by nestore mangone

In December 2017 I was asking myself a couple of times a day whether Newton was ready, and I could not come up with a convincing answer; but since no game is ever truly ready, the very fact that I kept asking the question meant it was ready enough. I had worked on it so much, and with such stubbornness, that I was genuinely tired of board games, of players, and of myself. I therefore decided to take a few months off and focus on my main job, which in the meantime was falling apart.

Then in January 2018, Newton did what it was not supposed to do. Barely three weeks after my noble resolution, a leisure visit to one of the many castles built by Frederick II in southern Italy sparked a renewed curiosity about this figure I had already heard so much about. I read a few things from my father’s library and understood that I could not avoid starting to design a new game about the most astonishing character of that period.

So, on a feverish night, while snowflakes were falling on the heights of the Sila, I locked myself in my studio-laboratory and created the first version of a game that would stay with me for a long time: Stupor Mundi, which at the time was more simply called Frederick II.

The first version of the game was completely different from the current one; in the next image you can see the very first iteration, printed and tested.

At the beginning there was no central board, only a display to draft various types of cards and a personal board to activate them. The interesting part was that each player owned two castles, one on the left and one on the right, and allies determined how to score points in that specific castle against the castle of the adjacent player on the same side.

The idea was genuinely good, but several problems emerged. Deciding the seating order in a four-player game was the least of them. The real issue was tracking power relationships dynamically and giving players the ability to react, turn after turn, to limit losses, mitigating the despair of those who saw points being torn away relentlessly, sinking into the feeling of playing a wargame disguised as a euro.

The game was interesting, but it was not what I wanted to achieve. I had a specific type of player in mind, and that direction did not work.

Some elements, however, were already clearly defined and I would never change them; they were the pillars of the game.

1. The card system - Face down or face up? Pure emotion, hard choices, the feeling of being clever because you give something up for something bigger; pain and pleasure. This is how euros are made. Nothing is given away; every time you lose something to gain something else, perhaps better.
2. The concept of allies - Those little rascals were mini-games on a single tile, worlds within the world. If the game was a large and complex stellar system, those entities were planets, each with its own scoring cycles to be fitted into the larger design.

I kept working, with difficulty. I was short on testers and at the time I lived in Calabria. Finding suitable people for a game like this required hours of travel, which I could only afford every two or three months. In any case, I was determined to finish the job. I made many sacrifices, and by Essen SPIEL 2018 I had a new version to show to a few publishers.

The new version introduced the central castle. If I could not have players confront each other directly, I could do it indirectly. Thus the castle of Frederick II was born, the shadow fief that ties together the plots of every other fief. The castle, in truth, is not a castle. If you think it represents a pile of stone, wood, and lime, you lack imagination, and that is a problem if this is your main hobby. In the Middle Ages, castles were useful defensive structures, but they were also symbols; the symbolic value of the castle points to the concept of dominion over land. Building and dismantling the castle of Frederick II means acting within a network of pacts and agreements, those made with the little rascals: the allies.

In this version the castle had eight sides; it was all about dense construction. More than half of the actions were directed toward building, but the numbers never worked out, the game went on forever, and something was missing. Something I had already wanted to include in Newton but had failed to achieve: passive powers.

If construction dominated everything, there was no room for anything else that was complex and cerebral. For years I had wanted to design a game in which passive powers were central; yes, exactly those powers that we players forget to use, only to complain later and accuse the designer of our own negligence.

I therefore decided to change the numbers. After returning from Essen SPIEL, carrying with me a certain excitement sparked by the interesting comments of various publishers, I got back to work. I was truly enthusiastic and produced two more iterations in quick succession, but something still did not add up. Where could I place passive powers and give them a different meaning? I did not want to give up; I wanted to bring that aspect to light.

At the beginning of 2019 however, a novelty arrived swiftly, like a brigantine pushed by the most favorable winds. I had spoken with Simone Luciani; we were both satisfied with Newton and decided to start working on a new game with a scientific theme. After several conversations it became clear that Darwin would be the next project, and that I would handle the first phase of development. I therefore had to set Frederick II aside.

In September 2019, I returned to work on Frederick II. Some time had passed and I needed a strategy to restart. Destroying everything seemed the most intelligent thing to do. I deliberately deleted all files, spreadsheets, and destroyed the prototypes by burning them in the fireplace while cooking lentils in a clay pot. I bought a bottle of Irish whiskey, got drunk alone, slept for two days, and then started working on the game again.

The next image shows the step taken in January 2020. What was new? The mini-tracks with passive powers. What was different compared to all the other games with this element that I had played? Timing. The passive power was not something you kept for the entire game; it was a temporal opportunity. You had it for a limited time. Which time? You decided. You were the one saying, "This part of my life went this way. I change everything. I put myself back into play. I take a step forward." And once again that real, authentic concept returned: in life you win and you lose. Sometimes you have to let go (at the end, you lose everything and die).

Right around that time I decided to leave my main job and devote myself entirely to game design. Just like the workers in my game, who leave a space, lose a power, but immediately gain a new one - another "skill", as English speakers would say. This gave a new meaning to my existence. I lost something; I gained something else. It was not necessarily an absolute improvement; it was a step to be taken with the right timing. It was only a potential improvement, perhaps even a short-term worsening, but a move toward a major improvement in the near future - a tango danced with time and power relations. The greatest satisfaction comes when something you create speaks not only about the game, but about your life.

Does the game seem devoid of theme to you? Do you not feel the theme? I can assure you that, for me, this is not the case. I am sorry when this happens and I fully understand when players feel lost because they do not grasp the connections between things. I always try to create points of contact between reality and the game, but 1) it is not always easy, and 2) it is not my priority. A creative does not necessarily have to be a servant to other people’s needs for existential representation. In general, being someone’s servant because they have money to give you is not the most edifying goal a creative should aspire to.

At that point the game was very close to what you see today; the final step was creating a system to manage the displays with all the various elements: cards, the goods market, and the allies market. I therefore designed the board with five zones and the movement mechanism. It felt like a natural solution, something that emerged on its own.

By then the game was mature, and I found a publisher, Quined Games, who helped me greatly with their comments and experience.

The game then went through further slowdowns due to a series of problems: COVID and other personal matters. Then one day I was put in contact with the person who would become the illustrator of the game, Maciej Janik, a phenomenal artist. We talked about atmosphere, imagery, castles, and about what interested me from my point of view regarding allies - about a universalistic game in which allies spoke about a very important aspect of political life and of that historical period. The absurdity of the Crusades and the way Frederick II had addressed the problem. If on one side the game spoke about power relations and the ability to face sacrifices in order to obtain greater things, on the other it spoke about concord. A game about the Middle Ages without bloodshed, without hatred between religions or races, but only intrigues, machinations, and growth within the framework of diplomacy.

Some people believe that one medieval king is the same as another, that an emperor is nothing more than a meme, a warrior with a crown who fights like a ninja, killing armored opponents with sword blows. If you strike someone in armor with a sword you will not stop them, even if you are the protagonist of a movie, but Hollywood directors do not seem to know this. Frederick II was not just any character; he is not a boring generic icon printed on the sign of a medieval pub. Frederick II was one of the most fascinating figures in European history, but a game is not required to explain this to you.

In any case, one day this arrived at my home: the first advanced prototype of the game. I almost cried with emotion.

The rest concerns the work of bringing the game to BGA, the balancing process, the sleepless nights, creative insecurity, and the Gamefound campaign... but that is another story.

by James Buckley

As the geopolitical environment becomes more tumultuous, the use of digital and analogue games by professionals to understand, model, and prepare for the future is coming to prominence. Professional wargaming is having its moment in the sun.

I moved into the world of professional game design having been the head of development at a hobby board game publisher. My first professional role was helping with the development and production of Battlegroup Wargame System (BGWS). The game was commissioned by the British Army to encourage the development of a wargaming mentality in the organisation.

While there are plenty of commercial wargames that cover tactical level combat, few are interested in capturing elements that precede a real life engagement: planning based on mission objectives, force capacity, tasking against specific time lines and geographic boundaries, and map work. That’s why they are not used for training by the army.

BGWS is interested in that. I believed that a commercial audience would be too. So I began work on transforming BGWS - an umpire led-game specifically designed for military professionals - into what was to become Battlegroup Clash: Baltics. A professional wargame, designed for a commercial audience. A game you can read about on BGG.

Step 1 - What To Keep
The two essential elements from BGWS I wanted to port to Battlegroup Clash: Baltics were the use of grid-based, real world maps, and the requirement to plan your operations before the game begins.

To my knowledge, no land-based tactical commercial wargame uses real world maps. Very few give much focus on operational planning, at least not how modern armed forces actually do it.

Step 2 - What To Drop
BGWS requires both an umpire and an understanding of military concepts and approaches that is beyond most civilians. It uses off-the-shelf 1:10,000 mapping, and off board cards to track lots of information on the units in play.

User playtest by British Army junior officers of Battlegroup Wargame System, the game that inspired Battlegroup Clash: Baltics.

To make it playable beyond the classroom, these features needed amending, and the game overall needed streamlining.

A first major decision was to move away from maps that require judgement to understand and parse. I commissioned the creation of bespoke maps, created by computer-aided design. These are real world, based on satellite imagery of Estonia, but with overlaid borders to identify key terrain types.

Map B from Battlegroup Clash: Baltics. The game uses 1:10,000 maps developed from satellite imagery from Estonia, with grid lines overlaid.

A second major decision was to move the stats for each unit onto its counter, rather than having them on a separate sheet. This significantly eases game play at a lower play count; everything is in front of the player on the map.

Battlegroup Clash: Baltics moves all the necessary information about the unit onto the counter (right). BGWS uses separate force cards for this instead of its counters (left).

A third major decision related to narrative. I wanted to move away from a generic ‘blue’ versus ‘red’ approach to the real world. The presence of a British Army Battlegroup in Estonia made that an obvious choice, and the game became NATO versus Russia in a hypothetical invasion by the latter of Estonia.

Step 3 - What To Add
Emphasising the present day narrative, and in keeping with my desire to create something that stood out from other tactical wargames, I decided to concentrate a lot of the design for Battlegroup Clash: Baltics on drones and electronic warfare.

The war in Ukraine has shown the degree to which drone warfare has changed the battlefield. Electronic warfare has been around for longer, but its intersection with drones and cyber attacks makes it now almost as important as kinetic effects on the battlefield.

In the game, every action that would generate some kind of radio or electronic transmission has the potential to be intercepted by the enemy. Intercepted transmissions can be used to target units for direct or indirect fires. Each side also gains access to Electronic Warfare Chits, that can be used on the battlefield for a variety of effects such as jamming your opponent’s recon drones.

This is important as reconnaissance drones, called UAS, completely transform the battlefield in the game, providing virtually unlimited line of sight for indirect fire. Another type of kamikaze drone, known as a first person video drone (FPV), can be used to directly attack enemy units, providing a more accurate, if less powerful, alternative to mortars and artillery.

UAS effect. In the game a UAS gives unlimited line of sight to the four adjacent grid squares.

Testing the Game
I wanted my playtesting team to combine folks with experience in both professional as well as commercial wargaming, and through a combination of persistence and good luck I was able to get both.

Prototype counters used in a play test.

While Tabletop Simulator played a crucial role in the development and testing process, I learnt from my time as a hobby game developer that digital is not a substitute for a physical prototype, so I had physical copies made and tested them both at home, at my local club and at conventions.

Testing the two-mapper scenario at PunchedCON in Coventry, UK.

Making the Game
Independent of the tariffs saga, I made a decision very early on that I wouldn’t get the game printed in China. China is funding Russia’s war in Ukraine, so it didn’t make sense to me to pay a Chinese company to make the game. Instead I chose EFKO in the Czech Republic. The price is higher than the Chinese alternative, but I can sleep easier with my choice.

The box cover
Selling the Game
Battlegroup Clash: Baltics is self-published, in the sense that I am releasing via my own company. I have sufficient experience of the board game industry to be able to do this, rather than having to use another publisher to release the game. This approach also allowed me to get the game to market very quickly.

I considered using crowdfunding as the vehicle for selling the game, but I was concerned that the concept might not fly with customers from a professional background. Furthermore, I didn’t need funding to develop the game, just to print it, and decided that a simple pre-order system via the Sapper Studio website, which I use for my game development consultancy business, would suffice.

I decided to make use of professional channels as well as traditional board game media to promote the game. This involved posting on LinkedIn and via the Fight Club Discord server, as well as hobby channels and events such as SD Histcon and Armchair Dragoons.

The success of the game in terms of generating pre-orders very much exceeded my expectations. I had several hundred pre-orders within the first few months, meaning I could opt for a larger print run than I had anticipated. Now the game is out for general release, and it’s time to see if my customers agree that I have been able to create a professional wargame for a commercial audience.

You can purchase a copy of Battlegroup Clash directly from Sapper Studio via this link https://www.sapperstudio.com/battlegr. Alternatively check your with FLGS in your country that you know stock a good wargame selection.

by Steph Hodge

Hey Everyone! Thank you so much for the warm welcome on my first post last week. :meeple:

Today I wanted to bring attention to Board Game Arena. Many of us enjoy playing games online, and BGA is one of the key websites for doing that. I am still amazed at the number of games they are implementing each year. There are over 1200 games ready to be played at your fingertips.

Currently, there is 1 week left to vote for the 2025 BGA Awards. The BGA Awards were first introduced in January 2024 for games from 2023, and they have continued each year since.

[ImageID=9395798 medium rep]

You can view the whole article here, but below is a snip-it of how they select which games are nominated.




To participate, you will first have to play each of the nominated games in the category you want to vote for. Once you play each game from a category, you can cast your vote here.

Here are the nominations:

Best Casual Game:
Coffee Rush
Flip 7
Qwinto
Skull King

Best Regular Game
Castles of Mad King Ludwig
Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game
Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor
The Guild of Merchant Explorers

Best Expert Game
Apiary
Concordia
Galactic Cruise
The White Castle

Best 2-Player Game
Azul Duel
King of Tokyo: Duel
Schotten Totten
Toy Battle

Best Brain Teaser
Digit Code
Logic
Orapa Mine
Ubongo

Happy Voting!

They will post the results on 2/16/2026 at 5:00 AM

by Robby Boey

The Museum Spark
The whole story of Abbates traces back to a single weekend outing: a perfectly ordinary visit to museum M in Leuven, Belgium. Museums usually inspire me to admiration, contemplation, and maybe jealousy when confronted with artists who clearly have a greater talent than I do. Yet, halfway through the galleries, it was the museum gift shop that lodged the fateful splinter in my brain. Among books and postcards sat a board game derived from one of the museum’s artworks. That’s when my wife, who works at Bornem Abbey, turned to me and said, almost mischievously, “Wouldn’t it be great if we used Bornem Abbey as our own board game?”

At first, it was just a thought experiment. But museums have a way of making ideas feel serious, as though monks, curators, and old medieval books are silently nodding in approval. By the time we were back home, the little notion had become a not-so-little itch; this could actually work. The abbey is practically begging to become cardboard: artifacts, stained glass, libraries, abbots, architecture, history, the works. And there’s something magical about transforming physical cultural heritage into a playful, interactive medium… a kind of preservation-through-play.

Tiles, Heraldry, Cards, Grids, and the First Meeple
The first draft was tile-based because of course it was: tile-layers are the early evolutionary stage of most Euro designs. I imagined players building a stylized abbey using square tiles, connecting rooms via coats of arms of abbots printed along the edges. It wasn’t terrible. It was even charming in that “this should probably be sold next to puzzles and tea towels” kind of way.

But testing quickly revealed its limits: calm, pleasant, and almost entirely devoid of tension. It was the board game equivalent of a monk humming a lullaby in Gregorian chant.

I felt the abbey deserved more verve, not chaos, but interaction. I wanted something where players would look up, watch each other, second-guess each other, and occasionally mutter mild insults under their breath.

Shifting from tiles to cards unlocked new design space. The game transformed into a 4×4 grid of cards on the table, with a solitary meeple marching around like a tiny abbot conducting inspections, moved by the roll of a die. Activating a row or column allowed players to claim a card from it. A neat mechanism with just enough positional tension to matter, especially as every row and column also had their own effect that would benefit the winner of that round. But who got to claim first? Enter the first appearance of bidding cards numbered 1–13. Simple, but competitive. A touch of interaction, without turning into a knife fight.

Already players were comparing intentions: “You want that stained-glass? Or are you bluffing?” The game was learning to talk socially.

Shrinking the Abbey and Growing the Puzzle
The next breakthrough came by shrinking the central 4×4 grid into a tighter 3×3. That small reduction made everything more deliberate as fewer spaces meant fewer choices and more pressure. Adding in a personal player tableau on which you would place the cards you won was another needed layer of gameplay. Now players didn’t just acquire cards, they needed to store them in their personal tableau. Rows and columns formed gentle patterns and scoring lines.

Then I mirrored the central meeple onto each personal tableau. Your own meeple determined where newly drafted cards could be placed. No longer could players lazily optimize. The game began to tease, challenge, restrict. And when games tease, players lean in.

With three cards per side around the 3×3 grid, there were three opportunities per round to bid. Initially, all bids were submitted blind and simultaneously. The idea worked logically; emotionally it felt bone-dry. Everyone revealed, shrugged, assigned cards, and moved on.

What finally clicked after several test sessions with the amazing team of Bornem Abbey was sequential - open bidding. Each bidding moment became a micro-auction: clockwise, highest card wins, ties forbidden. Suddenly players had agency in tempo. Adding an advantage to the lowest bid, made underbidding a tactic by itself. Seize the initiative next round and additionally force oneself into taking the blind from the draw pile; a form of gamble that often paid off in surprising ways.
The scoring system also matured around this time: three of a kind in a line scored 10, two scored 6, mismatches 3. It meshed beautifully with the abbey’s thematic triad: artifacts, stained glass, library books, and gave visitors a taste of actual abbey content without forcing it down their throats.

Beans, Beans, the Monastic Currency and Rules
And then… beans. Yes, beans.
With rows of cards on your personal tableau now providing points, I added a central tableau, the abbey chapter room, on which you had a score track for… negative points. Tying this in with the cards proved to be a fresh new mechanic, another layer in the game. Low bidding cards gained white beans (up to four), indicating how far the central meeple marched on this track. High values bore fewer or none.

Efficient for winning auctions, disastrous for bean logistics.

Meanwhile collected cards bestowed black beans, advancing the personal meeple. And at game’s end, the distance between central and personal meeples produced negative points, resulting in a monastic bean-based tug-of-war.

Mechanically it added tempo management, shared-race pressure, and a new layer of tension. Thematically it became a playful abstraction of the actual voting system in abbeys. More importantly, playtesters kept talking about beans afterward. When players talk about a mechanism after the table is packed up, design is doing its job.

The cards proved to be even more of a treasure vault for new mechanics. Every abbey needs rules, so ours gained one: St. Benedict’s. It rewarded players for sequencing bids cleverly: 1–7 first, 8–13 second, then even, then odd. Do it right and you earned a glorious 14-value card, worth a victory point at the end. It nudged players toward intentionality without being prescriptive. It also supplied flavor as monks love order, after all. Now everything clicks and the different mechanics just click.

Feedback
Thus armed, we marched to the Spel convention in Antwerp in November 2024 with five professionally printed prototypes. The booth was lively, feedback plentiful, and best of all, genuine strangers smiled while playing. This cannot be overstated: strangers are the ultimate calibrators of fun. Friends lie. Family lies. Colleagues lie because they must see you at lunch. Only random convention-goers express truth.
People praised the tension and pace, but they also nudged the weak spots: scoring was a little too predetermined, patterns a bit too solvable, and the Rule of St. Benedict too predictable after repeat plays. All fair. All fixable.

Back in our “war room,” scoring underwent surgery. Fixed 10/6/3 lines melted away and three starting revealed cards determined scoring values: 3/2/1 points per card for the three types. Instantly every game became a different economic ecosystem.

Mission cards entered next with spatial objectives promising five points for pattern completion and halving negative bean-distance if fully satisfied. They gave structure, identity, and long-term ambition to players’ tableaus.

The Rule of St. Benedict became modular via two double-sided guides per player, offering unique sequences and higher replay value. Suddenly players had strategic identities instead of purely tactical reactions.
The prototype now felt alive and, importantly, replayable.

A Deadline, a Printer, and Several Sleepless Months
Then came the twist worthy of a thriller; the city of Bornem joined forces with the abbey to help fund a first run on the condition that the game launch by April 2025. When this condition was agreed, it was January. We still needed to finalize rules, translate gameplay into precise language, prep InDesign files, negotiate printing, and manufacture on time without resorting to cargo ships that behave like slow, unpredictable sea turtles.

We selected Fabryka Kart: European, reliable, communicative, and they delivered with clock-like precision. Rulebooks printed, components boxed, meeples lacquered, games shrink-wrapped. In April, copies stood proudly for sale at the abbey. All this done at the end with many sleepless nights, working and editing, typing and designing.
Nineteen months all-in-all from spark to shelf.

Pontifex Games Begins & Closing Reflections
The funniest part of the whole odyssey is that the game was meant to be a one-off cultural project. Instead, it became the cornerstone of a publishing house: Pontifex Games. As of writing, we already have our second game, Sacra Maioritas out, an expansion for Abbates and our third release, Via Peregrina, slated for February 2026. Apparently once you’ve printed one game, it’s difficult to stop. Monastic vices take many forms…

In retrospect, designing for a real institution, with its own history, identity, and a tourism footprint, shaped countless design decisions. It demanded theme without theatrics, elegance without sterility, accessibility without boredom. And it revealed how physical sites and cultural spaces can find new life in cardboard.

If I learned anything, it’s that creativity also thrives on constraints: theme, deadlines, and funding all played their part. And through all of it, the game stayed fun. Which, in the end, is the only reason to make one.

by Steph Hodge

▪️ Capstone Games plans to release Rising Cultures this March 2026. This extends their 2-player lineup of games which includes Pagan: Fate of Roanoke, Watergate, Suna Valo, and many more!

Rising Cultures is brought to you from designers Aske Christiansen (Living Forest) & Francesco Testini (Tang Garden)

Here is an excerpt from a recent newsletter:

▪️ Aquaria is another new release available in the Capstone catalog after partnering with the small Czech publisher Delicious Games.

From Tomáš Holek the designer who brought you SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Galileo Galilei you can now control the aquarium.




▪️ Speaking of Tomáš Holek, he has yet another new game just released from Capstone titled Pondscape.




▪️ Scott Almes is quite the prolific designer who brought us Series: Tiny Epic (Gamelyn Games/Tycoon Games) games, Beer & Bread as well as a brand new game called Angel's Share. Capstone partnered with Spielworxx to release Angel's Share in February 2026.

▪️ Finally, the hunt is on in Pirates of Maracaibo because a second expansion has hit the market! Be on the lookout for Pirates of Maracaibo: Bermuda Triangle.

This new expansion introduces a new module that has players going on a treasure hunt, where players need to collect the most treasure. Of course, that is just one small portion of the expansion; there is added content with epic monsters you have to deal with, new improvement cards, and a new solo experience.

Are you ready to set sail?

by S G

In the early 2000s, I had the privilege of connecting with a NASA scientist who would change the course of my career. She posed a simple but powerful challenge: How do we share all the amazing work happening on the International Space Station in a way that actually excites the general public?

My answer was immediate — games.

With her support, I started down a path that would eventually lead to the successful Kickstarter of 4 Years to Mars. But like any real space program, the road wasn’t paved with yellow bricks. It was littered with asteroids, craters, and — oh yes — funding and budget issues.

History and Design
(Feel free to skip ahead to Gameplay if you'd like)

4 Years to Mars began life as a humble paper prototype for a NASA outreach mobile game called To the Moon and Beyond. My lab had already launched two successful mobile games, and this would be our third—and, in my opinion, the most challenging.

NASA periodically publishes a document called Benefits for Humanity. In its most common form, it’s a dense, 25+ page technical report filled with fascinating information about how NASA research benefits life on Earth and advances exploration. Unfortunately, it’s not exactly light reading and many people find it intimidating.

The mission I accepted was clear: translate that information into something people could understand—and enjoy.

After many hours of brainstorming, we landed on the idea of a card game. Players would:
- Conduct research based on the real research in the document
- Fund technology projects that used that research based on the projects in the documents and in NASA Spinoffs
- Use the funded technology to build mission components.

From this, a paper prototype was born.

The first cards were printed on sticker paper and slapped onto old playing cards. The “board” consisted of images printed on cardstock. We cannibalized games from home to scavenge money, tokens, and components.

Once funding was approved, playtesting began with people from across the agency, and development of the mobile game followed. If you’re curious, To the Moon and Beyond is still playable—just search for it along with “NASA” on Google Play, Xbox, or the Apple App Store (Yes, there’s actually an Xbox version).

From Mobile to Tabletop

In 2021, after 37 years in government and extensive experience using gamification across projects, I decided it was time to venture out on my own. One lingering dream was to turn To the Moon and Beyond into a family-friendly board game—one that taught players about NASA while being genuinely fun.

I secured permission to create the game and use NASA imagery (with restrictions), recruited my son—fresh out of college with a game design degree—and launched my company, Game2Learn.

The design challenges were significant. The biggest? Transforming a single-player mobile game into a 1–6 player tabletop experience that worked both competitively and cooperatively.

Our first attempts failed spectacularly. Copying the mobile formula directly just didn’t work. We scrapped the “one research topic discounted one project” system and replaced it with broad research categories that discounted multiple projects. To increase player interaction, we added Sabotage cards. We also rebalanced the mission objectives to create a consistent mission track.

To the Moon and Back—the board game—was born.

Iteration, Evolution, and Failure (the Fun Kind)

Testing continued in 2022 with a rough prototype at Origins Game Fair. Feedback was honest and invaluable:
- The board was too big
- The artwork felt unfinished
- This is fun!
- And, frankly, Mars is sexier than the Moon

I hired an artist, regrouped, and rebranded the game as 5 Years to Mars.

Artwork required many iterations. I had a clear picture in my mind, but conveying that across the continent via zoom was harder than I thought. Thankfully, my amazing artist grew adept at reading my mind and we settled on a design that not only fit the genre, but allowed players to stack the project cards for easier point computation.

While the card design stabilized, the board continued to be a challenge. A large board with designated spaces worked great—but was far too expensive to manufacture. We explored multiple layouts, tracks, and even tried to recreate some of the parts building fun from the mobile game.

Eventually, we settled on a smaller fold-up board for 5 Years to Mars. In 2023, after Origins, we launched the Kickstarter.

And then… we canceled it.

We had reached over 50% of our goal, but something was still missing.

The Final Countdown: 4 Years to Mars

Determined to fix what was missing, I sought out mentors and publishers and connected with Sean Brown of Mr. B Games. With his guidance, and additional feedback from convention players, I made several crucial changes. The game was split into a Base game, an Events deck, and a Cutthroat deck which broadened the game's appeal. The game was rebalanced to remove a game year, which shortened the play time and aligned with what seemed to be the industry standard length.

In addition to broadening the game’s appeal, the modular approach reduced the funding goal since the Events deck and Cutthroat deck could be made into stretch goals for the campaign.

In 2024, the game successfully funded on Kickstarter, and I was able to include the Events deck and the Cutthroat deck with my funding.

After manufacturing hiccups and tariff nightmares, 4 Years to Mars became a reality.

Game Play Synopsis

4 Years to Mars is a card-based game for one to six players that can be played competitively or cooperatively. The game is played over four rounds, called Program Years. These represent the four years you have to complete your program. To succeed, you must complete eight Mission Objectives by accumulating 6 points in each objective.

During the first Program Year, you will fund Research cards. Research cards represent topics you are researching in one of your four bays on the International Space Station. Your Research cards reduce the cost of Projects that you will fund in order to advance your Mission Objectives.

In the second through fourth Program Years, players can purchase Project cards as well as Research and Action cards. Project cards provide advances in your Mission Objectives as well as income for the next year of your program. Projects are categorized based on what benefits they provide in Scientific discoveries, helping life on Earth, advancing space Exploration, or inspiring youth through STEM programs. When combined into sets, these benefit categories also advance your Mission Objectives.

At the end of a Program Year, players advance their Mission Objective tokens once per mission icon on their funded Projects. Mission Objective tokens are also advanced based on what sets are made with card categories. The first and second players to complete a Mission Objective receive an Award from the government. This reward can be used to augment the next year's budget or can be saved for end of game calculations in case of a tie.

After Mission Objectives have been advanced and Awards earned, players receive 20 Spucks (space bucks) from the government and any income their products have generated. The first player token then passes to the player with the smallest budget for the next year. The first person to complete all 8 mission objectives wins the game.

The game difficulty can be varied with the inclusion of Event cards or played more competitively with the inclusion of the Cutthroat cards. Rules are provided for solo play as well as cooperative play.

Conclusion

Even with its ups and downs, this has been a wonderful experience. I encourage everyone: If you have an idea, don't dream it, do it!
I typically run the game at Origins, so if you're around, stop by and say hi. I may even have a NASA sticker left to hand out.

by Fat Francis

AUTHORS AND DESIGNERS:
Michael Rieneck
Franz Vohwinkel

Franz:
“Three Illustrations with fantasy motifs for a new series of 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles.” That was the assignment that led to the creation of the Skybridge in autumn 2010.

Beyond this, there were no instructions from the publisher, so I had to come up with something. Dragons! Fantasy - there must be dragons. But what else? I wanted it to be something else than the usual fantasy cliché with sword-swinging heroes and princesses to be saved in front of a Neuschwanstein-castle backdrop. Also, instead of developing three unrelated motifs, I wanted to come up with a small, short story to connect the three puzzles.

So, what’s cool? A hollow world. Ever since Journey to the Center of the Earth, I always found hollow worlds fascinating. What else? A huge tower, like the tower of Babel. Together with dragons, this could be exciting. Why is the tower being built? Well, as always with large monumental buildings, it is built to get closer to God.

Somehow this doesn’t really work for a hollow world, because there’s just the other side of the world to be seen in the sky. The sky over Thraen is finite, not infinite like ours. There was something missing to make it worthwhile for such a tower to be built.

Then I had an idea: In the middle of the hollow world floats a small planet, a moon! And what if the roles were reversed? If not the moon was an unlivable, dry world but the hollow world that surrounds it?

People must constantly fight for their survival on the outside, while they have to watch a lush, green and fertile world above their heads? A visible, real paradise, right in front of the eyes of all humanity? Wouldn’t that be enough motivation to build a huge tower into the sky that forms a bridge between the worlds? A world-bridge? A Skybridge?

Suddenly I had found my little story for the puzzles:
Part 1 - The construction of the bridge begins;
Part 2 - The bridge is half built, gravity flips to the other side;
Part 3 - The bridge is finished, people of both worlds meet.

The completed illustrations for the three jigsaw puzzles
The puzzles were produced and published, but were, as far as I know, not a great success: The puzzle series was not continued anyway. Normally, this would have been the end of the Skybridge and its worlds - if it hadn’t been for those prints.

The publisher gave me prints of the puzzles from the manufacturer. Full-sized, stable prints on really thick cardboard, not yet cut into individual puzzle pieces. I displayed and sold them in the following time at conventions, tournaments and game events. My little story about the Skybridge made visitors curious.

“Where can I read something about it?” was a question I was often asked. I always answered with “Sorry, I’m an artist, man. I can’t write.”

LEFT: Prints for sale at Emerald City Comic Con, Seattle, 2014 / RIGHT: Gen Con, Indianapolis, 2015
But over time, it started to bother me. Was it true that I couldn’t write? After all, I hadn’t tried it since my school days. So at some point, I decided to give it a shot sometime in 2011. I couldn’t say afterwards whether the result was good or bad, but one thing became clear to me: I really enjoy writing.

In the following years, the history and worlds of Skybridge grew dramatically. It became obvious that a short story wouldn’t do the emerging, complex relationships justice. The more I explored Thraen, Beeledhans Eye and the Skybridge, the more questions had to be answered. A three-part structure again offered itself.
Part I: How did the bridge come to be built after no one had dared to do it for thousands and thousands of days?
Part II: What happens when such a bridge is built under conditions of constantly decreasing gravity that finally flips to the other side?
And, last but not least,
Part III: What happens when the Skybridge is completed and paradise suddenly becomes accessible to all of humanity?

I would be a strange game illustrator if I hadn’t asked myself whether there isn’t a game somewhere in this story. Unfortunately, there is a good reason why I became an illustrator: math and I have always been at war with each other. But game design needs mathematics for their mechanics like players need the rules to play a game. It was clear to me that I was completely unsuited to developing a game on my own.

Then at a party during SPIEL in Essen - it must have been 2013 - I met someone who knows how to make games based on given stories: Michael Rieneck. I had already illustrated games he designed, but didn’t know him well. When we started talking, I gathered all my courage and finally told him about the Skybridge. Then I asked him if he could imagine designing a game for an unreleased book...

Michael:
... These are days still remembered many years later. And by that I don’t mean anything specific, like the weather or the corresponding date. I mean the feeling that this day triggered in you. Some kind of feeling that this day would change something. And that those experiences will have an effect for a long time. How long, I couldn’t guess, then back in the fall of 2013 ...

Franz Vohwinkel just asked me if I could imagine developing a game based on a story that has been on his mind for a long time and that he intends to write a book about it. I had to sort that out for a moment and let it sink in. I have worked with book templates before and appreciate doing it very much. On one hand, books usually provide great stories and ensure that you don’t have to look for a - usually superimposed - theme for the game anymore. In addition, books offer a common thread for the development of a game right from the start.

But a book that doesn’t even exist yet? That seemed quite bizarre. But there were no doubts. When an experienced game illustrator like Franz Vohwinkel comes up with a story, then it must be something very imaginative that should give enough starting points for a game idea. I didn’t know what the book is about, but I already knew my answer: “Sure, I can imagine that.”

And so begins a long journey into a strange and epic world that has been taking an increasingly concrete form in my mind’s eye ever since that day, drawing me further and further into its spell.

I can’t remember exactly when over the years Franz told me various details of the story. But because I couldn’t read anything about it, I asked him countless questions about it while we were working together, and he patiently gave me just as many answers - a process that continues to this day. In fact, there is still a lot for me to discover in Thraen. In the beginning, it was the big topics that we discussed and that were supposed to play a role in the game. The hollow world of Thraen, Beeledhans Eye, the peoples of Thraen, the cruel queen, the Drakhes and all the Gods. And most importantly, the desire to build a Skybridge. “Great,” I thought, I had already found the game goal. I immediately felt reminded of the building of the cathedral in The Pillars of the Earth. With this, the thematic framework established quite quickly. Another one thing was clear to me from the beginning. Franz certainly would want to illustrate his story with opulent pictures. Hence, large playing cards are undoubtedly the best medium to let off steam artistically. Also, we’d need a big game board, of course.

When you accept such a big assignment, you quickly want certainty. Can I even come up with something suitable? Am I really capable of developing a good game for Skybridge that can convince the players and especially Franz? The project has taken over my mind and it keeps occupying it until I have success or I failed. After our first conversation that night, I got to work very soon and created a card-based board game in which the Skybridge is built. At that time, I knew only a few main characters from the story. Franz had already told me about some of the cities and landscapes of Thraen. I still remember vividly how strange many names seemed to me back then. Today they are familiar and it feels like I have known them forever. But I wanted to ignore all this at first and develop a good game mechanic that fits the topic and can be filled with life later. The first prototype was actually ready before Christmas. It crashed with a loud bang, not just for my test players but also for myself. The decisions were bland and the atmosphere of an epic story did not even begin to come up at the game table. Franz didn’t see this prototype or the second one, which also was a disaster.

So the start was already an utter failure. In addition, I had gained a realization during those first two attempts that initially frustrated me, but turned out to be a stroke of luck later on. Initially the players were supposed to form their own extensive card displays, which they laid out successively on each side of the game board. The space required for this reached far beyond the normal dimensions of a conventional play table. It quickly became obvious: A maximum of one row of cards could be placed on each side of the game board, nothing more, unless we use very small cards.

Example of cards displays on all sides of the game board
This didn’t seem to be a real option for this project, which was supposed to come to life through its impressive illustrations. Then I got the idea to limit the card display to a row of six cards, to make them fit comfortably to the side of a large game board. Whoever wants to play a seventh card needs to cover up one that’s already lying out. The covered card would then no longer be usable for the player. For the available space, this worked wonderfully. From this moment on, each player had six card slots available on his side, which had to be tactically used in a smart way. We already assigned a color to the cards of each ethnic group. Each group consisted of eighteen cards, which were available in separate piles on the game board. At the beginning of a turn, one player could draw an open card from one of the piles and receive a bonus from the respective people. This mechanism hasn't changed to this day. Even back then, the top cards of the piles were only refreshed at the beginning of the new round. So the starting player always had the largest selection of cards to draw from in the current round.

With the help of the cards, the actions required for the game were controlled: procurement of technical knowledge and raw materials for the construction of the Skybridge, supply of food for the population, the expansion of military power, intrigues, oracles, praying for favors from gods, usage of Drakhes and more. There were quite a few different actions on the cards. Many were tried, many more were changed or abandoned.

The space problem was solved, but the game still didn’t work. The decisions were still trivial unfortunately. It was far too easy to construct a well-functioning display. So I wanted to limit the freedom of the construction of the card display. This was when the runes were born. With their help I wanted to tie the individual cards to certain card slots. If a player wanted to play a certain card, it had to be placed on a specific card slot and cover the card that might already be there. This quickly turned out to be a step in the right direction and I asked Franz to design six runes for me that could be depicted on the cards and slots. At first there was a total of six runes, but as it turned out, the freedoms were still too great.

The original six runes
Only after we limited the slots to five - and thus also the runes - was the slot management (as I called it) challenging enough as an essential game mechanic. (By the way, the sixth rune from that time still exists - you can see it on a belt of the rebel leader Raphis and as a tattoo on the neck of Hamises).

Franz:
In the meantime, Michael and I had started working on a serious prototype for the game. The first elements we needed were, of course, icons for the actions, layouts for the playing cards, and the game board.

Michael needed more and more background information about Thraen for his work on the game. My focus during this time was therefore mainly world building. Although much of it already existed in writing, the geography of Thraen needed to be visualized. I had to create maps to fully understand the connections between the regions and their peoples.
From these maps, prototype graphics of the game board and the playing cards were then developed.

Maps of Thraen

The first playable board

Prototypes for SPIEL in 2018[
Michael:
In the meantime, I was sure I had found the core mechanism of the game. Now I got down to work on the distribution of the cards and their functions over the five runes. For this I was in a lively back and forth with Franz about what could be included in each stack of faction cards. “Metal and Drakhes are only available for the Utreng, salt comes only from the cities of Shenna” is an example of the kind of information that I received from him. One can easily imagine that thematic correctness and game developing necessity did not always go hand in hand. We had to make compromises, but by that time I had long fallen to my own “Skybridge fever” and I no longer wanted things in the game to be completely different from the written story. It was a challenging puzzle that we had to solve together, but we managed to distribute the actions coherently and meaningfully among the now 100+ cards.

Meanwhile, Franz had made a breathtaking three-dimensional skybridge that was enthroned in the center of our game board. It looked absolutely gorgeous and I still have the picture of it close to my heart.

Cardboard prototype version of a 3D Skybridge
By that time, I had no more doubts that we’d find a publisher for Skybridge. What a painful misconception! Many days, weeks, months and even years of work were already spent on the project. Not only in terms of the development of the game design itself, but also in terms of the design of the prototypes, which, thanks to Franz, presented themselves differently than those I usually create. Should all of it have been in vain? For a brief period of time, we even played around with the idea of running a Kickstarter campaign. But in the end, the project seemed too big for us—we had no experience in this area. As difficult as this was for us, we had to admit that we would probably not be able to capture the history of the Skybridge in a board game and convince other decision-makers. At this point, the chapter “Skybridge board game” looked like it had finally reached its end.
Then the Vohwinkels decided to move from Seattle to Eckernförde at the beginning of 2020 - which happens to be about a 15 minute car drive from my home.

Franz:
After presenting the first prototypes to various publishers, it became clear to us that we still had a long way to go with the second prototype: Most important steps were moving the card slots from the game board to individual player boards and to disconnect the skybridge and the group of central draw piles into two separate game boards. With this new flexible version, Skybridge was now adaptable to a wider range of table sizes.
We also streamlined the gameplay and its essential mechanisms to make Skybridge less complex and more accessible.

Streamlined prototype versions of the game board, player board, and Skybridge
Michael:
Instead of communicating across the Atlantic, we were suddenly able to work collaboratively at the same table and try out new ideas together in smaller steps.

But what was left of our game, after all? Our “old” Skybridge was too bulky and overloaded, too confusing and long-winded for most publishers. There was so much criticism, I hardly remember it all. Still, we wanted to use the luxury of simply being able to meet every week in person to make one last attempt. For a start, we subjected our prototypes to a radical cure. Game board reimagined, event cards forgone, 3D bridge removed, development tracks eliminated. All that and much more. We streamlined the game significantly. As it turned out, we were really lucky. Maybe it was the luck of the skilled, but still, I consider us lucky: The new, stripped down game still worked. In fact, we instantly liked the new version much better than the previous version. It is actually rather rare that such drastic changes immediately work well.

But, surprisingly, so it happened. The flow of the game was better, the playing time was significantly reduced, somehow everything seemed to be more precise, more to the point. Suddenly we were hopeful again and we got to work - now in Eckernförde - with renewed verve. We had the new player boards and smaller, more functional game boards. This made the handling of the components much more pleasant and feel less rigid. We played countless times to further balance the game and test the new individual abilities for the players. Expanding these asymmetric player skills was an important step for us, to give the game the greatest possible variance.

Franz:
The large card size had been planned from the beginning, but until this point we used the regular trading card size, because it was more convenient for the creation of the prototypes. Now the time had come to convert all the cards to the large format. At the same time, the old placeholder-graphics on the cards - which showed just early sketches for the maps of Thraen - were abandoned in favor of mock-up sketches that showed people, landscapes and cities.

Example of original prototype cards next to expanded illustrations
Michael:
When we presented the new version, it seemed like we were actually on the right track. But despite intensive work on the game, this version also turned out to be a fallacy in the end. And so, at the end of 2022, we again reached the point to put Skybridge with a heavy heart into the drawer of failed projects. By now, we were mentally too deeply involved in our game for another complete restart - we were still convinced that our game was the best it could ever be.

Franz:
The second version of Skybridge also did not find approval from the editors. Our Skybridge board game project was thus over for the time being. Looking back, I can’t say whether I felt more disappointment about our failure or relief that the ordeal was finally over.

In my free time, I concentrated all my energy on the novel, which had grown to a considerable size in the meantime.

Michael:
And then luck struck again. This time it did not come from ourselves, but it came to us from the outside. I can’t remember the context and on which occasion it happened, but Peter Eggert asked me about our game -it was the beginning of 2023. He wanted to know what actually became of the game I and Franz had been working on.

I always had the different versions with me for testing at a game event of Inka and Markus Brand in Lieberhausen. That’s where Peter had seen the various prototypes in the years before.

“Unfortunately nothing,” I had to tell him. “Then bring it to Lieberhausen again,” he suggested. I brought it along in consultation with Franz and I played the game several times with Peter and his team. It actually went well. Or, as Peter usually phrases it: “That’s pretty good, but it can be even better.” He could actually imagine publishing the game after editorial processing at Deep Print Games. And just like that, hope and enthusiasm for the project were back again and we got to work with Deep Prints editor Moritz Bornkast. One thing was particularly important to Peter: He thought the game needed a little more complexity. He envisioned a third strategic level in addition to building the bridge and worship the gods. The resistance against the rebels and the simultaneous expansion of one’s own military power should become significantly more important to achieve this. The implementation of this third branch of strategy was once again a lengthy process. Not least because it made profound changes in the cards necessary. The new rebel game plan was created, which led to new garrisons and a new function on the cards. Other elements had to give way. Once again, thematic and mechanical adjustments to the many cards were necessary. In the end, it was worth it.

Franz:
When Peter Eggert from Deep Print Games appeared out of nowhere and expressed interest in Skybridge to Michael, I was extremely skeptical at first. I just couldn’t imagine that a solution could be coming to us and our game so easily and unexpected.
At the moment of signing the contract, the hobby of “Skybridge” instantly became a huge pile of work. It had suddenly become clear to me, that my imagined worlds would indeed be published after such a long time. I immediately started to feverishly turn the images in my head into pictures for the game.

In order to be able to really dive deep into the project, I stopped accepting any commissioned work since then and I solely focused on Skybridge.

Michael:
While Franz devoted himself to his artistic work around the clock, for me the most wonderful time began. I worked with Moritz fine-tuning the content for the last time. A few details here and there – there wasn’t much more to do for me. I don’t know how other authors feel, but for me, these are the best moments in a project. The moments when you see your game idea take shape with your own eyes for the first time and its full creative power unfold. I got to see new images from Franz every week, one more beautiful than the other. Places and people, all of which had existed only in my imagination, suddenly became visible, as if a thick veil of fog had been lifted step by step. It felt a bit like I was meeting old friends again after a long time and I was traveling to forgotten places of longing with them ...

Whatever happens, however the game continues its journey, it has a special place in my heart and I’m utterly happy and grateful that I don’t have to get it out of my drawer when I want to play it.

by Reed Ambrose

Wispwood is a magical forest filled with lights luring the most curious of cats. With each light—wisps from the old tales — and tree tiles, you grow your forest, placing individual tiles together as "tetris" shapes. Your forest is alive, like a slow breath inhaling and expanding until the round is over. Between rounds, your forest breathes out, removing the tree tiles but keeping the wisp tiles in place, revealing a unique spatial puzzle in your forest to solve the next round with a bigger grid size. Explore the whimsical woods and fulfill the wishes of the wisps to create the brightest forest!

For nearly nine months, my morning routine in Texas consisted of checking messages from Czechia.

If you'd like to know how I got there, you can learn more in detail on how the game Wispwood, came to be in this designer diary. What awaited me each morning were messages from CGE, i.e. Cat Game Experts (or Czech Games Edition) with their creativity, critiques, and more on the development of Wispwood.

It's been a fun and challenging ride, strapped into the roller coaster with them. I am thankful for how they develop games, involving me from the start and throughout the entire process. Their pawprints are all over the game, and not only is the game better for it, but so am I. Here's a broader look behind the trees at some of the game's development.

Theme and Title

Themes and titles are often changed by publishers, but CGE kept my quirky theme of cats chasing fantasy lights in the forest. I added cats to my prototype because of their desire to chase laser lights. I was humored by the thought that they would love chasing other magical lights like wisps, too.

To my surprise and joy, the theme was kept! I was thrilled about keeping the theme because it is a favorite literary element of mine, and I have long loved the idea of ignis fatuus. The Latin phrase can be translated to "foolish fire", an umbrella term for all lights leading followers true or astray in a marsh or forest, e.g. will-of-the-wisp.

"Foolish Fire" was the name of my original prototype. Admittedly, I loved that title and probably a bit too much, but after some brainstorming, the current title was suggested.

Let me clarify what I mean by "some brainstorming". I mean CGE is very unique in how they operate, allowing anyone in the company, regardless of their role, to weigh in at times on certain creative decisions with their games, and the title was one of those. I've never brainstormed on any idea with so many invested and creative people, much less one of my own ideas. The names and banter were plentiful, and it took a bit to agree on one, but I am thankful for the one we landed on. Wispwood is a perfect name for a forest where wisps playfully lure cats.

The Wisps

The game has four types of wisps: Jacks, Witches, Hearts, and Orbs. I wanted each type of wisp to feel unique and magical. I've written a little bit of lore about them here in another design diary. Nearly a decade ago, I created a world of different light sources, naming each light source type, and I'm thankful I was able to maintain some of that during this process. Even though most of the lore's depth isn’t in the game, I hope you feel a deeper sense of Wispwood's theme and setting because of it.

As the art progressed, the wisps continued to embrace their identities, and I enjoyed watching the progression by the artist, Štěpán. You can read more about his process and thoughts here. I know Štěpán and many others had ideas for the direction of the art, and it wasn't easy managing expectations, but his art evokes the wonder I had imagined.

At first, I thought I wanted all of the wisps to have faces and expressions, but I've come to realize that it didn't fit the tone of this game as much. In the end, the wisps strike a nice balance between a playful, magical side and a serious side. The idea being to not mislead someone to think the game is only for children. However, no promises if the wisps mislead you in the forest. That's on you.

The Goal Cards

While the core of the game didn't change much in development (i.e creating polyomino shapes out of individual tiles and keeping only the wisp tiles in your grid between rounds), the most intense development and playtesting happened with the goal cards. These cards are how you score the different wisp types as well as the trees in your grid. You have five cards to choose from for each type of wisp and tree, using only one per type each game. Based on these cards, you earn points for how you spatially place wisp and tree tiles in your forest grid.

Each wisp is known for working a certain way, and for the most part that still holds true to how I originally designed each type to score, but the details changed and improved a lot along the way with the expertise of the development team and the feedback from playtesters. For months, we tested a ton of iterations for each type, considering how to improve their conditions and even trying some wilder ideas.

There were a lot of passing cards and ideas back and forth on programs like Slack and Miro. We started with four cards of each type, but our task was to create five per type. We created much more than that for each, but eventually landed on the five best for each. Along the way, Min and Elwen of Lost Ruins of Arnak joined the development team and further pushed the game forward, especially regarding ideas and details for the cards. I'm thankful they did!

I'm pleased with how different each card feels, especially within its own type. For example, all Jack cards feel the same in that they are trying to avoid other Jacks, but each Jack card feels different when playing and yet remains true to the flavor of Jacks. I can say the same for each type of wisp and how they are intended to be played.

Your forest grows differently each game, not only because of the variety of scoring cards, but also because of where you place shapes and wisps and how those wisps remain as obstacles in future rounds.

The Pond

In the middle of the playing area is the central board where you draft your wisp tiles and choose your shapes to add into your forest. Before CGE, I had the board representing part of the forest, but early in development they made it circular and divided into different sections, allowing players to piece it together, making the game more variable.

Eventually, the circular nature transformed into a mysterious pond where the wisps gather in the forest. The pond gave the setting more character, and the game a more pleasing aesthetic overall. Lastly, the pond center was added with the reflection of the moon to further complement the nighttime atmosphere.

The Cats

What I added to be silly became a focal point more than I ever knew. I know people love their cats, but I did not add cats for that reason, per my reasoning above with their instinct to chase lights. The cats and their art were more intensely debated among the CGE team than just about anything else in the game. My guess is that the cat art had the most iterations because of how much people love them and have an opinion on them.

You can choose from six cats in the base game, with another six promo cats available. The types of cats range wildly for a lot of variety. And like the wisps, they too strike a good balance to fit the tone of the game. Pick your favorite one to play with!

But the cats aren't there just for show; they have abilities tied to their tile. When I first made the prototype, the cat tile was single-sided and not used for much outside of being a reference point for Witch scoring cards.

A big light bulb moment came when the team decided to use the back side of the cat tile. This one change allowed us to make the cat more useful and possess abilities because the cat tile had two states now. We condensed some 16 cubes and 16 tiles that did not match the other tiles in the game into a single tile: the cat tile.

What unlocked this potential was allowing the cat tile to flip and have two different states. The back side of the cat tile shows the cat hiding in a tree stump to show you have used an ability. Not only did the cat play a bigger role in the game now, but seeing your cat hide in a tree stump quickly became a favorite part of the game for players. It was a great example of doing more with less.

For those interested, Wispwood will be available in the U.S. in Q1 2026 in retail and on CGE's online store. I am honored and humbled for having other humans, especially the ones at CGE, apply their talents to this game. Thanks for following along! I hope you follow a wisp in the forest soon!

Reed Ambrose

by Peter Hayward

I had a dream.

In 2015, I had a dream. Actually, I probably had a dream every night, but this one was significant: I dreamt the mechanisms for a card game:

That's a quote from a board game chat I was in at the time. I shared the mechanisms from my dream, in case anyone knew whether I was subconsciously borrowing from another game or not.

One of those friends, Tom Lang, thought about the game and came back a few hours later with a more developed pitch:

If you've played Village Pillage, you'll recognize the above as about 90% of the final game.

I was excited:

The working title was "Backstabbards", and we spent the night making cards and putting rules together. Here are the starting cards we had for that first draft:

And here's what the starting cards ended up looking like in the final game:

I'm at around two dozen published games at this point, and I've never had another game stay so similar from first idea to final product.

Here's what we had at that early stage: Each turn, you play a card on either side of you, one against each neighbor. What those cards do is based on what your opponent plays: If you attack a farm, they gain resources and you steal it. If you don't want to be attacked, play a wall. If your opponent is playing a wall...well, that's the perfect time to play a farm!

As Tom said, it's a simple game of rock-paper-scissors.

(Fun fact: Different countries order the elements of that game in a different order. In Australia, it's scissors-paper-rock.)

We discussed the game for a few hours, realizing that the system didn't incorporate any way to win or gain new cards, so the Merchant was born: Play the Merchant to buy a relic, and if you can't afford to, buy a card.

I prepped a prototype and ran it the next day at a playtesting event:

The game has only two other mechanisms, each added to fill out the design a little. Instead of just defending, walls got a bank mechanism, putting a turnip (up to a maximum of 5) where it couldn't be stolen by attack cards.

And a final keyword was added: exhaust. An exhausted card sits out for a round – some cards exhaust themselves, some cards exhaust others.

From that small list of keywords, we put together a market deck — the "cooler actions from the middle" — of interesting, thematic cards. My co-designer Tom has some words to say about this process:

The design space of "does a different thing depending on who it's against" + the keywords gain, steal, bank, buy a card, and exhaust allowed for about two dozen thematic cards, like the Toll Bridge, a wall who charges Raiders and Merchants, or the Treasury, who banks more turnips than any other card.

Even just a card that does something unusual for its "suit" is interesting: The Pickler is a Farmer who gains four turnips, then immediately banks two of them. Cathedral is a Wall that buys new cards.

Through trial and error, we came up with some "rules" for ourselves: Starting Farmers gain 3 turnips, so market Farmers needed to gain a baseline of 4 + an ability. Some Farmers gain 5, but with a weakness.

Similarly, starting Raiders steal 4, market Raiders steal 5 + an ability, and some Raiders steal a whopping 6, but with a weakness, such as the Cutpurse who steals 6...but is stolen from when she goes up against an enemy Raider. The Berserker steals 6, but is stolen from when she goes up against a Wall. The Outlaw steals 5 and gets a free card if it faces a Merchant.

Walls were a little harder to differentiate, but we came up with some fun stuff. My favorite is the Moat, which absolutely kicks a Raider's butt...but waters enemy Farmers, letting them gain +1 turnip.

We quickly found more rules that would break the game if broken: Raiders must be great against Farmers, and Walls must be great against Raiders. Playing a Farmer against a Wall is inherently good (because of the opportunity cost), but if they had a specific interaction, it needed to always benefit the Farmer. We never wanted to "punish" someone for playing a Farmer against a Wall.

Merchants were the hardest to expand out. We ended up with only two: the Bard, who gains you a card from the top of the deck so that no one knows what you have, and the Doctor, who exhausts whichever card is played against him.

For many years, Village Pillage was my best-selling and best-known game. There's something incredibly clean about it: You play a card to the left and to the right, you resolve them, repeat until someone wins. (Tom Lang deserves the credit for that; I spent many years filling my games with so much unnecessary cruft.)

So how the heck do you expand a game like that?

Our first attempt was to add a second currency: pumpkins. The first expansion for Village Pillage was going to be called Dark Arts & Crafts, which added magic into the fantasy setting. We tried a few different versions, but we couldn't get it working. The issues were:

1. How do you acquire pumpkins, and
2. What do you do with them when you get them

For an expansion entirely based around pumpkins, you can see why that posed a problem.

Instead, we decided to go simpler. We'd maxed out the design space with our original twenty market cards, so to justify an expansion, we'd need new mechanisms.

In the original Village Pillage, we'd strictly kept all interaction to neighbors. You play against your neighbors, and you resolve against your neighbors. After the game came out, we had a lot of commenters wishing they could interact across the table – when playing with five people, they wanted it to be more than a three-player game — so we added some cards that cared about the total number of cards in play of a particular type:

In addition to that, we came up with provoke – the opposite of exhaust. A provoked card must be played next turn, though you still get to choose which side to play it on:

Those two small mechanisms were enough for about a dozen new cards, like the Beekeeper, who gains 5 while each other Farmer in play also gains 1, or the Matador, who provokes any enemy Raider it's played against.

Twelve new cards wasn't really enough to justify a full expansion, so we put our heads together and realized the root of the problem:

To keep the base game simple, we hadn't individually "costed" the cards. If you played a Merchant and couldn't afford a relic (the victory condition of the game), you instead paid a turnip and gained a new, more powerful card. No matter which card, you always paid one turnip.

This mean that all the cards had to be (approximately) balanced to each other. If one was significantly worse, it wouldn't be bought and would just clog up the market — and we deliberately avoided any kind of "clear the market" mechanism because if people consistently didn't want to buy a card, we cut it from the game.

Like I said, each upgraded card was basically one turnip stronger than a starting card + an ability (or two turnips stronger + a weakness), but if we added a "cheaper" card type into the game, something between the strength of a starter card and an upgraded card...well, suddenly we had a lot more design space:

What's more, cards had always been permanent additions to your village, but since these cards were acquired easily, it made sense for them to leave easily as well. Lo, a new keyword was born: sacrifice. Sacrificed cards are returned to the bottom of the deck.

And once cards were no longer permanent, this opened the door to stealing them from other players.

These new mechanisms allowed enough design space for another dozen cards, so we had two smaller expansions, and a friend of ours, Lauren O'Connor, came up with the names Surf and Turf. The nautically themed Surf added freebooters, the easily-bought cards, while Turf was dedicated to four-legged friends, from dogs to frogs to camels to ravens – the cards that provoked cards and cared about other cards in play.

A few years later, when people were clamoring for more Village Pillage, I was worried we'd explored all the available design space. I figured that instead we'd just give them the big box that everyone had been asking for, along with a handful of promo cards.

Tom was too busy and gave me his blessing to make the promo cards without him. I walked to a café, pulled out my iPad, and started brainstorming. When I'm first starting a game, it always grows from a central mechanical idea, and I have to scramble to find a theme for it.

But once I have a theme that I like, I can ask, "Okay, what would fit in this world?" So many Village Pillage cards started from theme, got cool mechanisms...then Tom Lang came in and worked out a more fitting theme for them.

For this set of promo cards, what made sense in the world of Village Pillage? It didn't take long for me to think of Robin Hood as a direction, and that immediately led me to a richer/poorer mechanism. Anyone with more turnips than you is richer, while anyone with fewer turnips is poorer.

It turned out this was a particularly fertile design space, and a few hours later, I had dozens of cards: Robin Hood, who steals more when against a rich opponent; Prince John, a Merchant who pays less for relics based on how many of his neighbors are poor; Little John, a Wall who steals 5 (the most a Wall has ever stolen!) if the opponent is rich. If you're rich, don't go picking on your poor neighbors, or you might encounter Little John.

("But don't let my name fool you. In real life, I'm very big!")

While designing, I found another unexplored pocket of design space: cards that react differently when they're against a starting card: The Sheriff of Nottingham steals +2 turnips against starting cards, which is a nice way to reflect the bullying nature of the character.

The Robin Hood mythos had so many characters that we ended up with thirty new market cards.

Then — finally! — we got pumpkins working, with special thanks to Sara Perry, who brought us a long way towards cracking it. Dark Arts and Crafts will be the final Village Pillage expansion, and it's now part of the Village Pillage: Big Box that Robbin' Hood was meant to be.

We could probably rummage through drawers and find another mechanism or two — in fact, the Big Box is coming with three mini-expansions — but we're happy with everything we've added to the game. Dark Arts and Craft will be the last expansion for Village Pillage. We've expanded it to a ridiculous degree and want to go out on a high – and wearing a Very Big Hat.

And it all started with a dream...

Peter C. Hayward

by Scott Alden

The BoardGameGeek Hall of Fame honors games that have made meaningful contributions to the board game hobby in the areas of innovation, artistry, and impact. By curating this distinguished list, BoardGameGeek seeks to preserve the history and evolution of board gaming, while inspiring and informing a global community of players who have a passion for games. Additional games will be inducted annually as the world of board games continues to evolve.

The selection process was guided by a jury composed of dedicated and experienced players who have been deeply involved in the board game community for years and who have brought their knowledge and expertise to the discussions. The process began by evaluating games that were at least ten years old in order to ensure widespread engagement and recognition. Additionally, the jury identified and included games that, while perhaps less widely played, have had a profound and lasting impact on the hobby.

The BoardGameGeek Hall of Fame focuses on modern board games that have directly shaped the contemporary hobby and community. Games such as Chess, Backgammon, Go, and traditional 52-card games, while timeless classics and undoubtedly influential, fall outside the scope of these awards.

Through this initiative, BoardGameGeek aims to celebrate the legacy of these exceptional games and their creators, while fostering a deeper appreciation for artistry and innovation within the world of board gaming.

This concludes the list of the 5 inductees to the BoardGameGeek Hall of Fame for 2026. Thank you to all of the jury and all of the contributors who have helped to form this award. This is an annual award, so we'll see you next year!

•••

Terraforming Mars - 2016

Set in a near-future vision of the corporate colonization of space, Terraforming Mars has proved to be imminently (im-,a-met-ly) replayable. By combining familiar game elements like card drafting, asymmetric player powers, a half-dozen resources, and bonuses claimed by whoever reaches a milestone first, designer Jacob Fryxelius (Frix-el-e-us) has created an involved game that challenges players to raise the red planet's temperature, adjust its oxygen level, and create arable land — but while players terraform Mars collectively, they all have individual goals driven by more than two hundred unique project cards that they will purchase and play. Whether you want to plant forests, build cities, or establish an ocean, you can work towards those goals, yet you need to keep an eye on everyone else because once Mars reaches critical terraforming thresholds for life in the form of oxygen, temperature, and fresh water, only one corporation will end up on top.

Youtube Video

by Dave Beck

Luthier was released in the second half of 2025, but has quite a storied history! Much like an heirloom violin that is passed from generation to generation, this game has been touched by multiple creative minds, and this diary aims to provide a small glimpse into that story. This will be told in parts from the perspective of the two designers, Abe Burson and Dave Beck, both of whom actually worked on it somewhat separately. Perhaps not that different from instrument makers roughing and finishing out an instrument in a workshop?

Part 1 will be told by Abe Burson, who originally came up with the idea for Luthier. Part 2 will be told by Dave Beck, who signed and published it with Paverson Games.

Part 1: Designer Diary
By Abe Burson

2008-2016 — Blueprints and Roughing In

The concept for Luthier came to me around 2008 after co-designing my first game, Master of the Elements, with Blaine Haagenson. Luthier's design idea was just the right fit for me as my dad has his Masters in Piano Pedagogy and I have a Bachelor's Degree in Music. Though I never built any instruments, in 2007 I did build high-end stereo speakers alongside my friend Matt (who designed them).

Simultaneously, I was getting into the popular Euro-style games of the time: San Juan, Puerto Rico, Modern Art, Agricola, and especially Caylus. Though I don't remember the specific "a-ha" moment for the idea of creating a game about crafting musical instruments, the synergizing of all of these interests resulted in me starting on the long — albeit extremely intermittent — journey designing Luthier.

My vision for the game was guided by these preferences:

• Euro-style: constructive, competitive, not just multi-player solitaire
• Medium to medium/heavy "gamer's game"
• 2-5 players, 90-120 minutes
• Focus on theme of crafting/repairing stringed instruments leading the design/mechanisms wherever possible
• Resource management, worker placement, bidding
• Create a feeling of progress/development/achieving goals and awards during gameplay and at the end
• Something that would sit on the same shelf as Caylus, Agricola, Puerto Rico, and Fresco (and later Viticulture)

2009 violin card for Luthier (design mock-up by Matt Knipschield)
In 2015, the design had several static phases each round, as shown in this rulebook excerpt:

The game did not have "patrons" at the time, but it did have "clients", which were a largely undeveloped portion of the design.

Luthier started out as a more literal interpretation of the word (which is the name of the profession for someone who makes and repairs stringed instruments) and was generally in a more modern setting. The instruments were all stringed instruments: violin, viola, cello, bass viol, acoustic guitar, and mandolin, along with some fun ones like sitar, koto, and viola da gamba (a Baroque instrument). The three materials in the game were all different types of wood: maple, mahogany, and ebony.

A player's workbench game board from a 2016 prototype
In the image above, note the three benches in assembly-line style, with the worker placement and bidding being separate. Also note that the instrument and repair commissions were for specific clients.

2017-2021 — Chiseling and Assembly

Though Luthier was playtested a few times from 2013-2016, these tests were few and far between, and most progress came in the form of me fiddling around with prototype components on my own and updating a rule sheet in Google Docs.

After playing Forbidden Stars in late 2017, I had the inspiration that cemented the foundational mechanism of the game, fusing the (at the time) separate mechanisms of worker placement and bidding. From here on, a round would essentially be two phases:

1. Prioritizing (planning), and
2. Resolution

This also marks the point when variable phase order during the Resolution phase and the variable market cost for the three materials were introduced. You can read more about how Forbidden Stars and several other games influenced the design in My Top 5 Games That Influenced the Design of Luthier GeekList.

After proper batches of playtesting, early 2019 was when the game started feeling like it was a) playing (generally) smoothly and b) had its own "personality". I prepped a prototype with placeholder artwork for Stonemaier Games' Design Day 2019. I received valuable feedback, both complimentary and constructive, from other designers. It was well received as a prototype, but a little "harsh" and still not yet refined. For example, during the Resolution phase, only the top two bidders got something; there was no alternate choice. Also, the assembly line style of three benches, coupled with the fact that workers assigned to those instruments stayed with those instruments through their completion, bogged things down. Playtesting and being flexible about feedback is the only way for a game to get better and live up to its full potential.

2019 Luthier prototype
I made a few minor tweaks and took it to Protospiel MN in January 2020. I felt the design had some momentum behind it and was excited to continue making tweaks to the core design. Little did I know at the time that Dave Beck would play Luthier and eventually become the co-designer and publisher!

January 2020 Protospiel MN, with Dave Beck (left) playing for the first time
Protospiel MN was right before the pandemic hit the U.S. After that, Dave and I went our separate ways and put our respective games (Distilled and Luthier) on online platforms.

Tabletopia Prototype — June 2020
During the 2020 lockdown and into 2021, Dave and I connected a couple times to playtest each other's games online. In late 2021, Dave reached out to me about potentially publishing and co-designing the game. I had a lot to think about: Does Luthier get refined more or less as it is and I personally put it up on the self-publishing site The Game Crafter? Or does it begin a new chapter in its design journey and have a shot at being on the shelf with Caylus and Agricola?!

How did I arrive at my decision to move forward with not only a publishing agreement with Paverson Games, but a co-design as well? I weighed several factors:

• Preservation of the integrity of the design/creative control going forward: My design journey had taken it through several different iterations of the game. Still, I knew it needed a fresh look and help polishing out the rough edges. When Dave and I talked through what would for sure stay in the published version of the game, we agreed on two non-negotiable facets: the instrument-making theme and the core bidding-placement mechanism.

With Dave in the role of both publisher and co-designer, plus with developer Richard Woods on board, I knew I would have less than 50% stake in any future changes to the game. I was okay with that. After seeing how much care Dave put into the design and production of Distilled, I had faith that he would not just preserve the essence of Luthier, but make it better.

• Time: Dave and I both have busy schedules. Mine doesn't allow much time for game design. Dave is not only a gamer and a designer; he is also a game design professor! He was really excited about the prospect of Luthier becoming Paverson's second release. I knew that this was the opportunity that Luthier needed to give it the time and attention it deserved to reach its full potential.

• Budget/Publishing: I had no budget for publishing games and had no interest in crowdfunding. Paverson, though just getting off the ground, had had a successful Distilled campaign and had the capacity to raise a good amount of money for Luthier.

• Likelihood of success within the hobby: Obviously an officially published game would have a better chance at people hearing about it and buying it. Plus Dave did an amazing job with both the design and publishing aspects of Distilled.

In a nutshell, I knew Luthier was now in the capable hands of a pro team with Dave at the helm.

2022-2025 — Reworking and Finishing

Once it was official, Dave and his team hit the ground running on more playtesting and design tweaks. We initially had scheduled meetings every week or two to talk through ideas, questions, etc., but from here on I transitioned from the creator/designer role to a co-designer/consultant role.

I'm sure Dave will have a lot to cover from here, but I would like to say that the published version of the game, though a little more epic and complex than I initially envisioned, meets and exceeds my expectations from both a design and production standpoint. Everyone involved in making Luthier what it is today should be proud. It is surreal to not only see it alive in the world, but also receiving so many positive reviews from people who have played it!

Part 2: Designer Diary
By Dave Beck

Thanks, Abe — wow, what a journey this has been! As Abe mentioned, we first met at the first Protospiel that I took Distilled to in January 2020.

By the way, in case you hadn't clicked the hyperlink and wondered what that odd-sounding name is, Protospiel is hands down my favorite event of the year. It's where a bunch of people get together — in person or online — and simply playtest each others' games. You don't have to be a designer to attend these either, so if you are someone who'd like to provide feedback on the development of a game's design — often in its early stages — consider attending one! If you've had an idea for a design of your own bouncing around in your head or on your kitchen table for the last few months (or years!), consider bringing it to a Protospiel. They're some of the most welcoming and positive environments one could ask for, and I think we could all use more of that these days. Just search for a Protospiel in your city, and I wouldn't be surprised if you'll find one happening at some point this year (or something similar)!

Abe, returning the favor to me and playing Distilled at Protospiel MN 2020
Anyway, this Protospiel in Minnesota was the first time I had brought Distilled into the public sphere for testing, so I had no idea what its future held, nor even the concept that Paverson Games would even exist! I had a chance to play Abe's game and immediately was intrigued by three things that stuck with me long after that snowy January weekend:

• His focus on the theme was extremely strong. I could tell that he knew about instruments and luthiery, and he cared about detail around music and musical instruments based on his experience as a musician himself.

• His game and mine were quite similar: play as a craftsperson, get resources, craft that thing, and get points and money. Where mine was a deckbuilder (yes, Distilled began as a deckbuilder!), his wasn't. His was something entirely different, which was the most important thing that stuck out...

• Luthier's key mechanism combined worker placement with hidden bidding, and it immediately intrigued me as something I'd never seen before in a game.

After we played both of our games, we decided to keep in touch. The world shut down shortly after that, and we all were forced to take our designs online for testing. I discovered Tabletop Simulator for Distilled, while Abe brought Luthier to Tabletopia. We got a chance to continue to test each other's games — as peer designers — over the next year. It was during this time I learned that Abe had actually been working on Luthier for over ten years, with heavy revisions and implementation ramping up in 2018. Abe even took it to Stonemaier Design Day in 2019 (a cool event that Jamey Stegmaier of Stonemaier Games hosts in St. Louis for prototypes and unpublished games), where it was one point shy of making the coveted "top ten" most popular games list at the event.

Fast-forward to late 2021, and I knew it was time to start thinking about Paverson Games' next title. Distilled's Kickstarter campaign was finished, and we were starting the year-long road toward finalizing localization and manufacturing (while I continued to work full time at the university), and I was itching to get designing again. While I had ideas for Distilled expansions (and an entirely different new game!), I also couldn't stop thinking about Luthier. Knowing that this idea of publishing games was something I wanted to continue to do — and many people were asking me at conventions, "So, Dave, what's next for Paverson Games?" — I asked Abe to send me a pitch document and access to his digital prototype.

Now, as a publisher, you don't decide to take on a new game on a whim. Someone has spent a great deal of time and effort toward creating something special, something that they care a great deal about. Additionally, you are committing to something that will occupy the next 2-3 years of your life, as well as tens of thousands of hours (and dollars!) of your own. This is a BIG commitment for two people: you as the publisher, and the designer of the game — and that's just for starters!

I played the game, talked for a great amount of time with my developer about it, and went through scenarios in my mind. During this time period it became clear that it would be best to have this be a co-design. This would allow me to have the excitement and investment in the game I wanted and bring it to the level that I knew it deserved after Abe had worked on it for so long, so we signed the contract in the spring of 2022, and the rest is history! As Abe mentioned before, there were certain things that would not change: that killer hidden-bidding mechanism, and that theme of crafting musical instruments.

After signing the contract, I found myself teaching in Scotland during the month of July as I had done for my university in years past. (Fun fact: That's actually where I first came up with the idea for Distilled in 2019!) During this visit, my wife Emily discovered the St. Cecilia's Hall & Music Museum in Edinburgh. She insisted that I pay a visit there, knowing that I had just signed Luthier to co-design with Abe.

Now, you need to remember that at this point, I was entirely focused on getting Distilled to print (which would be released the next year) and had not started thinking much about Luthier; at this point, Luthier was still nearly the same as when I had played it in January 2020.

The Gallery of Harpsichords at St. Cecilia's Hall in Edinburgh, Scotland
Just as I acknowledge my time touring scotch whisky distilleries in 2019 as the inspiration for Distilled, I owe much of where Luthier has landed to my experience in St. Cecilia's in July 2022. Walking through those galleries of harpsichords crafted for royalty, inspecting violins made by master luthiers, and seeing a serpent in person for the first time opened my eyes to what Luthier could be — not just a game about making and repairing stringed instruments, but a game about creating an entire orchestra, spanning hundreds of years of music history.

That was my first realization for Luthier, which allowed for the establishment of the theme to drive new mechanical ideas in the game, paving the way for another epiphany I had while reading the placards in the museum that day.

The Collection of Wind Instruments (including Serpents!) at St. Cecilia's Hall in Edinburgh, Scotland
Over and over again, the informational placards for each harpsichord, pianoforte, violin, cello, and more would talk not just of the instrument maker themselves (often including stories of their family workshop and history), but of the patronage involved with the instrument. A harpsichord might have been commissioned by a specific individual of the upper class, or a violin may have been created for a virtuoso to use in a concert performance in the royal court.

This caused me to begin to think less about these deals as a simple transaction (like selling a whisky or gin for money!) and instead as a patronage, where you can continue to benefit from the gifts of this individual if you deliver what is expected of you. It was right there on the floor of St. Cecilia's that I came up with the idea of the patrons for whom you have "orders" to fulfill, with compensation coming from staying in their good graces (keeping them happy) and being tracked by a cube that serves as both a marker for their patience over time and also gifts that they give you.

Furthermore, if you can make them happy enough by giving them everything they need, you'll turn them into a patron for life, permanently contributing toward your own workshop's engine by flipping them over and tucking them under your board to reflect this newfound power. This idea blended elements of the distillery upgrades from Distilled with the spirit labels and bonus spaces in a new way that got me extremely excited about moving forward with the game.

Original prototype for the patron card (left) and final version [right)
During my time in Scotland, my game developer and good friend Richard Woods (who lives in England) came up to visit me, and we started to brainstorm ideas over drinks at a pub in Dalkeith, Scotland. He helped me better refine the patron idea from above (like he always does with my hair-brained ideas!), and over the next year of development would go on to bring even more concepts to the table that are used in the game today.

Richard is to thank for the great idea of adding dice to the performance element in the game, as well as variable options for players at locations to choose from when resolving actions and some of those awesome tracks you can climb to build your skills in different disciplines. The game was really starting to come together as we invited more people into the workshop to lay hands on Abe's original creation!

Player board prototype from 2022, with patron spots, one of the tracks (that was eventually moved to the main board), as well as a curious grid at the bottom that is no longer there...
In the fall of 2022 and into the early months of 2023, I took the design to Madison Protospiel and Minneapolis Protospiel with many of these new ideas in place, as well as a few others that didn't end up making the lacquer room floor.

One of those was the concept of each instrument being represented by a tile of different shape and size. As players crafted instruments, they'd grab the associated polyomino tile and place it in a personal "crate" on their board meant to represent the collection of instruments they were creating. (That's the grid you see on the above player board!) While short lived, it helped to foster a discussion amongst playtesters around the idea of that "final game state" that I strive to create in Paverson Games experiences, that "photo-worthy moment" that you'll want to remember, regardless of whether you were victorious.

Someone suggesting moving this polyomino puzzle to the central board to form a group location, which is how the central orchestra and first chairs were born! I find playtesting — and especially the engagement of folks at dedicated events like Protospiels — to be some of the most enriching and memorable experiences of my time as a designer.

First central orchestra prototype from Protospiel MN 2023, in which we used hex tiles to represent crafted instruments
Building off of Abe's great foundational mechanisms and theme, and bringing in this new sense of history and the entire symphony of instruments was what we needed to start the next stage of playtests with our Discord community.

This also extended to conventions, where we have made a point of always having our "work in progress" games there for visitors to play. At the 2023 UK Games Expo, many attendees had a chance to play what they fondly still refer to as the "spreadsheet version" of the game. Despite having no art at that stage, it was wonderful to see how many people were excited to invest their time at a busy convention to sit down and discover what was coming next from Paverson. We believe strongly in showing our community what we are working on — warts and all — when most other publishers shy from this approach. Looking to our amazing community of players (i.e., you!) to help us develop and refine our games to be the best they can be has made us who we are today, and we continue to uphold that practice today. If you're attending one of the conventions we'll be at in 2026 or beyond, I hope you'll stop by to see what we're working on so that you, too, can contribute to the future of Paverson Games!

Prototype of Luthier from late 2022
The Art of the Instrument

Of course, if a game is about the art of the instrument and focuses on the beauty of the craft itself, we needed to get the very best to represent that vision visually.

Vincent Dutrait has been my #1 favorite artist in the board game world for some time now, largely due to the hand-drawn, "analog" approach he takes to creating his work. While most artists these days work mainly with digital tools — which is completely fine — Vincent is still sketching, drawing, and painting with pencils, markers, and paintbrushes before he takes the work into the digital realm for final compilation. The authentic, thoughtful, and natural look of his work is exactly what I was looking for in Luthier. I was absolutely thrilled (and a little surprised, I must admit!) that he accepted the invitation to work on the project! You might recognize Vincent's work from such titles as Heat: Pedal to the Medal, The Quest for El Dorado, Robinson Crusoe, and many other titles. Having an award-winning, highly talented artist and illustrator on board was a huge asset, and a dream come true for me.

Vincent Dutrait
As a studio art major in undergraduate university, I have a background in art and design, so I enjoy the aesthetic aspect of the tabletop design and development process. Working with the artist and graphic designer is very fulfilling for me as the publisher, and I'm probably a bit more "hands on" than most — which they probably don't always appreciate due to me asking so many questions!

While I'd normally be meeting with Vincent about the project over video chat, he is not only French (so English isn't his first language, just as French isn't mine!), but he lives in South Korea with his family, so the chance of video calls was almost impossible. Even so, the communication cycle that Vincent and I developed was great. I would provide information via an email in the evening before going to bed in the USA, then wake up to find images he had created overnight in South Korea that I could then react to in the morning. It was a wonderful pattern that felt like we were board game art pen pals of sorts, writing back and forth about Luthier! Vincent's illustrations and eye for authenticity and details were phenomenal, and his idea to bring in the map and environment artist Guillaume Tavernier to help create the main building was a great addition as well.

Sketch of a patron card by Vincent (left), and the full painting of the famed Madame de Pompadour
Many don't realize it, but a board game often will have TWO different creative contributors to a project: an artist and a graphic designer, although sometimes that is the same person, as with Erik Evensen on Distilled.

For Luthier, we worked with Matt Paquette & Co, a studio of designers who help to bring a number of different talented people together to contribute to a project. Matt and his team were integral to bringing Luthier to life, developing the iconography, typeface, card design, and rulebook layouts, among other things.

As you can see, while this might be called a "designer diary", making a game as big as Luthier involves much more than just the designers to make it successful. One could say a full orchestra was needed to pull off a performance of this magnitude!

It Takes a Stack of Worker Chips!

If you've played Luthier, you know that over the course of the game, your available workers increase from three chips to five. I like to refer to this as "your family" growing in number over the course of the game.

Well, just as I described the above folks contributing to the project, I have had others join Luthier that I don't just consider "one and done" apprentice chips that return to the market after they're finished with a task, people like Richard Woods, the developer for Luthier, who I mentioned earlier. He is hands down the #5 worker chip of the bunch as the game wouldn't be what it is today without Richard's keen eye for design and development, knowing exactly what screw to turn and lever to pull to make that engine hum. When I see an idea with patrons, patience, gifts, and cubes moving along a track, Richard helps to balance it so that it doesn't become too powerful, broken, or weak. He's able to test much of this through the dozens of playtests we conduct, both in-person and online, with many of those tests being co-ordinated by our playtesting lead, Neo Teng Whay, who helps to teach the games, observe them, and gather feedback and data for us to crunch and react to throughout the game's development.

Once the game felt it was at a state that it wasn't changing anymore, it was time to begin the solo design. We take solo design seriously at Paverson Games, always making sure that it has a dedicated ruleset and components, usually with a separate designer focusing on this experience for the game itself. As with Distilled, we turned to David Digby for Luthier's solo design, and due to Richard having lived and breathed the game for so long already, it became natural for the two of them to co-design the solo mode of Luthier, resulting in an automa that appears to learn and evolve over time with an organic deck of cards that reacts to the player and game.

Prototype of the solo cards and board for Luthier in Tabletop Simulator, 2024
Now, to bring all of this home and to make sure that these mechanisms that stretch across both multiplayer and solo game experiences are consistently presented to the player, I work with Cody Reimer, who holds a PhD in technical writing and games, and who co-teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Stout with me. Cody helps to edit the rules for all of Paverson Games' titles and also works with Richard and me to create the "beginner guides" that Paverson Games has become known for in our titles.

In the case of Luthier, this took the form of The Rehearsal, which is a guided first round of the game, teaching players nearly all the rules while they play through the first round (after which they can continue on their own, of course). That round — aptly called The Rehearsal — is meant to be led by one person referred to as the conductor, who is instructed to take hold of the included cardboard baton as well.

The rehearsal beginner guide in Luthier, with included baton (and fancy baton!)
While Cody helps to refine the rulesets, I hired musicologist Kevin Ngo, who holds a PhD in music, to help consult on the dozens of individuals and instruments in the game, as well as write the mini-bios for all of them in the rulebook. Kevin also helped me to identify the tracks I commissioned for Luthier's official soundtrack (also linked via QR code in the rulebook), which was recorded by a quartet in British Columbia. I feel that this extra layer of theme and authenticity is important in games as it demonstrates to the players the gravity of the experience they are having. It is rare to gather around a table with friends and family these days, and it should be an important occasion when one does so.

The official soundtrack for Luthier
It's amazing, really. What started as an idea by one person almost twenty years ago in Rochester, Minnesota has now resulted in something that took a whole group of people to finish!

Best of all, it is now being enjoyed by thousands of people around the world, including (perhaps) you. This hopefully demonstrates to you that no idea should be ignored or considered as having a "shelf life". It just takes the right combination of people to have the vision to believe in its success, and it too could someday become a reality.

by Scott Alden

The BoardGameGeek Hall of Fame honors games that have made meaningful contributions to the board game hobby in the areas of innovation, artistry, and impact. By curating this distinguished list, BoardGameGeek seeks to preserve the history and evolution of board gaming, while inspiring and informing a global community of players who have a passion for games. Additional games will be inducted annually as the world of board games continues to evolve.

The selection process was guided by a jury composed of dedicated and experienced players who have been deeply involved in the board game community for years and who have brought their knowledge and expertise to the discussions. The process began by evaluating games that were at least ten years old in order to ensure widespread engagement and recognition. Additionally, the jury identified and included games that, while perhaps less widely played, have had a profound and lasting impact on the hobby.

The BoardGameGeek Hall of Fame focuses on modern board games that have directly shaped the contemporary hobby and community. Games such as Chess, Backgammon, Go, and traditional 52-card games, while timeless classics and undoubtedly influential, fall outside the scope of these awards.

Through this initiative, BoardGameGeek aims to celebrate the legacy of these exceptional games and their creators, while fostering a deeper appreciation for artistry and innovation within the world of board gaming.

We are pleased to announce the next inductee into the BoardGameGeek Hall of Fame for 2026. The final inductee will be revealed tomorrow. Stay tuned!

•••
Love Letter - 2012

With over twelve reimplementations, Love Letter (2012) proves that a small game can pack a punch. The 16-card game by Seiji Kanai offers players risk, deduction, and a little luck as they attempt to deliver their love letter to the princess. Players must make a decision upon drawing a card on their turn: play the new card or play the previously held card. While simple, this decision might provide a player with protection, an opportunity to eliminate a player, or the right amount of confusion for everyone else at the table to not know what remaining card you have in your hand or how powerful it might be. And with one card removed each round, it’s impossible to know exactly what other players know. It’s an endlessly replayable light card game that certainly began the 16-card craze that is in full effect nearly 15 years later.

Youtube Video

by W. Eric Martin

Less than a week prior to the opening of the Spielwarenmesse toy and game fair in Nürnberg, Germany, Italian publisher Ares Games has announced upcoming titles for 2026, with these items to shown during this event.

▪️ War of the Ring: Sieges of Middle-earth is a new expansion for Roberto Di Meglio, Marco Maggi, and Francesco Nepitello's War of the Ring: Second Edition.

Here's how the publisher describes this Q4 2026 release:


▪️ Another The Lord of the Rings-based expansion due out in Q4 2026 is War of the Ring: The Card Game – Hope and Despair, which designer Ian Brody had teased on BGG in early January 2026. Here's the publisher's pitch:


▪️ Another Ian Brody title due out from Ares Games in Q4 2026 is Quartermaster General: West Front, the third title in Ares' two-player Quartermaster General game line. Here's the short pitch:


Note that the Quartermaster General: West Front cover shown at right is not final.

▪️ Looking even farther out, Ares Games will run a crowdfunding campaign in Q1 2026 for Mega Empires: The Far East – North and Mega Empires: The Far East – South, which it describes as two standalone games that expand the Mega Empires series. From the publisher:


Ares expects that the two Mega Empires: The Far East titles will be released in Q2 2027.

▪️ Q1 2026 will also see the release of Altay: Seafarers from Roberto Di Meglio and Fabio Maiorana, which adds three elements to 2024's Altay: Dawn of Civilization:

— A new game board featuring the Forgotten Sea where players can establish harbors and expand their civilizations through maritime routes.

— New rules for shipbuilding, sailing, and naval combat, which will be accompanied by new action cards and technologies such as shipwrights, explorers, and astronomy.

— A new playable faction, the Waterfolk: "Through the magic of their wise ones, tied to wavebending and song, they can travel the seas without ships. With their cards, they offer an entirely different playstyle, combining flexibility, resource control, and manipulation of discarded actions."

▪️ Finally, Guido Albini, Martino Chiacchiera, and Luca Maragno's Viking Route, which was crowdfunded in late 2024, is scheduled for release in Q2 2026.

by Scott Alden

The BoardGameGeek Hall of Fame honors games that have made meaningful contributions to the board game hobby in the areas of innovation, artistry, and impact. By curating this distinguished list, BoardGameGeek seeks to preserve the history and evolution of board gaming, while inspiring and informing a global community of players who have a passion for games. Additional games will be inducted annually as the world of board games continues to evolve.

The selection process was guided by a jury composed of dedicated and experienced players who have been deeply involved in the board game community for years and who have brought their knowledge and expertise to the discussions. The process began by evaluating games that were at least ten years old in order to ensure widespread engagement and recognition. Additionally, the jury identified and included games that, while perhaps less widely played, have had a profound and lasting impact on the hobby.

The BoardGameGeek Hall of Fame focuses on modern board games that have directly shaped the contemporary hobby and community. Games such as Chess, Backgammon, Go, and traditional 52-card games, while timeless classics and undoubtedly influential, fall outside the scope of these awards.

Through this initiative, BoardGameGeek aims to celebrate the legacy of these exceptional games and their creators, while fostering a deeper appreciation for artistry and innovation within the world of board gaming.

We are pleased to announce the next inductee into the BoardGameGeek Hall of Fame Class for 2026. The rest of the inductees will be revealed throughout the week. Stay tuned!

•••
Memoir '44 - 2004

At its core, Memoir ’44 (2004) distills the chaos and urgency of WWII battlefield command into fast, intuitive play. Richard Borg designed the entire Command & Colors system to give players meaningful decisions every turn, while the modular mapboards, dozens of official scenarios, and many expansions provide near-endless replayability. Its rules are simple enough for newcomers, yet the gameplay rewards seasoned strategists who understand timing, positioning, and the delicate rhythm of push and counter-push. For those that just want to play a fun battle game with dice, it delivers. For others who see its real treatment of history, together with simple modeling of command-control, morale and casualty effects, geographic conditions, and training, Memoir ‘44 shows how historical wargaming enhances our understanding of world events.

Youtube Video

by Scott Alden

The BoardGameGeek Hall of Fame honors games that have made meaningful contributions to the board game hobby in the areas of innovation, artistry, and impact. By curating this distinguished list, BoardGameGeek seeks to preserve the history and evolution of board gaming, while inspiring and informing a global community of players who have a passion for games. Additional games will be inducted annually as the world of board games continues to evolve.

The selection process was guided by a jury composed of dedicated and experienced players who have been deeply involved in the board game community for years and who have brought their knowledge and expertise to the discussions. The process began by evaluating games that were at least ten years old in order to ensure widespread engagement and recognition. Additionally, the jury identified and included games that, while perhaps less widely played, have had a profound and lasting impact on the hobby.

The BoardGameGeek Hall of Fame focuses on modern board games that have directly shaped the contemporary hobby and community. Games such as Chess, Backgammon, Go, and traditional 52-card games, while timeless classics and undoubtedly influential, fall outside the scope of these awards.

Through this initiative, BoardGameGeek aims to celebrate the legacy of these exceptional games and their creators, while fostering a deeper appreciation for artistry and innovation within the world of board gaming.

We are pleased to announce the next inductee into the BoardGameGeek Hall of Fame for 2026. The rest of the inductees will be revealed throughout the week. Stay tuned!

•••
Puerto Rico - 2002

In Puerto Rico, players assume the role of colonial governors on that Caribbean island who will oversee the shipping of goods to Europe, the acquisition of valuable commodities from plantations, and the establishment of buildings, each with their own special power or bonus. To do this, each turn the active player chooses one of the available roles, then each player (if able) carries out the action allowed by this role, with the role's chooser receiving a small bonus: an extra doubloon when trading, a discount when building, or an extra good when producing commodities. This dynamic drives the action in the game, with everyone trying to time their actions to maximum effect as they score points from shipping goods, acquiring buildings, and occupying certain large buildings. While the gameplay of this Andreas Seyfarth (say-fourth) design is rich and challenging, the setting is unpleasant, with players drafting enslaved laborers from a constant flow of arriving ships to occupy plantations and buildings. As a result, two decades after Puerto Rico was released, the publisher released Puerto Rico 1897, which is set in the year the island achieved political autonomy from the colonial Spanish government.

Youtube Video

by UnexpectedGames

It was December 2023. Two months earlier, I had wrapped up work on my latest game, The Mandalorian: Adventures, and I was trying hard to answer a big question: "What game is next for Unexpected Games?"

Creating new games has been my passion since I was a kid, but I was drawing a blank slate. I'd designed over twenty games in the last eighteen years — so many different games in so many genres. I was having trouble coming up with something that wasn't just retreading old ideas.

I'd spent the last two months tinkering with a few prototypes, while also laying the groundwork for an expansion to The Mandalorian: Adventures. I had some cool game ideas, but every prototype I made fizzled out or felt like a game that already existed. I was frustrated, disappointed, and lost.

Over holiday break, I finally found my inspiration in Dorfromantik: The Board Game. I was watching game reviews and learned something that melted my mind: it was impossible to lose a game of Dorfromantik. WHAT? How does a board game even function if there is no way to lose?

The last time I had experienced a brain-breaking moment like this was when I was introduced to The Mind. On paper The Mind didn't even sound like a game, but when I played it, I was completely blown away. The game was revolutionary and made me think about games in an entirely new light.

So thinking about Dorfromantik, I gave myself a challenge: How would I design a game if the central premise was that you cannot lose? The first thing I thought of was how this is a common theme in video games. Some of my favorites included Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, and even The Sims.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had never played a board game that captured the same "cozy" vibe found in these video games. Most board games that claim to be cozy have tense competition, crunchy rules, or punishing mechanisms. Yes, they look cozy, but they didn't have the relaxed energy and open-ended freedom found in cozy video games.

So how could I do accomplish this?

My main design challenge was to answer this question: "If you cannot lose, why are you even playing?" Thinking back to how Animal Crossing handles this, the answer was to give you goals and to make the gameplay rewarding.

The second answer was to make player choice matter. Decisions should have repercussions, and each group's village should reflect their personality. In addition to choice, it should also let you express your creativity in ways you don't often see in board games.

My third answer to this question was to make the gameplay story-centric. I love games like Tales of Arabian Nights, and by injecting similar story into my game, I could make the world feel alive. Residents in your town could have their own goals and ambitions, and the land itself could be full of places to explore and secrets to uncover.

Unlike Animal Crossing, I wanted a game that didn't go on forever. Instead, I wanted different endings based on the choices you'd made throughout the game. (We ended up with five endings, each with their own requirements.)

This thought experiment gave me moment-to-moment incentives, rewards, and a grand overarching purpose.

When I returned to the office in January 2024, I had an entire game sitting in my head, and I was ready to start making a prototype. Within a week, I had my first playable version.

I played it with Josh Beppler, and unlike my other recent prototypes, it was full of magic. Sure, the prototype was ugly and full of holes, but the experience was unique, fun, and full of possibilities.

For the first time in many months, I was excited and inspired. There was work to do, but I could already envision what the final game would look like.

Why, What, and How

The mechanisms of a game are not the game itself; they are merely tools used to express the game. This idea is sacred to me. In fact, when someone describes a game to me by first explaining the mechanisms, I often sigh and lose focus. Instead, I want to hear the STORY first (why), then our GOAL (what), then finally HOW YOU PLAY.

The story of Cozy Stickerville begins with a letter from your father. To summarize, he thinks you're lazy, but he's giving you this plot of undeveloped land as one last chance to prove yourself.

Over the course of ten years (individual games), your goal is to develop this land into the village of your dreams. Do you want a quaint village full of happy residents? Or perhaps you love nature and desire a community that can co-exist with wildlife while preserving the ecosystem? Or maybe you care about progress and industry? You want a busy city and all the money that comes with it. Or maybe you dream of a farming town...

There are countless options, and each decision leaves your fingerprints on your village. Regardless of your dreams, you must build, advance, and explore.

So how do you do this?

Each year starts with an introduction that provides story, starting resources, and surprises, then players take turns around the table making decisions and adding to their village as they see fit. There are two steps of your turn, and they are deceptively simple: 1) draw an event card, then 2) resolve an action.

Step 1 – Morning
Your day starts by drawing the top card of the event deck and resolving it. The game is played over ten years, and each year has its own event deck full of surprises.

There are three main types of event cards:

• New Action: These cards stick around and provide new options. These often provide new buildings you can construct or objectives to work towards.

• Choice: These cards ask you to make a choice. After deciding, you find out the consequences, which can be immediate or long lasting.

• Consequence: These cards have two different effects, one of which will happen based on the state of your village and the choices you've made.

Step 2 – Afternoon
During the afternoon, you perform one action. You can choose from anything marked with an hourglass icon on the map or on cards in play. For example, you could explore a location on the map or construct a building on the card you drew during step 1. Actions have the following effects:

• Gaining a Card: Some actions give you a specific card from the card catalog. For example: "Gain card 3" means that you thumb through the card catalog and find the card with the big old #3 on the back. This card could have immediate effects or new actions for you to resolve in the future.

• Reading a Story: Many actions tell you to read a specific entry from the storybook. For example: "Read story 7.2" means flip to page 7 of the storybook and read entry number 2. This is how you explore locations, help residents' personal stories, and uncover mysteries.

• Special Card Actions: Some cards have unique actions printed on them. For example, a card might let you spend three wood to build a house (that is, place a specific sticker on the map). We'll talk more about stickers in the next section.

After performing your action, the next player begins their turn. Play proceeds round and round until no cards are left in the event deck.

End of the Year
When the event deck runs out, the year ends. You resolve any "end of year" effects on cards in play, then decide whether you want to start the next year or save your game.

Saving the game is ridiculously easy. You simply throw all your resource tokens and cards into the save-game box, then mark your current year.

Accessible but Deep

Now you know the basics of playing the game. Sounds easy, right? Draw an event card, then perform an action. It is simple enough to teach anyone: gamers, kids, grandparents, even that weirdo who lives in your shed. We don't discriminate.

Remember, though, that a game is far more than its mechanisms. The real magic comes from all of the choices, interactions, and stories you'll discover. As you play, you'll find countless activities including fishing, exploring the mine, solving puzzles, and so much more.

So Many Stickers

If you've been following along, you might have noticed that I've yet to talk about stickers. Let's remedy that...

The name of the game is Cozy Stickerville, so you really couldn't have this game without stickers. In fact, the game contains more than eight hundred stickers!

"Wait, wait, wait," you say as you barge into my office. "If the game uses stickers, can you play it only once? Seems like a waste."

You startled me, but I quickly recover. I consider asking, "How did you get in here?" but instead answer your question: "Well, first off, the game is played over ten individual years. That's ten games!"

"So after ten plays I throw it away?" you ask.

"No, not at all. At the end of year ten, you get a resolution to your story, then you can flip over the game board and play ten more times."

"So twenty games", you say, tapping your chin. "That's pretty good. How much does it cost, 60 bucks?"

"Nay. Tis merely $39.99."

You smile and nod, ignoring the fact that I have begun talking like Shakespeare. You then visit our website and place your pre-order.

Okay, Stickertime

Let's talk about the types of stickers you'll find and how they're used to spark your imagination and tell stories.

Many effects in the game will tell you to place a specific sticker on the map. For example: Place sticker 3c means that you would flip to page 3 of the sticker book, then place sticker c on the map.

In general, you can place stickers wherever you want. We encourage creativity and want your village to capture your unique personality. There are some simple restrictions such as not placing on the fold and not covering other stickers, but these are all intuitive.

Buildings

Perhaps the most obvious stickers in the game are the various buildings you'll construct: houses, shops, farms, utilities, entertainment, and so much more. Constructing buildings often requires resources, which are shared amongst all players. Some buildings (such as farms) provide resources at the start of each year, and you'll find other ways to gain resources throughout the game.

Most buildings have a purpose, either through a card that provides a new action or a story for you to encounter there.

Decorations

Some stickers are decorations, such as flowers, animals, roads and more. Many of these are on clear stickers so that you can overlay them on buildings.

Although I'm calling them decorations, these stickers do serve a purpose. Placing these often generates money for you. Other decorations may be needed for goals during the game, for example, you may need a certain number of flowers or roads to accomplish certain ambitions.

Milestones

These stickers record important accomplishments and hardships. You often get these from pivotal events or after accomplishing a goal. For example, selling pets might give you the pet lover milestone.

When you gain a milestone, the sticker is placed on the right side of the game board. This serves two purposes: 1) it records and reminds you of important moments, and 2) it serves as the game's memory. For example, some events ask whether you have a specific milestone and will give you different effects based on this.

Milestones allow the game to react to the decisions you made, both good and bad.

Some milestones also have icons on them, such as the crown, star, or minus icon. These have no inherent effect, but as you play the game certain effects can reference these.

Hearts, Progress, and Upset

The first page of the stickerbook has many common stickers you'll use to track various activities in the game. For example, heart stickers can be placed on the happiness track when you accomplish goals.

Heart and progress can also be placed on cards and the storybook entries to track your progress on specific stories. For example, visiting a resident will often give you a short story and a choice. Depending upon what happens, the next time you visit this resident they will give you a different story.

Upset stickers are mainly placed near residents on the map to mark when they are unhappy. This can happen if you treat them poorly or if you don't fulfill their needs. The consequences of being upset can vary greatly, but let's just say that if you really like a resident in your town, you should try to find ways of making them happy.

Everything Else

Beyond the basic sticker types are many unique stickers, each with their own uses: catastrophes that can show up on your map, stickers used to solve mysterious puzzles, stickers that upgrade cards, and overlays that change stickers already on the map.

These tend to dive into spoiler territory, so I'm going to avoid showing any of them. All I'll say is that the longer you play, the more unexpected twists you'll encounter.

Exploration and Mystery

When you heard the title Cozy Stickerville, the picture in your head was probably something akin to Animal Crossing: building a town, fishing, doing chores, lazing around. While this picture isn't far off, it contains only a fraction of what you'll find in the game.

For the purposes of this designer diary, I'll spoil cards and puzzles only from the Cozy Stickerville prologue, a special demo that I made for the game so that we can show the game at conventions and online on Board Game Arena.

Exploration

Right from the start, there are locations to explore and surprises to find hidden throughout the world.

Let's say that you've built a tent on a previous turn and now wish to explore it for your action. The icon on the map tells you to read story 1.3, so you read that entry in the storybook.

As you can see, you can choose from two options. You cannot read ahead and will learn the outcome only after making your choice. (When playing with a large group, we recommend that another player reads the story aloud to you and presents your options.)

Depending upon how you respond, you'll get different information. Now, since this is a prologue, it only hints at some of the story yet to come.
Surprises can come from other places as well. Since each year has its own unique event deck, you're often faced with unexpected decisions at the start of your turn. The world will change and evolve, regardless of how you play.

Mystery

Some of the things you'll discover in the game require puzzle solving. These parts of the game are optional, but they've been popular with our playtesters.

Let's say that instead of exploring the tent, you decided to explore the gravesite. When you explore this site, the icon tells you to gain catalog card number 2. You draw that card and find a weird message written on the grave. Can you figure out what this means?

This demo puzzle is intentionally on the easy side, but it gives you an idea of the sorts of things you might encounter.

Activities for Everyone

Reading about these puzzles may lead you to believe that this is an escape room-style game in the vein of Unlock! No! Puzzles are simply one of the many activities you can partake in the game.

Some people will love the puzzles and spend their time and energy focusing on this part of the game. Other players may enjoy fishing, or building, or romance, or...

Well, I don't want to give it all away.

Since the game has so much to offer, it is fun seeing which parts different groups latch onto. The more you pursue a certain path, the more often you'll see those types of elements show up in your game. For example, if you're REALLY into farming, you'll see lots of farming options. If you ignore this storyline, you'll see other opportunities present themselves.

One of my core philosophies of this game is personalizing, and this mechanism helps ensure that your village will be unique to your group.
Speaking of gaming groups, the game supports 1-6 players, and it's been fun watching the different group dynamics emerge during playtesting. Some groups focus on the co-operative aspect of the game, consulting with each other before making choices so that they can work together toward common goals. Other groups are more chaotic and will sometimes choose actions to spite other players. There's no wrong way to play! You have control of your actions during your turn, so you can engage with the game (and your friends) however you'd like. Everyone is welcome, even hellraisers. (Well, unless the group bans you from playing with them, but that's kind of on you, isn't it?)

What type of village will you create? If you'll be in Charlotte, North Carolina, you can try the demo with us at TantrumCon, which runs Feb. 5-8, to get a spoiler-free taste of the game, which will be released worldwide in February 2026.

Corey Konieczka

by Scott Alden

The BoardGameGeek Hall of Fame honors games that have made meaningful contributions to the board game hobby in the areas of innovation, artistry, and impact. By curating this distinguished list, BoardGameGeek seeks to preserve the history and evolution of board gaming, while inspiring and informing a global community of players who have a passion for games. Additional games will be inducted annually as the world of board games continues to evolve.

The selection process was guided by a jury composed of dedicated and experienced players who have been deeply involved in the board game community for years and who have brought their knowledge and expertise to the discussions. The process began by evaluating games that were at least ten years old in order to ensure widespread engagement and recognition. Additionally, the jury identified and included games that, while perhaps less widely played, have had a profound and lasting impact on the hobby.

The BoardGameGeek Hall of Fame focuses on modern board games that have directly shaped the contemporary hobby and community. Games such as Chess, Backgammon, Go, and traditional 52-card games, while timeless classics and undoubtedly influential, fall outside the scope of these awards.

Through this initiative, BoardGameGeek aims to celebrate the legacy of these exceptional games and their creators, while fostering a deeper appreciation for artistry and innovation within the world of board gaming.

We are pleased to announce the first inductee into the BoardGameGeek Hall of Fame for 2026. The rest of the inductees will be revealed throughout the week. Stay tuned!

•••
For Sale — 1997

Stefan Dorra’s For Sale (1997) has endured as a perfect small game to open or close a game night, or provide a great break between larger ones. This compact auction-and-bidding gem distills economic play about real estate investment (flipping) into two brisk, tension-filled phases—one where players vie for properties with clever, often psychological bidding, and another where they turn those purchases into profit with perfectly timed sales. For Sale remains a go-to choice for introducing new players to auctions, yet it continues to delight experienced gamers with its clean mechanics, sharp decisions, and laugh-out-loud table moments.

Youtube Video

by SnowBoardGames

Our journey into board game development started during Covid. Before that, we had game ideas and early-stage prototypes, but we never found the time to develop them. We were either out climbing or playing board games with our friends. With the lockdown, we suddenly had the time freed up, and we got an idea for a husky sled-racing game after watching a movie.

Coincidentally, Kickstarter had just become available for Slovenian creators. I've been following the site for a long time and always knew I wanted to try it at some point. Being a physicist, I thought it would be for a tech project, but with the husky game idea and games being strong on Kickstarter, we decided to go for it.

That game, Hike!, was supported by 3,451 backers, and raised almost €120,000 – enough that we decided to stay in our science and engineering jobs four days a week and commit Fridays to board game development, with a vision of becoming a board game publisher. The big question then was: What should our second game be?

We were thinking about this from both the game designers' and the publisher's perspective, and it turned out Secret Recipe would prove to be quite a challenge for both.

From the game designers' side, we had game ideas at different stages of development, with different mechanisms, themes, and complexities, and the task was to find one we thought had potential, was doable in the set amount of time, and excited us.

From the publisher's side, we were looking at the product. We had a box size and complexity in mind (although we overshot both in the end), and we were thinking about what theme would be a good follow-up to Hike! We want to publish a broad range of themes, so we didn't want the theme to be too similar, or else we'd be labelled as a publisher who does only outdoor games, for example. Looking back, we may have gone with a theme that was too different as there's not a huge overlap between people who like huskies and people who like baking.

We tinkered with the design for a few months, and the idea started to come together when we were trekking in Nepal. We started with a grid and clues, and the original theme was prayer flags, with airy art, 8000-meter peaks, and Buddhist temples.

It started with a different theme, inspired by our trek in Nepal and the breathtaking Himalayas. (That's Mount Everest in the background!) We had paper and pencils in the backpacks and tested ideas in the evenings in the lodge.
After playtesting, the mechanisms changed quite a bit, and we felt that the design didn't fit well with the theme anymore, so we had a short stage in which we were tinkering with the mechanisms and contemplating different themes.

We settled on desserts during more travel, a climbing trip in the Balkans we took with friends. We had quite a culinary experience, and food and family relations felt a good match for the direction the mechanisms were going, so the game became about a family that competes for grandma's recipe book. The one who impresses grandma the most wins. Desserts felt a natural sub-category of food, especially as we remembered the cookies and tarts our grandmas baked when we were little.

Now the game had the raw mechanisms and the theme, so we dug in and started mixing them together into a cohesive recipe — balancing ingredients, tweaking ratios, and letting the concept bake.

Balancing the Core Mechanisms

The basic idea is that each player receives a part of the recipe from grandma. In practice, it's four ingredients, drawn randomly. On their turn, the players give clues about their ingredients using the central grid on the game board and clue tokens. On other players' turns, they decipher clues from the other players.

The first step in marrying the theme with the mechanisms was to reduce the grid to 3x3 and decide on the number of different ingredients (that is, the objects to discover), as well as the number of ingredients of each type. They now vary from 2 to 4, which makes it more interesting than having the same amounts as it increases the asymmetry in the player information.

I think our tech background showed here as we were able to get a balanced set-up pretty quickly. The final version has nine ingredients, and they're stuff you'd find in your grandma's recipes in Slovenia: flour, cream, eggs, apples, honey, walnuts, strawberries, grapes, and mint.

Overview of the components. Each player receives a recipe board with four hidden ingredients, a player board on a stand to track the clues, and a discussion card used to make guesses. The central board features the score track and the pantry grid where players give clues.

How Can Players Give and Decipher Clues at the Same Time?

With this framework laid out, the next design point was figuring out the clue system. This was a major thing for us as we didn't want to have asymmetric player roles with, say, the game master having all the info vs. everybody else deciphering clues. We also didn't want to hard-code the information beforehand and have a book with all of the game variants. We wanted the players to have the same roles, and the game to have endless possibilities. With nine ingredients (25 total) in 25 locations, the placement itself offers a great variety, but what really makes each game different is the player interaction – each group of players can make the game their own.

In order for this to work, we had to incentivize players to give good clues – meaning that giving clues should either bring them points or give other bonuses.

Looking at it from the other side, deciphering clues brought points (or took them away if the answer was incorrect), with you earning more points as the sole person who figured it out and fewer points if multiple players did. (A third option earns few points for a correct answer, but does not penalize wrong answers.) The penalty ensured that players didn't just make blind guesses all over, and the three options allow for interesting tactics.

We later added a bonus point for guesses that include an ingredient from the grid. This addition to the tactics is minor, but it ensures the grid keeps changing during the game without it being a burden, which was an element that saw a lot of iterations during playtesting.

Players use discussion cards to make guesses at the same time. These are responsible for a few of my favorite moments in the game, with the suspense building, and players looking at each other's guesses and debating.
If giving clues brought only a set amount of points, there was no real incentive to give good clues early on, and the gameplay stalled with some player groups.

We needed to introduce a sense of urgency, and we did so by introducing a set of point tokens. The player who gave a good clue would take three, choose one, and discard the other two; when the token pile ran out, you'd restock with the discards, so fewer points were left as the game progressed. We also added an option to forgo points, but gain additional info about the ingredients. It's a bit of a gamble, but if you do it early in the game, it can really pay off.

With this scoring system, players generally rush to score at least some of the high points from the point tokens with good clues. In some cases, experienced players will still want to give bad clues, score fewer points, and keep the information to themselves longer, but this path to victory is much riskier.

We feel the game has a good tension between giving and deciphering clues, and Mark from The Dice Tower noted, "I just love this theme and how it works together, and how clue-giving works!"

Designing a Clear Information-Tracking System

In parallel with developing the clue system, we were also developing a means to track information. There is a lot of it during the game, and we didn't want players to drown in their first play. We wanted to provide an intuitive tool that would allow players to track all of the "hard" information, i.e., the clues and the info they get about the ingredients.

We decided on player boards and erasable markers early on. These markers aren't a personal favorite, so we wanted to find something else, but with the complexity at hand, we couldn't find another system that would be flexible enough. This decision meant that the manufacturing would be more expensive due to the foil and gloss finish on the components, so it wasn't made lightly. We also wanted to provide a printed version for anyone who prefers pen and paper, but after crowdfunding polls, we decided to make it an add-on, instead of including them in the game.

Almost final version of the player board. The top row shows all the ingredients to be discovered, ordered by weight, then we have four recipe rows, one for each player's recipe (including your own, so you know what clues you've already given). Each square corresponds to one hidden ingredient that is being discovered.
The player boards were hands down the component that had the most iterations. From the beginning, we had four recipes with four squares each – to track clues for each of the ingredients being discovered – and the line with all of the ingredients at the top.

Initially, we also had a grid with recipe ingredients (nine hidden ingredients on the side shelves), but it was hard to track who knew what and where what was. Since all players track a lot of the same things, we decided to move this from the player boards and invented a fingerprints system on the main board. Each player gets nine fingerprint tokens in their color, and each time they peek at one of the hidden recipe ingredients, they place their fingerprint on it.

This system allows everybody to easily see which player knows which ingredients (a piece of information that can be valuable), plus it's aesthetically pleasing and fun thematically – you better hope grandma doesn't see you forgot to wash your hands! This system also helps eliminate player errors as each player needs to track only one bit of information, not the whole system.

The main challenge of the player boards was how to orient everything. Each player has a recipe board with hidden ingredients in front of them, and as the players sit around the table, they see it oriented differently, and the player boards need to work with all orientations, as well as for players who have different preferences and different levels of spatial awareness. Once we had the final version, it seemed so logical that we couldn't believe we hadn't thought of it before.

It's worth mentioning that we omitted one clue type, leaving only two: clues based on ingredient weights and ingredient types. It was impossible to have a good visual representation of the third type on the player board, and we thought having one additional clue type didn't bring enough to the gameplay to be worth it.

The players' fingerprints on the recipe shelves mark the ingredients the players know. This system is intuitive, looks good, and eliminates player errors when marking information.
Apart from this "hard" information from clues, "soft" information comes from the other players. Why are they giving me this particular clue when they could have done it better? I know that they know this or that. And so on.

This is where the game shines in my opinion – when players discover layers, so it's not only a deduction game, but also a social deduction game. The player board has enough empty space for dots, arrows, question marks, or any other system each player develops to track that.

What about the Two-Player Version?

One thing we didn't consider was that with all the clues and player interaction, Secret Recipe was essentially for three and four players first — and we are a two-person team. This meant we were constantly looking for a third playtester, and a lot of the things we could quickly playtest and iterate between the two of us during the Hike! development now required more logistics and therefore took longer.

Apart from that, we always knew we wanted to have a two-player version of the design that has the same mental puzzle as the three- and four-player game. We struggled a long time because using the same rules meant the game was too symmetrical, so in the end we took the same clue-giving system and adapted the incentives, changing the point token system to push players and create tension. We're happy with how it worked out, and the puzzle aspect feels similar to the multiplayer game. The social aspect, however, is completely different, so if you enjoy player interaction, I suggest playing with three or four people.

Fighting in the Kitchen

When we present this idea to others, everyone thinks the game is co-operative, probably because of the incentive to give good clues. In fact, Secret Recipe is highly competitive, and players give good clues because it benefits them.

I'd love to hear what you think in the comments. Did you get a co-op impression, too? Is there something in my wording that hints at it?

The art on the back of the player board by the awesome Dagmara Gąska. We wanted each player to have a unique feel, with a dedicated dessert and trinkets you would find at grandma's.
Challenges from the Publisher's Perspective

Aside from the game design challenges highlighted above, Secret Recipe brought a bunch of publishing-related challenges, too. The first was that while we had a clear idea of art when the theme was about the Himalayas, we struggled when we switched to deserts.

Consequently, it took us a long time to find an illustrator, and we actually started with graphic design before we had a clear art direction, hoping it would inspire us. Everything came together when we started working with Dagmara Gąska and saw the first finished illustration, the one for the red player board. We liked it so much that we decided to put it on the cover, too, and it pretty much set the tone for the whole game.

The most notable challenge, however, was that we wanted to keep the same box size that we had with Hike!, which is the same size as Codenames. This would greatly simplify the logistics, especially since we planned to run a Kickstarter and handle the fulfillment to backers ourselves.

However, it became clear that the player boards need to be bigger than the box allowed, not to mention that the components just wouldn't fit, so we needed either a major redesign, which would result in a completely different game, or a bigger box. In the end, we went with the latter. It's now the same size as Carcassonne, and it's packed.

Kickstarter and Beyond

We launched Secret Recipe on Kickstarter in September 2024, with the fulfillment planned to begin in August 2025. I'm happy to say that thanks to the experience from publishing our first game, the manufacturing went even more smoothly this time, and the fulfillment began in May, three months ahead of schedule.

That's us, Blaž and me (Nika), the SnowBoardGames team, with the prototype copy of our first game
Secret Recipe is now available from our web page and from some awesome retailers who choose to support small indie publishers. If we sparked your interest, I warmly invite you to check it out, or come meet us and try the demo at a future event.

Nika

by W. Eric Martin

Dotted Games, a studio within asmodee that creates games in collaboration with the LEGO Group, has announced its third release following 2024's Monkey Palace and 2025's Brick Like This!

Here's an overview of the 2-4 player game LEGO: NINJAGO – Destiny's Bounty Adventures from designer Jonas Resting-Jeppesen:


The NINJAGO brand turns fifteen in 2026, so this game celebrates fifteen years of the brand within the LEGO Group. My son barely plays games these days, but hoo boy was he into NINJAGO in his youth. Not the spinners with which the series debuted in 2011, but the larger LEGO sets that accompanied the cartoon series — and I appreciated the cartoon series in my own way, mostly because the characters actually developed throughout the stories rather than being the same from start to finish. This was a nice change from some of what we watched together as we were able to speculate on what might happen, while also playing with the characters to tell stories of our own. Days long past now...

LEGO: NINJAGO – Destiny’s Bounty Adventures will be displayed at toy fairs in London and Nürnberg in January 2026 ahead of a debut on July 30, 2026 at Gen Con and in retail outlets.