What if they became a resource? Captured warriors could now grant blessings from the gods. Loss became opportunity. Sacrifice became strategy. Suddenly, the abstract battlefield gained emotional and tactical depth without breaking its core identity.

Designing the Blessings
I experimented a lot. Hidden cards? One-card-per-turn effects? Triggered abilities when the King moves? I created dozens of effects and began playtesting relentlessly. Some were too strong. Some felt thematic but broke balance. Others were clever but unnecessary. And then another realization hit me. This expansion must stay small. Not a massive deck. Not a bloated system. But something elegant. Minimal. Almost invisible until you feel it. That’s when I decided these should be promo-style cards rather than a huge expansion box.

Small Changes. Big Impact.
A year on the shelf… Until IGNM
The expansion was finished. Balanced. Tested. And then… it waited. Like many prototypes, Hnefatafl: Valhalla spent nearly a year quietly sitting on a shelf. Until this year when it was selected for Indie Game Night Market at PAX Unplugged. That opportunity changed everything. I realized that bringing only an expansion wouldn’t work. Most players wouldn’t already own Hnefatafl. So I made a bold decision: I created Canvas and Postcard editions of the base game, so anyone could jump in immediately. Now the expansion had a proper home.

Art, Collaboration, and Pride
While preparing for IGNM, I was also writing an article about ancient games for Casual Game Insider. I casually asked the team, “What if we also add an expansion for Hnefatafl?” Their response was immediate, “That would be awesome". That was the final push. I contacted my friends Max and Angelita, and they created stunning artwork for the gods. Art that felt ancient, powerful, and respectful — exactly what the game needed. Seeing the final product was one of those rare moments of pure pride.

An Old Game, A New Layer
What makes me happiest about Hnefatafl: Valhalla is not sales or attention. It’s the feeling that we added a new layer to a cultural artifact without damaging it. The rules remain simple. The strategy remains deep. But now, every capture carries weight. Every loss has meaning. It’s still Hnefatafl. Just… alive in a new way.

Maybe I’ll finally publish my book about ancient games. Maybe I’ll add new gods as promos. Maybe I’ll finish my long-planned chess expansion. Whatever comes next, one thing is certain: I want more people to discover how powerful, elegant, and relevant ancient games still are today. Because sometimes the best design work isn’t about inventing something new. It’s about listening to the past and continuing its story.

(C) Roman Zadorozhnyy

Remember when every other game was a roll-and-write? That was living proof that even golden ages come with cloudy linings. Flip Pick Towers, designed by Rob Fisher and Adam Porter, benefits from its release a few years after the slew of samey writing games. It’s an unrepentant flip-and-write, is what I’m saying, more in the vein of Cartographers than the form’s more mathy alternatives. Some artistic talent won’t go amiss.

For those of us who can’t even sketch a convincing stick figure, however, it’s still charming, albeit not perhaps as compelling as some of the options out there.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Every round, three cards are flipped. Everybody at the table picks one — different ones, the same one, it doesn’t matter — and pens it onto their personal sheet of paper. Once the deck is out, it’s time to score.

There are a few little distinctions that set Flip Pick Towers apart from its peers, and no, I’m not talking about how the game’s title is a literal description of its phases. For one thing, the game cleverly triggers its scoring phase twice. This potentially pushes you through the deck twice, which is nice for those who are still learning its composition, but also encourages players to hustle toward scoring goals early rather than waiting for them to come together at the last moment. It helps, too, that it’s entirely possible for somebody’s failed castle to end the game a few rounds early. So much for that last tower you were hoping to stretch heavenward.

The constituent parts of your castle are simple enough. Most cards represent floors. These you stack like LEGO blocks, always keeping an eye on their stability number, which must tick downward with each successive level. Eventually bridges can span the gap between floors, providing foundations for further building and bypassing the usual stability rule for a moment. Look, it’s basic architecture. If you lean two crumbling minarets against one another, you can pile another few hundred tons of hewn blocks between them. Everybody knows that.

There are also magical creatures who provide special abilities — like, say, ignoring a floor’s stability, easily the most potent ability in the game — rooftops that can earn a few points but conclude a tower’s upward trajectory, and royalty who occupy all those empty rooms to score points. More on their majesties in a moment.

Finally, every card also provides a material of one kind or another. The format for these is simple enough, adding new features to your castle whenever you complete a material’s column. Hence glass introduces windows to your castle, bags of gold eventually fill entire floors, and banners hang from on high while magic beanstalks creep up from below. In fine flip-and-write fashion, these soon jostle for space. There’s room for planning, but remaining inflexible is a surefire way to get nothing done at all.

The last type of card is a dragon. Argh, the dragon. There are two of these in the deck, meaning you might see four of the winged pests in a sitting, and they’re as unwelcome as it gets. Whenever one of the sky-rodents appears, you either place it atop one of your towers — blocking further construction, which can be a real nuisance if they appear in the game’s early stages — or scrawling out one of your hard-earned bags of gold to buy them off. Thankfully, they are not sexist dragons, and no sacrificial princesses are required.

Speaking of princesses, the most interesting offering by far are the royalty cards. Each session assigns an objective to your queen, king, and princess. As their chambers are added to your towers, their points tend to compound. And compound. And compound. It isn’t uncommon for a single royal member to score as much in the endgame as a player earned at the midpoint tally.

In the best of instances, these transform the game’s sometimes obnoxious placements into significant opportunities. Remember those dragons? Well, if your king prefers occupying towers with dragons perched on them, now you can keep your gold and take care of the old man at the same time. All the better if you manage to erect a single tower with a single dragon atop it, then fill the place with four or five stacked kingly quarters. The same goes for the other elements. One session might feature a queen who yearns for escape, encouraging you to place those magical beanstalks next to her chambers rather than doing the normal thing by squirreling them off. Or, heck, a princess who just really likes living near bridges. Don’t we all appreciate a nice bridge?

Not every objective is similarly worthwhile. For every goal that enlivens the game’s placements, there’s another that’s plain uninteresting. After a couple plays, our group reached the point where we would keep drawing through the deck until we found something that felt sufficiently energetic.

Even then, the overarching puzzle doesn’t change much from one session to the next. On the whole, there’s enough to keep everybody engaged, at least for a session or two. But the gameplay is simple enough that, barring the pleasure of scrawling a little castle, with little banners that look like banners and not whatever my castle’s banners look like, there probably isn’t much to keep anyone coming back time and time again.

It is, in other words, a flip-and-write. A very good flip-and-write, a charming flip-and-write, a flip-and-write with plenty of little considerations to account for. But it doesn’t stand up there with the finest of them.

Maybe it doesn’t need to. I’ll admit I’ve enjoyed looking at my friends’ creations, and even letting them laugh at mine. To go with my perfect face for radio and outstanding voice for text, I have excellent penmanship for a keyboard. Once, I wasn’t even sure whether a room’s occupant was a Q, for the queen, or a bag of gold with a little knot cinching it closed.

Anyway. Flip Pick Towers. It’s cute stuff. I’ve had a nice time with it. I suspect I’ll strain to remember it by year’s end.

 

A complimentary copy of Flip Pick Towers was provided by the 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 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!)