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

by Justin Bell

Some friends recently hosted an all-day gaming session; sadly, a work trip forced me to miss out. The theme for the session was loosely inspired by dice drafting games, but it then stretched to include dice chuckers, roll-and-writes, worker placement with dice workers, and games that I am going to include even though I can’t quite place the specific way they use dice. I just know that dice were factored into the equation.

On the flight home, I spent some time dreaming up a perfect day of games based on a variety of dice mechanics. (This is one of my favorite things to explore in BGG’s database: looking up games by family or mechanic.) For my Dream Dice Day, all the games had to prominently feature dice, ideally with the use of dice drafting and/or dice placement mechanics. As long as dice were involved, I made the case to include the game for Dream Dice Day. My dream, my rules!

I used the timeframe that my friends used for their dice game day, about eight hours, give or take. With that as our frame, let’s check out my perfect day!

Pre-Game Appetizers: Railroad Ink: Deep Blue Edition and En Route

I’m not a big roll-and-write guy. I don’t love playing games alone, but nothing is stranger to me than playing games with friends while also…well, playing the game alone. More often than not, I watch as someone rolls a pool of dice, then regret my decision to play a game where we are sitting together, trying to figure out who can optimize the results of the shared dice in front of us. Usually, the only time someone speaks is when the next dice chucker says something like “everybody good?” before chucking those dice again.

That changes with two games that now serve as my “It’s halftime of an NBA playoff game and need something to play solo” titles, Railroad Ink and En Route. Both offer a fun, compact, quick challenge for the brain as I try to optimize my scores. I have two versions of Railroad Ink—the Deep Blue Edition and the Archipelago boards—so I can mix and match expansions. En Route’s solo challenge system and wide variety of maps work wonders, and while the base game uses a flip-and-write system, the dice variant from my copy of En Route: Special Edition is my preferred move. And the dice featured in En Route have that nice, hefty chunk to them.

If someone shows up late, I can squeeze one or both of these titles in with ease. That person in your playgroup who texts with the inevitable “Justin, you won’t believe this, but I’ll be 20 minutes late” problem? No problem at all, since I’ll keep the appetizers warm with these games until everyone arrives.

Noon: The Red Cathedral

2020’s The Red Cathedral, designed by the duo known as "Llama Dice" (Shei S. and Isra C.) and published by Devir, features a main mechanic that I adore. One of a player’s three options on a turn is to select a die from a central rondel by moving the die in a clockwise direction the number of spaces equal to the pips showing on the die. Then, the active player receives the reward on the space where the die ended up, and the die is re-rolled, giving the next player a fresh set of die selections to choose from.

Moving the die to just the right spot is a crunchy choice I love. The color choice of the die will often trigger a wave of bonuses on the player’s personal board, depending on upgrades made earlier in the game. Finding ways to move a die onto a space with as many as two other dice might triple the bonuses a player can receive. And each quadrant of the rondel offers the active player a different bonus, so figuring out which die to move and to which quadrant is a juicy choice, but one that doesn’t bog down the game with deliberations.

1:30 PM: Tiletum

The same two imaginary players who join me for The Red Cathedral would then take part in a play of Tiletum, a 2022 release from the team at Board&Dice designed by Simone Luciani and Daniele Tascini. The dice drafting here is genius. The color of the die and the visible pips represent the number of resources a player receives. The pips on the die’s opposite face (i.e., NOT showing on the die) grant the player a number of actions equal to the D6 inversion of the resource choice.

Every turn, you are choosing how many resources and how many action points you have from a pool of seven, since the total of every D6’s opposite faces always equals seven. If I want to take a merchant action worth three action points, that means I’m getting four resources of the chosen die color.

Dice are limited, and randomly drawn from a cloth bag to start each of the game’s four rounds…with some colors potentially left out of that round. While one of the game’s resources (gold) allows a player to change a die’s pip value, you might not have enough gold to make changes. That might leave you in a sizable hole with very limited choices. Each round’s scoring goal gives players three turns to maximize their chances at points in a round, giving the dice drafting a very nice blend of tactical and strategic choices.

With three players who play as fast as I typically do, Tiletum plays in about 30 minutes per player. That gives us time to play and grab a quick snack between games.

3:30 PM: The White Castle

The Devir dice double dip wraps with The White Castle, another Llama Dice masterpiece featuring dice drafting on an epic scale but in a very tidy package. In fact, The White Castle might be my favorite dice drafting game of them all, and even at four players, the game wraps in about 75 minutes.

The die drafting choices here are a blast, but they are even more interesting when there are a wide range of die values to begin each of the game’s three rounds. Triggering the lantern bonuses by taking the lowest-value die is one thing, but it’s a whole other thing when the “lowest” value die is a five or a six, almost guaranteeing a player extra coins to go along with the lantern goodies.

I prefer The White Castle at two or four players, so let’s assume another imaginary friend came over to join the first three players for the middle of the day, giving us a four-player playthrough.

4:45: Grand Austria Hotel

I think most regulars who visit BGG know that Grand Austria Hotel is glorious. Most players in my network prefer Grand Austria Hotel with some of the extras from the Let’s Waltz! expansion, but for the purposes of Dream Dice Day, I’m going with the following modules from that expansion: Start Player (so that players go in a clockwise order every turn, not the “snake” order where the first player also goes eighth in a four-player game), Would You Like Some More? (simply, more cards), and Unique Hotels, so that each player has their own asymmetric player power.

That means the game can wrap in about 90 minutes. The module with the dancers, Vienna Ballrooms, is fantastic, but it usually means adding 30-60 minutes of playtime. On Dream Dice Day, I’m focused!!

6:30 PM: Kingsburg

I’m finishing the day with the Dream Dice Day Daddy of ‘Em All: Kingsburg, ideally the first edition board with the expansion To Forge a Realm, specifically Module 5. That’s the module which replaces the die roll during the eighth phase of each round with the reinforcement tokens. These tokens give players a chance to plan around the potential baddie (zombies, goblins, etc.) lurking at the end of the round. Once players have seen Module 5 even once, they never go back to playing the game the old-fashioned way.

If forced, I will play Kingsburg at four players…but, we all know that the best way to play Kingsburg is with five players. In that way, Dream Dice Day has to have a fifth player show up only for the nightcap, but I’m sure I could find someone willing and able to stop by to fill that final seat. That’s because you want Kingsburg to be as tight as possible, and five players is solid gold. Scores are always close, and one wrong move (or one destroyed building) is usually the difference between winning and losing.

The dice placement in Kingsburg is brilliant. It’s full of drama. Cursing at the table is a guarantee, especially when two or three players have not rolled well during a season and are all fighting for scraps at the bottom of the pyramid. The +2 tokens are huge, almost as huge as the Market power that lets a player manipulate a die value +/-1 to snipe a space that you thought you had control of.

Kingsburg is a rich way to wrap things up, but I’d love to hear the lineup you would table instead! Maybe I’ll use your advice to plan my next Dream Dice Day…

by Martin van Rossum

“Cat Saga is a cooperative, story-driven adventure game. Explore the world together and make decisions that impact your unique saga.”

In this Designer Diary, I will take you on the journey of creating Cat Saga. We have worked on this game for over four years and are very proud of the result. Hopefully, the design lessons will help other aspiring designers bring their games to life.

How the Game Works
Before we dive into the journey of creating Cat Saga, let’s briefly talk about how the game plays. As a team, you will make decisions that impact the story, engage in combat, and use your abilities to overcome danger. You will create a wonderful saga together attempt epic actions, get into fights, find valuable items, and level up.

There are no turns; players simply move through the story together, with different paths leading to different endings. To overcome obstacles, players must complete a Try or Fight, using dice, abilities, and items to achieve a good result.

The Vision (4 Years Ago)
I have always wanted to create a story-driven game. As a young kid, my dream was to become a writer first and a game designer second. It felt great to combine the two crafts. The idea started when I realized I couldn’t find a good story-driven game or RPG that my wife and son would enjoy.

We began working on different concepts for a game that mixed TTRPG and board game mechanics. Quickly, we struck a balance of complexity that we enjoyed and started the in-depth development. A key goal was to make a game that would also play well solo and allow the “forever DM” to experience a campaign as one of the players. So there is no DM in this game, but we still wanted an exciting story with different paths to explore.

From the start, I wanted a game that plays quickly (under one hour) and carries your progress over to the next chapter. We began by designing something as rules-light as possible while still capturing the feeling of a fantasy adventure game.

It really helps to define your vision and target audience up front. For example, it made sense to keep combat simple and limited, given the targets I had set and the family-friendly nature I wanted to achieve. There are plenty of games with a heavy focus on combat; there was no need for this game to try to be everything for everyone.

Setting
We decided to make a family friendly light-hearted game. And we wanted a twist on the classic fantasy tropes. As a family we were discussing at the time to bring a cat into our home. That is when the theme was decided. Cats are cute and loved by many. This was before we called games "cozy" but looking back, this was a decision to make the game look the way it plays: simple, accesible and friendly.

Early Prototyping
It was clear that this was going to be a very accessible game, so we decided to only use paper, pencils, and dice. Since dice are the randomizer, it was important to decide how they would be used. In one early prototype, we used classic RPG dice: 1d4, 1d6, 1d8, etc. But to differentiate from well-known games and keep the system accessible, we decided to use only the familiar d6.

Adding the numbers on the dice to reach a certain threshold felt familiar, but it did not offer enough options to mitigate the dice. After some testing, we landed on a system where each number is represented by a trait. This means that rolling a 6 is not always good, it might be great for a Strength Try, but useless for another type of challenge.

For players, this allowed us to add options like flipping a die, adding or subtracting one, and, of course, re-rolling. Testing showed that re-rolling abilities were far more fun. They added a push-your-luck element to the game. Will you use that potion now, or save it for later? When you don’t know the exact outcome, the decision becomes much more interesting.

Development & Artwork (2 Years Ago)
The game was in a good state, and we decided to commit to creating artwork. In the meantime, we focused on intensive online testing. Shortly after the art was completed, Lucky joined our family as a cute little kitten.

"When we took these photos two years ago, the game was 90% finished. We have now finished the other 90%, and after the campaign we will complete the final 90%."

Looking back, I remember thinking the game was almost done and that it was time to create the artwork and start more blind testing. But during that phase, an enormous amount of work was still ahead of us. And I know that even after the Kickstarter campaign there will still be plenty left to do.

At this stage we hired an editor. I am not a native English speaker and wrote most of the stories myself, so it was important to have them reviewed and improved. The artwork also grew beyond our initial scope, and we eventually hired several artists to create all the pieces for the game. And we moved into heavy blind-testing. Besides regular playtesting sessions where people played at the same time, we also did a lot of “play-by-post.” We used RoleGate and attracted many blind playtesters from the RPG side of the hobby. Since there are no turns in the game, it flows very well online players don’t all need to be active at the same time.

Now (2026)
Lucky is more than two years old and no longer a small kitten. As much as she matured, so did the game. And now it is finally time to share it with the world!

Lessons
- Create something YOU are missing in the market. A game you would love to play. Ultimately a lot of hours will go into a design, make sure you will enjoy it.
- Start with a clear vision for your game. Whenever you are unsure on which decision to make, going back to the vision and target audience will help you decide. Stating this up front is not a marketing method, it makes sure you end up with a game that hits the targets you set out to achieve.
- Tap into other communities. RoleGate was a great way of testing for this game. Perhaps the gameplay or theme can help you find new groups of playtesters.
- Games are never finished, but at one point they are printed. Yes be a perfectionist, but also work towards completing a project.

by Marcus E Burchers

Welcome to the RISK G.I. JOE: Special Missions design diary! I am Marcus E. Burchers, and I was the developer on Special Missions. Most of the design work was done by Dan Blanchett. When we set out to make a G.I. JOE-themed RISK, we wanted it to be more than just another version of RISK. We wanted it to be something special that introduced something new, while also being uniquely G.I. JOE. Starting with that theme element, it was important to look at the aspects of the IP and make sure they were core to the game. While, yes, COBRA's goal of world domination fits nicely into the mold of a RISK game, the heroic G.I. JOE side required a bit more nuance.

The important areas of the IP to cover were:

1) The heroes. The villains. The big personalities. Roadblock, Scarlett, Zartan, Destro. G.I. JOE and COBRA both have a gallery of recognizable characters at the fore of the battle. Including them in some way was going to be a core mechanic.
2) Vehicles. G.I. JOE was a toy line in the 80s built around the unique (and often ridiculous – see: Pogo Ballistic Battle Ball) vehicles. Any game that did not include them in some way wouldn't be representing the franchise properly.
3) The two factions working against each other over the course of various missions/episodes.

These pieces of the IP gave some good building blocks to differentiate the game from standard RISK. Looking at point two first, early on we knew the minis would be vehicles, and we wanted them to be more than just force multipliers. In the earliest versions of the game this broke down into four types of units on both sides: Infantry, “vehicles,” aircraft, and tanks. For G.I. JOE, this meant the VAMP Mark II, Skystriker, and Wolverine; while for COBRA, we went with the Stinger, Rattler, and H.I.S.S. Tank. Each category of vehicle was unique (though the sides were equal – Rattlers and Skystrikers were the same, for example), with different move and/or abilities in battle, while the overall concept of battles was similar to traditional RISK.

Through the course of testing, having three separate phases of battle and unique combat abilities of each type ended up being complicated and a little hard to remember. For example, the tanks always rolled three dice, even if there was only a single tank present, while aircraft rolled two, also regardless of number. We attempted to slim it down by making the VAMP and Stinger just a bonus to the Infantry, but found that still wasn't sufficient. They got changed to being simple force multipliers (1 VAMP or Stinger was 5 JOE Infantry or COBRA Trooper), before eventually being cut due to the armies on the board rarely requiring force multipliers. This allowed the overall battle structure to be simplified into just Air and Ground attacks, with rolls of 1-3 dice based on your present units, a bit closer to traditional RISK, but retaining bonuses for the aircraft and tanks to keep them feeling special. The tank's special ability to deal additional hits was the last thing to get dialed in.

Equally important to the vehicles was the “why” of this conflict, or rather the win conditions. As I mentioned, a goal of world domination was all well and good for COBRA, but it didn't make sense for G.I. JOE. The earliest concepts introduced objective points as the solution to this problem. This ended up taking the form of Missions (JOE) and Plots (COBRA). These could be many different things from winning battles, to controlling certain territories. Originally, there was the thought it could be a race to a certain number of objective points, but we quickly decided on just “get the most” by the end of the game (which let us set a number of rounds to limit the game length from dragging). More than just running missions or plotting against one another, G.I. JOE has big, grandiose storylines. In addition to small objectives, the Master Plot/Scenario was something we added that can contribute a lot of objective points to your score. It also gave a story-driven reason for the globe-spanning nature of the game. Originally, we started out with Spread of Terror, and added more throughout testing. Each one added during testing created unique experiences and decisions, building in a degree of replayability.

The vehicles and missions (in particular the Master Scenarios) made the game feel very much like G.I. JOE, but I felt that the most important element would be the first: the characters. One bit of feedback I'd heard after working on Battle for the Arctic Circle was, while it was nice that the leaders were present, fans would have liked to see them on the field of battle. I knew that's something I wanted to make sure we did here with RISK, and Dan was on the same page. As much as the original toy line was about the vehicles, the characters were just as important, leading their troops from the frontline against (or for) COBRA. Since we were using tokens instead of minis, we were able to include a wide assortment of them. Most of the heavy hitters: Duke, Scarlett, Cobra Commander, Destro, Cover Girl, etc.

Though abilities did change, for the most part, the format of the leaders stayed the same from start-to-finish. They had a static or triggered ability that you could just use whenever applicable, a bonus to a certain type of unit in battle, and an activated ability using the resource we called Command Tokens. Those first two (the static/triggered ability and the battle bonus) were going to be used the most so they needed to sell the theme of the characters. For example, Destro as a weapons profiteer lets you build and deploy your aircraft and tanks faster. Cobra Commander can retreat outside the normal timing and throw some of his units under the bus in his place. Snake Eyes improves the JOE's Recon action, and so on. The Command Token actions are more impactful (often involving a Sneak Attack) because the Command Tokens were designed as a limited resource. If you're using them on a leader's ability, you aren't using them on something else. They were also tied to each characters' theme, such as Cover Girl allowing you to bring out or move around additional Wolverines.

When the game ended up going to Kickstarter, I had the opportunity to go back and add some additional leaders that we had not originally included in the game, since we were adding a promo pack (Jinx, Shipwreck, Crimson Twins, and Zarana). This ended up bringing the total count of leaders to 16, plus Serpentor (who is only used in two of the Master Scenarios). I'm pretty happy with how they all came out, both in their gameplay and thematically as the characters they represent.

All of these aspects helped sell it as a G.I. JOE game, but we also wanted to bring something unique to RISK. The primary innovation in that regard was called the Redeployment Track (renamed during testing to the Faction Track). Instead of units being defeated and needing to be repurchased, a period of repairing and refueling felt more thematic to G.I. JOE. It also opened up action possibilities, allowing you to devote precious actions (or Command Tokens) on your turn to get things out more quickly. Some details of the Faction Track did change from the earliest versions, such as which spaces units started on, but the original version largely remained intact in the finished product. It is an integral part of the gameplay that needs to be managed, and so far as we were aware was a brand new concept for a RISK game.

Those precious actions were the crux of the gameplay, and while they weren't brand new for RISK (some variants have used action cards before), they felt like a good way to differentiate it from most entries in the series. The need to plan out your turns in advance by placing the cards allows for a bit of strategic planning (or plotting!) that felt very appropriate to the franchise. Having two options and a potential bonus action still left enough flexibility for pivoting when the unexpected happened. The biggest change overall to the action cards in the course of testing was their interaction with Command Tokens. Giving Command Tokens plenty of desirable uses was important. They were used on the action cards' bonus actions more frequently in early iterations before important bonus actions like Recon became free. To give them additional utility (particularly once there were more free bonus actions), we added the ability to spend a Command Token to perform both of your primary actions on the chosen card. This was a popular change in testing as it opened up a lot of potential big plays. Recruiting new units and immediately advancing them (which, if you recruited a new Leader, sets them up to Deploy) was a popular one, but other choices like Maneuver+Reinforce can't be understated either.

The last major unique gameplay feature I'd like to highlight was another one of the early concepts that remained largely intact throughout testing: hidden units. COBRA isn't always open and brazen with its schemes. It is often hiding in the shadows and pulling the strings (as depicted in the Infiltrate World Governments Master plot!). To represent this, COBRA can put some of their units secretly into their territories, hiding them behind their screen. This took a lot of tweaking to get right, but the result led to a distinct difference between the factions, beyond just the verbiage (plots vs. missions). Playing as COBRA feels quite different from playing as G.I. JOE. We had to make a number of different changes to the concept. The biggest one was originally, all of COBRA's units could be hidden. As you can imagine, this became frustrating to play against as G.I. JOE, and was changed to something close to the current set-up where only a certain number of territories can start hidden.

There were also a number of rule issues that had to be ironed out. Hidden units and visible units in the same territory? No. Visible units passing through a hidden territory? Turned out the easiest answer here was it was ok, if they aren't stopping. The one that's stuck with me though was that COBRA's base had to be deployed secretly. This created a lot of rules questions, till we decided that bases couldn't be deployed secretly. Ultimately, this also led to COBRA getting COBRA Island as a territory they could place for their base at the start of the game as a counterpart to the U.S.S. Flagg (which had been around since the earliest iterations of the game).

I think this all adds up to a unique RISK game, but one that is also distinctly G.I. JOE. I hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it. It is a game that plays well no matter how many friends you have, as we designed it to work with 2-, 3-, or 4-players. Fittingly for the G.I. JOE vs. COBRA theme of the IP, unlike many RISK versions, the 2-player game is where it really shines. Happy gaming!

by Steph Hodge

I have been playing and hearing about a bunch of new editions for games getting reprinted with new artwork. This excites me because I love it when a game gets a boost, as it often means new gamers can discover and play it.

▪️ Floodgate Games just released a remastered version of Sagrada along with plans to release expansions as well.



The first expansion to be released is Sagrada: Panorama, which will include playing with up to 6 players as well as other new content:


I got permission to share this early.


▪️ CrowD Games had a very successful Kickstarter back in May 2025 for the highly anticipated Nippon: Zaibatsu. Nippon designed by Nuno Bizarro Sentieiro and Paulo Soledade, has been on my shelf since it was released, but it is also an example of a game that was very hard to get. Gamers are looking for this type of game revival. A hot, hard-to-find game with gorgeous presentation and streamlined mechanics.


[imageid=8820600 medium rep]
Nuno Bizarro Sentieiro and Paulo Soledade with Nippon: Zaibatsu pre-production copy at LeiriaCon - [user=deerstop][/user]


▪️ Allplay has been releasing a bunch of smaller boxed games each year, and there are always a handful of games being revived with a fresh new look. I am always in awe of all the games they are able to create each year. Here are just a few.

Piñatas by Reiner Knizia has been reimaged a few times before. Originally, it was known as Voodoo Prince , then later as Marshmallow Test. Piñatas has that burst of color that fits right in line with the other Allplay titles. This is part of the Allplay "Tricky Card Game" series, as it is a trick-taking game.

Another Knizia card game of interest might be High Society which has been through many iterations. The game was originally released in 1995 and has been a staple in many collections throughout the years. I am all in favor of bringing back classic auction and bidding games, as they are mechanics I highly enjoy and would always love to see more of. About High Society:


Container is a game that is always looking for more editions because it is so well-loved. This is an all-new edition releasing in Q4. Container first released in 2007 and then later in 2018 as Container: 10th Anniversary Jumbo Edition!. This is a highly sought-after game, so it is great for Allplay to make the game more accessible now.

by Fat Francis

Michael Rieneck
Franz Vohwinkel
Deep Print Games

Editor's Note - Michael Rieneck and Franz Vohwinkel wrote a designers' diary about the development of Skybridge, published on Feb 3rd, 2026. This diary is a compliment to that piece, but from the perspective of developing the artwork.

Artist Diary: Skybridge
There are moments in life when paths open up that you didn’t know existed at first.
15 years ago I surprisingly received an unusual assignment: design three fantasy puzzles, including a box design, for a new jigsaw puzzle series. Unknowingly, I had embarked on a long journey that has not yet come to an end.

September 2010

When I made this sketch for the first of a series of puzzles, I had no idea that I would write about it today. At that time the drakhes were still dragons, there were still visible sunbeams in Thraen (at that time simply called “Downworld”) and apart from the Queen, Adlem and the inhabitants of the “Skyworld”, Thraen, and Beeledhans Eye were still completely unknown to me.

Although I have discovered so much in Thraen since then, those three original illustrations laid the foundation for what Skybridge turned into today.

From my current point of view, the first puzzle was certainly the most important of the three, because it already contains all the essential elements of the story: the dry, hollow world on the outside, the lush and heavenly world inside, and the tower that will become a bridge, connecting both worlds.

The motif of the construction site from the second puzzle can be seen as “standing” or “hanging” depending on how one wants to view it. Here, the idea of weightlessness is displayed for the first time: In the hollow world, gravity pulls outwards (for us “down”), while the gravity of the central world pulls inward towards its center (for us “up”). In the middle between both worlds, the two gravitational forces cancel each other out.

A heavily revised version of the first puzzle became the cover of the prototype and a reduced version of the second puzzle can still be seen on the cards “Bridge”.

Only the third puzzle has fallen out of the storyline over time. Too much has changed, or looks completely different today: A peaceful encounter of characters from both worlds in a central room of the Skybridge is now completely impossible.

The Work on the Board Game Started
One of the first tasks was to completely revise the cover to match the current state of the worlds. The Skybridge now gleams in hopeful white and Beeledhans Eye is much more visible. The whole image seems much lighter, almost like a vision. The publisher contributed some good ideas like the slightly slanted point of view and the drakhe flying towards the viewer in the foreground.

The Five Main Characters
In addition to the cover, I first developed the five main characters, as they are important for the visual representation of the five ethnic groups on the player boards and the starting cards. Some of the maps of Skybridge were originally created in 2017, as well as this version of Queen Urcela, who always triggered the comment “She looks like Tilda Swinton”.

True. I think Tilda Swinton’s face is wonderful.

To avoid this similarity, I made a new illustration of the queen, which was quite challenging for me as I liked the original illustration so much.

In the new illustration Urcela is now seen wearing the Crown of Agony, which in the meantime had become an important detail of the story.

- In a first step, I revised the original sketch and drew a new face.
- Parts of the background and dress from the original illustration were preserved during the revision.
- Underneath the layer with the sketch I colored and modeled the face.
- Then I worked the sketch into the background with various blending brushes and added textures and details layer by layer afterwards. Finally, light color corrections completed the image.

I must admit that I like the new "Guinn" better than the original version.

While the game mechanics were still being developed feverishly, the illustration of the Skybridge was created. The bridge would no longer appear on its own game board, but was to be designed as a series of large individual cardboard tiles, laid out next to the game board.
This original sketch dates back to 2017. At that time, the bridge still consisted of 12 parts.

The player boards were more complex, because the elements on them changed several times in the course of further development. The background illustrations of the player boards had to be adapted accordingly. At this point, the illustrations of the five main characters were already finished.

In addition, I had to make sure that there were not too many contrasting details behind the game elements. The areas behind the text and at the bottom would be faded later on, but in this case, less was more.

The game board was a challenge as well, as it consists of many individual parts that had to be combined to form a whole. While I was already working on the illustration, a completely new area of the game board was created, which would not have existed without Moritz Bornkast and Peter Eggert of Deep Print Games: the desert map, where rebels and legions move towards each other. However, before we got to this point, we had to overcome a whole series of more or less usable versions, none of which fit particularly well into the board.

In order to keep the game producible and affordable while reducing the amount of different “game-locations”, the actual game board was brought to the format of a double-folded board the size of the box. The original game board for the Skybridge was scrapped and the desert map was merged with the game board.

The idea of depicting a part of the desert of the Sea of Winds was the breakthrough. In the story, rebels gather in Salthras Deen and try to make their way to the Skybridge, while the legions protecting the construction site move to meet them. At the same time, a storage area for the game components on the board was reintroduced. One space for a discard pile was removed and the other two were rotated to make room. The illustration of the game board consisted of individual parts that were illustrated and assembled largely independently of each other: the illustrations of the symbols for the game components, the map of Thraen, the desert map and the forts.

(By the way, the small skull that marks the discard pile represents the Realm of the Dead, the “Unseth”. All cards - countries, cities and characters, that end up here never come back. And so Thraen dies a little more each round.)

Most of the work on Skybridge was, of course, the many cards that really bring both worlds to life. The story of the Skybridge takes place in a fantastic world, completely impossible by our laws of nature. How can gravity in Thraen act outwards in all directions, while at the same time acting inward on Beeledhans Eye? Why is every day seemingly arbitrarily different in length? Where does the light come from? It’s magic! Of course, this is not entirely true: The people in Thraen believe godhs have created the world according to their wishes.

There is no magic in Thraen. There are no spellcasting wizards, just as there are no magic swords or heroes. Even the Drakhes are not magical beings, but animals that are captured by humans, tamed and used for their purposes.

The inhabitants of Thraen are simply humans, with all their faults and shortcomings. What would humanity do, if it could see paradise in the sky at any time? What if, in addition, life became more difficult to bear with each passing day?

Unfortunately, it was not possible to keep the short text passages from our prototype cards. The additional effort for production and translation would have been too high.

In order to be able to convey the worlds of Skybridge as originally designed in the prototype, I wanted to create the cards with a range of different realistic styles. It was important to me to show as many details as possible to make the peoples and their stories seem believable.

A little trick that provides increased detail is the size of the illustration. I created the card illustrations with the required resolution more than doubled. For printing, I then built the illustrations into the card frames scaled down considerably. Of course, some details are lost in the process, but the viewer still “feels” that they were there: Everything seems finer, more real, than in “regular” resolution. A pleasant side effect of this approach is also that the illustrations can later be displayed in larger formats as well.

Here are a few examples:

Vinad

In this important scene, Vinad, architect of the Utreng and Adlems main supporter, discovers that the construction of the Skybridge has been sabotaged.

Painting in Corel Painter, I used some of my own texture brushes, which I use to draw any kind of detailed patterned textiles with ease. I created a whole collection of them over the years, which I mix and paint over as needed. I affectionately call them my “wallpaper” brushes.

Min Vallesk

When a Serath greets someone with the word “Min” followed by his name, that person knows that the remainder of his life has just changed irrevocably.

Another type of textile details can be found in this image. Of course, each nation speaks its own language and thus also uses its own characters. On Min Vallesk’s headgear, two characters of the Selessem are recognizable in the pattern.

Usehet Tuin

Only the nomads of the Great Plains know of Usehet Tuin, the hidden valley in the Sea of Winds, where the ghosts of their ancestors are at home.
The Enebe Ghres only dare to come here when the situation is desperate and hopeless enough, to justify a plea for the help of the spirits.

The camp at the foot of the bridge

A key moment happens when the rebels find the camp of the workers at the foot of the Skybridge. The high price that ordinary folks have paid for the construction of the bridge is revealed.

The concept for the artwork of the Godh cards differs from the other cards in one essential point: They represent art that contains information about the different cultures of Thraens inhabitants. This is another, deeper level behind the obvious motif.

“The medium is the message” means here that different peoples also depict their Godhs using different mediums and styles. The Utreng for example like to carve their sacred images in wood, because wood is difficult to obtain in the high mountains of the Salthras and is therefore considered to be a valuable material. The Selessem also paint their naive art on wood, but only because they are a poor fishing people. They simply can afford no other surface to paint on.

In the enormous rock cliff on the edge of the Lhaedineer lowlands, the Lhaedineeri have found the ideal place for monumental depictions of their Godhs. The Tarrans, on the other hand, have perfected the fine art of sculpture. The work with precious stone has a tradition in the Reich that goes back to the first people of the White Sea.

In order to portrait this variety of styles convincingly, objects and materials need to be presented as realistically as possible. Only through the contrast of the respective art style and the medium on which it is created, it becomes clear that what looks like a drawing on parchment is also meant as to be seen as a “drawing on parchment”.

Valendha

The cultural contexts of the Godhs shown on the cards also become clearer because, unlike the other cards, almost every depiction of a Godh also shows writing in the respective language. Inscriptions, names and descriptions support the impression that the priests of Valendha want to say something about their Godhess in this carving.

Ephalu

The depictions of the Godhs on the cards are only intended as examples. There are certainly a variety of representations of every Godh in Thraen, some similar, some different, depending on which temple you are visiting.

Although mainly Tarrans believe in Ephalu, there are believers among the Enebe Ghres and the Unshackled People as well.
These peoples would certainly represent the blind Godhess of hope in different styles and mediums than the Tarrans. This is a field of the cultures in Thraen that I would like to explore more deeply in the future.

The worlds of Skybridge, initially described only in writing, now come to life in the illustrations for the game. Working with my own creation as a reference was a strange experience. It was often just as exciting and surprising for me as it was for Michael, who could hardly wait to see more every week. Holding the finished game in my hands now, after such a long time and all the ups and downs we’ve been through, still feels unreal to me.
I am looking forward to seeing Skybridge on the gaming tables and hope that lots of people will enjoy playing our game.

If you would like to see more of the art of Skybridge, you can explore it in greater detail on the website: theskybridge.de. (Currently available in German only, but eventually it will be available in English.)

I will also be posting information about further developments there.

by Justin Bell

60,000 gamers (including me) have been intently following the crowdfunding updates for the Brass: Pittsburgh campaign launching on March 24th. I’m a massive fan of the Brass system, as an owner of Brass (aka Brass: Lancashire) and Age of Industry (along with its first set of expansion maps, Japan and Minnesota). I’m also very happy to play your copy of Brass: Birmingham any time you want, for reasons I described in my Meeple Mountain review a few years ago.

While Santa’s elves spend the next few months working on the Brass: Pittsburgh production–sexy metal coins aren’t going to make themselves, after all–I’ve still got plenty to do to pass the time. That’s because campaigns for expansions, second editions, reprints, deluxe copies and additional games in the same universe always do the thing I love most–they fire up the base of players who love earlier games in these series, making these titles much easier to get to the table while riding the hype wave.

***

For about eight months in 2024, whenever I went to a game night, I placed my copy of Brass: Lancashire in my gaming “go bag.”

I tried to have Lancashire ready just in case my ideal scenario popped if we didn’t already have another game lined up. Every week, in every part of Chicagoland, no matter what else had been planned for that game night, I popped Lancashire into the bag. And every week, without fail, I would socialize my bag’s contents, then end with something like “...I’ve also got Brass: Lancashire in the bag, you know, just in case anyone wants to get that to the table.”

As you have guessed, Lancashire never hit during that window of time. There were always reasons, or excuses, why it never hit—”oh, you’ve got that hot review copy of _____”, “nah, let’s do a bunch of fillers instead”; “we only have about two hours left, and I thought Brass takes longer”—but the reality is that I never structured an entire night around getting Lancashire to the table. (I did play Birmingham twice in that time, ironic because I prefer Lancashire over Birmingham if I had to pick just one of those two titles.)

One of the other reasons why Lancashire never hit: I insist on playing it with exactly four players. The game is brutal regardless of player count, but it is perfect AND perfectly brutal with four players. A couple of times, Lancashire didn’t come out because we had three players, or a player count higher than four and needed another title to accommodate the group.

So, I went oh-for-eight-months back in ‘24. But now that we have a new Brass game on the horizon? It’s never been easier to get a game of Brass rolling. Just accidentally cough the word “Brass” while standing in a crowd of gamers right now, and you can probably get it to the table.

“Sorry, did you say Brass? Funny, I was just thinking we should get a game going.”

***

It’s happening at game nights in my circles and at get-togethers across the Chicagoland area…which tells me this phenomenon is probably happening everywhere.

I’m seeing Brass titles on the dance card a little more often right now. One of the heavyweight strategy nights in my area has had Lancashire or Birmingham pop up a couple times in the last month. Another friend had the chance to play the Pittsburgh prototype recently, thanks to copies hitting the hands of local influencers who are completing review plays in time for the wide range of coverage hitting the interwebs this week.

This might be the easiest time to ever get a Brass game to the table. But firing up the base doesn’t stop there, with a number of other titles suddenly getting hot thanks to the news of more expansion goodies hitting shelves soon.

My love affair with Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon means that the game hits my table from time to time. But with the release of the new expansion, Shackleton Base: Below. Within. Above., suddenly everyone else I know is interested in getting games of Shackleton Base rolling, too. It seems like The Old King’s Crown is everywhere right now…and there’s a new campaign active now for the game’s second printing that includes not only an expansion, but another game in the same universe, Annulet.

Now we’re even getting “games in the same universe” spinoffs! Maybe next year, we’ll get Chicago Annulet, helping NBC/Peacock maintain its stranglehold on Wednesday nights after episodes of Chicago Med, Fire, and PD.

Regicide’s new campaign is pushing not just one, but two new titles. The new Pirates of Maracaibo expansion Bermuda Triangle has given me yet another excuse to get plays of the base game in, both in person and on Board Game Arena. And Voidfall has an expansion AND a campaign game coming…which drove me to pull my Galactic Box off the shelf to get more solo plays in. (OK, OK, you got me: I only opened the box to slip faction mats into the triple-layer player boards. Don’t lie, Voidfall players–you’ve done the same thing!)

***

I know a number of people who avoid all these expansions, reprints, and deluxifications (it’s a word, trust me); to each their own. I use these opportunities to remember what I loved about the base game in the first place. Will these new goodies make me feel differently about why I fell in love with the initial titles? We’ll see. But any excuse to get some of my favorites to the table is an excuse that is good enough for me.

Fire it up!

by Adam Porter

Following the huge success of Voyages, many designers were keen to replicate Postmark Games’s model of crowdfunded, print-and-play, roll-and-write games. In early 2022, I was approached by an illustrator and graphic designer. He was unknown to me, but clearly talented, and he asked whether I’d like to collaborate on such a project. The arrangement was simple: I would design the rules, he would handle illustration and crowdfunding. There was no contract or firm commitment, but it felt worth exploring.

I immediately knew I wanted to create a flip-and-write game using a standard deck of playing cards. My favourite titles in this genre are Cartographers, Avenue, and Welcome to, so these served as my inspiration. I pulled together a few initial concepts and approached my good friend and frequent collaborator Rob Fisher (co-designer on Qwuzzle, Kompromat,Happy Hoppers, and Emberheart). As often happens, Rob wasn’t keen on my early implementations, but he liked the core idea. He took it away, and a few days later came back with a clear vision: a tower-building game.

That immediately connected with something from our past. Five years earlier, Rob and I had worked on a trick-taking card game about building totem poles. After each trick, players would pick a card and stack it into their own display, forming totem poles. The game was called Trick Pick Totem, describing the sequence of play. We never finished the design. We were uneasy with the theme, and the card play never quite clicked. But one mechanism stayed with us: when stacking numbered cards, values had to descend from bottom to top, while special cards bent the rules and opened up new scoring possibilities. That idea became the foundation of our new design.

We started referring to the new game as Flip Pick Towers – an evolution of Trick Pick Totem – once again a literal description of the turn structure: flip cards, pick one, draw towers.

Rob’s starting point for our flip-and-write was inspired. With an illustrator already attached, he imagined a game that became more beautiful as you played. Many roll-and-writes have clever systems but unattractive interfaces, like spreadsheets. Others begin with an appealing illustrated sheet that steadily degrades as players cross things out. From the very beginning, we set a guiding principle: the sheet should start relatively plain (framed by a nicely illustrated surround) and become richer and more ornate over the course of play. Players should be able to express themselves through their drawings – but without that being a requirement. Boxes, numbers, letters, or stick figures should work just as well, if players preferred.

I’m a strong believer in identifying a hook early in development. For Flip Pick Towers, it was simple and clear: ‘a flip-and-write game where your player sheet gets more beautiful as you play’.

Two other pillars quickly followed:
1. The game could use only a deck of cards and a sheet of paper.
2. It should be playable virtually, by any number of players (very much a product of our COVID-era mindset).

The earliest version used the numerical cards from a standard deck of playing cards. As in Welcome to, three cards were flipped; and all players chose one to utilise. Numbers represented floors in a growing tower, while suits allowed you to mark spaces in a small grid on your sheet. Completing lines in the grid unlocked decorations – banners, windows, treasure, beanstalks – each scoring in different ways.

Early Sketch. 18th May 2022. At this point, Royal Cards represented different types of roof.
The next step was to find roles for the royal cards. The solution was obvious and intuitive – they would live in the towers. Kings scored if placed in the highest room; Queens scored if royals were grouped together; Jacks scored for the number of banners on their tower.

We pieced together rules for the remaining cards, to maximise the use of a traditional deck. Selecting an Ace granted you a special ability which would allow you to break the tower-building rules in some manner (similar to our special cards in Trick Pick Totem). But what about Jokers? Well… they attracted dragons – fun to draw but they cost you points. What do dragons love? Gold. So we allowed players to discard one of their previously drawn treasures to persuade a dragon to fly on by, avoiding the penalty.

We imagined that players might like to colour and elaborate on their illustrations and share their finished towers online, much as they did with the wonderful map-building game, Cartographers.

21st May 2022. Royals now occupied the towers.
A couple of weeks had passed since the initial proposal by the illustrator, so I dropped him a message to let him know we had a game to show him. And… nothing. No response. Repeated messages went unanswered. And I felt a little deflated. Rob and I were left with a fun little print-and-play game but no collaborator and no obvious route to market. Neither of us was keen to run a crowdfunding campaign ourselves. And I had fallen completely in love with the game. I played it solo over and over. This was some of our best work, and we felt it deserved a full production, with a box and fully-illustrated, dedicated deck of cards.

26th May 2022. First prototype with printed sheets.
As development continued, the limitations of a traditional deck became more obvious. We had clever ideas for roofs and bridges between towers, but they cried out for bespoke cards to make them intuitive. More importantly – inspired by the variable objectives in Cartographers – we could see huge potential in how Kings, Queens, and Jacks might score, but realising that variety required a separate deck of scoring cards.

4th June 2022. Rules continue to develop. In this version, Royals could occupy bridges and roofs and they had fixed scoring, rather than variable objectives.
So we made a pivotal decision: abandon standard playing cards and create a dedicated deck. This allowed us to fine-tune card distribution, deepen thematic immersion, and introduce new options. Jacks became Princesses. Aces became Wizards.

We designed a deck of 30 different scoring objectives. At the start of each game, one objective is assigned to each royal – Queen, King, and Princess – creating an enormous number of possible combinations and dramatically increasing replayability. Queens might score for being adjacent to beanstalks, for each dragon in the same row as them, or for occupying your tallest tower. Kings might score for bridges in the same row, or treasure in the same column, or being adjacent to an empty room. Princesses might score for being above or below windows, or other princesses. I got more and more hooked on solitaire play, and started to think about how to approach the ‘win’ condition when playing alone. I wanted something more engaging than ‘beat your high score’. I’d enjoyed the system in Button Shy’s Sprawlopolis, where multiple objectives each have a target score that combine into a single goal. I borrowed that idea, but added difficulty levels: each objective in Flip Pick Towers has an easy, medium, and hard target. Your chosen difficulty determines your overall target score for the session.

7th June 2022. Rob imagining what a player sheet might look like with a professional illustrator
involved
Osprey Gameswere always our first-choice publisher. I’d pitched to them several times at UK Games Expo without success, but Rob and I admired their catalogue and the care they put into presentation – particularly with the Undaunted series by my friends Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson. I knew my original contact at Osprey had moved on, so I asked David who handled submissions now. His answer was Rhys ap Gwyn, and by sheer coincidence, Rob and I already knew him well. Years earlier, when Rhys was living in Cardiff, he was a regular at our weekly design group. We had playtested many of his prototypes and he’d playtested many of ours. So, our fears of needing to build new bridges with Osprey were unfounded. We just needed to drop Rhys a quick note on Facebook!

11th February 2023. Moving away from traditional deck. Now with icons for different resources, and special cards for roofs and bridges.
I showed Flip Pick Towers to Rhys at UK Games Expo in June 2023. In September, he told us Osprey wanted to publish it, but not until 2026. Because of the long timeline, he generously encouraged me to show the game to other publishers.

At SPIEL Essen that October, I pitched several designs, but two stood out: a worker placement game which would go on to be released as Emberheart, and Flip Pick Towers. Both games got a reaction unlike any games I had pitched before. Multiple companies were interested in one, or both, games. One publisher phoned me a few hours after I pitched Flip Pick Towers to him, and told me he wanted to publish it. I said, “But you haven’t played it yet”. He said, “That doesn’t matter. If there are elements which need to change, we can change them. But I don’t want you to show the game to anyone else.” The pressure spooked us, and Rob and I declined.

On the flight home, I was sat across the aisle from some other SPIEL Essen convention-goers. I could hear from their conversation that they worked for Osprey. I introduced myself and it turned out they had all played the Flip Pick Towers prototype and loved it. After weighing our options, despite the wait, Rob and I agreed that Osprey still felt like the right home. Enthusiasm counts for a lot. We signed the contract.

A couple of months later, Rhys sent us a selection of images from a handful of different illustrators, and asked our opinion about which might be suitable for the game. Hungarian artist, Beatrix Papp, was our preference because of the simple sketchy appearance of her drawings – they didn’t feel a million miles from the type of drawings players might create on their own sheets. Over the following months, Rhys involved us in every aspect of the visual development of the game, regularly checking in with us with each new batch of images from Beatrix.

We were hugely impressed with the attention to detail in the artist’s brief written for Beatrix, which extended to many pages. Here is an extract:

“Whimsical fantasy. This is aimed at casual gamers and families and will be marked as 14+.  However, we are not aiming for elements to be too cute. It would be great to give it a little edge, which is why we’re really excited to have you as an illustrator. Elements need to be simple, to encourage people to draw, rather than intimidate them. As such, we don’t need detailed backgrounds or anything, just little touches to indicate the situations / environment, as with the art that drew us to you. We also love the limited palette.”

Sosban the witch, Welsh for ‘saucepan’.
A challenge at this stage was calibrating complexity. Flip Pick Towers isn’t difficult to learn, but it introduces several unfamiliar systems. Each feature we added increased strategic depth but risked accessibility. We included stars on the player sheets with bonuses if you reached them with your towers. We tried reducing the number of columns. We removed bridges and roofs for a basic introductory game. But all of these changes diminished the game somewhat. Eventually, we accepted that the game needed to be presented in its best, complete form, and trusted players to meet it halfway.

Tall towers look tasty to Mellt the dragon, searching for a nest! Mellt - Welsh for ‘lightning’.
One pivotal design decision was formalising the behaviour of dragons. In the earliest versions of the game, they simply deducted points. In the final version, they arrive unannounced and perch atop your towers, preventing you from building any higher unless you feed them gold. Flip Pick Towers is intentionally low on player interaction. Aside from a few competitive elements – such as rewarding the first player to place roofs, or those with more windows than their opponents – most of the game unfolds independently. This choice ties directly to one of our core design pillars: Flip Pick Towers supports any number of players. However, we also wanted to offer a more interactive variant. Once again, we looked to Cartographers for inspiration, particularly its handling of monster attacks. In Flip Pick Towers’s competitive variant, when a dragon appears, an opponent chooses which of your towers it occupies, adding a sharper edge of player interaction for groups that want it.

At some point in this process, Rhys suggested weaving Welsh references into the game’s backstory. It seemed logical – castles and dragons are a huge part of the Welsh identity. ‘Y Ddraig Goch’, the red dragon, symbolises the country and appears on our national flag. Rob and I have both lived in Wales throughout our entire adult lives, and both of us have children who are Welsh. Rhys is Welsh – his surname ‘ap Gwyn’ means ‘son of Gwyn’ in Welsh, with Gwyn meaning ‘white or fair’). My design-focused YouTube channel is called Adam in Wales. This Welsh connection was a wonderful development, and it helped to make the project feel deeply personal. Wales has a rich history of myths, passed down orally by druids, and recorded in medieval manuscripts.

King Llew, Welsh for ‘lion’.
Our King is called Llew after a hero of Welsh mythology, and the Queen is named Blodwen, a name common in Welsh legends. The dragons carry the names Fflam and Mellt – Welsh for flame and lightning, and featuring the familiar Welsh double-letters. The wizards are now magical creatures: Bwca, the Welsh hobgoblin; Mab, the Queen of the fairies, made famous in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. We also opted for some more whimsical titles: a centaur named Ji-Ji, a name inspired by a Welsh nursery rhyme about a horse; a witch called Sosban, the Welsh word for Saucepan… just because it amused us! The rules explain that the winner of the game must jump up and down and shout ‘Bendigedig!’ meaning fantastic or marvellous! The rule book contains a guide to the origins (and pronunciation) of these names.

We explored many possible titles for the game, but they all felt generic. We’d grown attached to Flip Pick Towers, and we were delighted when Osprey agreed to keep it.

With artwork complete, the first half of 2025 was spent refining rules and polishing the rulebook, ensuring clarity without losing the sense of fun and whimsy. Rhys showed me a near-final prototype at UK Games Expo in June 2025. At SPIEL Essen, four months later, a full production copy was available for demo. I loved teaching the game. It’s ideal for learning as you play because, in that first game, every new card flipped introduces a new character – a princess, an imp, a witch, a dragon – or a building feature – a bridge, a roof – and players are always excited to learn what each new element means.

Flip Pick Towers is my twelfth or thirteenth published game (depending on how you count them…) and my fifth co-design with Rob. It is the game where we have had the most direct input at every stage of production, and that has been a real joy, making the project deeply personal for Rob and myself. We hope you love it as much as we do.

by Beth Heile

The Preview lists for both UK Games Expo and Game Market Spring 2026 are now live.

Haven't heard of a Preview list yet? Don't worry! There are so many features on BGG it's hard to keep track of them all.

A Preview serves as a list of new and upcoming games that will be available at a specific convention, either for sale or as a demo. Users attending those conventions are able to search, filter, sort, and save information from this list to help them target games they want to try or buy. Users visiting BGG can view this list to see which new titles are popular and getting a lot of buzz before a large event.

Currently BGG is offering Preview lists for the following conventions:
- Spielwarenmesse - list goes live in December
- Festival International des Jeux (FIJ) - list goes live in early January
- GAMA Expo - list goes live in early January
- UK Games Expo - list goes live in March
- Game Market Spring - Previously known as Tokyo Game Market, list goes live in March
- Origins - list goes live in April
- Gen Con - list goes live in early June
- SPIEL Essen - list goes live in July
- PAX Unplugged - list goes live in October

Please do not contact BGG to suggest other conventions to add to this list. We do not have plans to expand our preview lists at this time.

You can find all active and past Preview lists by clicking on "Browse" in the top menu of BGG and then choosing "Previews".

If you are a publisher, the process to submit games for a Preview list has been overhauled in the last few months. Please email news@boardgamegeek.com for a full tutorial or if you are running into any problems.

by Steph Hodge

In Q2, we will expect to see a handful of expansions released for many popular games!

▪️ Czech Games Edition (CGE) plans to release Codenames: Expansion Packs this Q2 2026 designed by Vlaada Chvátil. Introducing three new packs to mix with Codenames , Codenames: Duet, and Codenames: Pictures !



▪️ The Codenames: Fairy Tales Expansion Pack contains 50 new fairy tale-themed word cards, 3 agents, and 4 pictures. You will need the base game from either Codenames, or Codenames: Duet to play.



▪️ The Codenames: Sci-Fi Expansion Pack contains 50 new sci-fi-themed word cards, 3 agents, and 4 pictures. You will need the base game from either Codenames, or Codenames: Duet to play.



▪️ The Codenames: Pictures - Cute Critters Expansion Pack contains 40 new picture cards.You will need Codenames: Pictures to play.



▪️ Taking a side-step from expansions, CGE also announced Codenames: Critical Role Adventures . The adventure begins Q3 2026.

From a recent newsletter, Hachette Boardgames USA has announced two exciting new expansions, which are planned to arrive in April 2026.

▪️ Gigamic is publishing a second expansion for the hit title Akropolis called Akropolis: Panteon designed by Jules Messaud. The first expansion, Akropolis: Athena was released in 2024, which added new tiles and goals to complete.

Pantheon offers a whole new way to play Akropolis, as it is now possible to play cooperatively. An excerpt from the BGG page:



▪️ Studio H is publishing Cyclades: Maelstrom which expands on Cyclades: Legendary Edition designed by Bruno Cathala, and Ludovic Maublanc.