by Justin Bell

Most people in The Hobby are familiar with the term “the shelf of shame”, a funny name for the games on your shelf that you bought weeks, months, maybe even years ago and still haven’t bothered to play. (Maybe you bought the game because the box’s color scheme paired so well with the other titles on the shelf second from the bottom…maybe.)

I don’t want to discount what the shelf of shame represents. The people in my strategy group know that I’m always pushing people to only buy the games that they know they will play…and usually, they laugh at this advice and go hog-wild, buying everything in sight, whether they think they will ever really table those games or not.

To each their own. For many, simply buying a game and having a sweet new toy on their shelves feels good.

I don’t maintain a shelf of shame. Also, I don’t really have any shame. I do, however, have three games (from a collection of about 200) that haven’t been played yet, and in all three cases, the shrink has been ripped off, the games are punched, stickered, and ready to go, and I just haven’t been able to force them to a table yet. Give me another month or two, and those will hit a table sooner than later.

I’m a bit weird in that way: as soon as I buy a game, I get anxious; my new toy deserves to see the light of day, so I like to push those games to the table whenever possible. Otherwise, why buy the thing in the first place? I am also an enabler; friends know that I usually start game nights by asking if anyone has anything hot they want to bust out, especially if they just bought something they’re excited about.

Lately, though, I have been obsessed—truly obsessed—with tabling the games from a different part of my game closet. These games are known as The Maybe Pile…and I often wonder if everyone has a pile just like it.

***

My Maybe Pile began to form a couple years ago.

It’s such a tricky beast. That’s because The Maybe Pile includes games that have proven to be a challenge for one simple reason: “tablebility”, my made-up term for any game’s likelihood to regularly make it to my game table, given my personal gaming network.

Games that I did not enjoy typically go to one of three places: the sale pile, which usually amounts to the games I will sell or trade with friends or another player in my immediate network to ensure that I can still revisit the game later; my “review crew”, who get the lion’s share of my review copies; non-profit organizations which get my game donations, such as The Gaming Hoopla. The house is only so big, and I typically keep only the games I love.

Honestly, I am thankful each time I play a game that is either a banger or a dud…that makes the decision on what to do with it next very easy.

The Maybe Pile, however, is a problem, and it’s a problem that grows in scope each year. One game on the top of my Maybe Pile is Raising Robots, an excellent engine-building game designed by Brett Sobol and Seth Van Orden, the same people who created my favorite auction game of them all, Stockpile. Each time I break out Raising Robots, everyone loves it. It’s the rare game that plays up to six players. It’s relatively easy to teach and doesn’t devour the entire table. I gave it a glowing review on Meeple Mountain.

Raising Robots is strong work. So, what makes it a Maybe Pile title?
-->Everyone enjoys playing it, but I can’t always get people to play it a second time.
-->Raising Robots is fantastic as a solo game…but I usually do not play tabletop games by myself.
-->I would happily give my copy away…but no one else in my immediate network has it, and I just KNOW the second I move my copy out of the collection that someone will show up at my house and ask, completely randomly, to play Raising Robots. (Yes, I do give games from the Maybe Pile to friends with the not-so-subtle request that they never sell it, so that I can continue to access the game occasionally while having it live in someone else’s home. Shortly after I do this, time and time again, they sell it anyway; it was their game at that point, after all. This is why I have trust issues!)

***

Other titles in my Maybe Pile have their own set of issues. Often, I think the game is a 9 or a 10 out of 10…but the people I game with disagree. A few of the medium-weight Euros in the Pile are good, but they’re an expansion away from being great, so I hold on, hoping the game has sold enough units to warrant additional content. In one case, there’s an 18xx title in the Maybe Pile that I love but it takes a solid eight hours to play. In a world where I have other great 18xx titles that can wrap up in 3-4 hours on a weeknight, I lean towards getting those to the table first.

Two Maybe Pile games are card games I enjoy, but their base mechanics are replicated in other titles more popular with the folks in my groups. Another game I really enjoyed, Zhanguo: The First Empire, is a blast and features a solid main action mechanic…but the teach is just enough of a lift to force some hesitation every time I want to get it back to the table. Arcadia Quest is such a joy, but getting even a short campaign game rolling is becoming a task with my play groups.

In a good year, I get 30-40 of the games in my personal collection to the table with my game groups, and another 20-30 games are popular enough with my kids that they come out all the time at home. But, that’s it. I’m a game reviewer, so I spend most of the year working through review copies provided by publishers. My first priority is playing those review titles first, and I’m often quite satisfied with that responsibility.

That SHOULD mean that every title on the Maybe Pile should move out of my personal collection. But just staring at the games in the Pile gives me pause. Those are games I love…can I really walk away?

by Julia Thiemann

It all started, as so many great ideas do, while walking our dog in the park during the summer of 2018. We were chatting about game mechanics (because, obviously, that’s what normal people talk about on dog walks) and stumbled upon a concept: a set collection system where tiles could serve multiple purposes. Instead of needing specific pieces for a set, players could use a mix-and-match approach. And what theme fits better than paleontology? After all, scientists have been creatively(!) assembling dinosaur bones for centuries. Case in point: Elasmosaurus, which had 71 cervical vertebrae - more than any other known animal - confused paleontologist Edward Cope so much that he placed the skull on the dinosaur’s tail. Whoops.

Back to the game: We began designing fossils composed of 1, 2, 4, or 6 tiles, spread across three excavation site variants. We also categorized fossils into three types: terrestrial, aquatic, and botanical. Interestingly, despite all the iterations and big changes, these core elements remained unchanged throughout development.

The next step was deciding where players would exhibit their fossils. The obvious answer? A museum. This led us to a grid-based display system where rows and columns were linked to fossil types. At first, matching a fossil to the correct row or column provided a placement bonus, but we
later switched this to an income system - because: who doesn’t love a good engine-building mechanic?

Looking back, it’s fascinating how the initial prototype felt both very different and surprisingly similar to the final version. The main actions were already there but instead of a shared action board, players had individual action slots on their boards. Excavations originally involved hiring paleontologists, which sounded fun until it became clear they were causing chaos. It was never clear where they were digging, and players had little incentive to hire more than one or two. So, we did what game designers must sometimes do with their darlings: we mercilessly cut them. In a chat with designer Mandela Fernandez-Graydon, we had a eureka moment: linking worker placement directly to excavation. Now, where you place your workers determines where you dig next. Bonus: Other players' workers unintentionally help you, increasing the number of tiles you can draw. Cooperation through competition!

Fast forward to September 2021. We were confident we had nailed the mechanics and were ready to focus on production. However, one playtest changed everything. A comment that stuck with us was: "Where are the visitors?" Museums need visitors, yet our design focused solely on management and exhibition. Thus, our editor Rico pushed us to introduce visitors, which in turn created interesting new mechanics. Players now gain visitors whenever they complete a fossil, because, in real life, unveiling a new fossil would surely attract a crowd!

This change also allowed for more refined balancing: instead of directly awarding victory points, players now receive visitors, which later convert into points at a 2:1 ratio. It also led to our personal favourite: a visitor queue. Instead of a dull counter, players physically extend a queue track, making it clear just how popular their museum is. After these major changes in 2021, both we and our editor quickly realized that everything had fallen into place. It finally felt like the complete game, allowing us to shift focus to final touches and production management.

We specifically requested a female illustrator and fell in love with April Borchelt’s art style. We were thrilled when she accepted the job. Her fossil illustrations are stunning, and she provided several cover drafts before settling on the final version - a dynamic, eye-catching piece that immediately draws players into the game.

Rico had an early idea to include standees for completed large fossils. Not only do they look fantastic on the table, but they also serve as clear visual indicators of scoring potential. Alongside April, Dennis Lohausen worked on the icons and standee designs, while Gaston handled everything else: boards, rulebook, characters, and more.

Simultaneously, we collaborated with the Natural History Museum of Berlin for scientific accuracy. Despite extensive research, we made numerous mistakes when placing species in the correct time periods or scaling fossil sizes accurately. Dr. Luthardt, Dr. Schwarz, and Dr. Neumann were instrumental in refining these details and contributed fascinating fun facts found in the final rulebook. Dr. Luthardt, in particular, provided invaluable insights into paleo-botany - a field we found unexpectedly captivating. Check out the story behind Wollemia in the game!

Final fun fact: Our dog Jordie is in the game! Look out for the tiny brown puppy with one ear up, one ear down. He’s been with us when we first had the idea and through all the highs and lows, so naturally, he earned his spot.

Looking back, we couldn’t be happier with the journey and where it led us. Fossilium turned into a beautifully crafted, accessible strategy game with high replayability and rich thematic depth. Our fabulous editors Chantal and Rico made sure that even the smallest detail – balancing, icons, rulebook, material, etc. – is addressed with meticulous care. The artwork, components, and table presence are stunning. And, of course, there are dinosaurs. What more could a board game designer wish for? (Okay, maybe a pet dinosaur. But until then, this will do.)

by ilgiocointavolo

Petersen at Lucca Comics & Games in 2011
Why the creator of gaming's most famous Horror System prefers contemporary terror
When I asked Sandy Petersen about his upcoming Call of Cthulhu project "Big C," his enthusiasm was immediate. "It's in modern times," he said, "and it's about a drug selling group that is connected to deep ones." This isn't surprising—despite creating the most famous 1920s-set horror RPG in history, Petersen himself has always preferred contemporary Cthulhu gaming.

After 40-plus years of Call of Cthulhu, Sandy Petersen has a confession: he never really liked the 1920s setting that made his game famous. In an exclusive interview, the legendary designer revealed why he believes Lovecraftian horror works better in the modern era—and shared details about his return to contemporary Call of Cthulhu gaming.

The 1920s Were Never Lovecraft's Point
"Lovecraft didn't write in the 20s," Petersen explains, quickly clarifying his meaning. "I mean, he did physically write in the '20s, but he wasn't trying to write quaint slices of life in the '20s. He was doing cutting-edge science. He had air exploration of the Antarctic. He had submarines. He had ultraviolet rays. He had the discovery of Pluto. He was doing the most advanced stuff he could."

This insight cuts to the heart of a common misunderstanding about Lovecraftian horror. While most people associate Call of Cthulhu with flappers and prohibition, Petersen argues this misses Lovecraft's actual intent. "I'm trying to follow in his footsteps," he says. The 1920s setting was actually a compromise, not Petersen's vision. "Chaosium, without reading Lovecraft, thought he was a hack," Petersen reveals. "They hired me to write the book because they knew I loved Lovecraft and they knew that if they did it, it would be all snarky and contemptuous."

To give the project commercial appeal, Chaosium pushed the 1920s angle. "They said, 'Hey, the 1920s are cool. There's flappers. There's prohibition. There's gangsters. There's cool old Model T cars. We'll focus on the 1920s background.'" But Petersen had different priorities. "I never really played it in the '20s. I mean, I could play in the '20s, but I didn't focus on the quaint 20s stuff. I just said, 'Well, the 1920s have cars and they have telephones and they have guns, so I'll just run it like a modern game.'"

Why Modern Horror Hits Harder
After decades of gaming, Petersen believes contemporary settings offer distinct advantages over period pieces. "I think the modern times have the advantage that it's easier to get people into the mindset of it being scary. They don't have to get through everything's quaint and old-fashioned before you can get to the scary part."

The temporal distance creates additional barriers. "When I was doing it in 1980, the '20s were only about 50 years ago. There were a lot of people alive who had been alive in the '20s. Now the '20s are 100 years ago. Now no one remembers the '20s." Petersen's solution is characteristically direct: "If I'd done Cthulhu now, I guess they'd have to set it in the 1980s or 1970s, which is even crazier." Instead, he advocates for true contemporary gaming. "I want Cthulhu to be scary in the modern times where we live today. This is a really scary time."

Technology As a Gateway For Horror
Rather than viewing modern technology as an obstacle to Lovecraftian atmosphere, Petersen sees it as an opportunity. "People say, 'Well, we have guns.' I said, 'Well sure, they had guns in the 20s, and plus the cultists have guns and they're probably better organized than the investigators.'"

Cell phones, often cited as atmosphere-killers, become tools for terror in Petersen's hands. "Cell phones are such a great way to introduce horror into your life. The ghosts can call you on your phone. I have a whole scenario called 'A Voice on the Phone' where Shub-Niggurath contacts you over your phone and is messing with your head."

He's particularly excited about other designers' innovations: "One author, not me sadly, came up with the idea that one of Nyarlathotep's thousand forms is a computer virus. The phones and the internet and all these connected things—they go two ways, and they let the things come into our lives and give us horror beyond comprehension."

Big C: A Return to Contemporary Cthulhu
Petersen's upcoming "Big C" represents his return to modern Call of Cthulhu design. Under a new arrangement with Chaosium, he's focusing on contemporary scenarios while the company handles 1920s material. "It's a full campaign. It's going to be a hardback book, couple hundred pages long with all kinds of adventures and entanglements. The climax is in an unfinished supercollider tunnel complex with terrible horrors within."

The modern setting allows for more grounded horror: "It's about a drug-selling group that is connected to deep ones." This street-level approach exemplifies Petersen's preference for contemporary gaming—horror that feels immediate and relevant rather than historically distanced.

The Italian Understanding
During our conversation, Petersen reflected on why Call of Cthulhu resonates particularly strongly with Italian players. His observation touches on something profound about cultural approaches to cosmic horror.

"I remember years ago at Lucca Comics, an Italian keeper ran Masks of Nyarlathotep where every player died in the end. They knew they were dying going in, but they spent six hours crafting elaborate death scenes. One player wrote an actual sonnet as his character's final words."
This leads to a fascinating cultural insight: "Americans approach it as 'How do we beat Cthulhu?' The Italian approach is 'How do we make our destruction meaningful and beautiful.'" This perspective aligns perfectly with Petersen's vision for modern Cthulhu gaming—not about escaping cosmic horror, but about confronting it meaningfully in the world we actually inhabit.

Looking Forward: Horror in Our Time
As Call of Cthulhu approaches its fifth decade, Petersen remains convinced that contemporary settings offer the richest possibilities for Lovecraftian gaming. "So Big C is modern times, and Chaosium has said they want me to do the modern times books and they'll stick with 1920s. So that's fine with me."

His reasoning is both practical and philosophical: "It's easier to get people into the mindset of it being scary" when the setting feels immediate and relevant. Moreover, it honors Lovecraft's actual approach—using the cutting edge of contemporary knowledge to suggest cosmic possibilities beyond human comprehension.

"This is a really scary time," Petersen observes about our current era. Rather than retreating into period nostalgia, he advocates for horror that grapples with the fears and possibilities of today. After 40 years, the creator of Call of Cthulhu is still pushing the boundaries of what Lovecraftian gaming can be. By embracing the modern world rather than hiding from it, he's ensuring that cosmic horror remains as relevant today as it was when he first introduced sanity rules to a startled group of players in a haunted basement.

This interview was conducted for Il Gioco in Tavolo podcast. Full video available at Youtube Video

by Emily Vincent

I designed Knitting Circle during my first year as a game designer. I set the goal of designing as many games as possible so that I could build up my design skills quickly. I wanted to work on a lot of different types of games and mechanics, so I would give myself design briefs based on games that I liked, podcasts I was listening to, or random ideas that I had. Knitting Circle was born from a design brief that I gave myself. I’ve tried to capture that journey here for all of you, gamers and designers. I hope you enjoy this peek behind the scenes!

Knitting Circle Overview: How Does the Game Work
In order to understand the journey, I thought it might be useful to know the destination. Knitting Circle is played over 6 rounds, each of which has two primary phases: the drafting and the crafting phases. During the drafting phase each player takes turns moving their kitty pawn 1 or 2 spaces clockwise around the rondel, jumping over empty or occupied spaces. They then take one of the two tiles in the space and place it on their player mat, keeping it on the face that it was drafted (knit or purl). This continues until all players have drafted 4 tiles.

Then players enter the crafting phase. During this simultaneous phase, all players can place yarn tiles in sequence (starting top to bottom) onto their garment cards, purchase new garment cards with their yarn tiles, complete garments and place any corresponding buttons, pay to flip one of their yarn tiles, or use a grabby paw to take a tile of their choice from the bag. Players are trying to maximize their score across multiple dimensions: length of garment (longer garments score more), garment bonuses (end game conditions on each garment card), and their button objectives (using certain colors, making certain garments, or making certain patterns). The garment bonuses allow players to engage in a little bit of engine building as their early garments may set the path they take in their later garments.

Getting Started
I got the idea for Knitting Circle while listening to an episode of the Building the Game podcast about cozy games. I was driving to work and I paused the podcast to ask myself the question, “If I was going to design a cozy game, what would it be?” My first thought was of knitting, because winter hats and scarves are the coziest things I could think of.

Because I have dabbled in knitting, I was able to quickly come up with the thematic ideas that became the heart of the game. In knitting, there are two basic stitches, knit and purl. The cool thing about these two stitches is that they are essentially two sides of a single stitch - if you do a knit stitch, the back side of it is purl. If you do a purl, the back is a knit. So I knew I wanted tiles that were knit on one side and purl on the other. Building off of this idea, knitting patterns are specified by some number of alternating knit and purl stitches. By the time I had arrived at work, I had mentally sketched out the core concept of the game - to build color sequences that required certain patterns of knit and purl.

Inspiration
When I designed this game, I was inspired by the idea that cozy games leave you feeling proud of what you built even if you don’t win. So in a game like Creature Comforts (Roberta Taylor, Kids Table Board Games), you might feel happy with all of the cozy things you built into your tableau, such as a lovely bookshelf and rocking chair. I was also inspired by the puzzle games that I love playing, specifically Sagrada, Azul, and Calico. I wanted to create a game that lived in the same part of your game shelf as these amazing games.

Initial Prototype & Testing: The Good and the (Mostly) Bad
The very first prototype was made using index cards and resin gems. Because the gems didn’t have sides, I came up with a graphic design for the garment cards with two columns, one for knit and one for purl. This separation of yarn tiles ended up living far too long in the design, all based on the fact that my first prototype components couldn’t be sided. I thought the physical separation was helping players but this didn’t end up being the case. In retrospect, it was probably hurting most players more than it was helping.

First prototype with gems instead of yarn tiles
The primary goal of the game was to create different color patterns on your garments, specifically solids, stripes, symmetrical, colorblocks, rainbows, and abstract. The puzzle was to create those color patterns while alternating yarn from the knit and purl sides of the player’s board. This initial prototype allowed me to gain confidence that the knitting puzzle was actually fun.

I then made a set of circle tiles with knit on one side and purl on the other. This is when I discovered that the difference between the knit and purl stitch was difficult for a lot of people to see. Because of this, I continued to try to use columns on the player board and the garments as a second way to distinguish the knit and purl. I also just kind of liked the zigzag pattern that was created by the two columns.

Part of these early iterations included a passed draft that required players to take tiles in a knit/purl sequence determined by drawing a knitting pattern card. These knitting pattern cards had different lengths, up to five sequences of knit and purl. At the beginning of the round, five tiles were put into the four different bowls for the passed draft. When a bowl of tiles was passed to you, you had to take a tile from the bowl and flip it to the side designated by the current position in the sequence. So if the sequence was knit-knit-purl-purl-knit, you would take tiles on the knit side from the first, second, and fifth bowl you received but would take tiles on the purl side for the 3rd and 4th bowls. To help you keep track of them, you’d place the knit tiles into the basket on the left side of your player board and the purl tiles into the basket on the right side. You could only flip a tile if you discarded another tile to pay for the flip.

As I started playtesting publicly, I observed players struggling with the core puzzle, specifically with alternating the knit and purl sides of the tiles. They lost track of the requirement to play in sequence and they would also absent-mindedly flip tiles over. Since alternating between knit and purl was the heart of the puzzle, it was pretty disheartening to watch it be the biggest struggle for playtesters. I began to wonder if the puzzle might be too hard for many players.

The Eureka Moment
There were two breakthroughs that really turned the corner for this design: the yarn tile design and the simplified draft. One night in February 2023, I had an absolutely disastrous playtest. My players just could NOT keep track of which tiles were knit and purl. They kept placing them on the wrong side of their player board and using them in the wrong spots on the garments. I was so frustrated because it seemed very straightforward to me. But I came out of the playtest with a fire under me to make it so that they COULD NOT play their tiles in the wrong order.

That night after my playtest, I designed a custom tile shape that would only fit if played in an alternating knit/purl sequence. They were keyed with a positive and negative side. Before I went to bed, I sent a file to print 5 of these new tiles on my 3D printer while I slept. The next morning, the tiles worked exactly as I’d hoped. I immediately set out to print 8 different colors of tiles and redesigned all of my garments to fit the zigzag shape that these tiles created.

This was a huge turning point for the game. The bright colors, toyetic pieces, and intuitive puzzle were an instant hit when I debuted them at Unpub 2023. People immediately understood what they were trying to do and the common mistakes players had been making disappeared. Also, the table presence was AWESOME. It drew people in; they wanted to know what the game was and how to play.

Knitting Circle prototype at Unpub 2023

The other big breakthrough happened at Unpub. In the first playthrough, my friends Ashwin and David suggested that the knitting pattern cards were making the draft too hard. We immediately tried playing again with a much simpler approach - each player chose which side they wanted the tiles in their bowl to be and flipped them all to that side. When a bowl was passed to you, you had to take a tile on whatever side it was already flipped to.

With the change in the draft and the new tiles, the feel of the game changed completely. Suddenly people were talking and laughing around the table instead of quietly focusing on their own puzzle and/or frustration.

The follow-up from Unpub was exciting and a little surreal. Randy Flynn (designer of Cascadia) played the game and tweeted about it. Elizabeth Hargrave (designer of Wingspan) also tweeted about it, saying she’d heard about it at the show. A number of other designers at the show also posted about it on social media and suddenly the game had buzz. It was such an incredible act of generosity, seeing people in the industry using their platform to shine the spotlight on someone new. I’m so incredibly grateful to everyone who talked about the game and spread the word. As a result of this buzz, I ended up pitching the game to 16 publishers over the next few months and got connected to Flatout Games.

Feedback from Publishers
A lot of the feedback from publishers was that the game had a solid core but was in an “in between” place, where development could take it in a lot of different directions. It was a fun puzzle and the gameplay was fairly light. Some publishers wanted the game to be simpler, so that it was even lighter and more approachable. They saw a very toyetic form factor and wanted the gameplay to match that. Others thought the game needed to be a little bit more complex, to increase replayability and continue to challenge players as they increased their skills. It really helped me understand how much a game could change based on which publisher signed it and what their vision is.

The Development Process: Continuing the Journey with Flatout Games
Working with Flatout Games was an amazing experience. It was awesome to see how they approached development and I’m so glad I got to work closely with them. The high level goal of our development effort was always to develop Knitting Circle so that it felt like a Flatout Games’ game, especially Calico. The changes we made to achieve this goal really transformed the game.

The team wanted to add multiple paths to victory and increase the replayability of the puzzle. Multiple paths to victory is a hallmark of their games and particularly of Calico. In Calico, if you’re having trouble achieving your quilt goals, you can focus on scoring points with cats or with buttons. There’s always something to work on while you’re playing. Knitting Circle didn’t have those different paths to victory. It had two types of scoring, for garment length and also for patterns, but the pattern scoring wasn’t working well.

The first step was to separate the garments out into different cards. The version that had been signed had the player boards with one of each garment type on it, but this meant that the puzzle was basically the same every game. We worried that people would quickly “solve” the puzzle and wouldn’t want to play again. Separating the garments onto their own cards meant that the number and type of garment that you made each game was variable. This shift to cards immediately helped the replayability.

Another idea that Shawn Stankewich brought to the development early on was adding a deck of dual use cards that could be exchanged for additional tiles OR tucked under garments for end game scoring. This achieved two things. It increased the tile economy and provided another vector of scoring. Both parts of the card were working well, but the new deck of cards increased our component count and gave players another hand of components to manage. After much playtesting, we decided we needed to figure out how to keep the effects (bonus yarn tiles and end game scoring conditions) from the card but without actually adding new cards. We eventually moved these elements to the garment cards. We gave players bonus yarn tiles when they covered certain spaces on their garments and we put the end game bonuses on the bottom of each garment. While we lost a little bit of variability we simplified the gameplay and streamlined the components.

We ended up cutting two of the color patterns - rainbow and abstract. We found that the rainbow pattern was hard for many players to understand and the abstract pattern was too easy. We also cut the number of colors in the game from eight to six. This made it a little easier to get duplicate colors. This was important because all of the remaining color patterns required duplicate colors. Cutting to only six colors also enabled us to use the same six colors in Calico.

As our third vector of scoring, Joseph Z. Chen figured out that we could use buttons as mini-objectives that players can achieve throughout the game. Buttons also mirrored a scoring vector in Calico, which made Knitting Circle feel more like a Calico game. Once we had the length, button, and end-game scoring, we felt confident that the game really felt like a Flatout Games game. On top of that we added the advanced scoring objectives, another hallmark of Flatout Games games to enable variable setup, which in turn increased replayability.

As a team, we also had our eye on the passed draft - it just felt like we could come up with something more interesting. Shawn proposed the rondel concept when he was working on the solo mode and we quickly realized that it would work at all player counts. Prior to the use of the rondel, there was basically no player interaction in the game. The rondel added the opportunity to block other players from getting the tiles they wanted and leap over other players to move further around the basket to the tiles you might want to draft. It was an immediate winner. Later in the process, Molly Johnson wondered if the rondel draft could be used as a mini-expansion in Calico - to provide a tile-drafting variant! This was another step in bringing Knitting Circle into the Calico universe.

Lastly, my favorite development task was to add cats! If this was going to be a Calico game, it definitely needed cats. We hadn’t managed to add them while we were working on the scoring vectors but serendipity struck while I was at Unpub in 2024. I was testing the new rondel but had forgotten to bring any meeples with me. I did have cat pawns though, from another game I was working on. Players were delighted to imagine frisky kitties tumbling over each other in the yarn basket and retrieving yarn for their humans. I immediately messaged the team and we loved the idea of having kitty helpers. It was also a ton of fun to write the little cat backstories on all of the player mats. If you read those, you’ll see how all four of the kitties in the game live in the broader Flatout universe. We also decided that a couple of other mechanics could be themed as cats as well, specifically the cat grabby paws that let you take a tile of your choice from the bag and the “ugly sweater” button became the “angry cat” token.

Knitting Circle at Unpub 2024, with the garment cards, rondel, and buttons.

Final Thoughts
Overall, it has been an incredible experience to go from a cozy idea to a game on tables around the world. I'm so grateful to Flatout Games for taking the game on and for involving me in the development process. It was both fun and educational to be a part of the Knitting Circle development team. For designers who are interested in seeing how a game goes from signed prototype to finished product, I'd recommend participating in a development effort.

And the best part is that I think we created a pretty cool game! The sequencing puzzle based on color and tile side is fairly unique. I also think the close thematic connection to knitting helps the game shine - players who knit say that they can see that someone who has knit was involved in the design. Lastly, it really hits the highlights of games that I love. There is fun player interaction around the rondel, where I can lightly interfere with other players while setting up for my puzzle. And then there is my personal tableau where I can challenge myself against the puzzle without worrying about disruption from other players. At the end of the day, I think we delivered on the vision of a cozy and puzzley game night.

by Mike Peacock

"On your turn, activate all of your faceup card powers"

That's the hook of Flippers, a hook that causes penguin chaos with every card. In this diary, I’d like to waddle through the challenging path that led me to one simple hook.

It started with two targets: 1) High player interactivity, and 2) cool card powers.

To achieve the first target, I immediately went for a central play area, something that all players can contribute to building and influence - a good start. Using an empty play area, players would add cards and arrange them in a line. Cards at the start of the line are worth a larger amount of points than at the end. A nice and easy concept.

Perhaps the cards are people queuing for fast food or a roller coaster, and you can play your card powers to cut in, distract or move up along the queue.

It was a concept which I really enjoyed, but playtesting brought up some replayability flaws also, as British as it is, queueing isn't fun. Being able to either cut in or move up and down the line with your cards brought an interesting constraint and an enjoyable challenge, but I couldn’t help feel that there was more potential in there somewhere. So I swapped out the queue and tested out a grid. Now here's where the game started to find its happy feet.

Bring On The Grid
Having players place cards into a grid allowed for a lot of freedom, yet placing a card along the edge of another card, with no start or end, what are players competing for? Perhaps hit points or a ‘castle defence’ style game? I tested out something that I could get my head around and measure, so each card had a point value. A card with a strong power has a greater influence on the grid but will be worth few points, and vice versa. Whoever has their cards within the goal area of the grid at the end of the game earns that many points from their cards. Cards would push, pull and swap others, as if it were like a 12-player wrestling match!

Testing proved that the goal area didn't feel right, but a larger issue was that no one wanted to start! If players want to use card powers and have cards in the scoring zone at the end, no one wants to go first on an empty grid! It seemed like a wasted turn. So I introduced a points chest, something that is movable and claimable by the end of the game. This was a big turning point in the game design, so much so that I scrapped the goal zone and worked further on the points chest and how card powers can manipulate it.

Blueprints of player powers and card abilities
Feel The Power, Kronk!
Ideally, every card has a power, and depending on when and where it is placed, it will change the grid of cards in some way. Each card will also have an arrow, clearly showing which card is being affected by the card’s power. As players pick and play cards, columns and rows started to form. Powers could alter the point value on other cards and even flip them over or remove them from the game. When the game is over, add up the faceup points to see who wins! This part was the most fun to test out, creating new card combos and even messing about with player powers for some spicy asymmetry. The game was fun and brought players into a nice decision space, but I stumbled across a player power that changed everything.

Activate all of your faceup cards on every turn.

This brought a challenge of its own: how can I get my cards into the right position to attack my opponent but make sure that I don't mess up my next turn? I had so much fun with this player power that I thought - this is a game all in itself!

The first prototype cards of Flippers
Tear It Down, Build It Again
With this ‘Activate All’ concept, I found that not only was it a fun challenge to use as a player, but designing card powers that work within it was genuinely exciting and joyful. The card powers should be simple to understand and easy to use; that was a must. Originally, the powers were a bit word-heavy, describing what to do to a neighbouring card's value at the end of the game. It also led to a big discussion over calculating each player's total score, which just felt too clunky. So I decided to scrap the whole ‘card point value’ aspect. I admit, I was nervous at this point, so much had changed from what I originally had in mind, but I plodded on.

To replace these card values, I added ‘Player Hit Points’. This way, any plus or minus effects can take place immediately rather than at the end of the game. Instead of the cards themselves being the points, players start with points and can gain more from the points chest. This felt like a win; what a relief. It took quite a lot of time balancing the powers, but a summary of the final card powers included in the game are listed below.

Captain - Earn 1 Bonus point from the Point Chest
Flip - Flip over a card
Turn - Turn a card 90 degrees clockwise
Replace - Take the position of the targeted card
Switch - Change the position of the two adjacent cards.
Bump - Move all cards in one direction by one space
Block - Prevent a card from performing its power
+ 1 Point - Add 1 point to the targeted player
- 2 Points - Remove 2 points from the targeted player

Final cards with wooden fish tokens for point markers!
Controlling The Chaos
On a player's turn, they will play one card from their hand and then activate that power. On the next turn, do the same but then activate the card powers played from the previous rounds. This builds up a chain of events, a knock-on effect that all players can read and map out as the game continues. When there is more than one card power to activate, the player has full choice of which card to activate in whatever order they wish, but they must activate all of their cards.

The grid provides players with full control of where they wish to play their cards. The power activation allows players to make tactical decisions on how to manipulate the grid to maximise points. However, card powers will affect all cards, even your own. A master plan on one turn can backfire as an opponent changes the grid of cards, causing you flip, block or even force your own team to lose 2 points!

This is where the game really started to shine. Once players understood the card powers and the golden ‘Activate All’ rule, they seemed to embrace the chaotic turns as they played. Seeing players plan, shout and laugh at the continuous card play felt like the game didn’t need much more adding to it.

After a successful pitch to Molinarius Games Ltd, we brought in a team variant, allowing players to buddy up and added multiple ‘points chests’ to add variety between games. We discussed themes ranging from wrestlers, pirates, beavers, kings vs queens, cats vs dogs and landed on penguins vs seals.

Flippers was born, and after a successful Kickstarter, the game launched fully at the UK Games Expo 2025 and has been causing chaos on ice ever since!

by Elizabeth Hargrave

My game Sanibel is a love letter to my dad and to Sanibel Island. I'd like to tell you a little more about how it came to be.

The Beginning

My dad got a job at the University of Florida in the mid-1980s, and declared he would never shovel snow again. We were 90 minutes from the closest beach, and it was another hour to where my grandparents wintered in Venice, Florida.

My dad, brother, and grandparents at the beach in the 1980s
Containers around our house slowly started to fill with fossilized sharks teeth and miscellaneous shells. Mostly teeth: they're especially abundant in Venice. My dad's beach mode was walking for miles with a sandwich bag tucked into his shorts, looking among the light-colored shells for the little bits of black.

Fast forward 40 years to late 2022, and my family is still gathering at what is now my aunt's place in Venice. My brother and I have moved away, but we come back to Florida almost every Christmas, and we often spend a few days at the beach. Meanwhile, I have become a full-time board game designer. So, while we're having lunch after a morning of shelling on Caspersen Beach, my dad suggests: you should make a game about this.

I frequently brush people off when they have a game idea for me. I have way more ideas than I have time to design. But on this one I did a double-take. Why isn't there a game about collecting seashells? It's universally appealing. It's got an obvious tie to set collection. Even better: you could mimic walking down the beach using one of my favorite mechanisms, a movement track with last-player-goes-next turn order (which many people know from Tokaido or Patchwork). And shells are something I love, which goes a long way when a game design often requires months or years of iteration.

So I dove in and made a first draft. It was only cards. The beach was made up of the card backs, and they flipped over like a crashing wave to reveal shells. Different shells had different rules for scoring, like Sushi Go. But it just wasn't that interesting. I shelved it to work on Undergrove and the next Wingspan expansion.

Design Phase 2: This Shouldn't Be a Card Game

Fast forward almost another year. Unpub (a big playtesting convention in Baltimore) is coming and I've been too busy working on secret Wingspan things to have a game to test in public. I pull Sanibel off the shelf and there are no notes in the box. The first page of my design notebook starts: "I made this prototype months ago, and I don't think I made any notes! How should it play?"

Designers: don't do this.

After messing around with it a bit, I had a realization: this shouldn't be a card game. It needs to be on tiles. Within a week, I had made a new tile-based version, just in time to take it to Unpub.

My card based design had included cards with two small shells instead of one larger one. I leaned into this and made two sizes of tiles: hexagons, and diamonds that are a third of a hexagon. This was perhaps inspired by the fact that Facebook likes to show me posts from the Mathematical Tiling and Tesselation group. (I also briefly toyed with the Cairo tile pattern, but decided that asymmetrical pentagons are just too fiddly to place.)

Even in the early stages, it was clear this was the right direction. Adding a spatial element to the set collection gave you more to think about, and it just looked great on the table. A lot of my notes from Unpub are about muddling through tile placement rules:

I still hadn't totally worked out the numbers of shells to pick up on the different spaces, or how many should be on the beach -- but I knew that would be the next piece to really make each turn an interesting decision about how far to move and what to take.

Connecting with Avalon Hill

A few weeks after Unpub, I headed up to the Gathering of Friends. My friend Tanya Thompson was there, and asked if I had anything to pitch to her as the inventor relations person for Hasbro. I said no, but told her she could playtest the still-rough game I was working on if she was curious.

Tanya played Sanibel once and asked me to option it. Even in its rough form, I think Tanya could feel the same excitement I did about how it would eventually come together.

On my side, I was super curious about Hasbro's new effort to establish a line of gateway-level boardgames that merges the skill and gravitas of Avalon Hillwith the global reach of Hasbro. As I've talked a lot about diversity in gaming over the last several years, a concept I keep coming back to is that games that are broadly appealing, accessible to play, and distributed to a wide audience have the best chance to diversify the pool of people who play them. I thought Sanibel could work toward that goal as part of this new line.

I asked for a little time to work out some more details before sending Avalon Hill a prototype.

Design Phase 3: The Final Framework

Most of my playtesting notes from that time have to do with the trial-and-error of working out the fundamental structure of the movement on the beach and the way new tiles came out. In May, my playtesting buddy Matthew O'Malley and I spent a morning hammering out what became the final structure of the footprint spaces -- he deserves a lot of credit there, as he had recently finished working on the fantastic game First in Flight, which uses a similar mechanism for turn order. There are two giant stars next to the note in my notebook:

The trick was finding a structure that makes it enticing to push ahead to get more, while also making it viable to sometimes hang back and take less in order to have first pick of new shells later, especially when more tiles are about to come out. I love the push-pull feeling of tracks like this when they work well, and once we tried this structure it was obviously the one.

The mechanic for putting new shells out on the beach was also key. From the first card version of this game, I knew I wanted the feeling of waves revealing new shells. It's not just thematic -- the timed release of new tiles also allows you to narrow the number of tiles that players need to examine at any given time, while keeping things going long enough to have a game. But having refills at the end of each turn or even once around the table was too fiddly. When I realized I could add the wave almost as another player to trigger refills, I knew I had it -- though there was math to be done later to make a good number of shells come out at each player count. There is always a spreadsheet.

In breaks between working on the mechanics, I was also locking in the species to include in the game. This involved poring through iNaturalist for Sanibel Island, looking at shelling blogs, and even finding a couple of scientific papers with surveys of shells on the west coast of Florida. Some designers switch between games when they get stuck; I like to just switch to completely different tasks.

Design Phase 4: The Details

By July, I had a signed contract and had a kickoff meeting with a whole team of people at Avalon Hill who would work on the game. This was a new experience, as most of the companies I have worked with have tiny staffs -- when I signed Wingspan, Jamey Stegmaier was the only full-time employee of Stonemaier Games!

Once I started working with my developer, Doug Hopkins, most of the work that remained was refining how the shells score. Most of the scoring conditions started with how I think about collecting the different types of shells. I'll post a separate blog on that, as an excuse to show off some of my personal shell collection!

Doug and I bounced back and forth between mathing out expected values, and playtesting to see what people actually did in practice. I always love seeing how different companies do this: we were able to send the game to some families and watch them play on a video.

Other key players on the Avalon Hill team were Tess Hogan and Samy Ventura. Tess is the one who researched and wrote all the shell facts at the end of the rulebook, and made the rest of it flow so nicely. And Samy is responsible for most of how the game looks, including finding Dahl Taylor to do the art, directing the graphic design process, and designing the delightful folding player aids.

It was great to see it all come together!

Taking Sanibel back to Sanibel Island

At that point, the design work was done. But it's worth telling the story of how I've circled back multiple times to take Sanibel to Sanibel Island.

As you can see on the first notes pictured above, I was calling this game "Sanibel" from the very beginning, even though my family spent more time shelling in Venice. For one thing, "Venice" has obvious problems as a name for a game about shells and not gondolas. But also, if there's one place I think of for shells, it really is Sanibel Island. Its weirdly perpendicular orientation as a barrier island catches more shells than anywhere I've ever been. We'd drive the extra distance to Sanibel for special occasions as a family.

Somehow, I was still surprised when I first took the game to Unpub by how many people saw the name and immediately went, "oh my gosh, I love it there!". It has continued everywhere I've taken the game since. Even in Essen, where I had a German woman excitedly come up and tell me that she had just gotten back from Sanibel Island! It's a place that really sticks with you once you've been: not just the beautiful beaches, but the emphasis on local businesses (chains aren't allowed, with a few grandfathered exceptions), the lack of highrises, and the large nature preserves.

Completely separate from the fact that I was working on this game, my mom wanted to go to Sanibel Island for our family Christmas in 2024. Category 4 Hurricane Ian had done serious damage to the island in September 2022, including taking out the bridge to the island, part of the iconic lighthouse, and damaging a lot of the housing. We wanted to visit because we love the island, but also to help support the recovering businesses there.

As the date approached, however, multiple wrenches were thrown in this plan. Hurricanes Milton and Helene hit the island in September and October 2024. Around the same time, my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Eventually, the plan came back together: we got the go-ahead from his doctor that he should be fine for a week, and from our lodging that we'd have a place to stay. (The water damage to the elevator was not repaired yet when we arrived, though, turning our vacation condo into a third-floor walkup!)

Dad wasn't taking his normal miles-long walks, but we definitely found some good shells on that trip -- including my spouse finding an incredibly rare Junonia. I have just a brief note in my playtesting journal that my parents, husband, and brother played Sanibel on the day after Christmas. I didn't manage to take any pictures. But I definitely remember that my brother and my dad were in a fierce competition for the most shark teeth -- and that my dad had the most by the end of the game. It is a memory I will treasure, because he was gone just 6 weeks later.

I got to go back to Sanibel Island two more times in 2025. In March, we filmed a fun https://i.ytimg.com/vi/w3WMqEiuP1E/default.jpg' alt='video'>for the game. And then in December, Hasbro worked with the Chamber of Commerce on Sanibel to come do an event for the business owners on the island, who have been through so much. It has been heartwarming to see people be so touched to have a game named after their little island -- and to have them tell me I got it right. It was also an amazing opportunity to support the island directly: Avalon Hill contributed $10,000 to the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation.

While we were there, the Chamber of Commerce also asked me to put a copy of the game in a time capsule they were putting together for the town's 50th anniversary. (Is it cheating to share a picture?)

As much as my games have all been about the real world, this is my first game that has such a connection to a particular place. I'm so glad I picked this place. I hope you feel a little bit of the love I have for Sanibel Island and for my dad when you play this game.

by Felix Sonne

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

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



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

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



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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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



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

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

by Roman Zadorozhnyy

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

Norway, Gods, and a Feeling That Never Left

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(C) Roman Zadorozhnyy

by Matt Leacock

Matt Leacock: The design of The Four Doors followed a long, meandering route. It was the result of four different designers working alongside four different publishers to produce no fewer than five different games. I thought it’d be fun and enlightening to show just how much time, energy, and iteration can go into what (on the surface) might look like a fairly straightforward card game.

Please welcome one of the game’s co-designers, Matt Riddle (Matt R). Matt R will join me as we describe these five games below. Each iteration had its own strengths and each successive game improved on the former, until we were able to pull everything together into the final product, The Four Doors.

Believe it or not, our story starts with Matt Riddle and Ben Pinchback’s The Goonies: Adventure Card Game (2016).

Matt Riddle: After we made The Goonies, things did not go as planned (more on this below). I remember saying to Ben, “Now, I understand everyone's stuff is emotional right now. But I've got a Three Point Plan that's going to fix EVERYTHING.

Step 1. We’ve got this guy, Matt Leacock.

Step 2. ???

Step 3. He is going to fix EVERYTHING.”

So really, more of a two-point plan… Goofy movie quotes and false humility aside, I reached out to Matt about the possibility of working together with no expectations. Ben and I aren’t nobody, but still, Matt could have completely ignored me, and I would not have thought any less of him. Turns out, he is actually super cool and was willing to take a look at our design idea that we wanted to squeeze into his world, more on that soon. I did not expect it to be the circuitous journey that it was, but I could not be happier with where it ended up. 

And so, it all started with…

The Goonies: Adventure Card Game

Key dates
• Design started: Early 2015
• Published: 2016

Matt R: Designing games on spec is HARD. “On spec” means that a publisher asked us to work on a game with a specific set of requirements, or to a specification. As engineers (Ben and I are both engineers IRL) we deal with specs all the time. I am pretty sure Ben’s real-life job is to take the spec from the customers and take them down to the engineers. He is a people person. Designing Goonies was hard and easy at the same time. Mechanically, we knew it had to be a co-op, and the spec said it had to be a card game. That was easy, let's just be inspired by the best co-op game on the planet, Pandemic! I mean this, this is not made up, we literally designed a card game based on Pandemic over 10 years ago and then tried to convince Matt L that it should indeed BE Pandemic: The Card Game later on. Life is crazy.

Matt asked me to explain how Goonies works, and I will, I promise. Eventually. We very quickly had the structure of moving between locations and clearing obstacles (cards) using cards from your hand while holding off the Fratellis (threat meter and events). That was the “easy” part. The hard part was making it a Goonies game. We learned a lot when we designed a Back to the Future game that was, well, a game. Again, a card game, mechanically solid, but it did not FEEL like Back to the Future. It didn't deliver the feeling of BTTF that people expected when playing. On Goonies, we worked really hard to remedy that through characters and shared team turns and a general sense of adventure. As much as we could with 100ish cards (again, that pesky spec).

The locations from The Goonies: Adventure Card Game
Fast forward a few years, and Goonies has sold pretty well, but we had yet to receive payment for said project. It happens more than you think. The publisher hit hard times, and the check was in the mail for YEARS. This is a hobby for Ben and me, so it was annoying, not harmful, but it still suuuucckkkeeddd. That all led to the above two to three point plan. I knew we would make DOZENS of dollars to split three ways with Matt L., and they might even put our names on the box under his… but prolly in MUCH smaller letters. 

Pandemic: The Card Game (Pitch)
Matt R & Ben’s Initial Submission

Key dates
• Matt Riddle first emailed Matt Leacock on: 9 November 2018
• Prototype Submitted: 22 January 2019

What elements did you change in The Goonies in order to make it feel more like Pandemic for your pitch?

Matt R: Most of the original Goonies core design elements – locations with accumulating threats that need to be kept under control, the team turn, the card management – made it into the Pandemic redo. 

We changed the way Fratellis (escalation events) worked as many of them made a lot less since in the context of Pandemic, mechanically and thematically. Our design efforts were more around tweaking balance and incorporating any consistent feedback that Goonies received, which we felt could help that game.

The four cards that made up the board in Matt R and Ben’s initial submission.

Matt L: I took their original submission apart, put it back together with input from them, and iterated on it for two years until it was…

Pandemic: The Card Game

Key dates
• First design journal entry: 8 March 2019
• Last design journal entry: 28 January 2020

What from the originally submitted prototype stayed the same?

Matt L: Many of the fundamentals of the original submission carried over into the final version of Pandemic: The Card Game. Players took actions using multifaceted cards to move, treat disease, and meld cards to cure diseases. The same deck of cards was used for both player actions and to track the disease as it spread in the world. Players each had a role-specific power. Disease accumulated in specific regions, and once they passed a threshold, an outbreak occurred. You won the game if you discovered four cures, and you lost the game if you had too many outbreaks.

What changed in the developed version?

Matt R: It was fun going back and forth with Matt and watching our game turn into Pandemic while still seeing the core parts of the Goonies design. I wanted to say one of the hardest things in game design is killing your darlings. You will see in the next section that Matt helped us do that when we moved from a single pawn and “group turn” to individual pawns and turns. While the former could accentuate the master gamer problem, we did our best to design around that. Also, don’t be that guy. All that said, the game was BETTER after the change, it just took some time to get there. No one has ever accused me of lacking confidence, and I do not suffer from imposter syndrome. Neither should you BTW, do that thing you have been thinking about, the world needs your voice too, I promise. BUT still, I couldn’t help but think, why does Matt need us on a Pandemic game? He could totally move on and do it himself, but he did not because he is a good guy. And also, we are pretty dang good at making card games, look ’em up. 

Matt L: In order to increase player agency, I gave each player their own pawn and turn (instead of having the players play collective turns with pooled actions). To simplify things, I also decoupled “Move the team and cure a patient” into two separate actions, Fly and Treat. Giving each player their own pawn also meant they could meet to share cards, leading to the introduction of the Share Knowledge action and the need to coordinate in order to discover cures.

Matt R and Ben had four cards that had “specialist” abilities on them that could be played for a special effect and then removed from the deck. These added a lot of strategic depth, so we developed them into a larger set of event cards. Because these cards were removed from the deck (and not discarded) when used, this opened up a new loss condition: if the draw and discard deck ever ran out when you needed a card, you lost the game.

I removed the Rest option – where you took fewer than the allocated actions in order to draw additional cards. This seemed to reward inaction which felt against the spirit of needing to take urgent action. Instead, I introduced the Research action which simply lets you draw 1 card for an action.

To increase tension, I introduced an infection rate. Each time you reshuffle the deck, you advance a token along a track. At certain thresholds, advancing this token increases the number of cards you need to draw during the Infect step. This led to the third loss condition: if the infection rate marker ever reaches the end of the track, you lose the game.


The four locations from the developed version of Pandemic: The Card Game.

Other Changes

• One of the earliest tasks was renaming most of the nouns and verbs in the game to be consistent with the Pandemic board game. Patients became disease, epidemics became outbreaks, curing became treating, escalate became infect, specialist became event and so on.

• I removed the requirement that forced you to treat all the disease in a given location before you could discover a cure since it felt grindy, didn’t fit the theme particularly well, and wasn’t how the board game worked.

• I removed the idea that when you tried to discover a cure, you’d have a 50% chance of success (a holdover from The Goonies) since that just felt random to me.

• I simplified the way treating became more effective once a cure was discovered.

• I changed discarding so it was carried out as part of each action that required it, rather than a discrete step in the order of play.

Abandoned Ideas

Matt, Ben, and I briefly explored a zombie theme and a realtime version of the game, but quickly abandoned both ideas. Pandemic has always been about “science not violence” so zombies were out and the real time version didn’t feel like a Pandemic game.

Why was the game abandoned?

Matt L: While Z-man was open to the idea of the game, I was really uncertain about how it’d fit into the product line. We already had Pandemic: The Cure (the dice version of the game) and Pandemic: Hot Zone – North America was already planned as a simpler, more portable, entry product. It wasn’t clear that there was enough room for another simplified Pandemic game. As such, we kept kicking it down the road when it came to planning a release.

Matt R: If the game had not ended up being as awesome as it became as The Four Doors, I think I would have flown to Matt’s house and pulled a Say Anything to try and change his mind and get Pandemic the card game in the hopper. Luckily, I didn’t resort to that, and it all worked out in the end. Though Matt and his family missed out on me scream singing IN YOUR EYES THE LIGHT AND THE HEAT. Their loss, really. 

Matt L: A real shame.

Instead of being serenaded, time passed, until one day, I had an idea. If there wasn’t much need for a simplified version of Pandemic anymore, perhaps a simplified version of a more complex game (such as Pandemic Legacy) would work. I pitched the idea to Rob Daviau and Z-Man and they were both excited about the potential and decided to come on board. This could open up a new category of game!

We tentatively called the resulting project…

The Clockwork Initiative
(a Pandemic Legacy Card Game)

Key dates
• First design journal entry: 21 January 2021
• Last design journal entry: 27 June 2022

What changed in this new version?

Matt L: We took Pandemic: The Card Game wholesale and developed a story and campaign to layer on top of it.

Matt R: I have never suffered from imposter syndrome a day in my life. My Midwest white guy confidence is off the charts, my parents did TOO good a job with my self-esteem. That said, I spent months on calls with Matt and Rob, barely contributing. Ben and I would test an iteration and give feedback here and here, but it was Matt’s show. Ben and I are slow, we meet once a week, generally and pick away. By the time Ben and I would test, Matt L likely had fixed anything we found AND made a new build. He was very gracious about that lol.

Matt L: We worked with Rob to craft a story of agents tracking down enemy threats, avoiding toxic vermin, as well as prying locals in a six-chapter genre thriller set in the ’70s. Players basically played Pandemic: The Card Game, but their abilities, equipment, and objectives changed from chapter-to-chapter as the story unfolded.

This led us to explore the design space even more, which increased the number of events in the game.

The Clockwork Initiative was set in a gritty 70s townscape.
Matt R: The Four Doors? More like the four designers, amirite? This part was really cool for me. We were already working with Matt L, and now Rob Daviau as well. Especially because I am not a storyteller. I like theme and I want it to make sense in games, but I don’t read flavor text. I don’t read the paragraph at the front of a rulebook telling me some lore about being a farmer, or ship’s captain, or monster hunter, or post-apocalyptic delivery driver. I want theme in as much as it does not get in the way of rules and my understanding of the game. So to watch Rob develop this whole story system and adjust mechanics and actions to account for that was really, really exciting as a game designer. 

Why was the game abandoned?

Matt L: The game was a lot of work… and we simply weren’t having much fun doing it. We took a hard look at the numbers. Since it was a card game, it would have a fairly low price point and we’d be splitting the design royalty four ways. It would be a really heavy lift for a fairly modest reward. Ultimately, we were happy to put our tools down and move on to other projects.

Rob D: Hi, just wandered in to note that I spent a year of my life on this and then Matt kicked me out of the band. “Creative differences” he said. “Going in a new direction,” he said. There was also murmuring of me “bringing everyone down to my level.”  If you know Matt, or Mr. Leacock as he demands I call him, you know he’s a cruel vindictive person full of spite and I should’ve seen this coming. (Actually, this was fun to work on for a bit, until it wasn’t. It was never going to be a great game in this iteration so I bowed out and wished everyone luck, including Mr. Leacock.)

Matt L: <coughs> The project then lay fallow for some time, until one of the good folks from Gamewright (who had tried the game out at a conference) wondered if it might make a good Forbidden card game.

I took a look. It would. The result became…

The Forbidden Island Card Game

Key dates
• First design journal entry: 15 February 2023
• Last design journal entry: 4 September 2023

What changed in this new version?

I made the game’s card square and arranged them into a 2x2 grid to form the island. Each location had two different “shores” that could be threatened.
Matt L: In order to make the “island” for the game, I removed one of the game’s locations (reducing the number of locations from 5 to 4), made the cards square, and arranged them into a 2x2 grid. Since it didn’t make a lot of sense to Fly around the island (the board was much more compact), I dropped the Fly action and let players simply move to adjacent locations for an action, like they could in the Forbidden Island board game.

Instead of having an improved Treat ability when each cure was discovered, players would find treasures that unlocked a new power for the adventurers who held them.

Matt R: You will notice less and less of my witty repartee in these sections, and that is because, as I mentioned before, Matt L could have dropped us at any time, and we wouldn’t have complained or thought less of him. Sure, the DNA of Goonies has survived and evolved and improved throughout this process, but Matt L’s effort had far outstripped ours at this point. If that game had suddenly been released as Forbidden Island: The Card Game I would not have blinked twice. (I know Matt L. never considered it; he is a man of integrity, honor, justice, and the like, but just saying.) 

Why Was The Game Abandoned?

Matt L: I developed the game fully to spec, turned it in, and eagerly looked forward to its production and release. Then, after reevaluating their plans, Gamewright decided to cancel the game. So it goes. (Remember fellow designers: always be sure you get an advance upfront.)

I put the game into File 13. Perhaps something would come of it someday.

The Four Doors

Key Dates
• First design diary entry: 3 September 2023
• Last design diary entry: 23 March 2025
• Published: August 2025 (Gen Con)

Matt L: I was fortunate that Jason Schneider of Happy Camper (who had originally commissioned the game when he was at Gamewright) remembered the game and asked what had become of it. I was happy to tell him that it was still available. We got to work!

What changed in this new version?

Matt L: Jason suggested a treatment early on: “In the clearing of an overgrown forest stand four mysterious doors. Behind each door lies fantastic treasure, but also imminent peril!”

This cover composition prompted The Four Doors’ setting, threats, and goals.
I ran with it. The shadowy threats could be dispelled by illuminating them. The doors could contain the treasures the adventures needed – but they could be closed off if the players weren't careful. I experimented with the door card layouts and came up with the idea of stacking them into a tower. That opened up the idea of a lighthouse with a magical beacon on top. This in turn led me to change the treasures into the relics needed to light the beacon to dispel the shadows forever.

I stacked the four doors to form a lighthouse. The beacon card (on top) came soon after.
Most of the work in this version was spent trying to make the game as accessible as possible. One of the biggest development tasks was making it abundantly clear where each card goes on the table, how to stack and overlap them, and how to understand them in each of these states. I also spent additional time on all the phrasing of the spell effects and adventurer powers.

Another task was refining the solitaire version. I found the recent work I did on the solo mode for The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship rewarding and applied some of that same energy to The Four Doors. I wanted to make sure that the solo mode wasn’t just a patch or afterthought and worked to ensure that every card was usable and balanced when you played the game on your own.

At Last!

Matt L: The game premiered at Gen Con in 2025 and I couldn’t be happier with the final result. The mechanisms were refined over the five different incarnations and the product design really came together in this latest version. If you haven’t seen the shimmer on the lit beacon and the relic cards, you really should check them out – they’re nearly blinding!

So happy that Matt R and Ben patiently came along all the twists and turns. The game is better for it.

The published game, in progress. Photo courtesy of [user=kovray]Ilya Ushakov[/user].

Bonus Material

Some additional odds-and-ends that illustrate the game’s development.

Player card evolution. Left-to-right: The Goonies: Adventure Card Game, Ben and Matt’s initial submission, Pandemic: The Card Game,The Clockwork Initiative, Forbidden Island: The Card Game, The Four Doors , prototype and early proof.

Reference card evolution. Left-to-right: Ben and Matt R’s initial submission (typeset by me), Pandemic: The Card Game, The Clockwork Initiative, The Forbidden Island Card Game, The Four Doors

A relic card (left) and the final reference card (right) from the finished game. Image, courtesy of Board Gaming Crew

A big top with four doors. I briefly considered setting the game in some sort of a building or tent with a door in each corner.

by Justin Bell

Hey hey folks! I’m excited to be a part of the team here at BoardGameGeek as a contributor on the BoardGameGeek News blog. You’ll see me here every week and I’ll pop up with extra content from time to time, between articles and via some of our other internal productions, such as episode 88 of The BoardGameGeek Podcast which posted a couple weeks ago.

A little bit about me: like everyone else who works here, I love games. It’s probably fair to say that I love what games mean to my life a little more than the games themselves—getting friends and family together to chuck dice, talk a little smack, and laugh a whole bunch. Certainly, those nights are more interesting when the games themselves are good, but any chance to sit at a table to experience something together is really hard to beat.

I have been—and will continue to be—a contributor at Meeple Mountain, a gang of gaming fanatics who contribute written content (and a smidge of video content) to the tune of more than 500 articles, reviews, interviews, convention roundups, and more every year. I’ve had the distinct pleasure of delivering material on Meeple Mountain for the last five years, and I’ve been playing hobby games of all shades for the last 40. In addition to appearances on The BoardGameGeek Podcast, I have also appeared on 30+ episodes of The Five By and individual episodes of Five Games for Doomsday, Tabletop Submarine, The Tabletop Merchant Podcast, and Board Game Times.

When I’m not thinking about games, I’m usually doing one of the following three things. I might be working my full-time gig, as a global program manager in the training, learning & development space where I travel a whole heck of a lot. I am possibly eating...and, while I love to cook, the job and the travel mean I get lots of chances to fulfill my personal life motto: “when in doubt, eat out.” I am hopefully spending time at home with my wife and two kids, ages 12 and 9, who seem surprised when I’m not hosting yet another game night.

Speaking of home, I’m based in the Chicagoland area, where I’ve been for most of the last 15 years. Before that, I’ve gotten around a bit: Rochester, NY; San Francisco, CA; Charlottesville, VA; plus, all the parts of the “DMV” (DC, Maryland, Virginia), from Mount Vernon Square to Rockville to Falls Church to Gaithersburg to Crystal City, even a little old place known as Buzzard Point, the area just west of the baseball stadium that the Washington Nationals call home.

And then, there are the games. Mertwig’s Maze holds a special place in my gaming heart, being one of those formative experiences from a billion years ago thanks to friends who were all about games in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons series. I played a lot of the titles in the “Gamemaster” series from Milton Bradley: Shogun, Axis & Allies, and my favorite from that batch of titles, Fortress America. But I was also playing a lot of the games my parents bought for me, from Monopoly, UNO, and Yahtzee to more specialized titles like Go For It!, Hotels (a Milton Bradley title previously known as "Hotel"), and Fireball Island.

Any chance I could get to play games—board games, card games, video games, baseball, basketball, football—I did it. In college, it feels like I was playing either Spades or Hearts every night before heading out for the evening. As I got older, I got caught up in the magic of Catan thanks to a friend in Chicago who showed me Settlers of Catan: Cities & Knights, which led me down a path of so many modern classics, such as Race for the Galaxy, Puerto Rico, San Juan, 7 Wonders, and a number of other titles that I was thrilled to discover.

That love affair continues today. I put in the work to build up a few different gaming groups—I do games every Monday with a “review crew” at my house, Tuesdays once a month with BGG’s very own [user=LindyBurger]Lindyburger[/user], most Wednesdays with a group of folks I’ve known since I first moved to Chicago, every Friday at home with my wife and kids, some Saturdays with a mix of the deep strategy gamers who I met during COVID, and Sundays once a month with my buddy [user=imaginaryforce]ImaginaryForce[/user] and some of his friends in the Chicago suburbs.

Thanks to this wide range of gaming networks and my industry relationships, I get the chance to play a lot of different types of games. While I would categorize myself as an “omnigamer”, I usually gravitate towards the kinds of games I know I can get to the table consistently. That might range from family-weight games, trick takers, light dexterity games, and straightforward “roll and move” games to your run-of-the-mill medium-weight Euro game (tracks, baby!) to heavier fare, such as strategy titles, 18xx games, and “rules for rules’ sake” games that land in that 4.0+ weight class here on the Geek.

My all-time top five? Man…that’s a moving target. Let’s go with these for now:
1. Chicago 1875: City of the Big Shoulders
2. The White Castle
3. Kingsburg
4. UNO
5. Tiletum

My top five of the last five years? Much easier:
2021: Beyond the Sun (the Geek says it was a 2020 release, but I didn’t play it until 2021)
2022: Tiletum
2023: Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory
2024: Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game
2025: Vantage

Here’s my goal for the BGG community: write engaging articles and share interesting industry discussions, aimed at both our core audience as well as folks just dropping by to say hello. I’ve got a bunch of ideas, but I’d still ask for your input: what kinds of discussions really get you excited? What parts of the tabletop business intrigue you? Which personalities in this space are you most interested in meeting? What mechanics are you most excited to explore?

I’ve got thoughts, but I have a feeling you do, too…let’s keep the dialogue open. I’m excited to engage with the members of this community!


(it's always brunch time...right?)

by Courtney Shernan

One day in the summer of 2019, I was sitting on the couch with my little loaf Trixie, watching her lick my hand over and over, so I would keep petting her. It made me think about all of the ways that she would get me to do things for her, like standing by the front door so I would take her for a walk or groaning at her food bowl, so I would feel guilty and feed her an early dinner. And then I thought, “There’s a board game here!”

I thought about different game mechanics and decided to create a deck building game with an inviting and accessible theme of being a silly, spoiled dog. I really enjoyed playing deck-building games, but I knew how intimidating they were for me at first and that a lot of my friends and family felt similarly. My goal was to make a game that introduced deck building as a mechanic and captured the strategy under the guise of a cute, light-hearted dog game where you “learn” new dog behaviors to build your deck. The behavior cards would be things like “Wag Tail” and “Sit on the Human’s Lap” that you could play to gain “cuteness”. With enough cuteness, you could complete objectives like “Get a Treat” or “Get Belly Rubs” as a dog trying to get their human to give them what they want.

I spent the whole weekend brainstorming, typing up cards in Word, and printing them out. There were going to be so many fun elements, like polka dot accessories and little rain booties you could add to your deck to make your dog extra cute. I got everything together for the prototype I envisioned, and then I just couldn’t play it. Not that it was unplayable (although it very well could have been) - I just couldn’t bring myself to play it. I thought to myself that there was no way I could design a board game, and I didn’t feel like I had anything even remotely new to offer. I shelved it, and I felt ridiculous for even trying.

A year later in the summer of 2020, my husband and I were quarantining at home and started playing Gloomhaven regularly. I love how the game makes you determine the optimal time to play specific cards from your hand while having the option to get your cards back by resting. I remembered the work I put into Treat, Please! a year earlier, and I thought it would be fun to implement a similar rest mechanic, where dogs could choose to “Take a Nap” to get their behavior cards back from their discard pile, rather than having to wait until they’ve fully cycled through their deck. At that point, I decided to eliminate the deck element of the game entirely, leaving players with just their growing hand of behavior cards and their discard pile.

At this point in my life, I was looking for any kind of creative outlet to focus my attention, and I figured there was no harm in trying to see this through. The idea of having my own board game on my shelf had been a dream for a long time. I went back to my old prototype and completely reworked all of the cards. I also added a board with a house layout to the game, where you could only play certain behaviors if you were in the corresponding room of the house (e.g., you had to be in the kitchen to “Lick the Dirty Dishes”), and the human was also roaming around doing different things, which impacted your ability to get their attention.

After many iterations of playtesting by myself, my husband happily agreed to playtest. His first piece of feedback: get rid of the board! He was totally right; it was completely unnecessary and overcomplicated the game. Instead, I created an event deck, so I could maintain the feeling of the human doing different activities with implications for you as dog. One of my favorites is "The human is putting away laundry", which gives you the option to "Run away with a sock" for attention.

From there, I had a very rough prototype that resembles Treat, Please! in the form it’s in today:

Playtesting
I knew I needed to start playtesting early and often, but without being able to see my friends and family in person, my options felt limited. My friends and I had been using a digital platform for virtual D&D sessions, and I realized that if I could make my game digitally, my D&D friends would be able to playtest too!

I started off playtesting with my DND friends in August 2020, and it really helped build my confidence with explaining the rules and listening to constructive feedback. I quickly realized that I would need to expand my playtesting circle if I wanted to continue improving the game. My friends suggested that I join the PlaytestNW Discord, the server for a local playtesting group that shifted to virtual playtesting during the pandemic. I was so nervous to join my first Sunday playtesting session and told myself that I would just go to playtest and observe the first time. I reassured myself that if I had a terrible time and felt unwelcome that I could find other opportunities elsewhere. But I couldn’t have been more wrong; I was immediately greeted by the most welcoming community of game designers and playtesters, and it was amazing to see games at all different stages of development. I started regularly attending and eventually got the nerve to sign up Treat, Please! for playtesting in October 2020.

After joining PlaytestNW, my design journey started accelerating, and I was eager for more opportunities to playtest. That is when I learned about the Break My Game (BMG) Discord server, with playtesting events almost every day of the week! After attending my first BMG playtest, I knew it was the perfect place for me. One of the things that stood out to me the most was how well-moderated their playtesting events are and how supportive the community is, which made me feel comfortable sharing my game and receiving feedback from complete strangers. After being a member of the community for awhile, I became a moderator and eventually a playtest event host. Hosting playtests was an absolute blast, and I loved seeing how other designers’ games would progress over time. These online groups also helped me find other opportunities to playtest and network, such as Protospiel Online, Nonepub, and the Tabletop Mentorship Program.

There are countless improvements that I made to the game thanks to input from playtesters, but here are a few of the highlights:
• Removing negative interactions and focusing on positive, communal effects to lean into the idea that this is a household full of dogs that are competitive but love each other.
• Shortening the game from 10 to 7 rounds and structuring it as a week in the life of a dog, providing the opportunity to ramp up gameplay during the last 2 rounds of the game (i.e., “the weekend”).
• Reducing the burden of taking a nap by allowing you to play one of your behaviors if you take a short nap instead of losing your whole turn.

Once it became safe to meet up with others, I was so excited to start playtesting in person. Local conventions like Dragonflight and OrcaCon were amazing experiences to connect with my desired audience: dog lovers!

Pitching
Initially, I planned to self-publish Treat, Please!. However, my plans changed when I was invited to participate in the “Feedback Frenzy” pitching event at the online Nonepub convention in January 2021. I never considered the possibility that a publisher might be interested in my game, so the idea of pitching hadn’t crossed my mind until then.

For the event, I pitched to a panel of publishers and game designers and got immediate feedback on my pitch - all of which was livestreamed during the convention. It was a terrifying but exhilarating experience, and honestly, it felt like I was in my element. It made me wonder why I hadn’t considered pitching previously, and I started to believe I had a chance to successfully pitch to an interested publisher if I could find more opportunities like this.

I sought out other opportunities to pitch directly to publishers, including a speed pitching event on Discord through the Tabletop Mentorship Program and other virtual pitch practice events. During a pitch practice event on the Weird Giraffe Games Discord server in March 2021, I pitched to Chris Solis of Solis Game Studio, who reached out afterward requesting to play. We quickly set up a time to play digitally, and then he requested that I send him a physical prototype. It was immediately clear that he understood what I was trying to accomplish with the game, and I was thrilled that someone believed in me and my vision. After some back and forth, I signed Treat, Please! with Solis Game Studio in May 2021.

Design Development
Once the game was signed, Solis Game Studio took the reins and formed an incredible team to take Treat, Please! from a prototype (with a severe lack of cute dog art) to a polished game. I was responsible for playtesting as we worked on some gameplay changes together. At this point, I was focused on playtesting in person, so I could get detailed feedback from playtesters about all aspects of the game, particularly pacing and how the physical components felt.

I was so fortunate that Solis Game Studio encouraged me to be actively involved in the final development of the game and that I was able to provide input on the art and graphic design as it was being worked on. It brings me so much joy to see many of the dogs in my life shine in the adorable artwork of Kiem Hollis.

A love letter to Trixie, and hello to a new friend…
Trixie crossed the rainbow bridge in February 2024 after a battle with cancer. The day we found out there was nothing else we could do to make her comfortable and that it was time to say goodbye was one of the worst days of my life. I don’t know how else to describe my love for her other than saying she was my doggie soulmate. I am so grateful for all of the memories we made together that will continue to fill my life with joy, and I’m grateful for this game that will always bring me right back to those times with her.

We welcomed a new friend, Louie, to our family last year, and we’ve enjoyed learning his quirks and the unique things he does for attention. Like how he growls quietly and stares at you until you lift up a blanket for him to go under or how he loves to jump onto the window sill and sleep in the sun. He is a silly, sneaky boy with a loving personality that has been so special to see as he has settled into our home.

Trixie and Louie have brought an immeasurable amount of joy and love into my life. One of my favorite parts of playtesting was hearing players talk about their dogs and seeing connections form between complete strangers over their shared love of dogs. My hope is that Treat, Please! will encourage players to reminisce about all of the fun and silly memories they have with the dogs in their lives.

I’m so excited to share that Treat, Please! is now available on Solis Game Studio's website here. And please feel free to share your favorite doggo quirks and stories below - I would love to hear all about your wonderful pets!

And lastly, I just want to say that if you’re toying with the idea of designing your own game, do it. I wish I could go back and tell myself in 2019 to stick with it. Even if Treat, Please! didn’t end up being published, I am so proud of the skills I’ve gained during this journey and grateful for the communities that welcomed me along the way. If there is anything I can do to help you on your journey, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

by Beth Heile

We've recently made some big changes with our Preview lists, and things kick off with this list for Festival International des Jeux (FIJ) and GAMA Expo.

Previously, publishers filled out a form and BGG staff and volunteers entered that information into Preview lists. Now, our Preview lists will be self-service and publishers will enter that information themselves. This will allow publishers to simply the Preview process by inputting information themselves directly into the Preview system. Each Preview list will then be moderated to ensure that entries are allowable under our Preview submission rules.

PLEASE NOTE - inaccurate entries on a Preview list will be removed! Please view the posting guidelines in the tutorial or below for submission rules.

If you would like to submit an entry for the FIJ / GAMA Expo Preview list, you can find written instructions HERE.

If you have any question, you can post a comment in this thread or email at news@boardgamegeek.com.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

by Bert Hardeman

I have always loved playing games, and at some point, I thought: "Maybe I could design one myself." So, I sat down one evening, whipped up a prototype, and tried it by myself. It was a terrible game. I quickly realized that game design isn’t as easy as it looks. Since I didn't know where to start, I decided to do my homework. I read almost every article about game design on the internet and listened to countless podcasts. Still, I was waiting for that one spark—a truly original idea.

The Spark
At a convention, I played Rotterdam, a game about boats entering the port of Rotterdam. It features a unique mechanism where you call out a color, and then everyone must move on that color. I thought it was a clever system, but I wondered if I could extend it by making the routes variable. What if you could change the routes themselves? How much fun would that be?

To test this quickly, I grabbed Ticket to Ride: Europe because it already had routes and trains. My initial solo tests revealed plenty of problems; for one, the routes often required more than one "stick." I needed a map with better-spaced cities, so I tried Iberia using the trains from Ticket to Ride. That map had its own issues, so the next step was to create my own. I started with the Netherlands, but it felt a bit too small, so I expanded it to include Belgium and Luxembourg.

The Pivot to ...
I tested this version with my wife. She isn’t a fan of confrontational games and suggested a major change: only the active player should move on their turn instead of everyone. By now, the rules were: draw a random stick from a bag, play one of your three sticks, and return the used stick to the bag. You would then travel as far as possible along that color.

The biggest hurdle was the goal. If players were given random destination cities, some inevitably had better combinations than others. I tried changing the goal to a sequence of cities that everyone had to visit in order, but it felt like a difficult variant of Bingo — it all came down to whether you drew the right color stick. Even after increasing the variety to six colors, a race to random locations just didn't feel right.

The solution?

Making the game cooperative! I re-themed it: you were now trying to prevent cats from escaping a city after breaking out of a shelter. This worked! One thing I discovered during this phase was that people hated drawing random sticks when they needed a specific color. I changed it so that when you remove a stick from the board, you keep it. Now, if you don't have the colors you need, it's a result of your own planning.

Back to the Race
One day, while playing around with the sticks from the cooperative prototype, I arranged them into an arena of spokes. It looked exactly like a racing track. "Let’s make this a game about chariot racing," I thought.

To balance the movement, I initially let players choose all six colors at the start, switching one out each turn. However, this gave players too much freedom; everyone ended up on the same routes, which became overcrowded. I decided to limit players to only the next three sticks in their personal row. To avoid the "end of the line" problem, I arranged those sticks in a circle. It looked just like the spokes of a wheel—and that is how the title Spokes was born.

From Abstract to Thematic
The first playtest on Tabletop Simulator was quite positive. I initially described Spokes as an abstract racing game, but a playtester who knew about track cycling remarked that the game felt surprisingly thematic. From that moment on, I stopped calling it abstract. I tried to lean into the theme by adding movement limit, but the game was actually more fun without them. I also experimented with a "sur place" rule (standing still to gain an advantage), but since it was rarely used, I eventually scrapped it.

The competition
I entered Spokes into the Cardboard Edison competition. It was a great experience, and the game finished as a runner-up! I half-expected publishers to start begging to publish it right then and there, but that didn't happen.

The feedback from the contest was welcome: they noted that if a group was "mean," the game could become frustratingly cutthroat. Advanced players could block a winner simply by changing a stick in front of them. I solved this by making it mandatory to travel on the stick you just placed. You can still block people if the stars align, but it’s no longer something you can do constantly without consequence.

Finding a Home
I continued pitching to publishers, but many were hesitant, especially regarding the production cost of so many sticks. Eventually, I received an email from Mark at Radical 8 Games. Someone who had playtested the game recommended it to him. Mark watched my Cardboard Edison video, liked what he saw, and after a few weeks and testing a physical prototype, he signed the game!

Mark helped develop the game even further. He introduced the slipstreaming action, which removed the need for a clunky rule about not moving over the stick you just placed. He also streamlined the starting phase, which used to be the hardest part to teach. Finally, the artist Rusembell came on board and made the game look absolutely beautiful.

It has been a long journey from boats and cats to the velodrome, and I can't wait for you to experience it. Have fun playing!

by ilgiocointavolo

GURPS at 40: Steve Jackson Reflects on Building Gaming's Most Ambitious System
When I told Steve Jackson that three of my gaming buddies started arguing about GURPS combat mechanics just from hearing I'd be interviewing him, he laughed. "That sounds about right," he said from his home in Atlanta. After four decades in game design, Jackson has heard it all when it comes to GURPS: the love, the hate, and everything in between.

It was 1986 when Steve Jackson Games launched GURPS (Generic Universal RolePlaying System), making a promise that seemed impossible: one system for every game. Now, with hundreds of supplements and a devoted global fanbase, GURPS has arguably delivered on that promise. But how do you actually build something universal? And what would Jackson change if he started over today?

"I Thought Polyhedra Were Unnecessarily Complex"
The heart of GURPS is its 3d6 roll-under system, which was pretty radical back in the mid-80s. While other designers were embracing weird dice and complex mechanics, Jackson went the opposite direction.
"I thought that polyhedra were unnecessarily complex," he tells me, and then adds: "I still think that."
It's a surprisingly firm stance from someone whose system has grown to accommodate everything from space opera to medieval fantasy. But Jackson's logic is sound; "There are some very good systems that use polyhedra, but they use them in simple ways."
The 3d6 choice wasn't just about simplicity—it was about accessibility. Jackson wanted something that felt natural to players without requiring a math degree. "The core rules are very straightforward," he insists. "If we just wanted to sit down and go through a dungeon in GURPS? Oh, I could have you running in 30 minutes."

Thirty minutes. For a system that's notorious for being crunchy. Jackson seems to enjoy this contradiction.

The Complexity Guy Who Built Something Simple
Here's where Jackson gets interesting. "I'm a complexity guy," he admits without hesitation. "I like wheels within wheels. And when I write a game, the first draft is always longer than the final draft."
So how does someone who loves complexity create something that can teach new players in half an hour? Jackson's secret is layers.

"GURPS is a crunchy system," he says, completely matter-of-fact about it. "Completely fair. It's not as crunchy as some people want to make out, because the core rules are very straightforward. But there are specialist rules for many, many subjects. And those can get really crunchy."

The genius is in the modularity. You don't need to know the vehicle design rules to fight goblins. You don't need the time travel mechanics to run a detective story. But if you want to design a custom starship or solve temporal paradoxes, the rules are there.

Jackson calls it a "Catch-22 effect". "Now that there are that many supplements, people think it has to be crunchy", he states. The system's success created its own reputation problem.

"Eventually They Shut Up"
When GURPS launched, Jackson faced the obvious question: how can one supplement cover "every game"? His response captures his dry sense of humor perfectly:

"It was very funny when the game first came out, people said: 'Well there's only one supplement, how can it be for every game?' And then a couple of years later: 'Well there are only six supplements, how can it be for every game?' And then a couple of years later: 'Well there are only twenty supplements, how can it be for every world?' But eventually they shut up."

The proof was in the execution. GURPS didn't just promise universality—it delivered, supplement by supplement. Each new book stress-tested the core system against different genres and scenarios.

Jackson lights up when talking about GURPS Time Travel, which he co-wrote with John M. Ford. "He was a wonderful man to work with. And it came out very, very well. Much of it is an homage to the work of H. Beam Piper, one of my favorite science fiction authors."

It's these personal touches that make GURPS more than just a mechanical exercise. Each supplement reflects genuine passion for its subject matter.

Learning from SPI (and Translating to English)
GURPS didn't emerge from nowhere—it built on the tradition of detailed simulation games, particularly those from Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI). But Jackson learned from SPI's biggest weakness.

"The Ogre rules are very heavily influenced by SPI," he explains. "But they are translated to English, which makes a difference." That last bit gets a laugh out of both of us. Anyone who's wrestled with SPI rulebooks knows exactly what he means. "SPI's rules were famously difficult to interpret," Jackson continues. "I have no idea how many hours I spent on their games when I was in college."

Those frustrating hours became Jackson's design school. He took SPI's mechanical sophistication but wrapped it in clear, unambiguous language. It's a lesson more game designers should learn.

What He'd Change Today
After nearly forty years, Jackson has clear thoughts on where GURPS could improve. When I ask what he'd simplify in a ground-up redesign, his answer comes immediately: "Character creation. Social skill interaction. I think those are the big ones."

Character creation in GURPS is incredibly flexible, but it can overwhelm newcomers with options. Social mechanics, despite multiple supplement treatments, never quite achieved the elegance of combat resolution.

But Jackson isn't rushing into a fifth edition. "I don't like to do a revision until it's time," he says. "There are games that are revised every few years. And sometimes that's because the first job was sloppy and sometimes it's because there's a grab for money. I would rather people not say either of those things about me."

Italian Fans and Global Appeal
Jackson has fond memories of visiting Lucca Comics & Games years ago, where he met dedicated Italian GURPS fans. "The Lucca show is just overwhelming," he recalls. These days, Lucca has grown even more massive, but Jackson's experience there highlighted something important about GURPS: its international appeal.

Italian GURPS fans are "extremely dedicated," as I can personally attest. There's something about the system's comprehensive approach that resonates with European gaming culture, where detailed simulation games have always found appreciative audiences. Jackson's relationship with global gaming communities shows how GURPS succeeded not by being generically universal, but by providing tools flexible enough for any group's specific needs.

The Long Game
When I ask about GURPS' future, Jackson stays characteristically measured: "I'm never going to say no to a Fifth Edition. But I certainly can't say yes right now. As long as people are playing GURPS, there's new ideas coming up."

It's this patience that has kept GURPS stable while other systems chase trends through frequent revisions. Jackson built something that could grow organically rather than requiring constant overhauls.

Looking back on our conversation, what strikes me most is Jackson's consistency. The same design philosophy that drove the original 3d6 decision still guides GURPS today: build something simple enough to learn but powerful enough to handle whatever players throw at it. "I try to look at my own work and figure out what I did," Jackson reflects when discussing GURPS' enduring success. After forty years, he's still figuring it out, and that curiosity might be the real secret behind GURPS' longevity.

This article includes exclusive materials from the Museum of Games Ireland and Steve Jackson Games archives. All images and documents used with permission and proper attribution included.
www.mogi.ie

This interview was conducted for Il Gioco in Tavolo podcast. Full video available at Youtube Video

by Steph Hodge

I recently had the chance to sit down with The Op Games and get the detailed lineup of 2026 titles! I believe I counted 16 games, which don't even include the long list of Co-Branded Mass Market titles. Here are some highlights.


▪️ To kick it off, Flip 7: With A Vengeance just released. With the massive success of Flip 7 and Flip 7, we should expect to see a whole lot more flavors of this hit game.

The deck of cards now spans to thirteen 13's in Vengeance. You will also find new special cards, including steal, swap, discard, flip four, and more.





▪️ Also expected this Q1 2026, is TEMBO: Survival on the Savanna. The partnership with Sidekick Games (AQUA: Biodiversity in the Oceans & HUTAN: Life in the Rainforest) continues and delivers us a cooperative game this time.

▪️ Frenzy Falls is planned for a Q2 2026 release. From designer Randy Flynn (Cascadia) and Joseph Z. Chen (Fantastic Factories).




▪️ Get ready to test your dexterity skills in Cats Knocking Things Off Ledges. Not only are you building a tower of ledges, but you are knocking off your cat toys from them. Two separate instances where you will have to demonstrate your dexterous techniques. This game has already been released.


[ImageID=9286877 mediumrep]
(photo uploaded by Alexander Varela, The Op)



▪️ Winter chill got you down? Hummingbirds will lift you up with its colorful table presence. Already available for sale.

Hidden sand timers in Hummingbirds are how players will score points. Without the use of a clock to track time, you have to gauge how long each timer has been running before using your hummingbird to look at it. If the timer has expired, you are good to collect points for that color timer. If you look and the timer is still running, you will lose your positioning and a point token from your stash.

Time is on your side. Better to be safe than sorry!

(photo uploaded by Alexander Varela, The Op)

This has been only a small handful of games that The Op is releasing in 2026. Several hobby games are planned, and even more family and party games are on the horizon to be excited for.

by Jesse Eyer

Concept
I think we can all agree that global pandemics suck. But for all the misery that came out of COVID-19, there were a few small bright spots, and one of them was the inception of Siberian Manhunt.

By the end of 2020, we were deep into our third lockdown in Berlin, and my wife and I had burned through all of our light, two-player games. We yearned for something meatier, but something that could still be finished in a single evening since our board games and dinners shared the same real estate.

At the time, I was reading Louis L’Amour’s classic novel Last of the Breed, a harrowing adventure about a U.S. Air Force test pilot captured by the Soviets in the late ’80s. A Native American and a survivalist, he escapes his captors and flees across the unforgiving Siberian wilderness with the KGB in pursuit. It’s a ripping good yarn, and I highly recommend it.

“Someone should turn this into a movie,” I told my wife one evening before bed. “Or a Netflix series. Or a board game.”

Bingo.

That night I lay awake in bed, staring at the darkened ceiling, puzzling out the rules of my nascent brainchild. Naturally, it would be a two-player game: a fugitive on the run from the Soviets. It would need to be asymmetrical, with the Fugitive dealing with the daily trials of life on the run while the Government carried out the titular manhunt using almost unlimited Soviet resources, albeit with a few communist inefficiencies to keep things interesting. And finally, a manhunt practically demands hidden movement; after all, the Soviets wouldn’t necessarily know where the fugitive was. Once I scribbled down the basic framework of the rules, I fell asleep thinking about fleeing through the Taiga. It was not my most restful night.

Prototype
I got to work on a prototype the next day. This was not my first rodeo, so I applied a few lessons learned from my previous (unsuccessful) forays into board game design:

1) Write down all the rules in Excel and try to numerically balance the game there as much as possible.
2) Don’t waste time with artwork at the early stage. The game has to work mechanically first.
3) Avoid physical prototypes in the early stages, as the printing and crafting can become expensive and/or slow the development process. I used Tabletop Simulator (TTS) for all my early playtests.

My first map was built from Google Maps screenshots of the Baikal region of Siberia. I overlaid roads and towns using real geography as a guide, then added numbered locations that the Fugitive and Government agents would move through.

(Top) The prototype map board used Google maps screenshots stitched together vs (bottom) the final version of the map
The rest of the prototype used assets pulled from the internet and tweaked in my go-to tool for quick and dirty graphics design: Paint.Net. Assets could be uploaded onto my Google drive and imported into TTS. From there the playtest → update components → playtest iteration loop was super short, allowing for a quick convergence of the game design.

(Left) Prototype Encounter cards vs (Right) the final versions
Game Design
Although Siberian Manhunt would be asymmetrical, the basic game loop would be the same for both players:

Recover energy → Spend energy on actions → Clean-up
Where the roles diverged was in the actions themselves. I wanted the Fugitive’s experience to feel authentic: always on the move, low on supplies, unsure who to trust, and increasingly desperate. Their turns revolved around hidden movement, scavenging for food and equipment, hunting, crafting, and interacting with locals and wildlife. The Fugitive secretly recorded their exact locations, while a Hidden Movement Track publicly logged how far they’d traveled since they were last seen.

The Fugitive’s player board, with card slots for a character card, clothing, footwear, backpacks, etc.

Each turn began with an Encounter card, allowing me to introduce narrative challenges. A Wilderness Deck provided animals to hunt and craft components, while an Urban Deck supplied equipment from towns. Energy would be recovered in different ways. In the wilderness, the Fugitive regained only one meager point of energy per turn. In towns, however, they recovered fully — making towns tempting, useful, and potentially very dangerous if the locals decide to report them. The Fugitive could also eat food to boost their energy at any time (meat could be obtained from hunting, but would need to be cooked or else the Fugitive would face a parasite risk).

The Government’s role was simultaneously more concrete and more abstract than the Fugitive’s. The Government had physical pawns on the map; little KGB officers scouring the countryside for an elusive Fugitive. These pawns could move and search, attack the Fugitive if they found him, or capture him if two KGBs could get to the Fugitive’s location at the same time. Agents could also be upgraded into elite Yakut Trackers, who moved faster and could race across the map much like the Fugitive. At the start of each turn, the Government’s energy would be reset to be equal to the number of agent pawns on the map.

The Government player board, with 3 rows of Government assistance cards and 3 character cards

But the real engine of the Government was the Assistance Deck–resources from the central Soviet Government which provided powerful, one-time effects to help the KGB track down the Fugitive: aerial searches, checkpoints, helicopter transports, propaganda campaigns, and, most importantly, new recruits. Recruit cards added more pawns to the board and permanently increased the Government’s available energy: more pawns = more energy = more actions.

To model the attitudes of the local population, I initially created a Manhunt Deck filled with Loyal Communist and Silent Citizen cards. Each time the Fugitive entered a town, a card was drawn. Silent Citizens kept quiet while Loyal Communists immediately reported the Fugitive’s position. The Fugitive’s decisions influenced the deck’s makeup: heroic behavior added Silent Citizens, while killing and pillaging produced enthusiastic informants. Government actions, such as interrogations or propaganda campaigns, could also shift the balance. Eventually, I replaced the deck with a draw bag, which proved far more practical than reshuffling a deck many times per game.

(Left) The initial "Manhunt deck" (TTS version) vs (Right) the final "Manhunt bag"

While I made some adjustments to the game mechanics (e.g. converting the Manhunt deck to the Manhunt bag, creating a market of Government assistance cards instead of just a draw pile, etc.), they stayed fairly consistent throughout the game’s development. Most changes involved balancing the game (see below) and fully fleshing out the experience for both players.

Finding artists was surprisingly easy. I wanted a realistic, painterly look and searched portfolios on BGG and ArtStation for artists who could achieve that style. I found the cover of Stroganov particularly compelling and reached out to its artist, Maciej Janik. After a TTS playtest, he was enthusiastically onboard with Siberian Manhunt and ended up becoming the lead artist. I found the rest of the team the same way: Natalie Henderson, Radu Paul Mazanac, and JD Rodriguez. Each artist was relatively specialized (e.g. portraits, animals, propaganda-style artwork, map, etc.) so I ended up with more artists than I originally planned. Their styles were compatible though and the final product had a fairly consistent look and feel.

Theme
Thematically, I wanted to avoid using Louis L’Amour’s kidnapped test pilot plot. I initially considered making the Fugitive an escapee from a Soviet gulag, but Maciej rightly pointed out that the gulag system was horrific, and the game wasn’t about that. I turned instead to the Gary Powers U-2 incident. In 1960, Powers’ spy plane was shot down over the USSR. He survived, was captured, and spent nearly two years imprisoned before being released in a prisoner exchange.

Francis Gary Powers posing with his U-2

What if he’d escaped immediate capture and gone on the run instead? That question became the heart of Siberian Manhunt. The Fugitive became a U-2 pilot, downed behind enemy lines and fleeing into the wilderness on foot.

Later, I met Francis Gary Powers Jr., son of the famous U-2 pilot, who provided wonderful historical insights—and told me that Louis L’Amour had been a family friend, and that Last of the Breed was inspired by his father’s experience. In a small but satisfying way, it felt like Siberian Manhunt was closing a loop.

Gary Powers Jr. and I at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin

Balance
Balancing the game proved surprisingly challenging. In theory, it should have been straightforward: make food more plentiful to help the Fugitive, or add more Recruit cards to help the Government. In practice, everything affected balance: encounter difficulty, map density, town placement, card effects, and more.

I initially aimed for a perfectly even 50–50 win rate. It turned out that an even balance produced dull games. When the Fugitive was too strong, they disappeared into the map for an anti-climactic win. The sweet spot ended up being a 40–60 win ratio in favor of the Government. That intentional imbalance created tense games where the Fugitive was constantly under pressure.

The balance during each game shifts too. The Government begins in a weak position with just one lonely KGB agent on the board. The Fugitive also starts out weak but can quickly grow stronger with equipment from nearby towns. As the game progresses, however, the Fugitive is gradually worn down by life on the run while the Government recruits more agents and grows steadily stronger. By the time the Fugitive reaches the border region, wounded and low on supplies, the Government is usually at peak power, leading to tense, climactic showdowns just short of the Chinese border.

The final version of Siberian Manhunt

The game was extensively playtested, first on TTS and later in physical form. Every playtest was valuable, right up until the feedback started contradicting itself. For example, one regular tester hated crafting and wanted it removed entirely. Others loved it and wanted more. At that point, I just had to trust my gut and make the game I wanted to play. And hundreds of plays later, I still enjoy it, especially how each session organically creates a unique, often cinematic Cold War survival story.

Conventions and Kickstarter
We took Siberian Manhunt on the road, demoing it at SPIEL ’23, UK Game Expo ’24, and SPIEL ’24. The theme made it somewhat of a niche game, but those who appreciated the Cold War and survival vibes embraced it enthusiastically. In February 2025 we launched Siberian Manhunt on Kickstarter. The campaign was a lot of fun, with great backer interaction and plenty of lessons learned. Because the game was essentially complete before launch, with manufacturing by LongPack Games already lined up, we were able to move into production by June and wrap up fulfillment in November.

Demoing Siberian Manhunt at UKGE ‘24

I’m now hard at work on the sequel-expansion, Manchurian Manhunt, which explores what happens when the Fugitive crosses the Chinese border and the chase gets bigger, faster, and even less forgiving.

But that’s a story for another diary.

by Emanuele Briano

I’ve always been drawn to collaborative games with asymmetrical information. I like designs with few rules, high replayability, and systems that rely on player perception from different points of view. Cards often fit this approach well, especially when paired with a simple yet rich communication system.

One day, I started thinking about a different way to mark clues—something that could be fully integrated into the system, without adding extra components or rules overhead. What could work through a simple, intuitive gesture we all know? Clipping. The act of taking a clothespin and adding it to a card was instant love. That is were the journey of Clips started.

The Base Flow
The core idea of the game was quite clear: a collaborative card game where players could not see their own cards, could give and receive hints from the other players using the clothespins, and must play a card on each turn.

Clipping immediately showed several key advantages. It allows players to add and remove information quickly. Clothespins can be read from both sides, as they are usually symmetrical, and they carry only a limited amount of information. Each one can be slightly different from the others, while still remaining simple. Their number is also naturally limited, creating a shared pool.

From a design perspective, this opened up new possibilities. Each clothespin could convey only partial information about a card. The pool could be shared, forcing players to manage it collectively. And some actions could generate information simply because a player chose that move over another. The clipping gesture could be not only a gimmick, but shape the game itself.

Information
The first question was what kind of information the cards should provide. I wanted the information to stay simple. In this kind of system, complexity doesn’t come from the elements themselves, but from how they are combined and interpreted. Colors, symbols, and numbers are usually the most direct way to achieve this.

However, I was looking for something slightly different. I wanted something that could naturally interact with the idea of clipping, and that would allow players to give and receive hints easily, but without being certain about their cards. I wanted to keep the tension when a player plays a card, until they are able to see if the move is good or not. The first solution I explored was bicolor cards.

With bicolor cards, the information could remain deliberately fuzzy. Even if you know that a card is red, you don’t know whether it is red/yellow, red/blue, or red/green. Players can narrow down possibilities without ever fully collapsing them into certainty. Numbers, on the other hand, were useful to keep the gameplay working and to create different goals, such as same color pairs, or same numbers. Simple yet efficient ideas on which to build a feeling of progress.

The Theme and the First Reactions
The first idea for the theme came quite naturally. Vertical cards on which you clip colored clothespins = tissues. What else? It matched well, it was intuitive. Tissues can represent many things, and this was something we spent time exploring together with the publisher.

But it was clear the game was about the “Clips”, not the cards. We started testing the game everywhere we went: bars, pubs, sometimes even at the beach. Something unexpected started to happen. People would stop, watch us play, hesitate for a long time and then finally come over to ask what we were doing. They couldn’t resist any longer. In Italy, playing cards in bars is extremely common, especially traditional card games. But no one had ever seen colored clothespins clipped onto cards. The game was visually distinctive, tactile, and inviting. Those moments were just great.

The Quest For Elegance
At that point, the game started to work, but the material still felt like too much. I began questioning what could be removed and what the core experience really was. Was having two separate categories of information actually necessary?

We applied the Six Thinking Hats many times.

Colors turned out to be the key element of the game: the color of the tissues, and the color of the clips. But how could numbers be expressed using only colors?

I forced myself to remove the numbers and try a different approach: one clip for one, two clips for two, and so on. The theme helped justify this naturally. If a tissue is small, one pin is enough. If it’s larger, you need more pins to keep it safe from the wind. And I could add an interesting twist. If a card has three pins on it, it clearly cannot be a one or a two, but it could still be a three, four, or five. This way, information remains partial and deliberately fuzzy.

Presenting Clips to Piatnik
The first presentation to Piatnik was a key moment. Florian and I always had a very good connection on game styles, since the publishing of 80 Days. The potential of the game was immediately clear.

The gesture of clipping did most of the work. The discussion quickly moved away from rules and focused instead on player experience: what it feels like to place a clip, when you hesitate to move one, and how much information you are willing to commit in front of the group.
It took only a few weeks for the publisher to decide: even if producing clothespins is quite unusual to a board game publisher, they accepted the challenge.

Building the Levels
Building the different levels of the game became a key part of development, and it was something I worked on closely with the publisher. The challenge was finding the right balance between making the game immediately accessible, for demos and first plays, while keeping it intriguing for players who would come back to it multiple times.

After well over a thousand games with my most dedicated playtesters, Stefania and Marco, I had a very clear understanding of the harder levels and of what keeps the game interesting even after repeated plays. We had some “special levels” that we loved to try and defeat.

But that also came with a risk: losing touch with the experience of someone discovering the game for the first time. This is where the publisher’s contribution became crucial. Bringing a fresh perspective, and a strong sense of how games are taught, shown, and sold, helped rebalance the progression. Together, we reviewed the structure of the levels, adjusted their pacing, and reconsidered elements such as the optimal number of cards in the deck for printing reasons.

In the end, we arrived at a more gradual and readable progression. Those phases of tuning and revision are exactly where having the publisher fully involved makes the difference.

Discussing the Theme
The theme remained a recurring topic throughout development. Tissues could represent many things, and that flexibility was both a strength and a question mark. We discussed how much the theme should guide interpretation, and how much should be left abstract.

Several alternatives were explored and tested:

Morocolors - the first theme, where players are dyers in Morocco trying to deliver the best tissues to special customers from all around the world. Exotic, but straight to the point.

Gnomes stealing socks - cards represented socks, while clips marked which one to steal for the gnomes village hidden in the walls of the house. The idea played with disappearance, and fit naturally with color-based clues. Plus colored socks are visually appealing.

Naughty sheep falling into color cans - sheep fell into different colored paint, and they needed to get dried on the right thread. Funny, but could have been read as not animal friendly.

Actors having to change in the dark backstage - cards represented clothes, and clips tracked fast costume changes. All happening in the dark backstage.

Tuscan flag throwers - cards showed flags, and clips marked suggestions on which flag to throw next during performances. An Italian, culturally-grounded setting.

In the end, we decided to keep the theme simple and direct: tissues. They are immediately readable, physically coherent with the gesture of clipping, and flexible enough to support the system without explaining it. For the same reason, the title became obvious. Clips describes both the main component and the central action at the table.

Conclusion
Looking back, the project stayed remarkably close to its initial question. How little is needed to create a meaningful asymmetrical information game that can scale from family to expert? In Clips, the answer is a gesture full of colorful unique tokens. A small physical action allows players to create their communication system and improve game after game.

Now it’s time to put the game on the table and see how players feel about it.

Link to the game: Clips by Emanuele Briano

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.