by Nicolas Cardona

Hi, I’m Nico Cardona, a board game designer and publisher based in Barcelona, where I also run my small label, Too Bad Games. Today I want to share the design journey behind President, which is probably my first larger design outside the filler space, after titles like Rudolph, Mala Suerte and Panots. More than just telling the story of where the idea came from, I want to focus on the design problems behind it, the systems that failed, and the decisions that finally made the game click.

The Initial Spark

The first seed of President came from a somewhat unusual place: my master’s degree in organizational engineering.

One of the topics that stayed with me the most was game theory. I think it is fascinating for any designer, because at its core it is about incentives, prediction, trust, and decision-making under uncertainty. I was also very interested in graph structures, and at some point those two ideas clicked together in my head.

I started imagining a hierarchy represented almost like a graph or an organizational chart, where your position in that structure would determine how much power you had, and therefore how strong or relevant your actions would be. That was the first real idea behind President. I knew very early that I wanted a game with three levels of hierarchy. Everything else was still unclear.

What I did know from the beginning was the type of experience I wanted. I wanted a game for many players, one where trust mattered, where people had to negotiate, whisper in each other’s ears, make promises, read intentions, and sometimes betray each other. The political theme came later as the perfect frame for those dynamics, but the real starting point was not theme, it was structure and interaction.

The Core Design Problem

The real design challenge was this: how do you make a game for large groups that feels socially alive and interactive, but still has enough weight to feel like a proper game?

I love social games, but many games for large groups tend to fall into one of two extremes. Either they become hidden role games, where the entire experience depends on secret identities, or they become very broad party games, where the interaction is loud and fun but mechanically light. I wanted something in between.

I wanted a game that could handle a big player count, but where the interaction came from timing, hierarchy, negotiation, reading people, and managing risk, not just from shouting or acting.

That ambition created a lot of problems immediately. Early versions were much bigger, with more systems, more layers, more moving parts. In theory, some of those ideas were interesting. In practice, players got lost. The more I added, the more the game drifted away from the fast, readable, socially sharp experience I was actually trying to build.

At some point I had to be honest with myself. If I wanted President to work for a broader audience, and if I wanted the emotions to be immediate, fast, and easy to read at the table, I had to cut aggressively.

That became the real design process of the game: not adding the right things, but removing the wrong ones.

The Versions That Had to Die

One of the earliest versions looked nothing like the final game. At that stage, I was still exploring hierarchy in a much more literal and structural way.
President went through a huge number of prototypes. Some ideas lasted much longer than they should have, simply because I liked them too much.

One of the earliest concepts was that there would be two sides, blue and red, and at some point players could switch allegiances. The idea was that you would push for your side in order to earn bonuses, but maybe change camps when it became convenient. On paper, it sounded politically rich and full of tension. In practice, it was too much. It added another strategic layer, but not the kind of layer the game actually needed. It made the system heavier without making the experience sharper.

There was also an early version where players did not all have the same card set. Instead, cards were drawn, and your position in the hierarchy influenced whether you got stronger or weaker options. Again, this sounded exciting in theory. Higher status could give access to better tools, and the game could reflect power in a more literal way. But it quickly created too much volatility, too much information to track, and too much friction for a game that needed to stay readable, especially at high player counts.

Another difficult thing to abandon was the idea that being President should simply give better rewards than being Vice President or Secretary. At first, that was the direct logic: the higher your office, the bigger your reward. But this created all kinds of problems. It made the hierarchy too obviously dominant, flattened some of the interesting decision-making, and pushed the game toward a more static reward structure.

What finally worked was not giving the top position a directly better reward, but creating situations where being higher in the hierarchy became advantageous depending on what everyone else had played. That shift was crucial. The hierarchy stopped being a blunt reward ladder and became something much more interesting: a system of timing, initiative, leverage, and opportunity.

I also explored versions with more modules, more accumulation systems, and more phases. Some of them were individually fun. But the more I tested, the more I understood that President did not need more content. It needed more precision.

The Breakthrough

At this stage, the game was already much closer to its final identity, but I was still testing which actions deserved to stay and which ones had to disappear.
The real turning point came when I found a cleaner hand system.

Once I moved toward the idea that everyone should share the same set of cards, the whole game began to make sense. From there, I iterated many times, around twenty or thirty meaningful iterations, just to find the final seven cards. I was looking for a very specific combination: cards that worked mechanically, fit the theme, were easy enough to understand, and most importantly created strong interaction, replayability, tension, and memorable moments.

The other big breakthrough was the retrieval structure. Players use cards and lose access to them temporarily, then recover them through specific effects. That gave the system rhythm. It made timing matter. It made players pay attention not only to what others were doing now, but also to what options they might regain later.

At that point, I also realized something essential: if I wanted the game to scale to very high player counts, it could not be turn-by-turn in the traditional sense. The game needed simultaneous action selection. That was one of the decisions that truly made large groups possible.

But I did not want pure simultaneous chaos either. So the solution was subtle: players choose actions simultaneously, but they do not all resolve simultaneously. Resolution unfolds in order, shaped by the hierarchy. That gave the game speed without losing tension. It also made the hierarchy feel meaningful, because it effectively became a shifting initiative system.

That was when the game stopped feeling like a collection of ideas and started feeling like an actual design.

Defamation and the Social Engine

If there is one mechanism that made the whole design click, it was Defame.

Defame allows you to predict another player’s action, either in the current turn or even the next one. If you are right, you steal a victory point from them.

That may sound simple, but in play it changed everything.

The moment this mechanic entered the game, negotiation, promises, and public table talk became much more dangerous and much more interesting. Suddenly you could not afford to become too predictable. If you openly signaled your intentions, someone could exploit that. If you lied too often, people would learn to read you differently. Every deal, every bluff, every political speech at the table became part of the real game state.

In other words, Defame did not just create a fun effect. It connected the social layer to the scoring layer.

That mattered a lot. Many social games have plenty of table talk, but the conversation exists somewhat outside the formal system. Here I wanted the opposite. I wanted the game to reward reading people, misdirecting them, and choosing when to be transparent and when to manipulate. Defame was the mechanism that turned all of that into something tangible.

It is probably the hardest card to explain in the game. I know that. But I made a conscious design decision to keep it anyway. Sometimes you remove complexity because it is unnecessary. Sometimes you keep a little complexity because the payoff is worth it. For me, Defame was absolutely worth it.

Simplifying Without Hollowing It Out

One of the hardest lessons of President was learning that “simpler” does not automatically mean “better”, but it often means “clearer”, and clarity is essential when you want a socially dense game to work with many people.

There were moments when I tried to make the game deeper in a more conventional, gamer-friendly sense. More sub-actions, more differentiation, more layered effects. At one point, even with a smaller set of cards, each card could contain multiple sub-actions depending on hierarchy and context. The result was exactly what you would expect: too much information to retain for a game that was meant to sit somewhere between family game and social strategy game.

The issue was not that players could not understand it eventually. The issue was that every extra rule took energy away from the real experience: reading the table, making alliances, lying convincingly, spotting opportunities, and reacting quickly.

That became my filter for every design decision: does this rule improve the social engine of the game, or does it merely make the system denser?

If it only made the system denser, it had to go.

Scaling to Ten Players

From the beginning, I wanted a game that could work in big groups. Part of that came from watching large groups play games like Secret Hitler and thinking: I want that social energy, but I do not want to rely entirely on hidden roles.

Getting there was not easy. A game that works at eight, nine, or ten players can easily become too flat at three or four. The reverse is also true. Many systems that feel rich at smaller counts become painfully slow or unreadable at larger counts.

What made President viable at ten was not one single trick, but a combination of constraints. Simultaneous action selection reduced downtime. Shared card sets reduced rules overhead. Ordered resolution kept tension and readability. And then the “day cards” added just enough variety to keep the table alive from round to round.

Those day cards were another area where I learned the value of cutting. Early on, I had more than twenty. Eventually I realized that I did not need that much variety. What I needed were six or seven that were truly excellent, cards that created conversation, forced commitment, or encouraged bluffing in a clean and memorable way.

One of my favorites asks players to declare at the start of the round which action they will play. They may lie, of course, but if they actually do what they said, they recover a card. It is a tiny rule, but it creates exactly the kind of moment I wanted from the beginning: table talk with real consequences.

What the Game Taught Me

More than anything else, President taught me how games are really designed.

Theory matters. Studying systems matters. Understanding incentives matters. But at some point you are no longer dealing with theory. You are dealing with a living system that resists you. A prototype is not an idea. It is an argument with reality.

This game forced me to learn through repetition, through failed versions, through mechanics I loved and had to cut, through moments where I thought I was close and then realized I was still too far away.

It also reinforced something I believe very strongly as a designer: interaction is not decoration. It is not just a bonus layer you hope players bring themselves. If you want a game to be socially memorable, you have to build that social energy into the mechanics themselves.

For me, the best moments in games often come from looking at another player and thinking: what are you about to do, and can I trust you? That tension is alive. It creates stories. It creates laughter. It creates the kinds of memories that survive long after the rules are forgotten.

That is what I was chasing with President.

Looking Back

After all the cuts, failed systems, and repeated testing, this was the final form the game took.
People sometimes ask what I would do differently today. The honest answer is complicated.

Of course there are always details one could revisit. Every design contains a thousand possible alternative paths. But in a deeper sense, I would not undo the mistakes, because those mistakes are exactly how I learned what this game needed to be.

I am the designer of President, but I also handled the art direction and published it myself together with Zacatrus, a well-established publisher in Spain that supported the project. By the time the game was already quite advanced, I also showed it to other publishers and saw strong interest there too. That was reassuring, but more importantly, it confirmed something I had started to feel during testing: the long process of cutting, refining, and insisting on the core idea had paid off.

To this day, President is the game of mine I feel strongest about. Not only because of the final product, but because of what it demanded from me as a designer.

It taught me that when a game is trying to do something unusual, especially for large groups, you cannot afford to protect every idea you love. You have to protect the experience instead.

And sometimes, if you keep doing that for long enough, the game finally starts telling you what it wants to be.

by Justin Bell

Late last summer, I had dinner with an industry contact, and we got to talking about life, love, and the pursuit of tabletop happiness over a handsome buffet of cheap prosecco, garden salads, and chicken fingers. (Extra honey mustard, please.)

Eventually, our conversation turned to one of my favorite questions. “What’ve you been playing lately?”

The contact answered with a grin; like many, this contact mostly talked about games that they are not involved with professionally, since industry folks are usually playing games in development at their own company most of the time. One of their answers really intrigued me.

“I’m actually playing one of these games ‘two-handed’ a lot recently. In fact, sometimes on weekends, I pour a glass of wine and intentionally do that with titles that I can’t get to the table with my game groups.”

I paused for a second, making sure I heard this correctly: the contact was intentionally playing multiplayer games as two distinct players, alone?

“That’s right,” they replied. “Sometimes, I like to take longer turns thinking about what I would do as the active player, and it’s easy to imagine playing as someone else in a game that I know really well.”

We moved on, but the thought stuck with me. I digested it along with those tasty tenders, and let the thought marinate for most of the last few months.



As a media member, I “two-hand” review samples all the time, playing as two distinct players to get a feel for how the game plays. I always do this with games I receive that have not been released yet. Designers are often unavailable to teach their upcoming creations directly to peasants like me, so I usually have to grind through a rulebook on my own to learn a pre-production copy (PPC) of a rulebook before a video content creator has been contracted to produce a formal teach video.

Two-handing (or, “dummy-handing”, in my personal parlance) is a necessary tool for my efforts. I take teaching new games seriously, so the two-handed or three-handed plays really help me suss out the potential questions I’m going to face from other players. Usually, though, I don’t two-hand an entire playthrough…I might do two or three rounds in a four-round game, especially in a game that has mid-game scoring elements or pre-round steps that evolve over the course of a longer play.

But intentionally two-handing a game all the way to the end? Playing a game from my collection, for fun, by myself, pretending to be multiple players? I’ll be honest: I never even considered it. These days, half the games I review have a dedicated solo mode that simulates a two-player game, or—in what is becoming my growing preference—automas, geared by difficulty level, that can be added to multiplayer games to simulate a higher player count.

And many of the board games I want to play have a dedicated app or an implementation on Board Game Arena or Yucata, so if I really want to play, say, Race for the Galaxy by myself, I don’t have to two-hand it…I can just pull out my iPad and play against three bots of varying difficulty.

But there is something to the idea of putting a board game on the table, handling the fancy components, and playing a game live. I already play a lot of video games and I already play a lot of app-based board games, so maybe that industry contact was onto something.

I looked in my game closet and considered a couple of games on the Maybe Pile. It was virgin territory for me, playing some of the games in my collection two-handed. The results surprised me.



The current game on the top of the Maybe Pile is Evacuation, the Vladimír Suchý title from a couple years ago. Evacuation is a game I enjoyed when I reviewed it on Meeple Mountain, but it’s a game that has only hit the table once since my review plays in late 2023 when I bought a copy at SPIEL Essen that fall.

Evacuation’s play mode bit is divisive in my circles. Some players only want to play Evacuation in Race Mode, the rule set that is the main play variant in the game’s rulebook, while others prefer Points Mode, where a full four rounds have to be played to determine a winner. But I think the game hasn’t come out as often as I expected because it never got an expansion (not that it needed one, since there are 3-4 game variants and mini expansions included in the base game) and Suchý fans I know prefer some of his other titles, such as Pulsar 2849 and Underwater Cities, over Evacuation.

I decided to embark on a two-handed game night with Evacuation in tow. I passed on the glass of wine, but bourbon was handy. One refresher of the rulebook and I had the rules down again—a compliment, for a game that I hadn’t played in more than two years—and setup was a breeze. I set up a Race Mode game for two players, and I was up and running in just a few minutes.

I went through the motions on my first few turns, in part because I hadn’t played in a while. Evacuation’s big hook is the game’s goal: over a series of rounds, players have to evacuate their population from the “Old World” and settle them on the “New World” on the other side of the main board’s map.

As it turns out, what players REALLY have to worry about is the production level of the game’s three main resources (food, energy, and steel) on both worlds, tracked with three small discs on each player’s personal board. You start the game with a fully-functioning economy, but then you have to break that economy and rebuild it through settlement on the other side of the board…and, fast. All the while, players have to manage an action point system that gets very expensive very fast, as players spend energy from one or both sides of their personal board to get everything done.

That race in the base game mode ends when a player has bumped their three resource trackers to space eight or higher, at which point some final calculations are done to come up with a winner. And since I was playing by myself, I took my time feeling out what I remember liking about the game.

And as I took my turns, trying to build up a profile of what each of the game’s two players should do on their turn, something weird happened…I noticed I was having fun.

Not just a little fun, mind you; I really enjoyed puzzling out the best way to optimize each player’s board. These medium-weight Euros, the ones that feature tech tracks or personal milestones, make playing a game two-handed very straightforward. So, I used the two different sets of technology tiles to drive each player’s strategy.

If a tech gave me production powers for, say, steel, I leaned hard in building more “prefab” steel factories. When a tech gave me an ongoing power that provided additional rewards when I built stadiums—in a funny nod to all things sports, Evacuation provides “happy faces” to players who build stadiums, and each player has to build three stadiums for the New World by the end of the game—I went even harder on building more stadiums for that player.

I tried my best to pretend I was the purple player (purple being my favorite color) and to pretend that the yellow player was my hated rival. Still, I always gave yellow the benefit of the doubt, taking chances to stab the purple player whenever I had the chance. When yellow was the first player at the end of a round (turn order changes only between rounds), I always tried to block purple from getting the best bonuses, the technology upgrades, or the symbols they might need to build new population centers in a future round.

It felt weird to snipe myself…but hey, I’m a two-hander now!

The game experience just got better and better. Whether it was purple’s turn or yellow’s turn, it was always MY turn, so downtime was…zero. I experienced all the highs of putting together a solid plan. I’m not the kind of player that usually suffers through “analysis paralysis”, or AP, so I took my time on some turns and breezed through others. But since no one was waiting on me to finish turns, I never felt the burden of other players looking over my shoulder.

Undoing an action? All good, it’s still my turn, since I’m the only one taking turns! I spent time feeling out how each tech upgrade would benefit future strategy, so it was fun to explore the game in a bunch of different ways, but all during the same game. Having the chance to take so many turns made all the systems click faster, since I had more space to get so much of it wrong.

I had so much fun that, when the Race Mode game was over (Justin beat Justin thanks to a slight edge in minimum production levels), I decided to run it back. For my second play, I did Evacuation in Points Mode, using the Advanced Action variant as well as personal goal cards, which made it even easier to focus both purple and yellow on their distinct strategies.

After setting up the second game, I switched out the nine tech tiles from each player board and swapped in a new set for each player. The Points Mode game went the full four rounds, with yellow taking home a much deserved victory and a greater appreciation for the system Suchý created here. By essentially playing the game four times—maybe it’s better to say that I got to explore the system from four different perspectives, rather than doing four complete plays—I finished with my highest set of production levels and took much better advantage of the advanced action system than in previous plays.

These two plays cemented my belief that Evacuation should stay in my collection. It also left me wondering why I had not tried to two-hand any other games in my collection before now.



As it turned out, that industry contact was onto something.

The ol’ two-hander might have legs. I consider myself lucky to have 3-4 game nights a week with friends and family, but I think I will complain a little less often that I cannot get some of my favorites to the table. Those plays of Evacuation only took about two hours in total, so time certainly was not an issue. I’ve got some favorites that are getting a little dusty on the shelf; carving out time for a two-hander once a month is very easy to do, especially on a weeknight where I want something to do while watching the NBA playoffs in the background.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not about to spend entire weekends intentionally trying to play a heavy strategy game by myself as two or three other players. But I’m open to salvaging plans to play with other humans by just playing a game by myself instead. On nights where I set something up and players bail last-minute, I’m now a bit more open to the idea of playing that game on my own instead of angrily putting the game away.

A new pile of games is now building, next to the Maybe Pile in the game closet. This pile, the Two-Handed Stack, now serves as an activity to attack solo, especially when the eyes have burned out from staring at a screen for too long.

My early-to-bed in-laws recently spent the weekend, and that meant I needed a couple of quieter activities I could mess with after everyone went to bed…enter the Stack. Sometimes, I want to show the kids new-to-them favorites from the adult game collection, but they get a better offer to hang out with their buddies for another round of Fortnite. All good…I’ve got the Stack. My pile of review copies runs out early each summer, and using review nights to tackle the Stack sounds good to me.

Old dog, new tricks? Sounds like my two-handed game nights for the next few months!

by Jasper Beatrix

Game design is a journey, and one without a clear path, nor a clear end. Everything you imagine at the beginning is full of passion and hope, but so much in flux. What you will make is an unknown distance in time and space from where you are now: in theme, in mechanics, in style. We sometimes feel that we have changed as much as the game.

Inkwell, for example, goes back to a long car ride during the muted holiday season of 2020. Who were you back then? Who were we? And what was this game?

2020

Julia & I, having previously worked together on Sacred Rites, had a chat during my long ride up from NYC to Syracuse, New York, primarily because I am terrible at long solo drives. The topic was, primarily, a game that was about turning pages.

The brainstorm phase is like fishing about for infinite fish. Would it be a game with actual books? Folded boards? Large cards that flip off a deck? We discussed word puzzles, roll-and-writes, worker placement, token placement, dice management, hand management. But there was this focus on the verb of play that helped guide us: Turning the page. But that brought so many questions of its own. Does the page turn permanently? Can it turn back? Does a player know what is coming? Can they travel a book as they would a player board? Or is it a one-way trip? Do they choose future pages? Or choose to stick with what they have?

But in the end we called our shots; after three hours I had reached my destination, and in the end, the game was not built from a hundred ideas. It was built from a few, whichever ones we felt like pursuing, even if it led to disaster. It isn’t the right phase to be right; it was the opportunity to be wrong. We were stumbling in the dark, and as usual, enjoying it.

2021

After the holidays I looked back at our notes and prepared a first shot at what we called ‘CODICES’, which was about old books and rolling dice, and we liked the clever feeling of sneaking the word ‘dice’ into the title.

The idea was straightforward, at least at the time: Two sets of dice would be rolled, with one representing the ink color, and the other a numerical value. Each player would be limited to playing their numerical value on a space of the chosen color or filling pre-designated color spaces. There were other mechanics around pleasing patrons with bonus scoring for certain numbers and collecting gold leaf to decorate the pages. And, at each player’s leisure, they could turn pages back and forth to score in different parts of their book.

This left us in that most cursed of playtesting situations, once we got others to play: The game was interesting but not fun. This is a drag, to acknowledge that it felt fresh, and unfortunately, not special. We had a string of such designs around this time, grasping at creativity in the wake of so much going on in the world around us.

We tried to iterate in large amounts in different directions. This meant trying a version where the board was only a grid and was filled in to build patterns from pattern cards, as if to form illustrations. We tried word puzzles and drawing games. We tried returning to numbers again and moving from collective dice use to dice gathering done privately by turn, with each player gathering dice and exchanging them as if to gather their supplies. We also messed with applying force on the players, either through the action of another player, or through some sort of counter that players could affect, like a flexible game timer.

What was disheartening about this, as it often is, is that each attempt felt, somehow, worse. The passion was replaced by a grind of ideas and attempts. Band-aids on band-aids. Its journey almost ended.

2022

The game languished here, and that is important to acknowledge. We felt like we were done making games, and there was this process of ‘putting it all away’ that was quite sad. Turning the page, as it were. We recycled a lot of boxes, papers, bits. More than we probably should have. Of this project, all that was left, perhaps accidentally, was the bag of ink dice, and a single printed page. Fossilized, like many projects end up.

2023

The spark that helped us form DVC is for another time, but in that came two lovely things: Restrictions, and passion. We wanted to get back to making things. New designs abounded, but two old cartons of prototypes were dug up and rehomed. In all that was that little fossil, the dice and the page, and it was like a bolt of lightning. Who was that? The person that made this? And there was a surprise: Likely falling from another prototype, we also found a single real metal cube, a gold one, in the box with what was left of the game. Huh. It got repackaged and placed on a shelf.

2024

With a baby on the way, there was a sense of urgency for our little crew of friends and family. A whirlwind of work. Old designs found in that same process, repackaged the year before, were all the rage. Here Lies. Karnak. Rosetta. And a mess of others that have not surfaced quite yet. I began to make myself a little package of projects to work on later, as a promise. I dug up old files and put them in the cloud.

It was about this time we also got a chance to play a prototype by Lewis Graye, who has used paint cubes to represent the gathering and mixing of colors. There was even a touch of the colors 'matching’ the paintings they were paid for, and the cubes were taken from available inkwells to use.

2025

About two weeks after our little one was born, I was up all night keeping an eye on him and digging through those old files I had set aside, squinting at my phone. I hadn’t really designed anything in months, I was so nervous about being a parent. Game design felt so small, so unimportant.

But, in that chair, something clicked. Or really, everything clicked.

Lewis was onto something.

Inkwell ultimately became a drafting game, but designing it was also a drafting game, as the process of making something is often a game itself.

I got together with Lewis, as well as long-time collaborator Joey Palluconi, who had some thoughts about asymmetrical inkwells after discussing the old design. We began writing on cards, and quickly had arrays of cube spaces opposite pages of abilities. Then a central mat of abilities and cubes mixed together. Then a reset timer controlled by player choices. There was a debate of the abilities themselves, and the desire to let them combine and build engines pleased players more than punished. Joey, Lewis, and many of us had recently liked cozy games, ones that let us converse while we ‘did the fun thing’. That, maybe, was the drive in the end. Meditation, reward, beauty, straightforwardness. Younger me would have scoffed. But now, all of us in our struggles, me as a new parent? Inkwell playtests became a safe space of quiet, even as a designer. The three of us held clandestine little meetings at larger game nights, sheltering in the project as the world swirled around us.

You see, I am used to some common questions about game design. Where do ideas come from? How long does it take? How do you know what works?

Inkwell was built on work by quite a few people, but more specifically, it drafted many of its ideas from itself over the course of years. The segments of this diary in bold show where parts of the final design first surfaced, even if ignored. It took time to realize which fit where, what matched, what did well. Each iteration was like a turn of the page, where we would get a score and try again.

This game, as a design, was a comfort to us after a long journey. We hope you can make some tea, play some lo-fi music, place cubes, and hopefully breathe with us and think of how incredible it is for anything to get to its destination: here and now.

With love,
Jono Naito-Tetro
DVC co-founder

by Jeff Grisenthwaite

There’s something magical about a good pub trivia night. You and your crew huddle together, heartily debate the answers, and marvel at each other’s unexpected pockets of deep knowledge. You groan together when you’re wrong and send up a loud cheer when that answer that you pulled out of your @$$ turns out to be right.

These are the feelings that I aimed to capture and bring home with OUTFOX the FOX.

My Brother is My Target Audience
I made this game for my brother, Mike.

Growing up, he was the popular jock, and I, as you might surmise, was the nerd.

When it comes to games, he certainly enjoys them but he doesn’t want a bunch of rules to get in the way of a good time. The games he plays are easy to learn, promote strong interaction among all the players, and set the stage for dramatic or hilarious moments. And his whole family really likes trivia.

I wanted to make a game that Mike would love. If I could make a trivia party game that BOTH of us loved, I knew it could be a hit.

Hold Your Horses
My first prototype was horse-racing themed and featured top 10 lists, such as:
• Countries with the largest populations
• Movies with the highest ratings on IMDb
• The most popular sports in the world

The game provided three of the ten answers in random order and asked each player to come up with an answer and write it on a mini-whiteboard. Then players could place horse-racing style bets for which of those answers would be highest in the top 10 list.

Early prototype that featured horse-race style betting that was far too complicated.
Players would get points for both:
• Winning their bet.
• Getting other players to bet on their written answer.

This initial prototype (like nearly all initial prototypes) had some big problems:
• It didn’t feel anything like pub trivia night due to the lack of teamwork.
• Betting was way too complicated.
• Each player struggled to individually come up with answers and place bets for questions that were outside their area of expertise.

But there were some seeds of fun in that problematic first prototype. If I could solve those problems, there could be a great game on the other side.

Get Foxy
My goals for my next iteration were:
1. Infuse a lot more teamwork
2. Make the trivia easier
3. Simplify the rules

I restructured the game into a one-vs-many format, in which each round pits the current question reader vs. everyone else.

I shrunk the question from top 10 lists to top five lists and provided all five answers. The question reader gets to pick from three different questions to give them a chance to pick a familiar subject. They secretly look at the top five answers on the back of the card and think up a fake answer.

All six answers (five real + one fake) are read aloud in a random order and written on mini-whiteboards. Then everyone else gets to team up to guess the order of the top five list and which of the answers is fake.

Letting everyone team up to answer the question accomplished two things quite well:
• It made tricky trivia questions easier by leveraging the wisdom of the crowd.
• It recreated the collaborative, sometimes raucous, atmosphere of a great pub trivia night.

For the theme, I swapped out horses for a fox to lean into the sly feeling that you get when you fool everyone else with your fake answer (now referred to as “The Fox”).

I ran a number of playtests at Break My Game, Protospiel Chicago, the Chicagoland Boardgame Designers and Playtesters Meetup, and with friends and extended family, including, of course, my brother. As I iterated and improved upon the game, I was finding that players were loving the lively team debates to rank the top five lists, and they found particular joy in coming up with fake answers that tricked all their friends.

My niece, Chloe, was totally right about this one. We should have listened to her!
It was time to start showing my prototype to the world.

Contest Winner
I entered the game in a design contest from The Board Game Workshop. At the time, it was called Fox Five. Here’s my sell sheet and pitch video:

The sell sheet for my design contest submission.
Youtube VideoMy 2-minute overview video for the design contest submission.
Happily, my game won first place for the light game category. Even better, the prize for the winning entries was the chance to speed pitch in front of several publishers, including Curt Covert, the owner of Smirk & Dagger.

Curt immediately saw potential for the game, and we started discussing what would need to be true for it to be published by Smirk & Dagger.

Working with Smirk & Dagger
Curt’s biggest piece of feedback was that we should replace many of the questions that are more “things you learn in school” with questions that are more likely to incite amusing debates and hilarious moments for the players. This led to questions like:
• Gross things that the most people admit to doing in public
• Funniest English words according to a scientific study
• The most boring things in life

Additionally, we collaborated to expand the number of questions to 250, so that you could play many, many games with fresh questions each time. Finally, we refined the scoring to simplify the rules and ensure that everyone has a chance to come back from behind.

The published components of OUTFOX the FOX are great. It packs a lot of fun into a small box!
By my reckoning, the last great trivia game we had was Wits & Wagers by Dominic Crapuchettes, released over 20 years ago. We’re way past due for a new trivia game to test our knowledge and provide the kind of atmosphere to make us cheer, groan and laugh with our friends.

My hope is that OUTFOX the FOX can be this game for the world. I want everyone to be able to experience the joy of a great pub trivia night in the comfort of their own homes.

And I want to thank my brother for being the inspiration to make that happen!

by Steph Hodge

A heavy hitter today with these new releases

[imageid=6268503 medium rep]▪️ Coming this May we can expect to see The Queen's Dilemma released by Horrible Guild. Many of you have played or heard of The King's Dilemma, which was the first legacy game set in the Kingdom of Ankist. The Queen's Dilemma is a follow-up sequel set hundreds of years later. It will use an improved card system and tell a whole new story through a legacy campaign.

From the newsletter:


▪️ The Last Spell: The Board Game is a new release based on the Ishtar Games' video game published in English by Ares Games. This game was successfully funded back in 2023 on Kickstarter from Tabula Games and has been fulfilled to backers and is now available for sale.

This is a cooperative tower defense campaign game, but you can play one-off missions as well.

From BGG:



▪️ Mayfair Games joined forces with Alion – by Dr Ø to exlusively release Recall in the United States. Today is the scheduled retail release date, so you should be able to acquire it! This was a very popular title at BGG.CON Fall 2025 after its Spiel release.

Recall is brought to you by the designers of Revive (Helge Meissner, Kristian Amundsen Østby, Kjetil Svendsen, Anna Wermlund). The games have similar mechanics in a few ways, but the overall gameplay and feeling is completely different. For those who love crunchy Euros, you are in luck for this US release.

From BGG:

by Ellie Dix

The Theme
My granny made a medallion patter green and pink bargello cushion in the 1980s. She had it in her granny flat, where I often escaped to during my childhood. A few years ago, I realised I was spending too much time on my computer. Double-screening in the evenings. Working too much. So, I decided to take myself in hand and find a hobby that would pull me away from the screen. I came across a bargello-style craft kit to make a cushion, and the moment I saw it, I felt immediately drawn. It was like my granny guiding me towards it.

What started as one cushion has become something of an obsession. It was only a matter of time before this world crept into my game design.

Me, with a bargello cushion I made...
Mechanical Inspiration
But Threadeddidn’t start to take shape until I came across one particular component. I played Shogun and fell completely in love with the cube tower. It's a remarkable piece of kit - tactile, unpredictable, genuinely exciting - and yet it feels like a component that doesn't appear in nearly enough games. I knew I wanted to scratch that itch. The question was: what would the cube tower be doing?

The answer came quite naturally once I had the theme in mind. The tower would be a thread factory. Whatever comes out of the tower on any given turn represents the over-production - the threads that spill off the factory floor and become available. You can't predict exactly what you'll get. You just load it up and see what emerges.

The second idea arrived alongside it: an ordered worker placement system. Each worker carries a number, and those numbers change from round to round. When a location is resolved, the worker with the lowest number goes first. The interesting tension comes from decision-making at placement. You might choose to assign a higher number to the Workshop, if you're willing to gamble on going later in order to take a tapestry card further down the display row. High risk, potentially high reward.

The workers, who’s numbered days were numbered.
When Good Ideas Don't Survive
In honesty, the original version of the ordered worker placement system was a bit of a mess.

The drafting process had three nested rules about which numbers you were allowed to take and in what order. It was involved, fiddly, and crucially it didn't generate enough interesting decisions to justify all that overhead. The system as a whole was too clunky for the weight of game I was making and for the experience I was trying to craft. Playtesters were confused and simultaneously overwhelmed and underwhelmed. Overwhelmed by the amount of business and rules related to the numbered workers and underwhelmed by the decision space it afforded.

So, I cut it. In its place came a much simpler worker placement system: you queue at each location, and earlier arrivals have the benefit when the location resolves. The interesting decisions about timing are still there, just hopefully presented without the administrative burden.

Can you spot what made it and what didn’t?
I'll confess there's a version of that numbered system rattling around in my head where the timing of when your worker activates is the central puzzle. It just wasn't right for this game.

As many designers often find – a core part of the original design for a game often doesn't survive the development process. The cube tower made it. The ordered workers mechanism didn't. It’s sometimes hard to abandon core ideas from the original design, but I’m constantly reminded that it’s important to do so.

The Puzzle
What has never changed, from the very first prototype to the published version, is the core puzzle. It has two interlocking layers.
The first is the needle puzzle. How do I arrange the threads on my needle so the right colours become available at exactly the right moment? You add threads only to the ends of your needle. You can only remove from the ends. Everything in the middle is locked in by what's around it. Getting your threads into the wrong order is punishing, and planning ahead is deeply satisfying when it comes off.

The needle (grey foam object, with cubes), tested here in two-part form!
In the early versions, there was no basket, which give players additional storage and some flexibility to manage threads in the final version. Instead, your needle might hold twenty threads at once, and having one thread in the wrong position could be genuinely crippling. Some playtesters had a pretty bad experience of the game because they couldn’t manage the necessary advance planning with the timing of taking perfect tapestry cards. I experimented with various ways to ease the problem: allowing free discards so you could jettison a rogue thread from the middle of a promising sequence; shortening and splitting the needle into two parts that you could build on either side of; and a personal scraps pile that you could store things in, but that other players could raid. Eventually the needle shrunk and the personal basket found its shape.

A purse is a sort of like a small personal basket? Though this is more helpful for shops than thread.
The second layer is the scoring puzzle. Commission cards reward you for completing tapestries that meet their criteria. You can approach this either way: find commissions that complement each other and then hunt for tapestries to satisfy them, or take tapestry cards that appeal and work backwards to find commissions that reward your collection. Or of course, you can do a bit of both. The tapestry cards and commission cards themselves haven't changed since the first prototype.

Tapestry and commission cards, in prototype and final form.
Shops and Destinations
The ordering of the shops (destinations for workers) shifted several times during development.

In earlier versions, the Bargain Box appeared before the Thread Shop. The logic was transparent: everything left in the thread shop at the end of a round would be added to the cube tower, so players knew exactly what they'd be competing over. It felt fair. But it removed the mystery, and with it, some of the tension and excitement. Now the Bargain Box comes after, you don't quite know what the tower will produce, and that uncertainty makes every trip to it feel like an event.

One destination was added relatively late in development: a space that lets players pay to jump the queue at any of the other shops. It arrived because playtesting revealed that players sometimes felt their final workers had no good home. Once that space existed, that feeling disappeared. A small addition, but it made the whole system breathe better.

Working with Osprey
I pitched Threaded to Osprey three times. They passed twice.

Both times, they passed with real generosity - clear, specific feedback about what wasn't working, and an open door to resubmit if I could address it. Some of the mechanical changes in the game exist because of those conversations. It's normal to feel the sting of a rejection, but if a publisher has taken the time to play your game and tell you precisely what's not landing, the only sensible response is to take that seriously and ask if they'd be willing to look again.

The third time, they signed the game. And since signing, they've been wonderful to work with. The development and production process has felt collaborative and considered. They've helped my original design to shine through rather than reshape it into something else.

Full Circle
My latest Bargello project was footstool I made for my mum - a thatched design that echoes the colours of her William Morris curtains. It takes patience and planning and you have to think about what goes where before you commit the needle.

That's Threaded, really. The threads on your needle, the tapestries on the table, the commissions in your hand - all of it asking you to think three moves ahead, to hold your plan loosely enough to adapt, and to feel the particular satisfaction of a sequence coming together just as you intended.

My granny would have enjoyed it, I think.

by Justin Bell

“Daddy, can we play Thunder Road: Vendetta?”

One of the rules we have here at Casa de Bell is absolute: if the kids want to play a game from the adult game closet, I always say yes. (There’s only one game off-limits around here: Voidfall. That’s because I’m not teaching it…yet.)

One of the beauties of having kids who are now 12 and 9 is that many of the games in the adult game closet are drifting into the family game closet. As the kids get older, it’s been such a joy introducing new concepts and mechanics that were a bit dense even two or three years ago.

The nine-year-old was the one asking about Thunder Road: Vendetta. He was interested for two main reasons: first, he wanted to play the base game with the Carnival of Chaos expansion, because he loves the arena-style nature of that expansion map.

The second reason is why he really wanted to play: my boy was hoping to have another chance to beat down his dad.

In our first play of Carnival of Chaos, he acquired a “Super-Weapon” called Li’l Sammy, then used said Super-Weapon to shoot down my chopper—normally, choppers are invulnerable—on his way to a dominant victory where he wiped out all my cars.

(Yes, TR:V superfans, you are correct—there is a different scoring system in Carnival of Chaos, tied to “scrap”, the in-game cash that can be earned for damaging opponents. However, my son and I are simple with our approach to this game—the score is all about car kills. He won that first matchup three eliminations to one.)

After his victory, my son spent the next few days gloating about his victory.

At dinner: “Daddy, can you pass me…the Li’l Sammy?”
Before bed: “Hopefully you can beat other players to make up for your loss to me in Thunder Road.”
Walking to school: “I kinda want to play Thunder Road again to see if I can get the Li’l Sammy card. It was so cool shooting down your chopper.”

And on and on. For better or worse, my kids like variety; over the next few weeks, they kept asking to play other games. Weeks turned into months, and while I had the chance to play Thunder Road: Vendetta with other adults during that timeframe, I didn’t break out the expansion again until last week. That’s when my son walked into the game closet, saw the handsome red all-in Maximum Chrome edition copy of Thunder Road, and remembered Li’l Sammy.

“Daddy, can we play Thunder Road: Vendetta? Hopefully, I can get Li’l Sammy again.”

***

After I finished up the work day, I set up the Thunder Road: Vendetta base game with Carnival of Chaos on our kitchen table.

I insist upon using the Choppe Shoppe expansion content. That’s because I—well, now, both my son and I—love using the crew leaders and the car upgrades. The leaders use alternate “command boards”, the dashboard that accommodates each round’s extra die to trigger powers like nitro or the chopper, with asymmetric powers.

My son selected Bumpo the Clown as his crew leader for this play, a spooky-looking character who reminds me of Sweet Tooth from the Twisted Metal car combat games on PlayStation. Bumpo’s power is fine—he can reroll the direction die when his cars move in a slam—but his command board includes the Bump power, which triggers on 6s and allows Bumpo to move the other car on the first slam that turn, even if Bumpo has the smaller car in that slam.

I went with Machine Gun Joe, Esq. to lead my crew. Joe has a somewhat overpowered ability (at least, in the eyes of the nine-year-old, who has a tendency to call everything “OP” if it is not his own powers) to reroll the shoot die once during every attack action.

While I love the crew leaders, the best part about the Choppe Shoppe expansion is the car upgrades. During setup, each of a player’s three cars get outfitted with their own individual powers. For this game, I had a couple of simple upgrades—the Boost Switch, which gave me a +1 on movement, and the Heavy Frame, which grants the assigned car an extra damage slot (three slots instead of the normal two).

But I also had the Onboard Computer, which allowed me to ignore the effects of damage tokens when I assigned it to my large car (The large car is always the one that takes the most damage). So while I would still take damage during the game, it wouldn’t turn ugly, like things tend to do during a Skid or a Blast-Off.

With setup complete, we got rolling. The way the Terrordome (whoops, “Carnival of Chaos”) works, players drive their cars from three different entry-point track pieces outside the arena directly inside, then spend the game navigating pop-up hazards in the form of traps known as “Killer Pillars” that can eliminate cars through various game effects.

Of course, there are other hazards like those pesky opposing cars bent on using all manner of Super-Weapons and their Choppe Shoppe upgrades to take you out. There are a bunch of ways to get wiped out in the ring, and in my experience, games of Carnival of Chaos are a little quicker than the base game, especially at higher player counts.

Thanks to six Super-Weapon tokens scattered around the board, players are always gunning for the best stuff in the game. And while both my son and I were hoping Li’l Sammy would show up so that we could build on its legend, both of us drew cards that represented a bunch of fun toys that we tried to use to take each other out.

Unfortunately for my son, I got my hands on the Super-Weapon goodies first. Sometimes, love is a beatdown.

***

My first Super-Weapon pickup was the BFG…no, not that one. Here, the Big Friendly Gun (complete with a picture of what looks like a big chain gun with a smiley-face balloon on top) deals an extra face-down damage token each time the gun’s owner shoots and hits. I used that to deal two damage to my boy’s small car (the Doom Buggy) on a single turn, making it inoperable.

The Big Friendly Gun made more friends later in the game, when I used it to shut down my son’s medium car, the Avenger. My boy fought back. He grabbed a Super-Weapon token that became the Laser Kebab, which can shoot from the front arc of its assigned car any number of spaces, not just the one-space range of spaces directly in a car’s front arc. He poked holes in two of my cars the next two times he had the chance during his turns from across the arena. Damage, yes, but no inoperable status plays or eliminations.

Slams of inoperable cars into Killer Pillars and a Blast Off that shot one of his cars into the arena walls got me to a place where I was running a 3-on-1 break for the rest of the game. (Thunder Road: Vendetta vets, be honest: isn’t it a blast to watch what happens during a Stunt Die roll of a Blast Off? Goodness gracious, it’s hard to beat those moments in any game!)

Later, I picked up the Auto-Cannon for one of my cars, which lets a player shoot, move, then shoot again. My final Super-Weapon pick-up was the Torsion Dynamo, which removes a car’s guns but guarantees that the opposing car always moves in a slam. (Putting the Dynamo on my small Doom Buggy made that puppy a force!)

None of that mattered though…because as it turned out, I found an opportunity to take out my son’s last car with flair, using maybe my favorite elimination method in the game.

On my final turn, I was able to slam my son’s final car, the Eliminator, forward one space…right into the same space as his chopper, which he had tried and failed to use on his previous turn to take out my medium-sized Avenger.

Any car that ends its turn in the same space as any chopper is automatically eliminated. My son grew up in that final moment, and took his defeat like a man, ending our run of chaos (ahem, Chaos, with a capital C), with daddy taking home a three-to-nothing victory.

Even though Li’l Sammy never reared its ugly head, my son and I had a blast. Chucking those dice and talking a little smack and kitting out our cars and trying, but failing, to use our choppers, nicknamed “Blue Thunder” and “Airwolf” to wipe each opposing set of cars off the grid…it was all kinds of fun, win or lose.

I love playing games with the kids. I’m loving the chances I have now to get in more plays of the games I prefer, creating more memories along the way. And, I don’t mind handing out the occasional beatdown, especially when I can avenge an earlier loss.

That’s because I know what’s coming. The kids love wiping the floor with daddy from time to time, and giving them more chances just means playing more board games.

by Rosco Schock

The design that became The Golden Blade was the first game I ever designed, and the first iteration of it was way back in the autumn of 2017. I should also be clear that I didn’t set out to design a card game version of Diplomacy; that just kind of happened along the way. I hope you will enjoy this story of how we ended up there.

Background
It might be helpful to first explain the original Diplomacy. Diplomacy was first self-published in 1959 and is a war game that contains almost no random elements. Each player is a Great Power in Europe prior to World War I, with the ultimate goal of controlling a majority of territories known as “Supply Centers” to win. Players must first negotiate with each other during a turn before secretly writing the Orders for their units. All the negotiations between players are non-binding, and it has a reputation as a “friendship killer” when one player betrays another to win. It was frequently advertised as John F Kennedy’s and Henry Kissinger’s favorite game. Diplomacy was inducted into the BGG Hall of Fame in 2025.

Origination
At this point in time, I had never played (or heard of, to be honest) Diplomacy. Although I had been playing a lot of the BGG Top 100 games for a few years, I never tried to design one all by myself… except for that one time in 2013 that I made a set of cards for some vague concept to fix a game we were playing that had people building a city with power level cards of 1/2/3. Fast forward to 2017, when a friend invited me to a monthly board game play testing event.

Luckily, I remembered that I had this set of cards at home in a box. The 1/2/3 cards I uncovered came in three different types of city aspects, and the idea was something along the lines of upgrading your 1s to 2s to 3s or maybe drawing them randomly, but the 3s were rare, and the 1s were common with the 2s in between. (Sadly, these city cards are lost to time, as is the game that they were meant to be a fix for.)

First Version
With the play testing event rapidly approaching, the pressure was on. I needed a game to test with friends before I embarrassed myself in public. I eventually settled on the concept that you built your power such that the first investment got you to power level 1, two more to get to power level 2, and three more to get to power level 3. This power grid concept in the game has never changed. The first person to reach power level 3 in any area is the winner.

As you can see in the image, I moved away from a city, and it became focused on being a country that was trying to win a military, political, or financial victory. Although I wasn’t cognizant of it at the time, looking back, I can see the shadow of influence in this game from 7 Wonders. The idea that your military power level only affected your left and right neighbors.

The missing piece was how to affect your neighbors and how to build your power. I don’t remember specifically, but cards that affect your hand or let your draw cards seem obvious – as well as ones that let you build faster or attack your enemies. Below are the first set of action cards. Looking at the structure of these cards, I can clearly see the influence of decades spent playing Magic: The Gathering. Type-specific cards and type-specific counters feel very natural in this context. Each turn, players would secretly choose one of these actions to play against their left-hand neighbor and one to play against their right-hand neighbor.

One of the pieces of the design that I’m most proud of is the action validity system. I had a thought early on that you can’t bring a knife to a gun fight. So what if you always had access to all your actions, but you were limited by your power level and the power level of that neighbor? What this means in practice is that if you have a power level 1 military, you can’t play military (red actions above) actions against a neighbor with a level 2+ military. Equal is okay, but if they are higher, you lose access to those actions on this side this turn. Even more so, this is separately true for all three areas of influence. Maybe you can’t play military cards on your right, but could still play political or financial actions there, and maybe you can still play military actions on your left.

Finally, I had a game to test. I was able to grab three friends for an impromptu test at my house, and the game played really well, especially given that this was the very first play test. Time to embarrass myself publicly!

Into the Deep End
The first public play test actually went well, and players seemed to enjoy it. My friend asked me if I had an Unpub (a play testing organization) slot for PAX Unplugged. I had no idea what any of this meant, but I was ready to dive in headfirst. I went home and bought a ticket to PAXU, which luckily is only an hour train ride from where I was living. Steven Cole of Escape Velocity Games had posted on Twitter that he was taking pitches at PAXU, so I set up a meeting. Unpub was all booked up, but we met after hours, and I showed him my game with all the pride of my first child. Steven thought it had some potential but would need some changes to fit his product line. More importantly, he told me that he ran a monthly play testing group in Baltimore.

I now had access to lots of play testing to improve my game, and when Unpub Prime was scheduled for March 2018, I signed up for several testing blocks. Play testing with the public is a lot different than play testing with other designers. Throughout the weekend, players kept commenting that the game was kind of like Diplomacy. Later, while I was waiting for testers and talking to my friend (the one who launched me down this rabbit hole), someone walked by and asked about my game. I explained how it worked, and his comment was, “Oh, so basically Diplomacy, the card game. I remember someone asking me to design a version of that.” After he walked away, my friend said “Do you know who that was?” I was oblivious. He was flabbergasted. “That was Geoff Engelstein!” (designer of Space Cadets, Super-Skill Pinball and many more) Later on that weekend, I went up to him to see if he could remember who had asked him to create that design. He eventually remembered that it was Zev Shlasinger (of Z-Man and WizKids fame and currently running Play to Z Games).

Long Slow Wait
As I continued to test the game, I began to introduce it explicitly as Diplomacy: The Card Game. Most players saw a lot of the similarities, but one play testing friend from the Baltimore group named Jeff suggested that I was missing something. There wasn’t a way to betray other players. He had a point. I set off to design another set of three actions that required adjacent players to cooperate, or their action on that side did nothing. Besides the loss of the action you were banking on, there is also the opportunity to be attacked directly via your hand or your power levels.I also decided that these cards should be able to be played regardless of your power levels, since they require you to be vulnerable. Below is the first set of what later became the Promise cards:

Another card that changed during this time, as a version of Trade Pact moved out of financial and into the backstabbing set, was that I added a new card called Resupply to the financial set. Despite a card game already implying the importance of hand management, lots of players were being overzealous with University (Proliferation in the final version) and ending up card-locked. While Resupply only draws you one card, it also can never be blocked, so it can be a good choice if you think this opponent might try to play a blocking card this turn. It also lets you start rebuilding your hand.

One thing that became clear while testing – This game plays like a combination of Rock, Paper Scissors and a bluffing game, but in three dimensions at the same time. What actions does this player have access to? Which one are they likely to choose? Which side are they likely to play it on? What if THEY know that YOU know that is what you should do for an optimal strategy? In my experience, players generally have this same epiphany about halfway through their first game, and it usually goes something like “Ahhh, I get it now. I’ve made so many poor decisions. There are so many things I will do differently next time!” This is one of my favorite things when demoing this game.

I now had an improved and more Diplomacy-like game, and I was off to ProtoATL in 2019 (another Protospiel type testing event in Atlanta). One of the main reasons I wanted to attend was that Zev (with WizKids at the time) was also going to be in attendance. I met up with him and recounted my conversation with Geoff, and he remembered that it had been someone inside Wizards of the Coast (part of Hasbro) who had reached out to him and asked him to source or create a card game version of Diplomacy. This was incredibly exciting because if Wizards were already looking for this game, that would be one less hurdle to getting it published. He asked me to write up a document describing what was the same (familiar onboarding) and what was different (unique selling points). I also realized while talking with him that if I was going to keep calling it Diplomacy: The Card Game, then I needed to make it look more and more like the original. Before I sent him my document, I moved to a military, political, and naval victory as the goal. Blue made more sense as the Navy so the colors got shuffled around, too. If you are not familiar with the original, you control Army units and Fleet units around Europe as you compete for the win. I felt that Votes still captured the political capital you use during your negotiations with other players as you jockey for power.

I had a design where the flavor more closely aligned with the original. I came up with a list of what I thought best positioned the game for success: This is what I sent to Zev:



Zev sent the information along to his contact and we waited. Well, to be fair, it was probably just me. I’m sure he had far more important things on his mind than this. I would see Zev at conventions like Origins or PAXU and ask if he had heard anything, but he hadn’t. I do remain extremely grateful for the time and effort he spent on my behalf to get this game published. While my wait continued, the world stopped. Covid interrupted everything.

A New Hope
In 2023, it was announced that Renegade was releasing a new edition of Diplomacy. I immediately emailed Dan Bojanowski at Renegade and asked if they might be interested in a card game version. I knew that they weren’t going to have a booth at Origins, but suggested meeting up to demo it to anyone in attendance. He got back to me the next day, and we set up a time for me to demo it to Andrew Lupp (VP of Sales) and Thomas Haver (former World Champion and all around Diplomacy advocate/judge/tournament runner). Incidentally, and unknown to me at the time, Thomas was already working as a designer and developer of Diplomacy: Era of Empire, which is a re-imaging of Colonial Diplomacy.

We met at Origins and played a full three-player game. They both thought it had a lot of potential, and Thomas in particular wanted to play it with other Diplomacy players in his network. So I gave them my only copy and hoped for the best. This was a very exciting step forward in the process, and it was great to have an internal champion for the game in Thomas. He has always believed in this game from the beginning, and it would never have been made without his help.

In the fall of 2023, Thomas asked for a digital version to help expand his ability to test with other players. I hopped onto Screentop.gg and created a 3-4 player room and a larger one that would accommodate up to 5-7. However, things stalled a little bit after this. I know Renegade was working on Era of Empire as well, and I’m sure there was some discussion around how much appetite the community might have for new Diplomacy titles. The original has remained a classic for over 60 years for a reason, and the last thing anyone wanted was for any of these new titles to feel like a cash grab.

Dan reached back out in May 2024 and said they were internally discussing a Diplomacy card game again and wanted to run an online test. I did some cleanup of my digital Screentop implementations and was ready to go. In July 2024, we set up a play test with four people internal to Renegade. The playtests went great, and three days later, Dan informed me that they wanted to move forward. However, they first needed to get approval from Hasbro. The game was approved, and I couldn’t have been more excited! However, Hasbro had one request: The game needs to play 2-7 players because all the other Diplomacy titles have a two-player variant.

Home Stretch
Umm, how do you create a two-player game based on negotiation? The two-player variant for the original turns the game into a bidding game where players bid to create their initial positions on the map. One thing I decided from the start was that I wanted to find a way to make the two-player experience resemble the 3+ player experience as much as possible. Since negotiation was out, how do I create the same tension with only one neighbor? Additionally, I’d lost the ability to have players have different access to actions on the left versus the right since you have only one opponent. I decided that what if, instead of a single “conflict” being resolved on each side, players now had to fight two battles on each front? What action is on what side, and the order they resolve in, could create a space for a lot of mind games and second guessing. I had an initial version by December, but was still making tweaks. The big question was whether players were forced to commit each action to a single battle, or were they allowed to respond with either action in response or something else. I tried different versions of these, but they felt too complicated or too obvious. I finally settled on a system where each player had to commit to a vanguard action on their left, and they then “attack” either action their opponent had on this side. This added more bluffing and limited the complete control players had before. Below is the final version:

I created a two-player Screentop room so others could start testing this variant, and then Thomas and I were able to play it again at GAMA 2025. He liked what it was doing and thought we could pull in the France vs Austria name for this variant, which is already the name of a two-player variant in the original Diplomacy. It was also around this time that I got introduced to Marcus Burchers, who runs internal play testing for Renegade. We started running play tests at all player counts using Screentop and collecting feedback.

As we continued testing, one thing that became clear pretty quickly was that the two-player version needed some adjustments. Being only a few months old, it makes sense that it needed more development. While it should be clear that the Promise cards aren’t used with two players, I also chose to remove Invasion (later Stab) for a new card that blocked either type of action but came with a drawback. Part of this was so that there was a blocking card in all three areas, and I also wanted to see what cost players were willing to pay to block anything. As we started receiving feedback, one play tester had an interesting idea: what if Resupply drew cards equal to your power level for Fleets instead of just one? This was quite interesting, but I knew that would imbalance Resupply in the base game, so Convoy was born as the second action card that is swapped out for two-player games. Additionally, I had always thought that Espionage was slightly underpowered, and it dawned on me that this was the fix. It now lets you swap based on your Army power level, and it does that for all player counts. The two-player game was now feeling great.

Next up was fixing the rulebook. Like most designers, writing rulebooks is not my idea of fun nor my greatest skill. However, we all know how a bad rulebook can ruin a good game, so we set out to make it as good as possible. Additionally, Thomas was key in moving the flavor of the game to be maximally aligned with the original. We wanted seasoned Diplomacy players to immediately grok things as much as possible. Actions became Orders. Resources became Units. Deploy became Build. Destroy became Disband. Order cards were renamed to capture flavor. Then we started through at least 12 iterations of full document edits on the rulebook. Most of the rules of the game are very straightforward, but there are a few that can cause a bit of confusion, so we refined them often to get to the most concise and clear verbiage we could.

We also had to start making some component changes to keep the price point and box size that was needed. Initially, I used standard cards for the Units, but we had to move to half-size cards to lower costs and weight. Part of this is that to support a full seven player game, there needs to be quite a lot of the Unit cards so players don’t run out. If you look back to the original prototype, you’ll see that I used to have thin player boards to make the grid for each player's power grid. Those would be way too big to fit in any box. I worked back and forth with Dan a lot before we found the solution. Players now have six chipboard tokens that make the layout on the left and top to create the rows and columns of the power grid without explicitly having them designated. See below:

Final Thoughts
It has been a dream come true having this design get published, but it has been even more fulfilling watching people react to it in person. Thomas and I were at Battlefront: Dayton in the fall of 2025, and we ran the first-ever Diplomacy triathlon with The Golden Blade being the final game. I was running a pre-production copy, so no one in the group had ever played before. It was quite an exciting game. In the first two turns, players completely ganged up on the one very strong player and totally destroyed his hand and power grid. However, after that, they were all much more focused on their own plans. In the end, this player used Proliferate to claim a victory in the game on the last turn. That player ended up tied in the Diplomacy Triathlon event, which had to resort to a second tiebreakers to determine a champion. It was that close! Everyone involved had a great time.

Diplomacy: The Golden Blade even won the Ignis Award for best new game at the event! I’m looking forward to running demos and tournaments at major conventions this year. Come and join me and try this new addition to the storied Diplomacy franchise.

by Sandro Blasich

I've been designing board games for more than 10 years but it all started from fun. I had an opportunity to go to SPIEL Essen and I went and I felt like a kid entering the chocolate factory. I was completely blown away. I was there with a couple of guys that pitched their board games. So, I thought if they can do it, why shouldn't I at least try it too.

Thus I started designing more and more and I finished a board game that I wanted to pitch at Essen. That was in 2017. I had lots of meetings but I had no success. In my opinion, I had good games but nobody was interested enough to publish them. Little by little, I started to loose my enthusiasm for designing games and I told myself that I needed to take a break from game design but I couldn't, new ideas just came to me all the time.

Then, I designed a game just for myself. A friend saw it and he said that I have an excellent game. I didn't plan to pitch it but finally I did it and I signed the contract. However, it took several years for that game to be published (you will read about that game in my next designer diary).

Meanwile, a design group was organized in my hometown and we also had a panel discussion. That's where I met Vedran and we went together on the next SPIEL Essen. I didn't know that he was planning to open a publishing house. Then I showed him my prototype for Choconnect and he liked it. In 2024, he opened the publishing house Snovid Games and it debuted at SPIEL Essen with three games: Galebari, To be continued.. and my game Choconnect.

So, how did I come up with Choconnect? I often play board games with my two kids. One day we played the game Labyrinth and it crossed my mind that that game has an interesting mechanic which is very rarely used. Usually, I start with the mechanics and then I add a suitable theme when I design my board games. I was thinking what to do with that mechanic from Labyrinth. So, I thought of something like Connect 4 but different so that you put tiles instead of chips on all sides of the board and then you slide it so that everything changes all the time which means that you need to think ahead. And that's how the idea for Choconnect was born.

As the game is very abstract I needed to find a suitable theme and I though of my first time at SPIEL Essen and how I felt like a kid in a chocolate factory so a box of chocolates came to my mind. When I told my wife about that she happily approved since she's a proper chocoholic.

Choconnect is an abstract tile laying/pushing game where you are in the role of a chocolatier and you want to arrange chocolates in the best possible way. In Choconnect, you draw randomly a tile from the cloth bag (there are three different types of tiles) and you put it on the board. But the twist is that you can put a tile only on the outer part of the board and if there is already a tile you slide that other tile but it cannot go over the board. You want to make a line of chocolate tiles of the same type either orthogonally or diagonally. It depends on the type of chocolates (three in a row for dark chocolate, four in a row for milk chocolate and five in a row for white chocolate). Whoever succeeds in creating the line first wins the game.

Maja Benčić made a great job with the illustrations and graphic design so you have to be careful not to confuse my board game with an actual box of chocolates. Thank you Maja.

by Steph Hodge

This is the time for 2-player games! I have noticed a bunch of 2-player games hitting the scene in the past several years. I know I play a lot of 2-player games and am always on the lookout. Here are just a few more of those releases coming soon.

▪️ Bitewing Games (Zoo Vadis, Cascadero) has three new titles coming out that are for 2-players, which are part of their Mythos series! Bitewing Games has produced a ton of recent games from deisnger Reiner Knizia (Ra, The Quest for El Dorado... the list goes on forever), so I will start with the sharing about the new Collector's Edition of Ichor. [imageid=8195971 medium rep]
If you aren't familiar with the game, you are either choosing to battle as the Greek Gods or as the Greek Monsters. All of the figures have unique abilities, and you are trying to get all of your tokens onto the board before the other player.

About the new collector's edition:


▪️ Azure caught my eye because it has the wonderful artwork by Kwanchai Moriya (Food Chain Magnate, Under Falling Skies). Azure is an area control game where you want to advance on your track and reach the end before the other player. It will take about 20 minutes to play and has double-sided boards to keep the variety for replayability. More on Azure:




▪️ The third game I wanted to share is Moytura. This game can be played either competitively or cooperatively, which is interesting. I always love the option for cooperative mode. Moytura, is a battle for control of ancient Ireland over two eras. The game will be 45 minutes.

From the BGG game page:


▪️ You can also check out Iliad from the same 2-player series and designed by Reiner Knizia. This is also restocked with the other titles on the list. This was the first game of the 2-player Mythos series.

In Iliad, you will either be Hector of the Trojans or Achilles of the Greeks and strive to win the favor of the Gods by placing tiles and taking control of the grid.

More from the BGG page:

by Justin Bell

Yep, I get it—two new interview series across back-to-back weeks! (Don’t worry, I’ll be back to sharing random musings with next week’s column.)

I love the work that our team here at BGG puts into Designer Diaries, much of which is driven by the game designers themselves. I especially love reading Designer Diaries after I have played a game that recently got the Diary treatment, to get a sense of why the designers made certain choices during the journey from concept to final production.

In that spirit, I will conduct interviews with the people involved with every other part of the development cycle. A great deal of work goes into making a board game, well beyond just the game’s design. The business of tabletop is fascinating to me, so much so that I count more people behind the scenes (marketing, art, production) as a part of my network than designers, fellow content creators, and gamers. I still meet fans who give the lion’s share of the credit to a game designer for a product making it to market, without realizing how many people collaborate to make those dreams a reality…even in cases where a designer self-publishes a game. It’s quite rare that a game makes it all the way to your hands when only one or two people were involved. It takes a village!

So, let’s talk marketing. Our inaugural piece on the marketing process of prepping a tabletop game features Eveline Foubert, the Marketing & Events Manager at Mighty Boards. I met Eveline a few years ago at a show and we hit it off right away, mainly because of her willingness to talk smack almost nonstop.

We recently had a back-and-forth online, about Eveline’s background, the core audience for Mighty Boards titles, and the upcoming campaign for Yotei, launching on crowdfunding this week.



—----

Justin Bell (JB): I’m always curious to learn how people even find a marketing job in tabletop. How did you get your start with Mighty Boards?

Eveline Foubert (EF): Well actually, I scored my first marketing and PR job in the video game industry about 12 years ago. I was an avid Borderlands gamer, dressed up as CL4P-TP at a local expo (yes, there are photos), and ran into the marketing director of 2K Games! He loved the cosplay so much that we started chatting and eventually he offered me my first internship. From there, I eventually moved on to Electronic Arts, where I worked for a year or two before taking a short break from games. I travelled a bit, worked in the affiliate marketing and tech industry for a while, and eventually ended up in Malta. Five years ago, a mutual friend let me know Mighty Boards was looking for a marketing manager, and it just felt right to get back into the gaming industry!

***

JB: Mighty Boards has been around for a while now. How do you and the team define your core audience? I know that Mighty Boards makes a range of game types, but for this particular campaign, what kinds of players are you going after?

EF: We’ve come to see our core audience as players who appreciate beautiful illustrations, interesting themes, solid game mechanics and strategy. They might not always play on a weekly basis and aren’t necessarily looking for the heaviest games, but they do want something that feels engaging and memorable every time they play. A collaboration with a famous game designer doesn’t hurt either. With Yotei specifically, we’re aiming to reach an even wider audience, including people who are just getting into the hobby, and people who love Japanese games and experiences. Yotei is a game that works really well for both hobby gamers and those who might be newer to modern board games. It sits right at that intersection between accessibility and depth, which is a space we always aim to claim.



***

JB: I know the team works in a glamorous, floor-to-ceiling glass structure similar to a museum like the Louvre. (I’m kidding.) But I do know you sit with the team in Malta. How does that influence the point at which you learn about upcoming titles and begin to get involved in building ideas for your next campaign?

EF: Our office is even better: this little rock in the Mediterranean offers 300+ days of sun per year, so we get to go swim after work and play games on the beach! That being said, the rock is little (compared to mainland Europe), so we get most of our board game news online, through industry connections or at fairs we attend. We spotted Yotei at SPIEL Essen last year and completely fell in love with it. The team at Kumagera put their heart and soul into turning their local town into a board game and it’s hard not to appreciate the charm of Yotei and its people. In fact, Gordon Calleja and David Chircop (two of the principals at Mighty Boards) are in Japan right now, experiencing Hokkaido first hand!

***

JB: I know that a lot of your games go straight to crowdfunding. What success have you had going direct to retail? Is that an option at this stage?

EF: Retail is definitely an important part of our strategy, and we’ve seen solid success bringing some of our games to retail. Art Society was our first big retail project, which became the Game of the Year at Barnes & Noble! This year, Tenby definitely takes the cake. Deciding whether a game goes to crowdfunding or not depends on various factors, like community demand, funding needs and timeline. Crowdfunding is definitely a very big part of our strategy. It plays a key role in building awareness and creating demand early on. It also allows us to build stronger relationships with our community, as we often invite backers to help create a project by deciding on certain components or graphic design used in the games, and gather feedback. For Yotei, we felt a crowdfunding campaign was the right choice, as we can help the Kumagera team reach a bigger audience, and offer a Deluxe Edition that contains exclusive components made with actual Hokkaido wood, locally sourced and produced!



***

JB: I know the Yotei campaign is going live soon after this article goes up. In advance of the launch, what can you tell us about the campaign? And is this another one of those campaigns where there will be stretch goals every 15 minutes, every day, just once, not at all?

EF: Yotei is a Machi building game for 2 to 4 players where you use potatoes as a currency to build the most enchanting Hokkaido town. The game truly brings the charm of northern Japan to your table with gorgeous illustrations by Maria Kato based on real life locations, game design by Huy Pham, and locally sourced wooden components by Kumagera. You’ll buy or bid on fields, forest and mountain plots, and harvest potatoes. You then use your resources to serve ramen, host a potato festival, open a ski resort or a serene hot spring! The game offers a perfect blend of tactics and strategy that gives players a satisfying peek into life in Hokkaido.

We always aim to deliver a strong, complete experience from the start. Of course, there will be some surprises along the way, but the goal is to keep the campaign clear and enjoyable rather than overwhelming. We want backers to immediately understand what the game is and why it’s special. A big part of the campaign will highlight the real-world inspiration behind it, especially the connection to Hokkaido and the people involved in its creation. For Yotei, we will be offering some surprises and limited exclusives in the campaign, made of real Hokkaido wood! You’ll find a schedule of the planned drops and surprises on the campaign page, so you know exactly when to check the campaign page for news!

***

JB: I’m sure you’ve defined the profile for the types of gamers who regularly buy Mighty Boards products. But for the “normie”, the “muggle”, the casual gamer who might be new to crowdfunding…how do you draw them in?

EF: For new players, it’s key to make the experience feel inviting rather than intimidating. Of course visuals play a big role, but clear communication and instructions make backing a game more approachable. From explaining the gameplay, to a step-by-step guide on how to back a game, we aim to lower the barrier to entry so everyone can jump on the crowdfunding train.



***

JB: I remember when you were driving the campaign for one of the Vengeance: Roll & Fight titles, tying it in with the release of a John Wick film. I thought the parallels were perfect for the game alongside the flick, and in a world where thousands of games come out each year, you’ve gotta find a way to stand out. With Yotei and other games you have releasing in 2026, what plans do you have to get creative with spreading the word?

EF: Standing out is definitely one of the biggest challenges right now, as so many great games come out every year! I believe the key is always to try to focus on what makes each game genuinely unique. With Yotei, that’s very much the connection to a real place and the people behind it, which gives us a lot of authentic storytelling opportunities. We’re working closely with the team in Japan to capture that through video, photos, and behind-the-scenes content.

***

JB: For the casual fan—heck, even for the hardcore junkie—what do you wish more players understood when it comes to the ways games are marketed and sold?

EF: A thing people don’t always see or know is how much work goes into bringing a game to life beyond just the design itself. The designers start the magic spark, but the whole team—development, art and graphic design, production, logistics, marketing, sales, events, support etc. all play a huge role in shaping the final product and making sure the players get a great gaming experience. From when a game pitch comes in, based on the amount of work the game and graphic design needs, the fastest turnaround time is usually a full year. Bigger projects, like Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaan, took more than three years to make!

What some people might not realise is that marketing isn’t just about selling a game—it’s about helping the right people discover something they’ll genuinely enjoy. With so many games releasing each year, even great designs can go completely unnoticed without strong storytelling and visibility. A big part of marketing is testing—different messages, visuals, and audiences—to understand what actually resonates. I believe good marketing helps the right players find what they like in a very crowded industry.


Wait a minute...the Enchantress character from the first Fateforge expansion looks...just...like...

***

JB: Be honest: do you play a lot of games? Not Mighty Boards games, but other titles? Or do you separate church and state by not playing games much at all?

EF: I’m a big fan of competitive two-player games, and will never say no to playing Dune: Imperium. I’ve even been dragged into a full day of Twilight Imperium and actually enjoyed it! Last year’s favorites that hit the table on a regular basis were Compile, Cyclades, and Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth. I try to play on a weekly basis, but I do have to balance my time with other hobbies and outdoor adventures!

***

JB: I have questions about the playlist for this year’s SPIEL Essen booth party…assuming I’m still invited (a major question mark), who do I need to speak with to ensure more hip-hop makes the list in 2026?

EF: ... That being said - we’re bringing some exciting stuff to SPIEL this year! You’ll see For the Gods!, Yotei and the new Art Society expansion, Friends in High Places, on our demo tables, as well as two (!) brand new projects. Trust me, you’re gonna want to keep an eye out 😉

by Michael Feldkoetter

23 Years Earlier
In 2003, I designed a card game that had few rules but required tricky decisions: COCO-NUT. Each player gets 14 palm tree cards and seven special cards. You play a total of seven rounds, for which you choose three cards each. Together the players let the palm trees grow higher and higher so it can bear more and more coconuts and thus become more valuable. The trick now is to claim a palm tree at the right time. However, due to the different special cards, this is everything but easy and you have to try to anticipate the plans of your fellow players.

At that time, I had started to deal intensively with game designing. COCO-NUT quickly became a perennial favorite in my circle of friends and family and the game was also convincing in "neutral" test rounds. I felt encouraged that I had designed a good game and now planned to contact publishers to convince them of the game as well.

SAZ Prize
A small but fine coincidence came to my aid in finding a publisher. In 2004, there was an area at the SPIEL in Essen where game designers could show their prototypes. This was organized by the SAZ (Spieleautorenzunft = Game Designer Association), whose chairman at the time was Alan Moon. He had won the "Spiel des Jahres" award in Germany this year with “Zug um Zug” ("Ticket to Ride"). He donated a sum of money and awarded the SAZ Prize for what he considered to be the best game among the prototypes presented. He chose COCO-NUT.

TENAKEE
Because of the SAZ Prize, the publisher Amigo became aware of my game and included it in its program. However, they wanted to replace the palm trees and monkeys with another theme. We finally came across the totem pole culture of the Tlingit, North American natives who lived and still live in southern Alaska, among other places. The town TENAKEE became the title of the game.

A New Start
About 20 years later, I thought it was time to breathe new life into the game. The game play was still very popular, but the theme of the game was not suitable for re-entering the market. Even though the totem pole culture is a very interesting and venerable culture, publishers prefer to give a wide berth when it comes to Native Americans. So I searched for another theme. I didn't want to go back to COCO-NUT with palm trees and monkeys either and then I remembered Alan Moon with Ticket to Ride. Instead of playing the cards vertically like with palm trees and totem poles, I transferred the game into a horizontal direction and used trains as theme. With the title RAILWAY STAR, I now offered the game to publishers again.

Image of Railway Star
With the Korean publisher Mandoo Games, I found an extremely committed and qualified partner for my game. Mandoo Games also fell in love with the game play, but wanted an absolutely new and at the same time unusual theme. In the end, they chose hermit crabs, which collect cups on the beach to build a home for themselves: cool theme and cool graphics by Keanu Chong.

by Antonio Guillamó

INITIAL IDEA: SALT&PEPPER CONTEST (2024)

High Moon first came to life in a contest that consisted in creating a game with 20 cards or less. I’m not sure why, but I ended up using the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time medallions as a four coloured element for the game. This game was called “Medallones” (very original, I know).

Steal a card from the pile, place it on top of a card already on the table and create the biggest group of medallions of your colour of choice. The game was submitted, even knowing that the premise was way too simple. It didn’t make it past the first round. After this, “Medallones” was abandoned for almost an entire year.

TIME TO RESCUE “MEDALLONES”
August 2024, the date for the “Protos y Miguelitos” event, was drawing near and I wanted to at least bring there 3 or 4 prototypes so I could test them and keep working on them.
“Medallones” was one of the many other protos I had in store (and not in stores) and I decided on picking it back up since it needed little to no time and work to be able to be tested. I tried not to keep my hopes up, but you never know.

“Medallones” Prototype
“MEDALLONES” IN “PROTOS Y MIGUELITOS” (Summer of 2024)
Friday. 10 a.m. Albacete. “Protos y Miguelitos” event. Kortes (from Combo Games) and Toni López sat down to give “Medallones” a try and we proposed ideas such as creating a card market; an incremental cost for placing your tokens; covering other players’ medallions and receiving tokens back and Toni’s key idea: creating power plants of some sort that feed electricity to the roads you’re building and having to connect your medallions to those power plants in order for them to count for points. EUREKA!

Next morning, I grabbed a tip-ex and a pen and started changing the cards so I could turn them into power plant cards. I came up with a market from which you had to pick a card during your turn; the activation of squares with action icons by covering them, and a couple more things. All of this allowed “Medallones” to become something more.

“Medallones” with power plants
Flipper, Héctor Carrión and David Heras played a second game of “Medallones” and agreed on the prototype’s potential, suggested many interesting ideas that I ended up implementing. At that point, it was clear that the game needed a new name and a new look. Animals and burrows? Trains and stations? Caves and dwarves? NOPE. I decided on cities being fed by power plants. The name? Watts Up.

CÓRDOBA FESTIVAL (October 2024)
“Watts Up” was in an advanced state of development after the Córdoba festival, in which I was able to test it 10 more times. It was polished, simple and to the point, and that’s what caught Combo Games’s attention.

The main change introduced was the elimination of the card market and, in its place, a player card deck. This would demarcate the number of rounds per game, making it more tactical and less haphazard. Every player would have the same type of cards on their hands, only changing the order in which they appear.

Card market with costs
Furthermore, a scoring system was introduced, allowing the players for different play styles.

Watts Up in Córdoba (2024)
COMBO GAMES DEVELOPEMENT ERA
A few weeks after signing with Combo Games, the first big debate arose: a change in the theme of the game. Their proposition was to create a game inspired by the Far West in the USA. This way, instead of connecting cities and power plants, you would connect ranches to towns with cow caravans.

The game was renamed as “Deadstock”. Teepee tents, peace pipes, and totems would be some of the key elements of the interactions between cowboys and natives, who would help us prosper through our stock routes.

Prototype for “Deadstock” in “Las Levantadas” (May 2025)
After 7 months, the most meaningful changes at a mechanical level was the creation of a track were you progress as you cover native related icons from the cards and obtaining victory points and powerful actions in exchange, and the adjustment of different existing scoring criteria from when the game was still Watts Up.

Besides, a “token economy” was created consisting on covering the ranch cards of the other players. Now, the decision was even tougher. Should I cover their ranches to obtain many tokens, also giving THEM tokens in the process? Or should I play a more modest turn, but not benefiting them?
Undoubtedly, the game had increased in complexity and difficulty, but without losing its essence: placing cards and placing tokens. At this point, the type of game Combo was aiming for was beginning to take shape, almost reaching what it is today: a "Small Thinky Eurogame." A small-box game that really makes you think, searching for the best option in each of its 6-7-8 turns.

If I’m being honest, it was my initial idea to have a simpler game, but the end result is simply outstanding and I love it.

THE FINAL COSMETIC CHANGE: FROM “DEADSTOCK” TO “HIGH MOON”
The feedback from people trying out “Deadstock” was very positive, but we all agreed on one thing: the theme wasn't original. In this regard, Pablo Sanz, drawing inspiration from the cartoon aesthetic of the video game Grim Fandango, or from details in Tim Burton's artistic creations, proposed a "Weird West" setting, in which skeletal cows were herded to distilleries to extract their marrow and create spectral liquors. This twist gave the game the final, original, and distinctive look we were aiming for.

High Moon on TableTop Simulator

High Moon in physical format (prototype Córdoba 2025)
FINAL TESTING
From August to December 2025, extensive testing was conducted in both physical and digital formats to refine aspects related to the track scoring system, the balance of the scoring criteria cards, and other elements. This process transformed a prototype using colored medallions into what we now know as High Moon. It's a game that can be explained in 5 minutes, plays in 30-60 minutes, and, with just a few components, presents numerous decisions and alternatives in each game.

High Moon Render
AUTHOR’S THOUGHTS
As you will see when you play High Moon, the decision of where to place the card, to obtain tokens by covering the ranches of other players, or your own, is the main driving force for the second phase of your turn: the "token placement" phase. You'll see that the phases of placing more powerful tiles will require you to cover rival ranches with the card, giving them tiles that will boost their next turn. It's the price to pay.

Furthermore, being able to acquire bottles of liquor by connecting your ranches to different cities is very stimulating. And by doing that you get a boost that will allow you to have some truly satisfying turns. Use them at the right moment!

We've managed to achieve a high level of interaction, but not one that's too harmful. Whenever you do something wrong for your own benefit, others will somehow be rewarded and will have alternatives to continue prospering in their respective turns. This balance is key in High Moon.
I sincerely hope you enjoy your time in the Death Valley,

Antonio “Guilla”.

by Steph Hodge

A bit of Industry news in today's post

▪️ Exciting news for UK and Europe as Spiral Galaxy Games and Crafty Games (Sardegna, Tabriz) join forces in distributing the hit game Ostia: Mariner Edition. This game will be released in Q3 2026.





▪️ In other news, asmodee made a deal with Netflix to create any number of projects relating to the smash hit Ticket to Ride from Days of Wonder (Memoir '44, Heat: Pedal to the Metal). Asmodee and Netflix already have the agreement for Catan in place, as you can read about that here.

Here is a quote from the recent press release regarding Ticket to Ride, but you can read the full release here.



All Aboard!

by Jacquie Carroll

GET 9 is the first game I designed and published, and I am excited to share that story and provide a peek behind the scenes with you. Let’s start at the beginning.

[heading]Falling in Love with the Number 9[/heading]
I was introduced to a theory about the number nine—specifically that if you worked with numbers long enough, the result will either end in nine or add up to nine. The concept really intrigued me, and I started experimenting by playing with cards and dice to see if I could get to number nine based on that theory. Once I confirmed that I could do this consistently, I realized a fast, challenging numbers game could be fun to play and become a reality.

[heading]Simple Rules, Infinite Paths to Nine[/heading]
GET 9’s gameplay is a straightforward process of combining cards and dice to create calculations that end in nine, using the mathematical functions of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and even cross sums. The game ends when either one player no longer has cards, or the deck is empty. The player with the most cards in their calculation pile wins.

[heading]Prototype: Raw but Functional[/heading]
The first prototype components I developed to test the game mechanics were raw and unrefined. For the original concept test, I used Skip-Bo cards and a pair of dice from another game, adding stickers with plus, minus, multiplication, and division symbols. With these simple materials, I began experimenting and exploring whether GET 9 (I didn’t have a name yet) could work in play with others—not just me. Playing with others was basically going to tell all.

[heading]Early Voices that Shaped the Game[/heading]
During one of the first playtests with my sister Annette, she suggested that players place their cards face up rather than hold them in their hands. That single change transformed the game and the play experience-- suddenly, everyone could see available options, stay engaged, and feel connected to the game at all times. From an educator standpoint, I love that!

Due to this one change, I added the opportunity to steal. If one player couldn’t produce a combination using their dice and cards and passed, and others saw a possibility, another player could steal by placing their hand over the dice. If correct, the stealer could use the other player’s dice and cards, to create combinations, and steal their cards.

Also, a subsequent test with her grandchildren, Loki and Thor resulted in Loki’s recommendation to add zeros. Out of the mouth of babes…of course we needed zeros!

My son Dylan arranged some playtests with his friends, Amy and Carly, teachers of 2nd, 3rd and 4th grade students who made many suggestions including that the card number options should be increased to thirteen to allow for more play calculations. However, instead of adding additional cards, my graphic design partner Murat, and I thought that allowing players to combine cards to create new numbers would be a workable solution instead of adding cards to the exiting deck. Again, I loved the kids and teachers’ suggestion, because joining cards to create new numbers really allows for infinite combinations to get to nine.

[heading]One Game: Many Learners [/heading]
Play testing with my son, Evan, we discussed that GET 9 could be beneficial for younger children like my granddaughter Alessa, but that multiplication and division functions are really too much for five-, six-and seven-year-olds. I wanted to develop a game version for younger players that could then transition them into GET 9. After several ideas, that really were no good at all, it turned out the simplest solution was just adding a set of dice for younger players. This is why GET 9 comes with four dice. Two dice for younger players focusing on plus and minus, and two dice using all four mathematical operations: plus, minus, multiplication, and division for everyone else.

Additionally, to add more of an element of chance and play, I added two options to all dice: a blank spot which means that that particular dice can’t be used to make a calculation during that turn, and a ? indicating a wild dice, allowing players to use any of the mathematical functions to create a calculation during that play.

[heading]Lessons Learned: Symbols Matter[/heading]
The one element that consistently confused players during playtesting was the symbol marking on the dice. I initially used an asterisk (*) to indicate multiplication—as used in Excel--instead of the traditional (x) symbol, hoping to avoid confusion with the plus symbol (+). Of course, the early symbols were hand-drawn and difficult to recognize after some playtesting wear and tear, so I replaced them with a printed version. Even then, the results remained the same and the confusion persisted. In the end, I switched to the standard multiplication symbol X. I was hoping that this change would reduce the confusion since, x on the dice is diagonal, and + is vertical. It did.

[heading]Collaboration: My Ace in the Hole[/heading]
I had a lot of fun coming up with the idea for the game and playing testing the GET 9 prototype with as many people as I could talk into it: young and old alike. But GET 9 would not have happened without my neighbor—now my good friend—Murat Kocyigit.Life has a funny way of placing exactly the right people in your path when you need them most. As I began tinkering with the idea of GET 9, a wonderful couple, Murat and Hande moved into our neighborhood, and we became friends almost immediately. Who would have guessed that just as I was developing a game idea, my new neighbors happened to be in the graphic design business Lapastudios.com? Their journey to becoming my neighbors—from Germany and Turkey, by way of Los Angeles, and ultimately settling in a house two doors down from where I lived was--- Kismet!

Murat and I became an effective team. Together we came up with many ideas, and there were several card layout iterations. Everyone liked the visible numbers on the front of the cards, immediately; however, the back of the cards took a while. Every time we came up with a design, I would ask everyone—literally. I held a garage sale—I asked people to share their thoughts. I went to the grocery store and waited in the check-out line—I asked people. You get the drift.

Many of my family and friends received countless texts with possible images, options, and surveys asking which version they liked the most, and I couldn’t have done without all of their feedback and support. Incorporating their feedback, we played around with back of the card designs, dice images, and of course the overall box design. In the end, I hand drew an image, and Murat brought it to life.

[heading]From Wordy Rules to Visual Storytelling[/heading]
All of this creativity was fun! I think the biggest challenge I encountered was the rules. When I first began writing the rules, it felt so wordy, which it was. As an educator, I knew, too many words just get people to zone out. So, what started as a text heavy explanation to clearly communicate the gameplay and mechanics gradually evolved with a visual approach—first sprinkling in small graphic elements and eventually committing to transforming the instructions that relied on visuals to tell the story as well.

[heading] Goosebump Moments[/heading]
Apart from the fine-tuning suggestions, I noticed that the mechanics clicked immediately, and players of all ages got the game within minutes. What surprised me most was although this game is really designed to be competitive, when the game was played with children of different age groups, the older kids really encouraged and supported the younger ones (this was also true for adults). I got goosebumps when they cheered each other on. Again, as an educator, I love this!

[heading]Player Sweet Spots[/heading]
GET 9 is meant to be easy to access, and cross-generational as well as cross-cultural—open the box, deal the cards, select dice level options, and start playing right away at a variety of skill levels. When I began thinking about a specific target audience, I discovered that every playtesting group highlighted different benefits, depending on their age and experience.

The educators, teachers, and home-school parents I worked with quickly honed in on the game’s educational benefits: number sense, pattern recognition, mental math, confidence building, and social interaction. They really appreciated that GET 9 offers play and the kind of practice and that doesn’t feel like practicing--exactly what so many anxious learners need. Through this feedback, it became clear that there is a sweet spot for students in third and fourth grade. This finding was reinforced when GET 9 received the Parents’ Pick Award 2025 for alignment with math standards and educational value.

On the other hand, my more seasoned friends and play testers commented on the cognitive benefits of keeping their mind fresh and challenged. Additionally, they really liked the social component—connecting with others is fun, and now a research-supported way to nurturing longevity (Check out research on the Blue Zone). They also tended to take the game to its full potential based on their skill levels. Beneath the simplicity of GET 9’s game play is something powerful: the game will grow with you as your skill level develops. Check out some of their calculations that GET 9—in particular, when they zeroed in on the cross-sum option.

[heading]Bonus Applications[/heading]
As an educator, I also spent time teaching English, as well as English as a Second Language (ESL). Like I mentioned before, I used a lot of games in the learning process, and I know that games really work in supporting and building basic interpersonal language skills— in particular, the words and sentences we tend to use every day. That is what helps build fluency in a new language. Therefore, I am committed to translating GET 9 instructions into various languages, so they can be used for other language acquisition opportunities—be it in formal or informal settings. Since numbers are cross-cultural, it is just as easy to play GET 9 in German, or Spanish, or Vietnamese. My hope is that having language-specific instruction options available will support learning for both ESL students, as well as learners of a language other than English. I only have a few right now, but the goal is to grow this list. You can download these on www.gamekraft.us.

[heading]What’s Next[/heading]
My road to game designer really was an accident in what feels like the full circle of my life’s journey. As an educator, my passion has always been learning and teaching so that knowledge can make a difference in learners’ lives. As such, I have often used games in the learning process, because I intuitively knew that learning sticks, and is more enjoyable when it is fun and authentic—of course, now there is a lot of research supporting just that.

Although it was not my intent to create a math game, my time as an educator and personal finance coach made me realize that GET 9 could help reduce anxiety and build number sense by making math feel approachable, playful, and non-threatening early on. It is a game that builds confidence through repetition and success. My hope is that it will help individuals break through their mental blocks around numbers and math beginning at an early age, and that this confidence with numbers will continue to stick with them into adulthood, where numbers surround us daily. GET 9 is a way of making math, engaging, fun, and enjoyable for all ages.

I hope you enjoyed the behind the scenes in the making of GET 9, and if it sparked your curiosity, I Invite you to take the next step: play a few rounds, then post your comments in BGG, or connect with me at www.gamekraft.us for downloads/resources and email info@gamekraft.us to share feedback, questions, or your best “path to nine.”

GET 9 has only been around a very short time, and my goal now is to connect with as many interested players, retailers, and distributors as possible. Let’s Play!

Jacquie

by Justin Bell

The ongoing “is it AI art or not?” conversations in tabletop are important...and, exhausting. It feels like every day, there’s a fresh round of discussion that I have to work through online, as supersleuths real and imagined attempt to navigate whether an upcoming game’s illustrations were drawn by hand, built by a mix of human and artificial means, or generated purely through AI tools. I get why it's a thing...and it's also why I'm excited to focus on a different lane.

I’m a fan of so many incredible artists in this space, so I thought now would be the right time to interview some of the industry contacts I’ve made over the years to learn more about their process, by highlighting some of the images that will be included in an upcoming or recently-released title. I will ask these individuals a series of questions in an offline interview to demonstrate how they create an image or a series of images from scratch.

What are their inspirations? When are they involved in the game’s lifecycle? What changes from the time an artist begins composing an image to the time a game arrives on my doorstep? As a massive fan of the storyboarding process used in the film business, I’m always fascinated by an artist’s original ideas and what changes are implemented during a game’s development process.

In that spirit, welcome to our “Illustrator Avenue” series, focused on an individual's body of work (separate from our Artist Diary series, which focuses on one specific game). My hope is that, at least once a quarter, I’ll bring forward an interview and the associated progression of images from a person whose work I enjoy, a name that you might know but that I think everyone should know eventually. (In that vein, with no disrespect to “household” tabletop artist names such as Ian O’Toole, Beth Sobel, or The Mico, I’ll try my best to shine a light on some lesser-known stars whose work I’ve obsessed over recently.)

For this edition of Illustrator Avenue, I spoke with David Sitbon, the in-house illustrator at Sorry We Are French (SWAF), the publisher of titles such as Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon, IKI, and Kingdom Crossing. David and I recently had an offline back-and-forth. (My broken French and David’s excellent French meant that Google Translate was very much our friend during this exchange!)




Justin Bell (JB): David! Thanks for taking the time to “speak” with me. I’ve got to know: how did you hook up with the team at Sorry We Are French to become their lead in-house illustrator? What were you doing prior to your time in the tabletop industry?

David Sitbon (DS): To answer that, I need to start with the second question—which means going back more than nine years! Before joining the SWAF team, I had studied with the goal of working in the video game industry. Unfortunately, breaking into that field was much more difficult—even back then. I eventually bounced between various creative jobs for two years, none of which held much personal interest for me. During that time, I discovered board games; I would visit a local shop every now and then and strike up friendships with the people I met there. Then, in the course of a casual conversation, a friend from the shop showed me a job posting for a studio looking to hire an in-house illustrator for board games (spoiler alert: it was SWAF).

I laid my cards on the table and poured everything I had—every skill I’d acquired—into my application, telling myself that this was my one and only chance to work in an environment where I could finally find artistic fulfillment. After several days of intense effort, I landed the permanent position—and here I am, still with them to this day. No matter what difficulties life throws our way, we must keep fighting for the things we hold dear.




JB: My first experience with your work came during plays of the medium-weight Euro title Galileo Project. I loved your style from the jump, be it the distinct nature of the humans drawn on the game’s box cover to the illustrations on the tech and robot cards. What was the first game you worked on for SWAF?

DS: When I arrived, the studio was truly in its foundational stages. There were two projects underway: Ganymede and Immortal 8. Ganymede was entrusted to the talented Oliver Mootoo—a project for which I created the HUD elements for the cards and game boards.

It was on Immortal 8 that I produced my very first illustrations, as well as the game's graphic design. In fact, one of the characters (EZ) had served as one of my job application tests for SWAF.




JB: One of my favorite ironies of the board game industry is that many of my contacts don’t play board games at all. How about you? Do you consider yourself a player?

DS: Yes! In fact, it was even a prerequisite for working at SWAF—especially since working in-house allows me to go beyond just illustration and graphic design to participate in development, playtesting, brainstorming, and so on. This has greatly enriched my knowledge of board games. And I still play constantly, whether internally or in my spare time. This background proves invaluable whenever I have to illustrate or design game components.




JB: Working in-house probably makes it easier to have visibility on SWAF’s upcoming pipeline; you already work together with the same teams, but each title is designed by a different set of authors. When do you typically get involved? And how many projects are you juggling at any one time?

DS: As I mentioned earlier, I am fortunate enough to be able to observe—and even participate in—the game development process. It is usually around this stage that I begin to visualize the project. Being able to play the game and witness the prototype’s evolution allows me to anticipate and fully grasp the ins and outs of the game before I start illustrating it. Generally, I work on one or two projects simultaneously (very rarely three). It all depends on the complexity of the game I’m working on. An expert-level game is far more demanding than a family game—haha!




JB: I’m a huge fan of Shackleton Base, so I’m really curious about the art that is featured in the new expansion, Shackleton Base: Below. Within. Above. Can you tell us about one of the images (the cover, the project cards, etc.) that will be included in the game, and give us more detail on the journey of that image?

DS: As a brief aside regarding the game’s cover art: it serves as a mirror image of the original game’s cover. Through the visor, one can observe just how much the development of the lunar base has evolved since the core game. It also features various visual nods to the different corporations introduced in this expansion.




As for the cards, co-designer Fabio Lopiano provided a wealth of ideas—drawing upon existing concepts as well as projections of realistic hardware within this futuristic setting. From there, I would begin researching appropriate visual references.
The Shackleton Base expansion introduces three new corporations; Undermoon, in particular, specializes in drilling the lunar surface to facilitate resource extraction. For the illustration of one of the Undermoon cards, I needed to depict a machine excavating a crater. My mind immediately went to a drill—specifically, its tapered, streamlined shape. I wanted to combine this with a piece of heavy construction machinery capable of effectively "breaking through" the lunar surface. The caterpillar tracks—clearly visible in the initial sketch (and subtly suggested in the final version by the tracks left on the ground)—reinforce this dynamic of a powerful, heavy-duty vehicle. The figures surrounding the drill serve to emphasize its colossal scale.




My creative process always follows the same routine: research and reference gathering, sketching, inking (using a light table), and finally, coloring. From the very outset of the process, I make sure to account for the fact that the illustration will ultimately be integrated into a HUD (complete with various banners and information panels); this ensures that all visual elements are positioned optimally within the final artwork.




***

A big thanks to David for spending some time answering my questions for this interview. Also, a big thanks to Pauline Lebel and the team at Sorry We Are French for collaborating on our inaugural Illustrator Avenue article. You can check out the complete SWAF catalog at https://sorryweare.fr/en/.

***

Are you an illustrator and/or graphic designer involved in the creation of images and iconography for the tabletop space? Please reach out! I’m building up a repository of people interested in contributing to this series. Just message me here on BGG and we’ll get to work. Thanks for reading!

by Matthew Weaver

In Baseball Card GM, players use the baseball cards they already own to simulate a real game. They draft their team from real baseball cards in their collections, use the stats on the back of the cards (batter and pitcher) to weigh the odds of each 2d6 roll, and play out each plate appearance over a 9-inning game. The “GM” stands for “General Manager” - in real baseball that is the person who picks the players that make up the team - which here indicates the real “game” is in how well you build/draft your team around those stats/probabilities of each player.

Below is a designer diary for this game, however it is not mine - I did not invent BCGM, my 8yr old son Garrett did and I am just the publisher.

IDENTIFYING A PAIN POINT
The story goes that Richard Garfield had several ideas for games, but it was not until Wizards of the Coast CEO Peter Adkison mentioned what people needed was a quick portable D&D themed game, which could be played during their downtime between longer role-playing sessions, that Magic: the Gathering was born. What they had identified, so coined in the startup space (usually in tech), was a “pain point” - ie an underlying problem/behavior people need solving that they otherwise fix in unsatisfactory ways.

Garrett not only identified our first target pain point, he felt it himself - he could not actually PLAY with his baseball cards. He was constantly sorting and resorting his cards into various teams and lineups, but there was no way to test out how that roster might actually perform. This was not just HIS behavior either - we knew so many kids who did this, and frankly as a kid I did it too!

“How can I actually play with my baseball cards?” was his question. The problem was that nothing existed - and we looked all throughout the spring of 2024 for anything that did it. In fact that is how we even learned about Board Game Geek in the first place, searching for games that use your real baseball cards, and do it in the way Garrett knew each stat SHOULD be used: players with more homeruns or doubles or walks ON-CARD should get more homeruns or doubles or walks IN-GAME (and in roughly the same proportion). It seemed so obvious, how could it not exist?

In the summer of 2024, Garrett decided he would make one himself.

JUST A DINING-ROOM TABLE PROJECT
So Baseball Card GM started with a designer with no design experience (Garrett), a publisher with no deep game knowledge (me), a play-tester who was just learning to read (Garrett’s 5yr old brother Simon) and none of us intending to actually create a game to sell. It was just supposed to be something to do at our dining-room table with the baseball cards Garrett had collected from what I had bought him at Philadelphia Phillies games and card shops and my old collection from the 80’s and 90’s (called the “junk wax” era because of their over-production and under-value) which I was slowly parceling out to him.

If we were going to use cards that already existed, we first needed to figure out what stats are on as many brands and years of cards as possible. The more all-inclusive of cards that can be used the more joy! Baseball cards have been around for over 100 years, but they are far from consistent. In fact we discovered it was in 1981, through a Topps vs Fleer lawsuit that broke the monopoly with MLB, that the stats became standard on all Topps and Fleer (shortly followed by Donruss, Upper Deck, Leaf, Bowman, etc.) cards: the SEVEN key stats for batters being HR, 3B, 2B, Avg, Hits, BB, and RBI. Though of course you can use other or older cards for BCGM, just occasionally you need to look up a stat or two.

We then needed the nature of the dice roll mechanic, for which he chose the simplest - a 2d6 of the same color because it results in 21-unique combinations. As we had seven stats, each stat could be a column in a 3x7 grid (though the number of rows would eventually change, more on that below). While those were the inputs at our disposal, we needed to match them to every possible output of a plate appearance. The initial thinking was that a higher number in each stat would lead to a better outcome (homerun, triple, double, single, walk) whereas a lower number would generally lead to a worse one (strikeout, ground-out, pop-out, and fly-out).

That grid was essentially the entire game for six months - and it went through 15-18 different iterations as we play-tested ideas out. Garrett and I and Simon would try out an idea, I would amend the grid, print out the new version, and try it again.

Some cases were obvious (HR stats dictate homeruns, 3B dictate triples, 2B dictate doubles, BB dictate walks) whereas others were not (ex there are no singles stats on cards, strikeouts stopped being a stat on cards in 2014, and you cannot roll an RBI you need to do some other outcome to cause a score). So Garrett fiddled to come up with some clever narratives to pair the stats and outcomes - ex walks and pop-outs are paired implying batters don’t walk because they swing at pitches outside of the zone which results in pop-ups, or to make RBIs important he made them a proxy for hitting fly-outs (which over time will result in sac flies that bring in runners whereas a ground-out may lead to an inning ending double play and no RBI). Rolling for batting average is not an outcome either, so we linked it to singles that would in fact increase your batting average IN-GAME, and as there are no strikeouts on all cards we paired them as the negative of fewer hits, and eventually as the negative against triples as well because as strikeouts in MLB have increased in the last 45yrs triples have greatly decreased.

PLAY-TESTING UNTIL THE BOX SCORES LOOKED RIGHT
When inventing a new game with entirely new rules, it is (I imagine) tough to know if the end-result is coming out “right” - but we had it easy because we already knew if the game mechanic was working properly it would result in a typical box score for a real baseball game. Garrett would often go to his room and play out a game while keeping the entire score card for both sides, come back and show that there were say too many runs being scored or too many strikeouts happening or too many triples, etc.

That led to our big breakthrough, that admittedly even a novice tabletop sports simulator player would recognize right away, that the odds inherent in the 21-dice combos actually mattered. Each dice roll was a plate appearance, and ON-CARD a full season (which you would want to have the best chance to max out on the stats) was say 630-720 plate appearances. So each instance of that 2d6 was really 18-20 (1/36 with a double roll) or 35-40 (1/18 if a non-double roll) of each stat happening IN-GAME over a like season of rolls. If we wanted realistic results, we needed to reweigh the grid to match those - home runs could only appear in two cells as historically 60 would be the most we might ever have to meet, whereas triples could only appear in one cell, doubles in two, walks in just four (as 120 walks is historically very tops), singles in six cells, etc.

So our grid would not be a 3x7 rectangle at all, rather something with the same seven columns but different numbers of rows in each. And as we set the cut-offs right… eureka! By November 2024 the box scores Garrett was keeping for his solo-games started to look very real!

The other additions to the MVP (“minimum viable product” – the essentials to make it playable and testable) were also discovered by Garrett while play-testing:

(1) The cards ARE the pieces - As the cards were moving around the bases, we needed to codify what happens to those runners in certain instances of hits or ground-balls or fly-outs or pop-ups. Turns out we only needed three rules to ensure all situations were covered (Garrett was on his local Little Leagues 8u travel team at that point and things like running on contact with two outs to score from second on a single were exactly what was already being drilled into him).

(2) The pitchers needed to matter too - This was also just Garrett being a baseball nerd. He had seen enough baseball in his life to know the lefty-lefty or righty-righty match-ups are worse for the batter, so he decided to build that into the game. If we were using an above-below stat check to determine a plate appearance outcome, then it was logical for the tougher pitcher match-ups to move that stat line up (ie make it harder for some batters to meet the threshold). And if you have pitchers matter, well how much they can pitch in the game matters too, so we limited them to their actual innings pitched on their card.

All these nuances, along with stealing bases and the ever-changing main mechanic, became part of a new hand-drawn board Garrett drew to contain the game and the two line-ups (along with benches and bull-pens). We had our first working proto-type of BCGM by December 2024.

WAIT, DID WE ACCIDENTALLY MAKE SOMETHING KINDA GOOD?
When you invite friends and family to play your game, you expect praise. They are going to be polite and uncritical, probably not the best play-testers. At the time we did not have access to, nor would we have even known to seek, genuine board game enthusiast play-testers that we have now learned can be found in clubs just about anywhere. And yet, even with that caveat, as Garrett’s school friends or baseball teammates tried the game (and their parents watched on), even on our rapidly deteriorating paper prototype, we started to think we had something here.

There was enough positivity at least for me (dad, now publisher) to step back in and get a graphic designer who I have worked with for years to put together all the pieces into a visually simple product. And of course give it a name. By January we had a design of newly minted Baseball Card GM to print out at our local print shop.

It looked great, but immediately Garrett knew CARDBOARD was not what his game wanted to be - though he did not play Pokemon, his friends did and they had a playmat for their cards. The cards would not slide, the surface made it easier to pick them up, and most importantly a playmat went where the cards went (in a backpack, folded into a binder, etc.). In feel, BCGM wanted to be more like a TCG and that meant a NEOPRENE surface. It also meant we could avoid many of the things I (as a parent, not yet a board game publisher) really struggled with for games in our home - bulky boxes that take up room and get destroyed, excessive pieces that get lost, instructions that get torn or frankly largely ignored. OUR USE CASE was keep everything (ie all mechanics, all rules, etc.) on one playmat so that it could go to a school, youth baseball tournament, friend’s house, or restaurant/bar with no box/pieces/instructions needed.

By February 2025 we had our first neoprene prototype and March-April our first true samples from the eventual manufacturer overseas.

THEN THE SECOND GUESSING KICKS IN
I was always prepared to order at least 50, just to give away to friends and family and schoolmates and teammates, but if we were going to take this further (and order an additional 500 say, enough to get a good sample set of users to validate our assumptions that anyone would like this idea other than us) I started to bring up to Garrett the OTHER things we could be doing with it. There were MANY ways to add to the “baseball-ness of the game” or “game-ness of the baseball,” and as we had time and all could be easily done to a neoprene design all options came up.

Ultimately, though never written down explicitly, we had an agreed upon criteria for addressing new ideas for the game:

(1) Does it relate to a specific stat on a card? There were many fielding components that are fun, like errors or wild pitches or plays at the plate, but those are not stats on cards.
(2) Does it involve an actual baseball type action? There were ways to disrupt an opponent’s turn by forcing re-rolls or changing their roll, and those are a board game mechanic but not a justified baseball one.
(3) Does it have potential for overuse that slows down gameplay? There were ways to make more pitcher’s stats impactful and more often, but those would take constant checking against cards and make games take far longer.
(4) Does it “blow-up” the board with too much text or new pieces? Many new ideas involved longer explanations or additional cards, but those did not “fit” in our playmat only mission and “the cards are the only pieces” focus.

As a side note, what I have really come to appreciate about the BGG community is that many have taken it upon themselves to add these nuances to satisfy what more they want from the game: new rules suggested in forums, additional cards designed and left in files, etc. Garrett loves hearing the new ways people play and we both welcome and celebrate them all – the fact that BCGM can be so modular is a plus in our minds!

The big internal debate was deciding between laying out the dice combos SEQUENTIALLY across that dice grid (starts 1&1, 1&2, going across to 5&6, 6&6) or placing the doubles (1&1, 6&6, etc.) in more particular spots that breaks that flow but hits the necessary cells correctly. You will see right now some hitting outcomes are statistically overrepresented (in the 630-720 plate appearance rule-of-thumb) compared to historic outcomes because when in order a few of the rolls land on the wrong stat cells.

But this was a publisher’s worry - designer Garrett decided that fast and easy play was more important, so chose the speed of finding your roll in the grid (which is a bottleneck) over the stat "precision" because he was still got very normal "baseball looking" box scores in his solo-play. Besides, we had created a system even a 5yr old (Simon) could follow so why break it?

With that decided, I pulled the trigger on the additional 500 units - it of course took MONTHS of painful waiting for them to arrive from overseas, so it was not until October/November 2025 that we could really introduce it to the world. We had always driven by PAXU every year (the Philadelphia Convention Center was on Garrett’s way to school) but never knew what it was. I signed us up for UnPub and we did play-testing with folks we could arrange through BGG - the response was largely “I can’t believe no one has ever thought of this before!”

DESIGN IS MORE THAN JUST THE PRODUCT, IT IS POSITIONING
Coming from the outside of the gaming world, we were new to all the terminology and categories (“What is a meeple? What is a heavy Euro?”). But I knew that if this game was going to be a thing, it had to pass the smell test of the most discerning noses. We would take our lumps on BGG and with reviewers, learn what the game is, and what it isn’t, and really lean into the parts that are unique and special.

Youtube Video
Baseball Card GM will never be Strat-o-Matic Baseball or APBA Pro Baseball to true tabletop simulator fanatics. But that is ok, some very respected people in that space called it a “gateway-simulator” that can get kids introduced to that hobby. Baseball Card GM will never be as delightfully gamified as Baseball Highlight: 2045 for true board game aficionados. But that is fine, as it was Dan King (The [user=dkingnu]Game Boy Geek[/user]) who first gave BCGM a label of “deck-construction auto-battler” (not terms we knew) and really placed it in context: the GAME is in knowing the cards and building the rosters, while playing it out is thus a quick - and to be often re-iterated - process. And isn’t that exactly the itch that Garrett was trying to scratch in the first place?

It was also Dan King who showed us that HOW you teach someone the game ends up influencing WHAT they ultimately appreciate about it. Our rules sheet taught the main mechanic, the rest was just baseball, but by including a short sheet walking players through steps to learn over a few games - progressively more complicated stats picking, progressively more strategic drafting methods, and progressively more complex gameplay - we could help accelerate the realization of what is so fun about BCGM.

IN CONCLUSION: “INNOVATION ALWAYS LOOKS OBVIOUS IN HINDSIGHT”

At least that is how the saying goes. Replicating the game of baseball is by no means innovative, but using already existing and traditionally non-gaming items which many already own and treasure may just be exactly BECAUSE it looks so obvious a solution when you actually see the end product done. And yes, it took the mind of 8yr old Garrett to ask the question “How can I actually play with my baseball cards?” and the persistence to not take “You cannot” for an answer.

Our vision for the future is to impact the sports card space more than the gaming one – with wide ranging value propositions. For baseball fans like Garrett, they get to play with their cards like they always wanted to. For adults who used to be collectors, they get to experience the nostalgia of their youth by re-engaging with their old cards. And for the industry in general, it is creating NEW value from the bulk common cards that are otherwise monetarily worthless (this is a TCG “democratized” as the best cards in the game are in fact NOT the most rare or expensive at all, often just the opposite).

Sports cards and Pokemon/MTG are so often sold in the same places, with the sports folks in the front never understanding the TCG folks in the back (and vice-versa). Wouldn’t it be cool if those two worlds could find more common ground in your LGS/LCS?

by Kitsune Games

Hi everyone! How’s it going? Nico here, co-creator of Guanteo along with Flor.

The starting point for Guanteo was: “I want a board where the cards fight each other.” Initially, they were going to be Yokais with superpowers, but as much as I love them, Japanese narratives are quite common. Since I train boxing, at some point, the planets just aligned in my head. (I’m not ruling out future games with Japanese narratives, though!)

The boxing theme allowed us to unify everything we had in mind: a board made of cards (our ring) and the presence of players on that ring, each with a deck of their own color. We had a ring and we were standing on equal ground, with 8 cards each—just like the minutes before a fight begins.

The Cognitive Challenge: Thinking Under Pressure
Just like when you're in the ring, where "thinking" is hard because everything happens fast, in real-time, and you have to be able to respond. That’s how the idea of face-down cards came about—both yours and your opponent's. If you don’t remember them, if you’re not fully engaged in the match, your mistakes will most likely have consequences.

In the first prototypes, the activation mechanic was "Oxygen." The game asked you to discard an amount of oxygen from your hand equal to what the board card required to execute a punch—like saying, "you need air to keep fighting." Later, we changed this to Power, as it was more intuitive iconographically and rationally. Thinking about oxygen makes sense, but it’s less adaptable to a game than thinking, "I'm hitting you with power." So, the activation cost shifted to Power while keeping the same logic.

The Dance of Boxing and the Science of Memory
There was some back-and-forth in early playtesting to make it work. As we balanced the idea, extra elements emerged, like moving your own cards or your rival's. While this costs a turn (and consequently some board control), it allows for different positioning. The "dance of boxing" appeared with these movements; it wasn’t just about punching anymore—it was about moving and distributing ourselves differently across the space.

Memory is a key point: to win, you must dominate 12 of the 16 ring cards with your own cards. This means you’ll have at least 10 cards on the board before the final blow. In terms of memory, that’s a lot.

Without boring you with technicalities, Working Memory has a limited retention capacity. For many years, it was set at the "Magic Number" of 7 ± 2 chunks of information. However, more recent studies indicate this was overestimated and the real number is closer to 4 ± 1. This is why the probable number of cards to remember in the game ranges between 5 and 9; you will always be forgetting one, and it’s up to your strategy to plan around that lack of information.

Rewards vs. Frustration
After several tests—and I must confess many losses to Flor—it became necessary to incorporate a way to recover information. We didn't want an extremely frustrating experience; we wanted something that required focus but remained achievable. This is how Rewards were born. By successfully hitting your opponent, you not only eliminate their card and take that space, but the game rewards you by letting you check a number of your face-down cards again. This gives the Working Memory the "nudge" it needs to retain the info. We also added card drawing to rewards; the one who hits takes the advantage—just like in boxing.

What Happens When Memory Fails?
When we accidentally execute a hit against ourselves, our own card is eliminated, and we hand that board space to the opponent, losing out on rewards. This is the penalty for not remembering our cards. Because of this, this isn't a game to play at a crowded event while chatting; it requires focus, memory, and strategic planning.

Aesthetics and the K.O. Octopus
The game's aesthetic is simple; we focused on card values so players don't have to spend too many cognitive resources understanding them. To activate a card, you discard the same value from your hand—which is the most eye-catching part—and we used real boxing punch names to go with it.

The K.O. card features an octopus. Why an octopus? I don't know, really; I just imagined that an angry octopus with boxing gloves would be quite a hostile sight. A kangaroo just didn't have that charm—it's been done before.

We tried to take care of every detail, both in the cards and the box. We know perfection is impossible—my apologies for that—but please know we truly tried. In this regard, Lu from Macuco.art gave us a hand, as always, and her eye as an artist and designer helped everything look a bit better—thanks, Lu!

The Journey
This is our first game. Every step we took had its bumps, and we navigated them while learning. As I write this, we are about to publish our second one, and the progress is noticeable. We don’t necessarily know much more than before, but we’ve stopped making the same mistakes.
Since this is our first, I have to say that, personally, it has been a beautiful journey. Being able to think, have things not work, rethink, test, play, break everything with new ideas, and then break it all again—it's incredibly fun. I insist on this a lot—you might read it elsewhere too—but in this digital age, where everything is immediate and being bored means scrolling through short videos on a platform, allowing ourselves to get bored and get creative is the best medicine.

Not to mention the satisfaction of bringing a game we invented and worked so hard on to a community that gives us great feedback and appreciates it. It is heartening to find people on the other side who enjoy sitting at a table, sharing a moment, and hitting "pause" on the noise we live in.

These are just some personal reflections. My outlook on everything I do is the same: to share, to play, to bring people closer, to become better friends, and, above all, to generate a positive impact on others. I found this in the world of board games; I am quite new to it and have a lot to learn, but it is definitely a world I want to stay in.

Anyway, if you want to know more about Guanteo, you can visit our website, check out the manual there, and find it in shops across Argentina (hopefully the world some day!).

Flor and I hope you liked it and enjoy it. We wish you many great matches and, above all, keep playing—it makes us better.

Thanks for reading! We really appreciate your time and would love to hear your thoughts

Official Website: guanteo.kitsunegames.ar English rulebook available HERE.

by Steph Hodge

Speaking of shiny new editions...

▪️ Rose Gauntlet Entertainment just released a new edition of Keystone: North America – Second Edition along side with a new expansion called Keystone: North America – Coastal Expansion. From designers Jeffrey Joyce and Isaac Vega (Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game, Forgotten Waters, Ashes Reborn: Rise of the Phoenixborn).

Keystone: North America came out in 2022 and hit well for a lot of gamers, especially the solo crowd. A lot of thought went into this second edition, and there is a great interview found here. I wanted to highlight a key difference about this new edition.

The biggest difference is that the game is only 1-2 players; however, there is an expansion pack that will extend the game to 4 players called Keystone: North America – Second Edition: 4-Player Upgrade Pack. From the interview I linked above, there is a quote from Vega:



From the BGG page:


▪️ As mentioned above, there is also a new expansion that was released with the base game called Keystone: North America – Coastal Expansion. You can also buy the extension for 4 players called Keystone: North America – Second Edition: Coastal Expansion – 4-Player Upgrade Pack as well. Here is another quote from the interview with Vega:




[imageid=9498900 large rep]

▪️ We expect to see a lot of new games from Rose Gauntlet Entertainment in the next few months of Q2.

Pebbles is a new area control game for 2-4 players and will play in 60 minutes.

Photo credit to [user=kovray][/user]

▪️ Flock! plays 2-5 players and is a Rummy-style card game to collect flocks in about 20 mintues.

Photo credit to [user=kovray][/user]


▪️ Rook Requiem is a new trick-taking game for 3-5 players and will play in 45 minutes.


▪️ Flock! is a new dexterity game for 1-4 players and plays in 30 minutes.

Photo credit to [user=kovray][/user]

by SumainGames

Believe it or not, it all started with a dream. My co-founder, Michael, had an unfortunate (and completely unintentional) meeting with the bottom of a swimming pool and ended up with a traumatic brain injury. In late 2023, while his recovery was long and about as fun as watching paint dry, he was grateful to still be alive.

During this slow and frustrating process, something unexpected happened: the concussion started giving him vivid dreams. One of those dreams wasn’t just any dream, it was about a game. Michael woke up and immediately called me to spill the beans about this dream-game. He described a game system inspired by Oh Hell, and he was convinced it could actually work. I got very excited and immediately started throwing ideas around to develop the gameplay further. Together we fleshed out the system, refined the ideas, and built the rules. It ended up becoming a trick-taking game, but with a twist!

Next came the big question: the theme and visuals. At first, we played with the idea of plant evolutions as a theme, but eventually we leaned toward something more character-driven through anthropomorphism. That direction felt stronger, and it ultimately evolved into the sci-fi war theme we have today. As an illustrator myself, I had to do things the old-fashioned way: drawing the cards on my iPad and print them so we could test the game.

Once we realized the game had real potential, we decided to take it up a notch. I turned those scrappy drafts into proper visuals, though it took me the entire year of 2024 to finish designing all the cards! Because it is more of digital painting rather than just graphic design.

And just like that, Cosmic Crowns was born. We were definitely concerned about exposure. Both of us are Deaf, and we didn’t know anyone in the tabletop industry. But we decided to be fearless and just go for it. In early 2025 we made our debut by launching the game on Kickstarter. Now we’re working on an expansion with new designs that will amplify the Cosmic Crowns universe.

Hopefully it won’t take me another year to finish this one! 😄

Sincerely,
The other co-founder and illustrator, Alessio