Sail South for The Isle of Penguins
Instead of corralling cats, you can prepare to pack penguins
Instead of corralling cats, you can prepare to pack penguins
by Steph Hodge
Are you into the darker themes such as the Cthulhu Mythos and Zombies? Well, here are some upcoming releases that might fit your fancy.
The Isle of Cats designer Frank West has unveiled a new game set in the same universe as his bestselling polyomino-puzzle title, saying the project was shaped by lessons learned from more than a million recorded plays of the original.

The Isle of Penguins, which launches on Kickstarter on July 7, sees players rescuing the sea birds from melting ice floes and fitting them onto uniquely shaped rafts, in an experience West says is faster and more accessible than The Isle of Cats while retaining its strategic depth.
West, who runs publisher The City of Games, told BoardGameWire The Isle of Cats had now surpassed 250,000 physical sales since it was released in 2019 – a figure that rises to almost half a million when including spin-offs The Isle of Cats: Explore & Draw, The Isle of Cats Duel and digital versions of the game.
He said the design for The Isle of Penguins emerged after six years of analysing data from digital versions of The Isle of Cats, as well as player feedback from across Kickstarter and YouTube video comments, social media discussions and BoardGameGeek reviews.
That data amounts to more than one million plays across the digital versions the game – information West says he has used to create a game that plays 20% to 30% faster than The Isle of Cats standard mode, while also giving players more to do.
He told BoardGameWire, “I think my main takeaway was that The Isle of Cats is a great game that is loved by a lot of people – It didn’t need fixing. But, there are things that could make the game more accessible to some people. I wanted to design a game to sit alongside The Isle of Cats, rather than replace it.”

West said major changes include a new selection system which allows for simultaneous play, most scoring happening during the game rather than at the end, and a drastic shift to the complexity of the polyominoes themselves.
He said, “One of the unique parts of The Isle of Cats when it was released was the complexity of the cat tiles themselves. They use less common shapes and can be very tricky to place, which is great.
“However, some players struggle to flip tiles in their head or visualise how something might fit, and the complex shapes in The Isle of Cats made this challenging for them. This was a key part of the game, and I spent many years working out how to flip the experience.
“In The Isle of Penguins, every penguin tile is a square or a rectangle. These are the simplest shapes, and much easier for people to visualise and rotate in their heads.
“But the raft board you are placing them on is far more chaotic, with many restrictive areas, which makes finding the right place to put a tile just as hard.
“Effectively, this flips ‘hard shapes and a simple board’ into ‘easy shapes and a complex board’.”
He added, “I have been thinking about a lot of these things for a long time, but when I managed to flip the polyomino experience with the raft board, and found a way to make simultaneous play work, I realised I had something exciting.”

West said that streamlining of the game allows players to do more in less time, without reducing decision making – and added that the title would retain Isle of Cats’ inclusion of both a family mode and standard mode, in addition to a new expert mode for the new game.
He said, “This keeps the entry point of the game as friendly as possible, while offering something more to veterans of The Isle of Cats looking for a step up.
“It was important not to assume that just because someone has been playing games for years, they would now want something more complicated. But I also wanted to make sure there was something there for those who did want it.”
West confirmed to BoardGameWire that the new game would be illustrated by The Isle of Cats artist Dragolisco, saying, “I wanted to ensure The Isle of Penguins looked familiar to those who loved The Isle of Cats, and I think he is a great artist. He did a fantastic job!”
The original Isle of Cats Kickstarter campaign raised more than £460,000 from over 8,100 backers in 2019, and was followed by a £1m-plus campaign for the base game and several expansions in 2021, which was backed by over 12,000 people.
A co-op spin-off title, Race to the Raft, picked up almost £350,000 a year later.
The Isle of Penguins is set to launch on Kickstarter on July 7.
The post Million-play analysis inspires streamlined Isle of Cats successor, as game’s sales pass 250,000 first appeared on .

A new Earthborne Rangers campaign? You don’t have to tell me twice. It is hard to get me to play the same game more than a few times, but I will drop any and everything to spend more time in—or, in this case, under—the Valley.
While the base game of Earthborne Rangers—one of the greatest gaming experiences of my life, and an experience with which this review will assume you are familiar—takes place across a wide range of beautiful landscapes, Legacy of the Ancestors sends players into the depths of the Arcology, the ruins of a lost civilization that used to inhabit the Valley. This is the sensible choice, a natural development coming out of the first game. The first campaign leaves the Arcology, a consistent splash of harder sci-fi tech in a sea of solarpunk, barely explained, and the underground tunnels are as strong a contrast in setting as it’s possible to have. No more sweeping vistas for you, no no. Best you can hope for is a spot of bioluminescence.
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The cornerstones of what make Earthborne Rangers great are still here. The caverns of the Arcology teem with life and discoveries. There…
The post Earthborne Rangers: Legacy of the Ancestors Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Hybrid physical and digital game console maker Board has raised another $20m in venture capital amid plans to launch an AI-powered game design platform.
The new funding round, which was led by Union Square Ventures, means Board has now raised $35m in external funding since the touchscreen device was launched in October last year.
That launch was accompanied by a suite of 12 initial games, including a design from veteran board game creator Bruno Faidutti, which make use of physical pieces that interact with the digital board.
The company claims thousands of developers are starting to create games for Board using its software development kit, although it is yet to publicly announce any tie-ups with existing board game publishers or other designers.
Alongside the funding announcement Board said it would unveil an AI platform later this year which will allow users to build their own games using natural language prompts, saying taking a game from idea to playable prototype can be done in less than an hour.

Michael Mignano, general partner at Board investor Union Square Ventures, cited Roblox as a successful example of that model – although that platform has faced repeated criticism in recent years for financially exploiting young developers and putting pressure on children to spend money via its virtual currency.
Mignano said, “I grew up playing Nintendo and Super Nintendo, huddled around my living room CRT television with my sister, parents, friends. As I grew older, and the technology changed, so did my habits, and my gaming turned inward. I transitioned to Warcraft on my PC, and eventually to casual games and The Battle of Polytopia on my iPhone.
“But now I’m looking for reasons to put away my phone and be present with others. I’m attending more live sporting events and concerts than I have in my entire life. And instead of playing a console game by myself on a late Saturday night, my family and I are playing board games and card games around the dining room table.
“It’s not just me: both live events and board games are on pace for record years in 2026, with each market continuing a multi-year climb to all-time highs. This is the shift we keep coming back to at USV: even though we’re still addicted to our algorithms and group chats, people want ways to have fun with their friends in person.”
Board was founded last year by Brynn Putnam, who previously built smart fitness device company Mirror before its $500m acquisition by Lululemon in 2020.
Previous attempts to make a hybrid digital and physical board game console include The Last Gameboard, which raised more than $185,000 through a Kickstarter campaign in 2020, and followed that up with $6m in venture capital funding.
That business shuttered in 2024, however, with CEO and co-founder Shail Mehta saying the company never managed to overcome the lag and inconsistency in its touchscreen tech to allow for a mass consumer release.
Games in that device’s library included Terraforming Mars, Viticulture, Downforce and Steve Jackson’s 1977 debut game Ogre.
The post Board, the startup making a $400 board game console, leans into AI-powered designs after raising another $20m first appeared on .

With this My Favorite Wargame Cards Series, I hope to take a look at a specific card from the various wargames that I have played and share how it is used in the game. I am not a strategist and frankly I am not that good at games but I do understand how things should work and be used in games. With that being said, here is the next entry in this series.
Barbarians at the Gates, The Decline and Fall of the Western Roman Empire 337 – 476 from Compass Games is a Card Driven Game for two players set during the final hundred plus years of the Western Roman Empire as the Barbarian tribes in the north came down with a vengeance as they clashed with civilization and carved out their place amongst it. The time period covered in the game is from the death of Constantine the Great (337 AD) to the deposition of the last Western Roman Emperor by Odoacer in 476 AD. The Roman player will command the Roman Legions loyal to the failing central authority and those Germanic peoples who have settled peacefully inside the Roman Empire, while the Barbarian player leads Usurper Emperors, and controls the migrations of the Germanic peoples, who are the Barbarians at the Gates. This game is really quite good and feels very much like a wargame even though it is a Card Driven Game. There are lots of opportunities for troop movement, combat and maneuver. And I really liked that. The game is a Card Driven Game and the use of cards is all important and very well done. Each player has their own unique deck of cards that are used and these cards are sometimes removed from those decks when played for an event and also new cards will be added to the deck after each turn. The cards played during a player’s impulse which are not used for the Event are then used for their Operation Points value. These Operation Points can be used for many purposes including Activating a leader, Forced Marches, Raiding, Reinforcement, Migration and Successful Usurpation.
The real trick to the cards is to plan out how you are going to use them to your advantage but also how best to use them. Activating Leaders is very important as you can then move them to attack, defend, change control of areas and other actions. Activating a leader depends on their strategy rating (the lower the strategy rating, the better). When a leader activates from a card, they receive a number of Action Points which can be used for movement (1 over highway, 2 over rough or river connections, 3 over strait or for naval movement), continuation after battle (a kind of advance after combat), changing control over unfortified spaces and sieges of fortified spaces. But the cards also are very mean spirited. What do I mean by this? Well, in our first play, I was carefully using my cards to build up my armies to fend off the initial attacks of the Barbarian hordes. I also had begun to build somewhat of a super stack as well to attempt to foray into England and take on the Barbarians there. As I did this building up, I was unaware of the nasty nature of some of the cards. Some of the cards, both for the Barbarians and Romans, allow a play that will turn a single leader and their entire stack into either a Usurper or a Pacified Barbarian Settlement. Both are equally nasty and you have to keep in mind that you can have your best armies simply taken from you and turned to your enemy.

And this concept of taking your best armies away from you, either as the Roman player or the Barbarian player, is well demonstrated with the play of the Rome Offers Settlement card. This card literally allows the Romans to resettle a Barbarian Tribal Marker, along with any combat units with the marker to a Loyalist Provincial Capital. The play of this card at the right (or wrong) time can lead to serious issues on the front lines. Playing the Rome Offers Settlement card simulates foederati diplomacy, allowing the Roman player to integrate migratory tribes into the empire and to gain access to additional manpower to defend the frontier. The mechanical effects include that the selected Tribe will now be aligned with Rome and becomes allied to the Romans. This will lead to the Barbarian Control Marker being removed from the target tribe’s space on the Tribal Alignment Track. The real benefit is that the Roman armies don’t have to risk loss and time in fighting the Barbarians targeted but also provides somewhat of a defensive buffer as the settled tribes will serve as a guard on the frontier, protecting specific Roman provinces and providing a strategic military advantage against other hostile invaders. This card is very important and can be considered essential for the Roman player, as allying with these tribes limits barbarian raiding opportunities and provides crucial resources needed to survive later waves of invasions. Also the preservation of army strength gives an immediate benefit to other ongoing campaigns against other invading tribes. I love this card and the concept from history that it attempts to inject into the gameplay.

Foederati were peoples and cities bound by a treaty, known as foedus, with Ancient Rome. During the Roman Republic, the term identified the socii, but during the Roman Empire, it was used to describe foreign states, client kingdoms or barbarian tribes to which the empire provided benefits in exchange for military assistance. The term was also used, especially under the empire, for groups of barbarian mercenaries of various sizes who were typically allowed to settle within the empire.
The term foederati had its original usage and meaning extended by the Romans’ practice of subsidizing entire barbarian tribes such as the Franks, Vandals, Alans, Huns and the Visigoths, the last being the best known, in exchange for providing warriors to fight in the Roman armies. Alaric I began his career leading a band of Gothic foederati. At first, the Roman subsidy took the form of money or food, but as tax revenues dwindled in the 4th and the 5th centuries, the foederati were billeted on local landowners properties, which became identical to being allowed to settle on Roman territory. Large local landowners living in distant border provinces on extensive villas, which were largely self-sufficient, found their loyalties to the central authority, which were already conflicted by other developments, further compromised in such situations. As loyalties wavered and became more local, the empire then began to devolve into smaller territories and closer personal fealties.

Here is a look at our unboxing video:
We also did a video review and you can watch that at the following link:
I also wrote a First Impressions post on the game and you can read that at the following link: https://theplayersaid.com/2022/11/08/first-impressions-barbarians-at-the-gates-the-decline-and-fall-of-the-western-roman-empire-337-476-from-compass-games/
In the next entry in this series, we will take a look at Baron von Stueben Trains the Continental Army from Washington’s War from GMT Games.
-Grant


This is a new game from the wonderful people who bought us Pandemic. Once again they bring us a game that while using some of the Pandemic mechanics, feels like a different game. It does feel very much like a Lord of the Rings experience and not just a rebadge of the original game. This is a co-operative game where you can explore , do objectives and then finally destroy the ring.
You each play as a set of 2 characters which include Frodo and Sam, who of course must finally destroy the ring. On your turn you can do 4 actions with one character and 1 action with the other Middle-Earth has been divided up into twelve areas and you start in different positions across the board. Sauron isn’t going to just let you sit back, his forces are controlled by an interesting card mechanic with different troops ready to move along different lines depending on cards drawn at the end of each round and these forces intensify at various points in the game.

While some co-operative games can suffer from an alpha player take over, the nice thing is that with the objectives you can split up and do the objectives near your area without one player telling everyone what to do. Then team up for the final objective which is of course destroy the ring.
This is a chance to be the wonderful characters from the amazing Lord of the Rings and to go out there dodge Sauron’s Eye and mess his day up no end. You can order it at: https://www.bgextras.co.uk/pandemic/pandemic-games/the-lord-of-the-rings-fate-of-the-fellowship
The post The Lord of the Rings Fate of the Fellowship board game first appeared on Board Game Extras.BGI 422 The One About Unobtanium
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I wouldn’t wish to inflict board game drama on anybody who wasn’t already saturated in the stuff, so I’ll keep the details sparse, but the past couple of weeks saw a minor authority figure on BoardGameGeek sharing his views on demonic possession with a potential customer. I try to stay away from such dust-ups, but I found myself compelled to weigh in. My resultant post discussed the textual development of an adversarial spirit in Judaism and Christianity and made an impassioned plea to anyone basing their decisions on the existence of otherworldly beings.
Over the coming days, I heard from a number of people. Some had been touched by what I’d written. Others were just glad to have encountered something informative on the internet. One or two were offended.
But what stood out to me the most were those who had, like me, encountered “demonic possession” in the wild. Not the real thing. Not actual demons clawing their way through the cracks in the world. I’m talking about the excuses, usually offered by pastors, who couldn’t explain some phenomenon, but who needed to be the authority figure on everything. The undiagnosed illnesses. The non-mainstream gender orientations. The people who wanted nothing to do with the good news.
Playing Martha McGill’s Witch Hunt 1649, it was impossible to not mull over those thoughts all over again. It was impossible not to think back on the time I met a witch.
Statistically, you’ve already assumed that I’m talking about a woman.
Witch Hunt 1649 isn’t about the witch hunts that dominated my schooling. Those were New World witches, the result of mistrustful Puritans living on the edge of a world that seemed immune to their understanding. McGill’s telling predates Salem by half a century and takes place far across the sea. In the same year that Charles I lost his head and Oliver Cromwell prepared the New Model Army to march northward, villages in Scotland reacted to their uncertainty the same way that countless communities had done before: by blaming the women they didn’t like very much.
There were men witches, too. Not many. Just enough to ensure that nobody was above suspicion. Of the 3,800 Scots accused of witchcraft, eighty-nine percent were women.
In the game, the figure is similarly skewed. At the start, everybody receives a character to embody. These cards offer only a few tidbits. A name. A woodcut illustration. A once-per-game special ability. And a small blurb that explains why these people are subject to suspicion. There’s Elspeth, who once nicked some nice linens. Agnes, who knows which herbs might ease a fever. Bessie, whose primary sin is that she’s a bit lazy. Janet, isolated after cutting the sheep-stealing cousins out of her family. William, who loves a ribald joke. Helen, over-eager to share her conversion experience with her neighbors.
Ordinary people, in other words. To most of us, it would be their neighbors who seemed too buttoned-up. Too prying. Too obsessive about the minutiae of everyone’s lives. Too willing to fling an accusation that might get one of their neighbors strangled with a cord and their stake-bound body charred to ashes.
Of the fifteen character cards, eleven are women. Seventy-three percent. If anything, Witch Hunt 1649 short-sells the divide.
As a game, Witch Hunt 1649 is a simple thing. That’s to be expected. Published by Central Michigan University Press, this is closer to an educational tool than a hobbyist product. Like Greg Loring-Albright’s Keep the Faith from the same imprint, there’s an element of role-play, with most turns consisting of a single card-flip. This card presents some stroke of ill fortune that has befallen your character. Chronic headaches. Extra tithes. A cousin’s hasty marriage. The rumor that you’re a closet Catholic. You’re allowed to choose how to respond to these misfortunes, but there’s no such thing as coming away richer. Every choice is a Sophie’s choice. Waning physical welfare, waning standing in the community, or waning material goods. After a while, you begin to wonder why anybody bothers trying to be good.
The one respite is that you’re still here, still alive, still capable of improving your situation. You take the card fate has dealt you and acquire something from the market. Like everything else in Witch Hunt 1649, these are meager possessions. Your goal, apart from survival, is to accrue enough to place yourself in high society. Higher society. One sickle and pair of shears at a time, one cow-shed and kiln, you construct a life.
As often as not, those possessions become anchors. That Bible improves your standing in town, but you might have to part with it to support the local poor. The local poorer. That basket helps you carry more fish from the stream, but it hurts all the worse to lose it. Other items, like creepy rams, are liable to trick some farmer into thinking they’re striking a pact with the devil. When the trial begins, everything becomes potential evidence.
The witch-trial is the centerpiece of the game. As soon as you have three black marks, you’re dragged before a council of fifteen propertied men and put to the test. Black marks, it must be noted, have nothing to do with your choices; either you gain them or you don’t, entirely irrespective of your decisions. They’re also drawn face-down. When the trial begins, you have no idea of the substance of the accusations against you. At times, they’re as harmless as a rumor. Other times, they’re as damning as a rumor.
To secure an acquittal, you spend your meager health, your meager reputation, your meager possessions. You try to persuade your friends and family to stand by you. You’re well aware that these are hard requests. If you’re found guilty, your relations will also stand trial. It isn’t until the accusations are revealed, flipped one by one, that your fate becomes clear. Even then, survival is only momentary. There’s nothing preventing you from being dragged before the council at a later date, no matter how much of your property you’ve parted with, no matter how many teeth you’ve lost to the stress.
For the first few years after I came home, it wasn’t uncommon for someone to ask if I’d seen any demonic possessions out there. Possessions or skinwalkers or witches, anything like that. I’d served a portion of my two years as a Mormon missionary among the Crow Nation, and people were always quick to note how “Those folks are more spiritual than we are.”
In this case, “more spiritual” meant more susceptible to the beings that dwelled on the other side of the crack in the world. Spirits, demons, angels. Beings we never saw as white folk. Beings that only seemed to gather around those with brown skin, on land they’d been planted on by the government, or else in faraway places where people still practiced cannibalism and wife-burning and whatever else.
Whenever anybody asked the question, I thought about the witch.
I first heard about the witch from a guy in Hardin, the half-white, half-native port town on the edge of the reservation. We were set to baptize a man. Crow. Maybe already a member of the church, but records were spotty. On the scheduled day, he didn’t show up. “He was probably called away by that witch,” the guy said. I laughed, but he insisted that, no, he was being serious. “He’s taken up with a witch,” he said. “Those folks are more spiritual than we are. We can’t hear their call because we aren’t as spiritual,” he said. “We,” he said, meaning white folk. I asked if we should go find him. Find him and help him. If he was under thrall to a witch, surely that meant he needed us more than ever. Needed Jesus. Needed baptism. Needed something. “No, there’s nothing for it,” he said.
I returned to the Crow Nation many months later, after many people had asked me about the spiritual folk out there, about whether I’d seen any possessions or skinwalkers or witches. It took some phone calls, but we found the witch’s address. We hopped in the truck and took off, the missionaries who now lived on the rez seated in front, talking excitedly about how they’d exorcise the witch’s demon or dust off their feet against her house.
When I met the witch, I was surprised. Not because she was a woman. (Eighty-nine percent of witches are women.) It was how ordinary she seemed. Her trailer looked like the other trailers that dotted the rez. Her dogs barked like the other dogs that barked on the rez. Her wind-chimes chimed like every other set that chimed on the rez. I asked if she’d seen our man. The one who’d skipped out on his baptism.
“Sure,” she said. “He comes around when he’s trying to get off the meth. He stays a few days, sweats it off, then he goes home again.”
Oh. Well. It wasn’t true, then, what I’d heard. Someone had told me she was a witch. Ha ha, what a mix-up.
“Sure,” she said, laughing brightly and rubbing at the sunspots on her forearm. “I’m a witch. I’m a witch at helping people get off the meth.” Then she told me about her degree in nursing, how the learning had come naturally. How she’d worked for years in addiction recovery. How she was, indeed, an actual witch, with a power for curing people of their killing habits.
On the drive back, as we talked about our encounter with the witch, two of the other missionaries bubbled first with excitement, then with righteous upset. We hadn’t done anything. No denunciations had been leveled. No demons had been cast out of their hosts. One told a story about how a devil had once held together a person’s broken leg, then the prophet had cast the devil out. This caused the leg to break again, because evil magic sometimes imitates good things. “We should go back,” he said. “No way,” his companion shot back. “What if she uses Satan’s priesthood on us? You know they’re more spiritual than us.”
I didn’t say much. Between this and my previous visit to the reservation, I was starting to harbor some serious doubts about the shape of the world. There was a crack in it, all right. A crack that ran right through it. But the crack wasn’t what I’d been told. It wasn’t us on the one side and evil spirits on the other. It seemed to me there were good people all over, lots of them, some with addictions or problems or sicknesses, and some who wanted to help. And then there was us. The people in the white shirts and ties. Telling stories about everyone else. Trying to square them so they looked the way we wanted. And then, when they wouldn’t be squared, pretending they must have widened the crack to the other side and beckoned something ugly into themselves.
I no longer believe in witches any more than I believe in teenage boys being sent by Jesus to proclaim the restoration of an everlasting gospel that keeps changing on itself. But I do believe there are demons out there. There’s nothing supernatural about these demons. They look like us and dress like us. They eat our favorite foods and watch our favorite reality shows on television. They do pretty much whatever they want to do, and then they come up with compelling reasons why they were in the right to do it. Those are normal enough behaviors, but the way to tell a regular person from demon, I suspect, is that a regular person might come up with a reason why they were a good fit for nursing school. A demon, on the other hand, explains why they’re the chosen one who’s been endowed to save the world from itself. Whether anybody wants it or not. Whether they have to bind a person to a stake and flick a torch into the straw.
Witch Hunt 1649 pulls a lot of weight for such a small game. It shows how insular communities can curl in on themselves until they sour and curdle. It examines how people on the margins, women especially, become scapegoats for no greater sin than being marginal. It preserves the memory of the crimes against those people rather than letting us forget the cruelties we can unleash on our neighbors.
But for me, mostly, it gets me hoping that the only witch I’ve ever met has helped a bunch of people with their methamphetamine addictions.
A complimentary copy of Witch Hunt 1649 was provided by the publisher.
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Peter unboxes all the extra stuff you can get to expand your games of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. The Board Game!
I’ve been hoping for some time now to get my hands on this extra stuff for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. The Board Game, and the wonderful people at Awaken Realms were kind enough to send me the goodies I didn’t get the first time around. So here’s an unboxing of the miniatures packs, terrain pack, stretch goals and expansions for this excellent game of survival in the irradiated Zone!
By the way, don’t forget to download my rules & reference (and of course it’s also on Tabletop Codex)!
by Beth Heile