by Clarence Simpson

1NSP1R3D

In a way, VNTYPL8S was born out of necessity.

VNTYPL8S exists, in no small part, due to the fact that I committed to playtest a game that didn’t exist yet.

The Unpub Festival in Baltimore is a great place to playtest your prototypes. It’s a long-running convention that’s focused exclusively on design and playtesting. Designers pay to reserve one of their dozens of rectangular playtest tables for a 4-hour block of time during the con. But for their 2023 event, they decided to try something different.

In October 2022, they opened up table reservations for Unpub 2023. But this time, it wasn’t just for rectangular tables. They offered shorter 2-hour blocks at big round tables that were separated from the main bulk of rectangular tables. They were intended to be used for playtesting shorter party-style games that needed less time but space for more players.

At the time, I had only designed one party game, and I was already pitching it around to publishers. So, it didn’t need any playtesting. I didn’t actually have a party game to playtest at Unpub, but I decided to register for a party game table anyway. It was a new way to utilize Unpub, and I wanted to give it a try. I liked the idea of being locked down to a table for a shorter amount of time, and getting large group tests, which are often hard to coordinate otherwise. I thought “Surely I can come up with a party game concept by the time March 2023 rolls around!”

Smash cut to mid-February 2023. I still don’t have a new party game, and haven’t even really thought about it at all. Unpub is now weeks away. I’m starting to feel the pressure, and there’s nothing like a good deadline to motivate me.

I start browsing back through my giant Google Doc of board game ideas. I’m sure there's a decent party game idea somewhere in there. I just need to find one and throw together something playable. As I scroll through dozens of pages of ideas, I spot a single sentence that says “A game about vanity license plates”.

I don’t remember when I wrote that in there. It was obviously just a passing thought since I had written no other details. But it got the gears turning, and I started considering if the idea was worth pursuing.

Examples of vanity plates in the US
In the US, at least, vanity plates are ubiquitous. Everyone has seen them on the road. And, at some time or another, everyone has probably spotted a vanity plate that they couldn’t quite decipher, leading to a few moments of brainstorming and guesses, hopefully leading to a moment of perfect clarity, when they finally fully understand what the characters on that plate are supposed to mean.

Thinking about that simple experience that happens organically on car rides, it had many of the hallmarks of an interesting game. People were presented with a puzzle, and after some debate, discussion, and often out-of-the-box thinking, you reach a conclusion. It also provided those eureka moments when you feel clever for finally making the connections that the car owner intended.

So, I decided to go for it and start my pre-design research phase.

R3S34RCH

Not everyone is like this, but for me, before I dump a lot of time into a new design idea, I really want to know what else already exists that is similar thematically or mechanically. And I was sure that a vanity plates board game must already exist. So I dove into research mode on BGG.

Some vanity plate cards from the 1988 game, Vanity Chase
I found surprisingly little in the way of games themed around vanity plates. I found some very old games that contained examples of vanity plates that were difficult to decipher. But they were only concerned with players deciphering plates, not creating them. That sort of game would have limited replayability once you’ve seen all the plates in the game, though. I wondered if I could create an experience that allowed players to both create plates and then decipher them.

Then, I found one fairly modern game about vanity plates that was about both creating and deciphering plates. At first glance, I thought I had missed my chance. Someone had already made the game I thought of. But looking closer, in that game’s plate creation phase, players were given specific random phrases that they then had to communicate in vanity plate form.

Accomplishing that generally just meant removing letters until the phrase fit on the plate. Which letters to remove (frequently vowels) often felt so obvious that I was sure many people who had the same prompt would create the same plate. In some ways, it felt like there was a “right” answer to each prompt card. So, although this game had both the creation and deciphering that I wanted to do, the creation seemed very unsatisfying to me, and didn’t really engage the creative part of the brain like I wanted it to.

Example of play from Less Is More where you earn points by giving clues with as few letters as possible
I was also curious if there were other party guessing games that might operate on a core system of restricting your clues to a finite number of letters, effectively doing what vanity plates do without the vanity plate thematic dressing. I found several that encouraged you to write clues in as few letters as possible, like Less Is More and Inklings, but none with a fixed character limit.

With that, I felt comfortable moving forward with designing the game. But I had to act fast because I also had a chance to do some playtesting at TantrumCon next week!

D3S1GN

The first thing that came to mind when I sat down to design the game was that people usually want to remember a license plate when they see someone commit a crime with a vehicle. So, I thought about players seeing a license plate at a crime scene and then trying to catch the criminal later. It was an interesting framing, but it really didn’t sound like it would be about creating or deciphering plates. So, I quickly trashed that idea.

Next I thought about communicating secret messages using the 8-character limit of most US vanity license plates. That sounded more like a party game. But I quickly realized that the best conceptual framing would probably be that each plate would be associated with a person with a specific job, sometimes realistic, sometimes wacky, like Author or Tooth Fairy. Players would be given a random job, create a vanity plate associated with that job, and then the other players would have to guess what the job was based on the plate. This was essentially what happens in real car rides every day and would provide players with an immediate hook.

Some Job cards from the first playable prototype of VNTYPLTS
But I knew the trick would be how to get players to create plates that were difficult to decipher. A plate like “ILUVCARS” leaves nothing to the imagination and nothing is up for debate. The best plates were the ones you had to work at a little before discovering their intended meaning.

So I started to think about what makes certain real world plates more difficult to decipher. Frequently, they had no vowels. Sometimes it was difficult to tell where one word started and another word ended. Some of them like “SP33D” would use substitute letters, presumably because someone else in their state already claimed “SPEED”.

These observations, coupled with real-world plate restrictions, led to my initial set of rules for plate creation. These rules remained constant from the very first prototype to the final product:

- Max 8 characters
- Only uppercase letters and numbers
- No vowels (though you could use other letters as substitutes)
- No punctuation or spaces

Now plate creation was starting to get interesting! But I felt like, even with those restrictions, the plates would still be too easy to guess. For the job Dentist, you could just say “T33TH” and it would be obvious that the plate went with a Dentist. And you could write the same plate every time the same job came up. There might be a “best” plate for each job. It still wasn’t difficult or interesting enough.

Just playing by these basic creation rules seemed like it would lead to predictable and boring experiences. But how do you incentivize players to create more difficult or more obscure plates? I often think of Dixit in these situations. The scoring in Dixit is cleverly structured such that it’s optimal for the clue-giver if only one other player can figure out their clue. That scoring naturally makes players want to create difficult clues. But I wasn’t sure if there was enough obvious direction on exactly how a player might make a plate concept more difficult to guess.

The original Restriction cards, giving players 1 pt per letter used
If you look at a lot of guessing party games, many of them ask players to communicate some concept to each other, but force them to do it in some very non-optimal way through various restrictions on their communication. So, I added a second layer of restrictions to VNTYPLTS. In addition to a random job, every player would be given a card with a set of three random characters on it. Players would earn points if they used those 3 characters in their plate and if they avoided using vowels. I structured the three characters on each card to always be a set of one common letter, one less common letter, and one number. I hoped these randomized restrictions would add just the right amount of confusion and chaos to the process.

Now I felt like I really had something. So, I cracked open NanDeck to create a small deck of Job cards and a small deck of Restriction cards. I combined that with the dry erase plates and markers from my copy of Just One, and I had myself a first playable prototype!

For game structure, I took inspiration from So Clover. Everyone writes simultaneously during the plate creation phase to minimize feelings of down time. Then, players take turns revealing their creation and letting the other players guess their job.

The last thing I needed was a name. And with a game about creating 8-letter vanity plates, I thought it would be pretty cool if the name of the game was also a valid 8-letter vanity plate. With that, VNTYPLTS was born.

The VNTYPLTS title banner, with tagline
It also struck me that if I overlay the title VNTYPLTS on an image of a blank license plate that the game is relatively self-explanatory just from that cover image. For most people in the US, seeing a cover image like that, they could immediately and instinctively know what kind of game they’re about to play. So, I added a tagline that I thought was pretty catchy - “If you can read the title, you’re already playing the game!” and I was off to TantrumCon for my first playtest!

PL4YT3ST

The very first playtest went surprisingly well. Sometimes players would guess a plate immediately. Sometimes they would give up and make a wild guess. But the best moments were when players would stare at a plate for about 10 seconds and then go “OHHH!” and guess correctly. I needed to make sure those moments happened as much as possible.

Originally, players wrote down their guesses for which Job they thought each plate belonged to. Everyone who guessed correctly scored points. It worked OK, but it was clunky. I also realized that a structure like that prevented players from celebrating their Eureka moment when they finally deciphered a tough plate. They would have to sit there until everyone else finished, and then the excitement would have faded away. So, I pivoted guessing to be a real-time race. Each player only gets one guess and the first player to guess correctly gets a point.

I also had people tallying their scores on the back of the Just One plates, and it quickly became obvious that scoring was overly complicated. Party games need just enough scoring to teach players how they’re supposed to have the most fun with your game, but no more. Once you start doing arithmetic or spending a significant portion of your playtime on scoring, you’re doing it wrong.

Some player-created plates from the first playtests at TantrumCon 2023
Can you guess which plates go with which jobs?
The problem was that I was giving people points for too many things. You earned points for not using vowels. You earned points for each of the 3 restriction letters that were used. And you earned points for guessing other people’s plates.

But also, when I watched the players who chose not to use the restriction letters, or to use vowels in their plate, I noticed that the plates became too easy again, and the game was much less fun. I needed to not give players the option to have less fun, and just force them to make their plates the hard way.

So, “no vowels” just became a rule of the game that you had to remember. If you used vowels you were cheating. Doing this was the secret sauce of the game early on. Making sure that vowels were never in plates instantly made the game better.

Forcing players to use the three restriction letters was a little more tricky. There wasn’t always an obvious way to use specific letters. But I tried still presenting it to players as a requirement. I was constantly amazed at the clever ways that players managed to use their three characters in their plate. Occasionally, someone would be paralyzed by the thought of how to use their three characters, but I would always tell them that if they couldn’t think of another way to do it, to just put them anywhere in their plate.

More player-created plates from TantrumCon 2023
Can you guess which plates go with which jobs?
Ideally, I wanted the three characters to have a “purpose” in order to count for scoring. I didn’t love that you could do “DRNKSTM7” as a plate for Bartender. Clearly it’s just “drinks” and then the three extra letters. That wasn’t quite playing in the spirit of the game and I instinctively wanted to stop it, but it was too hard to police through rules. I finally decided it was actually fine, because it does still provide some confusion regardless, which is important. But more importantly, it makes the game more accessible to players if they get really stuck on how to use those required characters.

These changes allowed for a new scoring system that was dead simple. Each turn, the first player who guessed correctly takes the Job card as a point. And if the clue was guessed correctly and the clue-giver used their three required characters, they take the Restriction card as a point. That made two points per turn and your score is just a pile of cards that you needed to get out of the way anyway. It was elegant and perfect for a party game.

When I ran the game, I was fairly loose about allowing players to draw a new Job or Restriction card if they were having difficulty. That would also often fix problems with feeling paralyzed, and kept the game moving.

Other than these tweaks, not much changed after those TantrumCon playtests. When I brought the game to Unpub not long after, it was still largely the same game I started with. And it was creating great moments for playtesters at those round party tables that I had no idea what to do with a few weeks earlier.

R34DY

Just after Unpub 2023 officially ended, some designers and publishers were sticking around to hang out Sunday night. So, I got the chance to playtest VNTYPLTS with a few more people including Elizabeth Hargrave and a game publisher, IV Studio.

[twitter=https://x.com/StoicHamster/status/1638029216108126209]
IV Studio said that they don’t publish party games, but if they did, they would definitely publish the game. Elizabeth loved the game so much that she tweeted about how it should be on the shelves of Target. After all the other positive feedback, this final playtest sealed it, and I knew it was ready to pitch to publishers.

Soon after Unpub, I picked out some mass market party game publishers to pitch it to. But it ended up being significantly tougher to find a publisher for the game than I initially thought.

Even with Codenames being such a juggernaut in the industry, some mass market publishers have a strict policy against doing games that ask players to be “creative” in any way. They said it made some players feel uncomfortable and inadequate, and they couldn’t afford to make anyone uncomfortable when trying to reach a mass audience.

I also found that some European publishers didn’t feel like they could connect with their audiences because vanity plates don’t exist in Europe in the same way they do in the US. In many of the most populated European countries, they don’t exist at all. And the few that do have vanity plates generally have strict limits on how much of the plate you can customize, often only a few specific characters. The freedom in plate design that we have in the US is actually fairly rare, across the world.

So, even with such a strong concept and the endorsement of an industry heavyweight, I went through 15 pitch rejections before I finally found it a home.

PVBL1SHD

I had known Chad at 25th Century Games for several years through various conventions, and I had been looking for a chance to work with him on something. So, in July 2023, I pitched VNTYPLTS to him over e-mail. He gave my PnP version a spin, and about a month later, he offered me the most designer-friendly contract I had ever seen. So, I signed the game and we were rolling!

One of the first things that came up after signing was the title. Someone asked me why it was VNTYPLTS instead of VNTYPL8S, and I was honestly embarrassed that I’d never thought of that. I loved that it showcased the creative way that numbers are intended to be used in the game. So, we immediately made that subtle, but important, name change.

Things started moving quickly after that. Within a week, we were talking about making more Job cards. I only had a small set of 54 Job cards in my original prototype. Chad wanted to get 220 total cards in the game. I had some work to do!

Originally, I had focused on professions, but with all the new cards needed, we decided to expand a bit and reframe Job cards as Owner cards. After all, there's lots of reasons people get vanity plates in real life - jobs, hobbies, fandoms, personalities, and other identities. In the end, I came up with a list of different categories that could help inspire new Owners: Normal Professions (like Accountant), Wacky Professions (like Necromancer), Creatures (like Dragon), Hobbies (like Homebrewer), Fandoms (like Horror Fan), Personalities (like Night Owl), and Pop Culture (like Godzilla).

Some 0WN3R (Owner) cards from the finished product
I had mostly avoided pop culture references in my original prototype, partially because I wasn’t completely sure about the legal implications of using them. But also, I was worried about how those references might shackle a game to a certain time period and make the game look dated in the future. I wanted it to have a shot at being timeless. But the two references I put in my prototype Owner cards, Ghostbuster and Jedi Knight, were also always a lot of fun to play with.

I went back and looked at Just One for comparison, and I was shocked at how many pop culture references they used. But I noticed that they were very carefully curated. Some were single words with multiple meanings in addition to the pop culture reference, like Rocky, Dune, and Matrix. And the only other references were so well-known that it would be very unlikely for players to have not heard of them, like “Batman”, “Pikachu”, and “Nintendo”. So, we decided to carefully move forward with adding some pop culture references.

A portion of the Google Sheet containing all the 0WN3R card data
After making the complete list of Owners, Chad handed all the card content over to Nathan Thornton, of Green Team Wins fame. Nathan came up with all the hilarious descriptions for each Owner card, which really gave the game a nice layer of polish.

The descriptions may seem like fluff, but I believe they’re actually a critical part of the game. They allowed us to use obscure jobs like Herpetologist without making players feel stupid for not knowing what it is. The descriptions also serve as sparks of creativity. They contain words associated with the Owner, so they can be used as the starting point for a plate. Nathan also added dates/locations to each Owner card, which are often little Easter Eggs, like the Time Traveler being listed as from Hill Valley, CA, the fictional town in Back to the Future.

A dry erase plate board from the finished product
While all this was going on, Chad had also kicked off graphic design on the game. The game didn’t need a lot of graphic design work and it was knocked out pretty quickly. The last few UI tweaks we made were adding the plate creation rules to the dry erase boards as well as eight blank spaces to write letters into. This helped players play the game more easily without ever referencing the rulebook.

By the end of 2023, the game files were effectively finished and we had a factory-printed prototype in hand. But for various reasons, actually printing the game was on hold for an excruciating (to me) amount of time.

VNTYPL8S set up for demo at the Diana Jones Award Emerging Designer Program table at Gen Con 2024
In July 2024, VNTYPL8S was officially announced. I was able to attend Gen Con 2024 thanks to a generous prize package when I was selected for the 2024 Diana Jones Award Emerging Designer Program. And there I ran the first public demos of VNTYPL8S.

At Gen Con 2025, VNTYPL8S had a limited con-exclusive release while waiting on the full print run. And now, finally, after a few more delays due to fixing a printing error, VNTYPL8S is having a proper retail release.

The final production version of VNTYPL8S
VNTYPL8S has yet to get that placement on the shelves of Target that Elizabeth thought it deserved. But now that we’re finally getting copies out to the gaming public, who knows what will happen!

I’m really looking forward to more people getting their hands on the game and seeing the creative plates that people come up with. Thanks for reading about its journey and I can’t wait to see it on your tables!

by Steph Hodge

▪️ Pandasaurus Games always has a lot of really cool games in the pipeline, and they recently announced a few titles being released this summer, but don't forget about their other just-released titles as well!


▪️ Shackleton Base: Below. Within. Above. is a new expansion just released! This expands the very popular Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon which was released last year. In the box, you can expect to find 3 new corporations to mix with your base game, new scoring milestone tokens, and more content for the solo gamers out there.

▪️Also recently released were the two small expansion packets for Faraway and Castle Combo. Don't underestimate a few cards being added to your games; they add a big punch! Check out Castle Combo: Out of the Oubliette! & Faraway: Under Starry Skies.


And now for all of the summer releases! I have three exciting new games that have been announced for release this August!

[imageid=8660175 medium rep]▪️ Time to check out Kingdom Crossing from designers Marco Canetta, Stefania Niccolini the team that brought you Zhanguo: The First Empire & Railroad Revolution. This game plays 1-4 players in 45-90 minutes.

From the newsletter:



▪️ Seems like a perfect time for Sandcastles to be released as we get ready for the warm beach weather. For 2-6 players and plays in 20 minutes.

More on the mechanics from the newsletter:


▪️ Finally, a new release of a classic game from 2003 called Gulo Gulo. This is a family game that will play well with kids and large gatherings, as it plays 2-6 players in 20 minutes.

From the newsletter:

by John Drexler

This is the story of how I published my first game Colossi. I learned 100 hard lessons along the way. But the most interesting are the bookends: how it started, and how I eventually realized I was done designing.

The Conception

In 2016, I was trying to design a huge, wildly ambitious superhero RPG with my friend Walter Somerville. Being new designers, we of course picked the hardest possible first project. The game was doomed, but it got our creative wheels turning. One afternoon I was on a walk with my friend Mitch, and I tried to explain a combat system I'd been developing. It was just one piece of this massive, sprawling idea. The explanation came out garbled. Mitch nodded politely, tried to play it back to me, and his version was completely wrong.

It was also better than mine.

That's where Colossi started. Years later in 2020, humbled by several other failed ambitious projects, I excavated just that one combat mechanism: preparing cards in three environments at once, because you don’t know which hand you’ll play next. And that was a good enough idea to build a much smaller game around.

I think a lot about where good game ideas come from. Good game ideas are everywhere, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. A painter sees the world in color, light, and shadow. Game designers see games everywhere: complicated real world systems, war, funny social situations, etc. Our job is just to stay open and pay attention. In this case, a great idea came from a friend's misunderstanding of my bad idea. Sometimes you get lucky.

Day 1

The picture above is literally day one of Colossi. Pencil, paper, and the simplest possible implementation. I prototype fast and furious: get the idea out of my head and onto the table so I can see whether it has legs. I've written about this at length elsewhere. A game only becomes a game when someone can pick it up and play it. Before that, it’s merely a thought experiment. Colossi came to life because I kept putting it in front of people, starting on day one.

From that first sketch, the structural hook was already there. Three Environments. Both players have identical starting decks. And, critically, you don't know which Environment will resolve first. So you're preparing three hands at once across three lanes, hedging across all of them. Because when a fight breaks out, you better have a well constructed hand with synergies and combos in that environment (originally called “Zone”).

"How much craziness can this scaffolding hold?"

My design process is typically:

1. Build a strong and compelling base scaffolding.
2. Pressure test how much wild stuff the scaffolding can hold.

I strive for the experience where a player picks up a card and says, “No way. Am I seriously allowed to do that? And if I combo it with this other card… that must be broken…” And then it works.

A lot of the cards from my first iteration were simply elemental cards like water, fire, and electric, to build up power to win an environment. But I gradually started layering in crazier card types with big exciting effects.

The Colossus cards represent your special abilities as a Colossus. These cards all feel like cheating. Heap lets you tuck any number of your cards under itself and count them all toward its power. This allows you to make use of low power cards, dramatically change your hand size, and negate negative effect cards all at once. It’s a great example of a huge, out of the ordinary moment that makes Colossi feel so exciting. Manifest literally says "play another card from your hand, even if you're not allowed to play that card right now." I kept waiting for Manifest to break the game. But it just worked.

Another breakthrough was Abduct. There is a set of Beast type cards, that directly attack your opponent by forcing them to lose cards. Everyone starts Colossi with identical decks, which I was attached to because it puts tactics ahead of luck. But the game really came alive when I introduced a Beast card that lets you steal a card your opponent has played and making it part of your deck. Slowly, over the course of a match, the decks drift apart. By the final Skirmish, the composition of what you're drawing from is meaningfully different from what you started with. In a few games, testers abducted their opponent’s Abduct card! Things got crazy, but the game didn’t break, and it was still pretty fair.

That gradual asymmetry was a breakthrough. The identical starting decks give the game its fairness. Abduct (and eventually other cards that warp the decks) gives it an arc.

Now that Colossi’s foundation felt solid, I started asking how many crazy cards I could fit into the game. The answer, it turns out, is quite a lot. I developed the player decks quite a bit, and got it to a place where there was a fun and surprising set of synergies and counters. But the game needed more.

The first big addition came from a test with Walter. He suggested that every Environment should have its own unique rule, something that rewrites a part of the game. That single observation cracked the project wide open. Sacrifice Mountain makes you discard cards onto an opponent's deck. Magnetic Maar pulls cards from other environments into play. Glass River has you prepare cards face-up, totally inverting the strategy. Suddenly every session played like its own mini-game. Each Environment now had personality, and felt like a real place.

This was the right level of complexity for new players. But some of my testers had now played the game dozens of times. I had lots more ideas for things that were too crazy to fit into the base deck. Things that you don’t want to happen four times in a game. So I added Items: single-use cards that are randomly distributed to Environments and let you pull off enormous, game-warping plays. A few of my favorites:

Ebenezer: Discard your entire hand. If you discarded at least 4 cards, this card gives you +15 power.
Wager: Guess out loud who will win this Skirmish. If you're right, draw 2 cards from your deck and prepare them on the next Environment. If you're wrong, discard all the cards you have prepared on all Environments.
Terraformer: Destroy both non-active Environments, and replace them with new ones from the deck.

The random combinations of Environments and Items created a genuinely dynamic problem to solve. Matching the synergies and counters in your deck to the environments and items available turned into an addictive game loop. Layer on the dynamic of your opponent bluffing and putting together counters of their own? I had a good game on my hands.

Hiring an Artist

These environments were the centerpiece of the game. They deserved oversized cards and gorgeous art. I found my artist Sean Thurlow (Instagram) right here on a BGG forum! Sean does environment art professionally for video games and animated shows. Handing Sean the brief of "here are twenty ridiculous Environments, go nuts" was a dream. Art sells games. Without Sean, I would not have had a successful Kickstarter.

The Graveyard

For everything that made it into the final game, two or three things got cut. My list of cut content is bigger than the game itself.

Most of the cut cards fell into the following categories:

1. Too many edge cases: The most instructive cut was a card called Hypnotize: "choose an opponent; for their next turn, they must play three cards in a row." It was a fun deviation from the normal gameplay. It was also an edge-case machine. What if the hypnotized player also has a Hypnotize? What if another card interrupts them mid-turn? What if they only have two cards in hand? Every playtest produced a new ruling, so out it went.

2. Redundancy / too same-y: since I’m optimizing for big, crazy, exciting moments, it was critical to not have a lot of cards that do nearly the same thing. I even had a good number of cards like Recreate that let you copy a Divine Gift or Beast effect an opponent had just played, and it was fine, but it just repeated an effect you just saw, and it fell flat.

3. Mechanically sound, but a vibe killer: I like games where you can really mess with your opponent. But I ran into some ideas that just felt awful. Some cards felt like you were a big brother bullying your little brother, and at the table it just felt bad.

Putting It Down

After 18 months of grinding on this game, I burned out. Colossi was close to done, but I couldn't tell what "done" meant anymore. It felt like there was no end to testing and idea generation. I got overwhelmed and tired, and went to work on other games. I made a web based social game. I developed new board game ideas. I set Colossi aside for nearly a year.

The revival happened at a work retreat. A coworker had heard I made games and asked me to bring one along. I was down on Colossi at the time and brought it reluctantly. They loved it. They pushed me to finish it. It had problems, but I had fresh eyes and more design experience. This was the test where I really honed in on Items, and refined how you use them. I was ready for the final stretch.

Testing and development are arduous. Progress stalls. You lose perspective. You need kind people around who will remind you that the thing you made is worth finishing.

Knowing When To Stop

When I came back to Colossi, I was energized and started piling on new ideas again. Now that I had the right form factor for Items, the ideas were flowing.

I played it dozens more times, mostly with my friend Chris Thornton. Chris is a star playtester and a brilliant designer in his own right. He'd been brainstorming alongside me for years. After one test he said, “Every new idea either breaks the game, is redundant, or would turn Colossi into a fundamentally different game." The graveyard was bigger than the game. It was extremely difficult to come up with new crazy things that made the game better. And that was the sign that I was done.

This is a great heuristic to know when something is done. There’s no stone left unturned. You’ve tried everything. And every new idea hurts the game instead of enhancing it.

It was a weight off my shoulders. Because he was right. The foundation was holding absurd amounts of crazy: players stealing each other's cards, cycling half a deck in a turn, manifesting Beast cards out of nowhere, forcing mass discards, and the game still played fair, fast, and exciting. The cup was full of water, and it wouldn't take any more water.

Time to print.

Self-publishing

I ran Colossi as a Kickstarter through my own publisher, Catacombian. Many backers took a chance on the game, got it into production, and carried it across the finish line.

Self-publishing means you learn every part of the pipeline whether you want to or not: manufacturing overseas, freight and customs, CE testing, warehousing, fulfillment (domestic and international), distribution, retail outreach, reviews, advertising, and the long, slow work of getting the game onto shelves. Each of those is its own game, with its own rules, and most of them do not come with a rulebook.

I would not have done any of it without the playtesters, the backers, and the wave of designers and publishers I pestered for advice along the way. The board game community is weirdly, disproportionately generous. If you're working on something, keep asking people for help. They will help. It is noteworthy that the story of Colossi mentions so many other people. Game designers have nothing without friends, testers, and collaborators.

Thanks

Colossi is available now on our website and in select retail stores. If you'd like to go deeper on the design process, including a longer conversation about where good ideas come from, I talk extensively about this process in my blog / podcast / YouTube / Instagram / Bluesky.

by Justin Bell

A few months ago, I joined two friends for a play of The Gallerist, one of my favorite titles from designer Vital Lacerda. (Also, Vital: thanks for the intel on hot spots in Lisbon. The pastéis de Belém were absolutely magnificent!)

A friend was celebrating his birthday weekend, so he was hosting an all-day gaming session where folks like me would show up in waves to play the birthday boy’s favorite titles. It had been maybe a year since I last played The Gallerist, so I watched a teach video to warm my brain up to the rules and reminded myself of some of the things I’ve seen work when I’ve won, and (more often) watched others do to win.

The host, who we’ll call “Schmeven”, had built a schedule for the day that was pretty tight. We’re talking two-hour blocks, with some games that were already going to push on the soft borders of that Google Sheet’s time window. The Gallerist was set for 11:30 AM, the first game on the slate. For this particular day, I was intent on arriving a couple minutes early, to help Schmeven keep the events on schedule.

I rolled up at 11:28 AM and buzzed Schmeven’s apartment. Walked in, sat down, and readied myself for the play. Schmeven, who, like me, ensures that the first game of the day is locked and loaded when guests arrive, had done his part and the game was set up and ready to go.

Then Schmeven got a text. Our third player, who we’ll call “Slim”, was running late. Slim had taken the wrong bus line to Schmeven’s house, so he was going to be delayed for another 20-30 minutes.

Foolishly, I had made other plans with the family to start about a half-hour after the originally scheduled end time of 1:30 PM. That part is on me; two hours for The Gallerist with players I don’t know is potentially a gamble. But, hope springs eternal. My thinking: if Slim moves at the velocity of Schmeven and I, we’ll be fine to wrap up The Gallerist in 90 minutes or so.

Schmeven’s quick turn-taking is well established; Schmeven and I have done a two-player game of The Gallerist in just over an hour, and we’ve done two games of Speakeasy in a single sitting in under three hours. He has earned the Justin Bell Gold Speed of Approval and is always welcome at my table; he, like me, takes snappy turns. Even though Slim was the wildcard on this particular day, he just had to play at roughly the speeds Schmeven and I normally play at, and we would be in great shape.

Well...not exactly.

***

Slim arrived, exchanged pleasantries, apologized for the delay, and sat down at his station near me at the table. Slim is a seasoned strategy gamer who entered our gaming circles with a wealth of street cred. I was excited to see what he would bring to The Gallerist during our play.

After everyone was seated, I turned to Slim. “When’s the last time you played this one?”

“Gosh, maybe six, seven years ago? It’s been a while, so I’m a little rusty…I didn’t have time to do a full rules refresh, but I think I remember how most of this works…the player aid IS really good, so I can always fall back on that.”

My heart sank. My soul—what little soul I had left—sank lower, if that was possible. We were definitely going to have to sorta play and sorta teach this game to Slim while taking our own turns. There was no way we were getting through this one in 90 minutes.

Separately, in my review crew, everyone knows that I have a hard and fast rule when it comes to tabling games: if there is a teach video anywhere on the interwebs in English, players have to watch those videos before they come to game night. It saves SO MUCH TIME, and it ensures everyone has skin in the game when it comes to the investment part of knocking out multiple plays of different games in a single night.

I am more lax about this with other groups, and for this play of The Gallerist, I think there was an unspoken expectation that everyone knew the rules, but we never called that out when setting up the birthday schedule. After this experience with Schmeven’s birthday play of The Gallerist, I’m thinking about changing my tune.

***

As I expected, Slim tested every bit of my patience during our play. I’m told patience is a virtue, but I’m beginning to question that.

I’ve only joined Slim for a couple of game nights, but I have found that Slim is a player who verbally talks out his options before taking a turn. I do this from time to time, especially late in a game with friends where I can talk through one or two options on a turn that might swing the game. But certainly not on every single turn.

Slim’s turns looked a lot like what some friends call “min-maxing”: exploring many, if not every, possible outcome before making a selection most beneficial to the current game state. Again, no problem late in a game, and I am on record as telling other players that on the final turn of any game, you can take as much time as you want…no one wants to see a player lose a game because they made a major blunder on their final action.

But, Slim’s min-maxing happened on almost every turn for the first nine, maybe ten turns.

The Gallerist is an action selection game where players have a choice of four major locations. Each major location—the International Market, the Sales Office, the Media Center, and the Artists Colony—offers two unique actions. When a player moves their pawn to a new location, they pick one of the two actions there, and execute it. On successive turns, the active player must move their pawn to a new location to take a different action.

I never mind when a player is thinking through which of the three locations they want to move to next, nor how they will best execute the action at their chosen location. But a player needs to fully understand what’s possible at each location, and Slim’s rust showed during those moments. Often, that meant Schmeven and I were explaining what actions were possible at each of the three locations available to Slim on that turn, which meant talking through the possible outcomes of SIX different actions.

Every turn.

When I do a full teach of any serious strategy game for new players—this exact scenario happened just two weeks ago, when I got to play Chicago 1875: City of the Big Shoulders with a couple new players—I just turn my brain off completely when it comes to building my own in-game strategy. That’s because I find it difficult to manage both what I want to do, and what others need to understand in order to enjoy their play of the game. Just when you begin to think through your own turn, a question comes in that breaks your concentration.

For a learning game, totally fine. For this play of The Gallerist, I was pretty excited to get into “the art of strategy,” the game’s tagline.

I quickly became the surly, impatient curmudgeon who rushed through his own turns so that we could simply wrap up the game. By turn four, my main focus became trying to mask my anger, in service of Schmeven, the birthday boy who (I hope) was having a great time just getting a game off the shelf that doesn’t see the table nearly as often as it should.

Maybe two-thirds of the way through our play, Slim was in great shape on the rules and finished off a victory, navigating his own turns with ease. And, to Slim’s credit, he acknowledged the help that was provided by his tablemates during the game. Our play took just over two hours, which in some ways was a miracle.

My only regret? Not doing a full teach of The Gallerist for Slim the moment he acknowledged that he hadn’t played the game in years. Teaching The Gallerist to a new player only takes about 20 minutes—the player aid really is great as a teaching tool—and for a seasoned player with even distant plays under their belt, getting a quick re-teach is usually enough.

It’s also fun to see how I change as I get older. I don’t mind losing, and I’m certainly less competitive than I was ten years ago. But, I do mind waiting. (Yeah, it’s your turn!) If patience really is a virtue, then I guess all I can say for now is that I am working on it!!

by Mantita Games

We'd been kicking around the idea of a digital card game for a while, and when we landed on Witchcraft! it all clicked. It's a fantastic game, with a really powerful card mechanic, and on top of that it has the kind of complex, demanding strategy that hooks us. We love hard games — the ones that make you think — and Witchcraft! was a perfect fit.

So we got to work.

[heading]The challenge we thought would be the big one: the interface[/heading]
The first thing that worried us was how to translate the reveal/hide card mechanic to a screen. It's the game's most distinctive feature, and on the table it's completely intuitive — the card is split in two and you can see both sides clearly. In digital… well, that was another story. How was the player going to keep track of which side they were playing? How would they choose?

Our first instinct was drag-and-drop. We went all in and built a system where, when you picked up a card, two distinct zones appeared and you dropped it into one or the other depending on the side you wanted to play. On paper it looked great. We tried it on mobile and it fell apart: clunky, unclear, artificial.
Our second idea was to put two little buttons, one on each side of the card. Our designer really went for it here — he came up with some lovely buttons, full of personality — and with that solution we reached our first testing phase feeling pretty good.

And then the first two people who tried it told us the same thing, with almost the same look on their faces: why can't I just tap the side of the card I want to play? We looked at each other. We felt a bit silly. And right then it hit us — the solution had been right under our noses the whole time. No dragging, no buttons, no inventions. Just tap the card. Sometimes the road to the obvious is longer than it should be.

[heading]Meanwhile, on the visual side[/heading]
While we were tangled up with the interaction question, there was another thing on our plate: how all this was going to look. And here we had a huge head start — Albert Monteys's illustrations. Honestly, just dropping them into the mobile layout already did half the work. I mean, wow. With illustrations at that level, the question wasn't whether they'd hold up — it was how we were going to make the design around them live up to them.

Luckily, the original game's graphic design was done by Meeple Foundry, so we weren't starting from scratch — not even close. Everything was very well prepared to edit and tweak, and there was a clear design language that helped us enormously in figuring out where to take things.

From there, we put together some pretty scrappy wireframes — really scrappy — and handed them to our designer, Lorenzo Berzosa, who helped us pull it all together in a consistent, coherent way. We knew what we wanted on each screen; he turned those sketches into something that actually holds up visually.

Ugly wireframes

Actual designer work
[heading]The challenge we didn't see coming: the tutorial[/heading]
In our heads, teaching people to play Witchcraft! wasn't going to be complicated. The rulebook is short. The mechanic didn't seem convoluted to us. We had it figured out.

Our first tutorial was a disaster. Most of our early testers got lost in the tutorial. Yes, lost. They understood the individual actions, but not how they connected to each other or why they mattered. That's when we remembered one of the harshest lessons in development: just because you understand something after months up to your neck in it doesn't mean it's easy to explain. If anything, it usually means the opposite.

We went back at it. We rethought the pacing, changed the order of the concepts, cut things, swapped explanations for playable examples, cut again… and bit by bit the tutorial started to work. There was no single magic change — it was pure iteration: try it, see where people get lost, adjust, try again. Even now there's still room to grow, especially because the game has so many strategic layers and it's hard to cover all of that in five steps.

[heading]And then came the fun part: the campaign[/heading]
I'll admit, the campaign was by far what I enjoyed programming the most. It was exciting and challenging in equal measure. On the architecture side, we were able to put together something pretty solid that let us configure each tale almost automatically, and from there it was test, test, and test.

I got pretty obsessed with the final tale. In fact, I started to believe it was impossible. I remember anxiously asking Salt & Pepper: but has anyone actually beaten the game? Is it even possible? Until one night, at three in the morning… I did it. The achievement system popped up right on cue telling me I'd completed the campaign, and I almost teared up. An epic moment I keep with a lot of fondness.

[heading]Magical challenge unlocked[/heading]
It's been a long road. A lot of design revisions, a lot of hours in front of the code, and the involvement of a bunch of testers who got really invested and contributed ideas and suggestions that ended up shaping the game you can play today. This digital Witchcraft! is, in large part, theirs too.

On April 15th, 2026 we went live in the stores. And with the launch comes another pile of lessons learned… but that's for another day.

Thanks for reading.

by Tom Lehmann

Race for the Galaxy: Xeno Counterstrike
Rio Grande Games
Designer Preview by Tom Lehmann

Xeno Counterstrke is the second and final expansion in Race for the Galaxy's Xeno arc. Introduced in the Xeno Invasion expansion, the Xenos are a violent xenophobic alien race that cannot be negotiated with.

Taking place after their invasion of galactic space, Xeno Counterstrike portrays the galactic empire's expansion through the frontier zone into Xeno space.

Xeno Counterstrike features two play experiences: a frontier game, with powerful new worlds to explore and settle, and a bonus counterstrike game, which continues the invasion game from Xeno Invasion and takes the fight to the Xeno worlds.

The Xeno Invasion expansion is recommended but not required for the frontier game, which can be played by 2-4 players with just the RFTG base set. The counterstrike game requires Xeno Invasion, which also adds a 5th player option to both experiences.

Frontier Ho!

The frontier game adds 46 frontier worlds divided into two separate decks of Near and Far frontier worlds, plus a new Frontier Settle action card.

Frontier worlds are located in the starry rift section of space that separates the galactic empires from Xeno space. These worlds are populated by a mix of pioneers, outlaws, and worlds previously conquered by Xenos.

Xeno Counterstrike uses several concepts introduced in Xeno Invasion:
* mix-with-hand for all Explore actions,
* Xeno worlds -- worlds already conquered by the Xenos,
* specialized military vs. Xenos (similar to military vs. Rebels), and
* the Anti-Xeno "keyword" -- groups opposing the Xenos.

Initially, players can choose to settle only Near frontier worlds. Once an empire has grown to 5+ cards in tableau, it can settle either Near or Far frontier worlds.

Settling a frontier world is a plunge into the unknown. To do so, a player plays Frontier Settle (triggering a normal Settle phase for the other players) and draws 3 cards from a frontier deck. They can choose to play and pay for or conquer one of them, discarding the other two worlds face down to that deck's discard pile. (Unlike a normal settle, they don't draw a card afterwards, as their card bonus is the card they drew.)

If the player is unable or chooses not to settle any of them, they keep one card for a later normal settle or card payment; thereby losing a tableau-building tempo, but gaining a card.

However, this risk is balanced by the frontier worlds being cosiderably better than similar cost regular game worlds. Deciding when you are ready to settle frontier worlds and whether they should be Near or Far ones adds new decisions to the game.

Some cards have powers that help you settle frontier worlds and some 6-cost developments reward players for settling frontier worlds.

Thematically, settling frontier worlds is a resource committment across considerable time and space, so each player can do so only every other round (their used Frontier Settle card is tucked under their start world for one round to mark this). When playing the experienced 2-player variant, players may do a Frontier settle every round.

Design Considerations

Mechanically, having frontier worlds be separate decks, instead of adding them to the game deck, solves two potential expansion issues:

First, in an expansion, players want new, fun cards to play. Satisfying this desire often leads to "expansion creep", where expansion cards are just better than the original cards. By placing the better worlds in separate decks with a risk-reward mechanism to obtain them, I can give players access to lots of really great worlds without diminishing the base game worlds (as players still need to build up to afford frontier worlds and also need worlds to settle when other players call Frontier settle).

On the development side, the higher military defenses in the Far frontier deck creates a need for more military cards, allowing me to make a few fun but costly military cards:

Second, single-deck games (such as Race for the Galaxy) have the "sample variation problem" where, as the deck grows in size, the odds that a player draws a bunch of one type of cards (say, developments) and none of another type (say, worlds) increases with each expansion that adds more cards, increasing the luck of the draw.

This issue, along with a desire to tell different stories, led me to create separate expansion arcs.

With almost half this expansion's cards in the frontier decks, I could design a lean addition of 6 start worlds and 25 game cards to the main deck, concentrating on interesting variations of existing cards that didn't produce expansion creep:

These cards had to provide enough Xeno Worlds, military vs Xenos, and Anti-Xeno keywords so that Xeno Counterstrike could work without Xeno Invasion.

Testing revealed an issue: namely, the game was a bit too short for the powers of Far frontier worlds to have an impact, as by the time players had built up and acquired them, it was often over.

The solution was to add some VPs to the initial common pool (15, not 12, VPs per player) and to play to 15, not 12, cards in tableau to make the game 1-2 rounds longer. This still keeps the frontier game reasonably short and snappy, but allows those big Far frontier worlds a chance to strut their stuff.

The Empires Strike Back

Beyond depicting a varied frontier, I wanted Xeno Counterstrike to continue Xeno Invasion's storyline: what happens after the invasion is repulsed? Can the empires then take the fight to the Xeno hive worlds? Could I give this an epic feel?

The optional counterstrike game begins as a combined frontier and Xeno Invasion game until the invasion is successfully repulsed (if the Xenos win, the players all lose). Then it shifts into the counterstrike game, replacing the invasion game tiles and cards with the counterstrike versions.

To ensure that this game doesn't end prematurely, I greatly enlarged the VP pool (to 30 VPs per player) and eliminated tableau size as an end condition. Players have to either exhaust this larger VP pool, conquer all the Xeno systems (which scale with number of players), or have a combined military vs. Xenos that is equal to or greater than the Xeno conquest value, as shown on this track:

After a successful repulse, play resumes, except that now the players are on the attack and the Xenos, if at least one Xeno system isn't attacked each round, carry out retaliatory strikes (similar to the old invasions, but with a new deck).

The Xeno systems are a deck of Sattelite and Hive worlds of varying strengths.

To attack them, an empire plays their Frontier Settle card, using its conquest portion, provided they have either 16+ cards in tableau or contain at least one Far frontier world. A failed Xeno system conquest increases their retaliation strengths that round.

Some Xeno retaliation strengths and all Hive world strengths are equal to the the attacking empire's military + military vs. Xenos + 2-6 more. To defeat them, the empire must have at least 9 military vs. Xenos and additional temporary military equal to the card's extra 2-6 military.

Thematically, this represents Xeno swarming tactics, where they bring more than the opposing force to overwhelm them. Only surprise tactics, represented by temporary military, can defeat them.

The extra awards for successful defeat of retaliating forces is the reverse of Xeno Invasion, which favored being the smallest military capable of holding them off. Now, the military that defeats the largest attacking force gets the extra awards.

Players can win either by military conquest or by churning out massive war production represented by VPs (as all empires are now assumed to be on a fully mobilized war footing).

The optional counterstrike game changes Race for the Galaxy considerably, as tableaus of 20-25 cards are not unusual and game time is roughly doubled. This is the version for the players who want a longer, more epic version of Race for the Galaxy against a common foe.

Finishing Touches

In developing Xeno Counterstrike, I was aided by my long-time partner Wei-Hwa Huang, his wife Trisha Huang, and Chris Lopez. They tirelessly playtested both versions and made many useful suggestions. Thanks!

With more than 75 different card illustrations, this was a demanding assignment for the illustrators, Martin Hoffmann and Claus Stephan, and the graphic artist, Mirko Suzuki. This product marks more than 20 years we have worked together. I would like to thank them for all their contributions over the years.

Jay Tummelson of Rio Grande Games, as always, was very supportive. Bringing games to market during these times is quite difficult and I deeply appreciate his efforts in doing so.

It's been a privilege to work on Race for the Galaxy and be able to tell different stories. I'd like to thank all the fans for their interest and support. I hope you enjoy the stories of exploring the frontier and defeating an xenophobic race that Xeno Counterstrike offers. Enjoy!

-- Tom Lehmann

by Steph Hodge

▪️ Hachette Boardgames USA has been on it with announcing new games! Today, I will highlight some of the smaller games coming out in the next several months.

[imageid=8969959 medium Rep]▪️ Canal Houses just released this April and should already be hitting the stores. From the Gigamic catalog, Canal Houses is a 20-minute game where you build up the beautiful streets of Amsterdam. The colorful houses and charming artwork are used for scoring at the end of the game. From the newsletter:



▪️ Another new release from Gigamic is Pirate King! this June! Pirate King is a push-your-luck card game for 2-5 players and will play in about 15 minutes. Pick your captain and build your deck, but don't be too greedy, or you just might bust out.




▪️ Leaf It! is a new dexterity game from Edition Spielwiese releasing this June. Leaf It plays 2-4 players and takes about 10-20 minutes. There is a mix of memory and dexterity as you have to assemble the canopy and then dismantle it, collecting the most valuable animals as you do.

From the newsletter:

▪️ HUCH! is a new partner with Hachette, and they just announced 3 mini games releasing this May! All of the games support 2-5 players and can be played in about 15 minutes.









If you are on the go or are looking for some quicker games for the collection, these seem like they would fit the bill.

by Nicolas Cardona

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

The Initial Spark

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

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

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

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

The Core Design Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Versions That Had to Die

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Breakthrough

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defamation and the Social Engine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simplifying Without Hollowing It Out

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

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

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

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

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

Scaling to Ten Players

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

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

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

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

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

What the Game Taught Me

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

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

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

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

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

That is what I was chasing with President.

Looking Back

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Justin Bell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

by Jasper Beatrix

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

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

2020

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

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

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

2021

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

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

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

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

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

2022

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

2023

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

2024

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

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

2025

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

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

Lewis was onto something.

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

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

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

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

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

With love,
Jono Naito-Tetro
DVC co-founder

by Jeff Grisenthwaite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Steph Hodge

A heavy hitter today with these new releases

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

From the newsletter:


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

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

From BGG:



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

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

From BGG:

by Ellie Dix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My granny would have enjoyed it, I think.

by Justin Bell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Rosco Schock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Sandro Blasich

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Steph Hodge

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

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

About the new collector's edition:


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




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

From the BGG game page:


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

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

More from the BGG page:

by Justin Bell

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

by Michael Feldkoetter

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Antonio Guillamó

INITIAL IDEA: SALT&PEPPER CONTEST (2024)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

High Moon on TableTop Simulator

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

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

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

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

Antonio “Guilla”.