by BoltKey

Part 1 – Finding the Right Pace & Depth
Those who follow CGE for a while know that a lot of design happens in close cooperation between the designer and CGE after the game is accepted by the company. I was in a bit of a special spot in this project: I have worked as a full-time employee at CGE, and I have worked on Drillers since late 2023.

The process of CGE deciding to publish the game was quite gradual. I was bringing various prototypes to CGE events, some people that liked the game pitched in with their skills to make the next prototype just a little bit better, and this eventually evolved into the crunch of a real project with real deadlines and stakes. Říman, a CGE in-house 3D artist, was a great partner in the initial phase and contributed many ideas that made it to the final game. We spent many evenings brainstorming and discussing the game, and that’s the reason he is titled co-designer on this project.

There was not a singular moment, contract, email or meeting where we decided “let’s do this”. It was almost like a natural progression.

Development and design of the game were a lot of fun and great adventure, as with any game design endeavor I get involved in. I am writing this diary from my perspective (Adam Španěl) as the lead designer and author of the initial concept, but I’ll occasionally use “we”. That means “the development team”, which mostly consists of me, Říman, Tomáš, Elwen and Mín.

The Story of Drillers
Back in 2005–2010, I spent a lot of time playing flash games. It was a golden era of browser gaming. That’s when I discovered Motherload, and I absolutely loved it. The sense of wonder every time you discover a new type of mineral. The satisfaction of selling your haul, finally refilling your fuel at the last second and upgrading your machine. The courage it took to just go deeper, and keep discovering more.

The series that culminated in Super Motherload in 2013 helped define a genre of "mining games" like Dome Keeper, SteamWorld Dig, and many others. They all share the core loop: dig, gather resources, sell, upgrade, repeat.

No board game I have played quite captured the feeling I got from the video games: you know you should probably head back up as your fuel is running low, but there is that really valuable gem just within reach that would be just enough to buy that upgrade you really need. And the next time you get there might be too late. On top of that, your curiosity of what is hiding in the depths is sometimes stronger than your rational decision to just play it safe and return to camp.

Designing for Myself
I know I should probably focus more on who the target audience is when designing a game. However, I am one of those designers who make games primarily for themselves. The games I want to play, and the games I feel are missing on the market. And if other people end up enjoying them too, that's a great bonus. I knew an exact feeling I wanted the game to create, and the only way to play it was to make it myself.

So, I got to work. The very first iteration contained just the core elements: cards that generated moves and drills for fuel, tiles that created cubes that you could collect in your cargo, and when you reached the surface again, you could buy better cards. I am really glad that these core mechanics "survived" in pretty much unchanged form from the first iteration to release.

Of course some of the mechanics evolved: how the shaft tiles worked exactly, and how the card offer worked, how the card management worked, and gradually mechanics like drones, repair, unique effects, floor cards or permanent cards grew around the game, but the core loop was tight and solid.

Abstracting the Mine
One core mechanic of the mining video games is that as you play you’re constantly reshaping the world as you play. You are creating a maze that you have to later navigate, so it has this kind of "build your own puzzle" element to it, and if you are not careful, you might get lost and perish.

At one point I considered playing around with this idea in Drillers. It turned out to be just too bloated in combination with other mechanics, and it added too much unnecessary complexity that was not so fun. So I decided not to explore this direction any further.

Drillers – Mainboard progress

Game Duration
Drillers is a game with variable and player-driven game length. This creates a sense of urgency and a bit of race. This however poses several design challenges.

Balancing the Game
Drillers is all about optimizing your turns and pushing every card to its limit. There is a big difference between what a beginner can do in a turn, and an advanced player. Since the game is timed by what players have accomplished in the game (how much they’ve mined), this creates huge discrepancy between length of different games. While advanced players usually hit the "sweet spot" of 10–12 turns, beginners' games often stretched to 17 or 18 turns. Combined with the natural learning curve of new players, this initially resulted in pacing friction that lacked momentum.

During development, we noticed that many players played it safe and stayed near the surface, working with the minerals that they could reach easily. While that approach worked, it often led to slower and less engaging moments.

We wanted to bring forward the feeling that we love about Drillers. The need to go a little bit deeper, take a risk and get something more valuable. So we started to shape the game to naturally encourage players to dive deeper:

The Market: Encouraging Diving Deeper
Initially, the prices for selling minerals were flat, but we decided we need to make them variable somehow, to make the new shiny minerals more attractive. We considered a shared market, but that was too complicated. Instead, we created the system where the more you sell of the same mineral, the less valuable it becomes. Eventually, we made the silver and gold prices drop to zero credits if they are oversold. It’s basically a way of pushing the players towards diving deeper for more profitable minerals.

The Floor Cards: What Lies Beneath
There was the idea of floor cards adding special rules floating around, but I was scared of it: I didn’t want to add too much rules overhead. But I think they turned out great. The main principle is that the floor cards only trigger when you actively interact with the floor, rather than just passing through. But the main reason was, again, to motivate new players to dig deeper. The curiosity of what is on the next floor really helped this.

It was a challenge to hit that sweet spot with the floor cards so they are significant enough so you want to care about them, but not game-changing in a way that gives unfair advantage to certain playstyles.

Let’s look at the Hot Tub. The first version gave a discount of 1 drill but also 1 damage. This was just bad most of the game, and usually you wanted to avoid it. The intention was to make that floor a bit more dynamic, with easier access to tiles, but the drawback was too much, so the opposite happened, with many players skipping that floor entirely.

In another version we added 1 extra fuel for each tile on top of the damage. This solved the initial problem of skipping the floor, but created a new one: players could suddenly make very unpredictable moves, grabbing 3 or 4 tiles at once and sometimes ending the game prematurely. To restrict it, we limited the effect to once per turn.. But this was still a bit too weak.

In the final version we gave it a major buff, where for the first tile, you get a discount along with the damage to your hand. Now that’s definitely beneficial, but still can bite you if you are not careful.

Another interesting example that highlights the back-and-forth with the illustrations is Lobby.

The original idea was simple: a safe space where you can prepare for your next big turn. At first, it only had the ability of keeping 3 cards for free. That worked quite well, but in practice, the timing often felt off. When the card was revealed, you usually didn’t get to take full advantage of it.

We brainstormed the theme a bit: first, it was just a “safe ledge”, which felt a bit bland. From there, the idea evolved into something more playful–a rest spot for a picnic table next to a vending machine.

When we were thinking about how the floor should work, we leaned into the theme of the vending machine, adding abilities involving money and getting snacks. Adding these effects ate up the space for illustration, so we dropped the picnic table, which evolved into the garden chair.

This quite wild iteration led to a really sweet floor card. It is a perfect example of the “game design informs art, art informs game design” principle that CGE prides itself in following.

Drillers – Lobby Event card progression

Game End Trigger: Making Progress Visible
Finding the right way to end the game took several iterations.

Initially, the end of the game was connected to the total number of minerals sold by all players. That worked reasonably well, but it was a real pain to track during play.

Then we moved on to a system where all the ground tiles had a number of dots, and if you collected 12 dots, you triggered the end of the game. The same issue, you had to keep recounting dots of other players to see if they were close to ending the game.

Then Říman had the great idea of connecting it to the physical size of the tile, making deeper tiles bigger, and slotting them above the player board. It was intuitive and satisfying, but this led to another problem: when players collected too many minerals and kept building their deck instead of getting the fat points on the lower floor tiles, it made the games exceedingly dragged out.

So finally we connected the dots, and made the end trigger by combination of tiles and minerals filling the track from each side. With that, we have a system that is quite intuitive, takes into account both minerals and ground tiles, but more importantly, you see at a glance how far along everybody is.

I am really glad how that one turned out.

Drillers – Progress of the player board

Ending Turns
Another mechanic we iterated quite a bit was the final turns after the game end trigger.

The first option, that is quite common, is giving every player the same number of turns. I usually don’t like use of this mechanic in games for two reasons. First, you must somehow mark or remember who was the starting player. And second, in my opinion, it adds more asymmetry to the player order than with variable number of turns: the last player approaches the end of the game differently than the first–they know exactly how many turns they have left, which can shape their entire strategy.

Instead I prefer giving players later in turn order extra resources to compensate for potentially less turns than others. Some players reported that having less turns than their opponents felt unfair. We tried quite a few solutions until we found something that felt right. First, we simply gave an extra turn to the player who triggered the game end. This, however, led to the extra turn feeling a bit useless and uneventful, and in some ways boring: the final turn should feel like an all-out finish, but the player triggering the end of the game expended most of their resources to trigger the game end, and didn’t have much of anything left for the extra turn. But we still wanted to give that all-out final turn to the opponents.

So, finally, we settled on the big 18-VP bonus for the closing player, that should compensate for the opponent’s extra turn (along with that extra card we gave just to make the final turn feel even bigger) The solution finally felt quite good for all parties involved.


Thank you for reading our Part 1 and coming under the surface with us.
Next time, we’ll dig into the core mechanics of Drillers–deck-building, decisions and how we shaped the way the game actually plays. If you want to get a head start, you can dive into how the game works by reading the rulebook: Drillers Rulebook.

If you want to be notified when the Part 2 drops next week, subscribe to Drillers here on BGG.
Looking forward to reading what you think so far.

by Steph Hodge

Time to get our feet a little wet with these new game announcements.

[imageid=9531435 medium rep]▪️ Stonemaier Games sent out a May update with new expansions available for several titles, including Finspan. The expansion to Finspan is called Finspan: Sharks & Reefs and it adds 75 new cards, which include new shark cards and coral habitats. Lots of new strategies to pursue.

From the BGG Page:



▪️ Mythic Baths was just announced from Good Games Publishing with a release happening soon. Hopefully available at GenCon 2026. A cute game for 2-5 players that will play in about 30-60 minutes. Your objective is to treat the guests and collect as much aber as possible to win.

From BGG:



▪️ Six-Sided Seas Was just announced for GenCon 2026 release from publisher Solis Game Studio. This is a 2-pirate game, but you can add a set to allow it to play up to 4-pirates. Gain glorious victory in 15-20 minutes!

From BGG:

by Michael

"When a man with a 0.45 straight meets a man with a rifle three-of-a-kind, you said the man with the pistol's straight’s a dead man. Let's see if that's true. Go ahead. Load Shuffle up and shoot draw."

Sorry to any film aficionados, you’ll survive though. Rattlesnake is a two-player duelling card game, lightly inspired by deck-building games. Players start the game with identical decks of cards, numbered one to five, and a central market (The Saloon) between them that holds cards for purchasing. They take turns purchasing cards and attacking each other (or not) by placing runs (sequential numbers) or sets (the same number) face down on the table, then comparing. Defenders take a Hit card to their discard pile if the attacker wins, and when a player has no Hit cards left, they lose the game. At any time in the game, from the moment the game starts, players can play a card in their hand for its ability. The downside however is that card is removed from their deck permanently afterwards! As cards are bought from the Saloon, events come out that change the rules of the game permanently, and slowly push the players into finishing things. The game has an ebb and flow to it that tries to create the tension and stress of actually being in a pistol duel in a run-down western town.

[heading]Prologue[/heading]
A little about me. I am an Australian/British/soon-to-be-Italian game designer, who lives in The Netherlands. By day I am an engineer, so working with systems, whether mechanical, electrical, or cardboard-based is all the same to me. I have been making games for a few years as a hobby/fun activity with friends, but this is the first game I actually decided to publish. More accurately, the first I felt was actually worth publishing. More on that later. What I like though, is telling stories. Board games are not ideal for this, but I try my best to fit a narrative into my designs in some way. The narrative might not be obvious at first glance, but Roland’s art definitely helps it stand out more. By the end of this design diary, I hope you can see the narrative in the game, and it brings it to life just a little bit more.

[heading]Act 1: We pass time between funerals and burials[/heading]
I was watching For A Fistful Of Dollars while my wife was away one week: the original spaghetti western (Western movie made by Italian directors), directed by Sergio Leone. This is where the story of Rattlesnake starts. I was moved by the music, the cinematography, the style, and the simplicity of it all. So of course, I thought, let’s make a game about this. Naturally. What you interpret from that is “oh, he wants to make a game about people shooting each other, easy, seen it before”. I am not so shallow, and there are games that do duelling much better for those things (Kiri-Ai anyone?). I wanted to make a game that tells the story of two people who are stuck in a duel, hiding behind some scrap of anything, desperately trying to figure out how to not die. The same, yes, but also different.

The obvious link is poker. To preface, this was all started way before Balatro was released. Board games take forever to publish. The first step in developing a prototype, normally, is to experiment and fail a lot really fast. So I started researching the history of card games in the Old American West. It made sense at the time. Several Wikipedia rabbit holes later I emerged, bleary eyed, tired, and unaware of where I was, or what I was doing. So the next day I just grabbed a deck of French suited playing cards, and then made a second deck of ability cards, with random scribbled abilities on them. I wrote whatever I felt would be appropriate or just sounded cool.

Four hours pass by and the tattered remains of two playing card decks litter my desk, and my paper waste bin is overflowing and begging me to stop. This is what progress looks like. I had gone through about 20 or so versions of the possible game in a single evening. That’s a new game version every 12 minutes on average. I had also ruined several fine felt-tipped pens in my haste. No time for funeral processions, or even digging the proper hole, just bury the past iteration as fast as possible. Whatever is not dead will climb out of the hole. Eventually, I actually accomplished some design work, and I came up with this bizarre system of two decks, where one would have traditional playing cards, albeit slightly modified, and the other would be full of crazy abilities and bonkers things. I nicknamed this second deck “The Michael Bay Deck”. Players could then choose to draw from either of their decks on their turn. I used spreadsheets and a program called NanDeck to rapidly print out digital versions after this.

The first playtests went well. The testers reported that the game was “a little too swingy” and other quotes like “wait, let me read that card again” and “does this really do what I think it does?”. A resounding success. The cards were built around spending your traditional playing cards (symbols on the left of the ability cards) like a resource to play abilities, but also using traditional playing cards to attack your opponent in a kind of hand comparison game (like poker, ish). Everyone did have fun though, which was a huge positive. The game was more broken than politics, but people were laughing and enjoying it. Great! BURY IT!

I churned through so many prototypes of this that I lost count. I keep almost every version of each prototype I make in general. Version control started at version 0, but each version had decimals. Even the decimals had decimals after that! There were three separate characters, each with their own ability decks, and they were all around different themes and play styles. You’d think with around 20 cards to each character, multiple copies in each deck, that it would be easy actually. But no. In the end, we were just optimising a dead horse. Don’t optimise, just bury it and move on.

[heading]Act 2: Sometimes the dead can be more useful than the living[/heading]
What if, now hear me out…the abilities were on the playing cards? It took much longer than I will admit to reach this conclusion. It was really quite simple, I just added numbers from two to seven, plus the face cards, to the ability cards, and then one entire deck was gone. Buried! Instantly half the components! Seriously, this was a game changer, literally and metaphorically. People went from “oh, that was alright” to “shut up Michael, I’m playing here!”. Great success. I kept very, very detailed testing notes after every single game and had a wealth of info to look back through and try spot the issues. Most feedback has value in it, if you can find the nuggets of truth buried deep within. The note that helped me the most was “there are too many cards and decks”. Insightful I know. But it took about 10 sessions before someone said that out loud. Before then, it was always some arbitrary problem, a feeling they couldn’t describe or explain. I was swimming in a vast lake of vague expressions and blind design suggestions, until someone just shouted “why are you wearing two snorkels?”. Obvious isn’t it? Remove the excess and bury it.

The game was finding its footing more and more with each revision. Five card hands, both players are refreshing at the end of any turn, and abilities are one-time affairs before they disappear forever. The keyword for removing a card from the game was of course, “Buried”. My testing notes document was swelling and gaining self-awareness, consuming and digesting copious quantities of feedback and test data. Every week there was a slew of new prototypes. Monday I would test with my closed group, Tuesday I would fix it and test solo, Wednesday I would semi-blind test with another local design group, then Thursday I would fix and solo test again. The game was starting to feel more and more like two idiots hiding behind barrels and overturned tables, trying to figure out the next move in an actual western stand off, and less of a “I play this card for X” kind of game. The downside is that I have never heard so much swearing in pubs before, and I grew up in Australia. This game brought out the worst in people. This is how I learned to curse better in Dutch as well though, so free language lessons I guess? It meant that I had tapped into the part of the brain I was searching for, poking the right neurons and getting closer each time.

Something was not right still though. So, I did what I normally do, grabbed a shovel and I buried most of it. Gone were the unique character decks, unique abilities, and also after much complaining, the black and white card design. Head play tester, and fellow game designer Steve van Bennekom, summed it up perfectly, “It looks like a spreadsheet threw up on a card game. Put some artwork on the cards please”. The Dutch are often criticised for being rude, but they just cut out all the filler words native English speakers use. Straight to the issue. There is never any “would you kindly” or “have you considered”. They make great play testers. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease though.

DISCLAIMER: Although I used AI art during the prototyping process to help with playtesting, no AI was used in the production of the final game. Roland MacDonald did all the art, which you will learn about later, I promise.

The game was now very similar to what you will see and play today, albeit with more cards and worse artwork. Symmetric decks numbered two to seven, a central market with the “face” cards, and of course wound cards. The Aces were considered as both ones and tens, depending on the hand of cards. This is what some might call the core concept. I can’t remember how many months it took to get to this point, but it was not quick. Balance was always a concern, but Steve, again, solved it in an evening's work one night. He wrote a python script that ran simulated hands both as the player and the opponent, and worked out the possibility of winning based on every single hand combination in the game. It keeps going. He then wrote me a full report, three pages long, detailing his findings, the outcomes, and where the likely overpowered combinations are. I paid for the drinks at the next test session.

Even more data in hand, I was refining more and more. This is also where the real work started. It was time to get serious. I needed more help. So I did what most normal people would do, and I started asking strangers. One such stranger was Roland MacDonald. I met him once, but didn’t know who he was at the time. I’m just going to paste some of the email I sent to him at a later date:

“We met a while back at a game design night, and you tore a friend’s prototype game to pieces (metaphorically). Are you around anytime for a chat and/or a drink?”

That’s really all it took. Turns out he lived 10 minutes from my house. We met up at a local pub, along with the friend who made the mentioned prototype (it was Steve, again). After many drinks, a long chat, we eventually tested out my game. Testing with experienced designers is a different world. Regular players give you a kind of “vibe”, while hobby designers and testers might start telling you a solution already. With actual designers and industry veterans, words sharper than razor blades is what you get. Not cruel, but precise, they cut down to the bone of the issue in a few words, leaving a huge, gaping wound that your ego, hopes, and dreams can ooze out of before you have time to blackout. It wasn’t that bad really, but you’re never prepared the first time. It feels worse, hearing these things the first time. Good feedback, would do it again. But it highlighted something I had forgotten in all the mechanisms and gameplay focus. It lacked something, some kind of spark or thing that really made it special. It was just…fine. Fine is a word you use when someone asks how you are and you want to be avoidant, not to describe something you actually like.

[heading]Act 3: You shoot to kill, you better hit the heart[/heading]
Progress slowed for a little bit as I dealt with some work things, Christmas, and regular life. This would eventually result in me taking off several months from work. Complete happenstance, but Roland also found himself without a project for the first time in a long while. So we did what British people do best, and we went to the pub…..a lot! This wasn’t game design or anything, just two guys enjoying a drink while the rest of the world was at work. It was what I imagined the feeling of zen must be like…but I am probably remembering it wrong.

Problem is, both of us are the type of people that cannot sit still. I had begun guzzling art lessons like a dehydrated dog and revising my graphic design skills while stuffing publishing information into the remaining gaps in my brain, trying to prepare for any outcome for the game. Roland however, was bored. He had gone from full-time, non-stop projects for several years, to watching me twitch uncontrollably as I struggled to find mental space for everything. I got a text one day that just said “Do you mind if I draw some artwork for your game”? The answer is obvious. The ramp up from here on was intense. Roland and I were meeting maybe two to three times a week now, always at a pub, and we would playtest, discuss his latest card art, discuss the next changes needed. I don’t want to think how much money we drank these months.

I really hope Roland does a write up on the card art and the process he went through from initial sketches to final card art. It was really eye-opening for me, but also really shows you why it costs to buy art. The process can’t really be copied that easily, because you’re targeting human feelings, and that’s hard to do with an imitation. By now, we had cut the decks down to their current numbers, with only cards numbering one to five. Eventually, we would even remove one each of the four and five cards from each player’s starting deck (players started with three copies of each card). Even the Saloon cards would be changed to match this number scale, allowing much more freedom to players to craft a play style they like. Changes now were small and gradual. A fine rasp to take the sharp edges off, rather than the surgical shovel used in the early stages.

One problem remained though. Roland hated westerns. After Western Legends, he was sick of it. I think he tried for about four weeks to find a different theme that fit the game. Sci-fi, boxing, fencing, medieval sword fighting, and other weird ideas. Eventually Roland gave in, having found no suitable replacement, and I quote “if I’m going to draw it, then I’m going to draw it how I want!” This was still a man who had asked me if he could draw the cards. What came out of this though, was a look back at the art of the period. The colours of the Old West were not fifty shades of brown, but a colourful expression of a wild landscape that played with the sun and sky. This is where the colour palette used in the game came from, and it is all the better for it!

On the plus side also, pushing him into an uncomfortable style that he didn't want forced him to come up with one of the best card backs ever!

This was now a production outfit. Roland was operating as artist, I was handling game design still as well as layout and publishing, and we both managed play testing. It must be stated, that you need to have friction when making anything. If you’re not disagreeing at least a little, something is wrong. This was not a problem for us! The best example and culmination of this was centred around the card that is now called “Dodge ’n’ Shoot”. The card ability originally was “Topdeck. If you win, ignore an Injury you are about to receive”. Topdeck just means both players reveal the top card of their deck and compare the numbers. Higher number wins, repeat ties until someone wins. This seems simple, right? Well, during a test with Roland and a friend of mine, this was the “discussion” after the Roland played said card to the table and starter dictating what was happening:

Michael: That’s not how that card works, Roland.
Roland: Yes it is.
Michael: What do you mean? I wrote the damn card!
Roland: It is! We both Topdeck, then combat is resolved by the Topdeck! It makes sense!
Michael: No! You just ignore an injury! That is literally what is written on the card.
Roland: The card is wrong, that is not what it says!
….

This continued for a while. The clock inched slowly over two minutes as we screamed at each other like an old married couple, in a crowded and busy pub, while my friend sat there awkwardly like a child in the middle of a divorce settlement. Eventually I stopped and tried to explain one more time what I had written on the card to Roland. The response eventually was: “Oh, I get it now….that’s dumb, why would it do that? It should just say what I said”. The table was silent for a few seconds. My friends eyes darting back and forth like he’s assessing the emergency exits. Then we just laughed after about ten seconds and continued playing as before. Like I said, you need friction, but maybe more important is the ability to resolve the friction. His version is in the final game by the way…

It is now March 2024, and the game is ninety percent finished. Artwork is mostly done, the rules have been ironed out to “clear enough”, and I had already started making the full 52 card print sheet. This is not normal. You should never, ever finish a game to this level before it is signed with a publisher (Kickstarter excluded). The awkward question I have been avoiding like the plague comes up, “So, ready to pitch the game now”? I am not given time to think however, as Roland most likely has already anticipated my response and simply says “Let’s go to UK Games Expo in May, it will be a good place to test it out”. I have zero excuses really, and I really should stop avoiding the part that is the most important. Flights, accommodation, travel companions, and wives are all organised in the week. Remember how I said the game was ninety percent complete? Well, that remaining ten percent would turn out to be around fifty percent of the work.

The following is a lesson in what you should not do. The artwork was finished, and I really do mean finished, and we spent maybe four weeks arguing over colours and fonts. I have a professional ink printer at home with proper, colour accurate cardstock, so naturally we spent a few days just printing out entire sheets of cards, artwork, boxes, posters, just to see and compare the colours. If you think that sounds silly, that’s okay. You’re wrong, but I don’t begrudge you for not wanting to go down that insanely deep rabbit hole. We made full art boxes, Roland cut and folded card inserts, I got all the cards professionally printed and cut, and I made full-art A4 sell sheets. All in all, we made about ten or twelve “prototypes” for giving away at the expo. The week leading up to UKGE I spent a minimum of twelve hours a day working on something, Roland was working on my desk next to me for about eight of those hours usually as well. It was also absolute overkill, and you shouldn’t ever do this!

So, UKGE rolls around… in Birmingham. The first day was all business. Roland dragged me around the expo, introducing me to publishers, sneaking some prototypes into their hands, other designers, and even a couple of pitch sessions he managed to organise last minute. I said little, just watched and learned, answered some questions when people asked me, and tried incredibly hard to absorb all of it. There was so much nuance to dealing with publishers. Nothing is ever a no, but it is an opening for another question though. The amount of info is overwhelming. Sometime in the afternoon Roland told our friend and I that he was off to have meetings for several hours, so we went off to actually explore the expo for the first time that day, and maybe even play a game or two!

Beer o’clock finally arrives (have you noticed the pattern yet?) and we head to one of the terraces outside the expo to relax and wait for Roland to catch up. It is sunny in England, serenity around the terrace, the dull patter of a nearby fountain and birds, and all is right in the world for a few minutes. Then Roland arrives and it begins. He’d been off with Trevor Benjamin (one of the designers for the Undaunted series, among other things) testing the game. Trevor liked it, and said he should show it to Osprey. What a coincidence Roland had a meeting with them shortly! They liked it also apparently. To top it off, the person at Osprey who would likely review it later was a huge fan of Westerns. I made sure to point that out to Roland every single chance I got by the way. Remember exploring the different themes, Roland?! Remember! I know you will eventually read this! Long story short, Osprey were keen, and would review it internally and let me know at a later date. Business as usual.

You’ve seen the box art, and the title, and the BGG listing so you know they took the game. But the story isn’t over. This was just Friday at UKGE, and I had booked myself a table at UK Playtesting for Saturday afternoon, I think it was three hours long? If you don’t know who Playtest UK are, look it up. A really great, helpful community that organise playlists all over the UK. I arrived on time, setup a couple of copies on the table, put the marketing stands, sell sheets, business cards and posters up. I looked completely out-of-place. Most people show up with actual prototypes, rough drawn art, simple place holders etc. Here I was with full art posters and an essentially finished game. The Saturday afternoon slot is supposed to be quieter though, as people are already tired and looking to relax. Wrong. I had three small tables crammed together, technically enough for six people to play in three pairs. Those seats were full from start to finish, and then some more. I had three games running at all times, and I was usually playing in one of the games. People came here expecting prototypes, so they knew what they were getting into, but still they are all very understanding. Every single person filled in the feedback forms, and gave really positive comments. Two people tried to buy a prototype, and I exchanged a couple of business cards with different publishers wandering around, as well as chatting with one or two others who were’t looking for this type of game, but really wanted to know more. It drew too much attention.

At the end of the test session, my friends scraped my semi-conscious body off the tables and helped me pack up. A long, low wheeze was all that emerged from my mouth. I sounded like an orphan from Victorian times with black lung, unable to make more than simple sounds and grunts, indicating mostly through gestures and coughing. More than three hours of yelling over the constant roar of bustling people had taken its toll, and my voice was basically gone. The obvious solution was finishing for the day and going to the pub early. Seemed to work. The rest of the expo was less eventful, and I returned to actually doing fun things for the last day, if you don’t count the eight hour queue at the airport to leave….

[heading]End Credits[/heading]
Jeez, that is a huge wall of text and pictures. I wanted to give you all the actual story of the game development, rather than just the game changes with each iteration, etc etc. You know that the final game is the best parts of everything we tried, so those steps aren’t the real dev diary. Working with Osprey Games has also been quite painless. They would of course contact me in the first couple of months of their own testing, and ask questions about gameplay changes. However, remember all those test notes I took? Every time they asked for a possible design change I just told them the day and test result from that specific change, already tested. Eventually it became clear that we really had finished the game. They had a few artwork changes they wanted to make to meet their own guidelines and criteria, which is normal. Other than that we mostly argued about fonts and colours, and the rulebook of course…

It must be said, that without a lot of incredible people this wouldn’t be here today. My regular playtest group, mostly Steve van Bennekom, who played maybe over one hundred games in the course of development. He put up with my constant testing every week, and shaped so much of the game that you see today. Trevor Benjamin was a huge help, not just for his referral, but also advice and wisdom about the board game industry in the latter days of UKGE. Lastly of course, the game would not exist without Roland MacDonald. Not just because he drew pretty pictures, or knew the right people, or had the right experience, or pitched it to every man and his dog. He basically mentored me, without me knowing in the beginning, in a lot of aspects of creative design. More than that, he pushed me continuously, knowing that I needed a little push to really deliver. Hard work pays off, but you still need luck, and good friends. I know I was luckier than most people, but still had to do silly amounts of work. Hopefully my wife will read this and finally understand now that all her brilliant game ideas are not worth fifty percent of the money just because she thought of it, and that the real work is in the execution.

Hope you like the game at least!
Michael

by Justin Bell

I have spent the last several months revisiting the game Rats of Wistar, a design from Simone Luciani and Danilo Sabia released all the way back in…2023. (Yes! A game three years old!!!) When I first reviewed the game over at Meeple Mountain, I talked about the many details that worked for me in a four-stars-out-of-five article.

Since then, I like where Rats of Wistar has landed in the overall scheme of the tabletop strategy gaming landscape. It’s holding onto a spot in the top 1,000 games on BGG (as of this posting, spot 930, a spot that might have changed even while you were reading this article), and that feels about right. The general consensus: Rats of Wistar is a solid way to spend a strategy gaming afternoon, with a strong action selection system. There are plenty of reasons why the game hasn’t landed higher; Rats of Wistar is a game most people in my network have heard of, but many have never pushed to try, at least not yet.

I suspect that, for a few players, Rats of Wistar is probably one of their favorite games. For others, even a single play made those players hope that they never see Rats of Wistar in a dark alley again (a dark alley with proper game tables and just enough lighting, of course).

I love going to the Ratings & Comments area on BGG to see what people think about a game, to see the trend line of a game’s comments after it first hits and then again later (months, and often years, later), to see how public opinion has possibly shifted. Our BGG community is a colorful bunch, so I often go in just to read what people think of a title after I have played it for the first time or after finishing a full review.

The commentary on Rats of Wistar is emblematic of how I feel about game opinions, too. Some people have games they love…and it’s wild to see how differently others feel about those exact same games. Certainly, no single game is for everyone. But I am continuously amazed by how widely opinions can vary on the same title.



Rats of Wistar is a lot of things—a worker placement game, a hand management game, a game about racing for public milestones, a tableau builder.

It’s also a game with two decks of Invention cards: 100 “basic” Invention cards, and another 80 “advanced” Invention cards, and all 180 cards are different. Some of the cards have one of five Skill icons: Intelligence, Agility, Stamina, Perception, or Strength. Some cards have no tags at all. Most cards are worth positive points at the end of the game, while a few are worth negative points. All the cards in Rats of Wistar have a cost to play, which includes a mix of resource costs (wood or metal) as well as conditional requirements, such as other tags from played cards.

The best Rats players typically play the most cards. I spent about six months lurking in the top 25 on the Rats of Wistar implementation on Board Game Arena, and I learned a lot from the world’s best players (mostly by getting smoked) on my way up the leaderboards. Now, I mostly play Rats for fun, because of the things many of you have called out in the Ratings & Comments area on BGG. That also means my stress level is lower—Friendly Mode has been a blessing—and this has not diminished my love for the game.

So, again: Rats of Wistar is a card game. It is a swingy card game, for all the reasons most card-driven tableau building games are swingy thanks to the random flop of new cards into the market and the opportunity to top-deck new cards. It’s also a little swingy right from the jump, thanks to a pre-game card draft.

During setup, each player selects a pair of Invention cards, one basic Invention and one advanced Invention card, with the player last in turn order drafting cards first. Rats of Wistar is a very tight action selection game, and going last even in the first round can be a detriment, one reason players might find themselves using one of their three first-round actions to flip turn order by visiting a space known as the Alchemist’s Hut location on the main board.

But the reward for going last is not a bad one, in a game where the right combination of cards to start the game could lead to some juicy bonuses.

In part, this is because there are three public milestones available at the start of each game. Sometimes, the milestones are driven by those card tags I mentioned above; these Skill icons might mean a game where you need to have two Strength icons to get a few points and an instant bonus. Or, you might be in a game where the first player to dig three rooms in their Rat compound (these are not your mama’s rats, friends) earns four points and a card draw of an additional Invention card.

But selecting cards first, in a card game where cards are a big driver, ends up being a big deal. I love it…and so many of you do not. A quick sample of the negative comments on only the most recent page on the game’s BGG Comments area:

“Starts strong…but devolves into a random luckfest unworthy of its playtime.”

“Not my cup of tea.”

“Very snowbally.”

“Was this playtested more than a handful of times?...too much hidden information on the board, too much imbalance among cards.”

I love these comments and respect these opinions. But, you know what’s funny? These are exactly some of the reasons why I love Rats of Wistar! Nothing makes me angrier, especially in games where there are dozens, if not hundreds of cards, where the cards in a game ARE completely balanced. I want cards that are intentionally unbalanced—some Invention cards cost more than others, but provide a whale of a bounty. Other cards in Rats of Wistar have crap powers…but those cards have the Skill icons needed to complete missions and objectives later in the game.

I’ve played games of Rats of Wistar where I was the one snowballing other players. I built up a hand of cards that played well into each other, then got on a run where I played a card which allowed me the chance to play another card for free, or a card that gave me a once-per-round power that tied beautifully into 3-4 other cards in my hand. In other games, I got completely trashed by a player whose hand management destroyed my game or built up combos that I could never compete with.

I LOVE Rats of Wistar for those reasons!



Nothing brings joy quite like spending 15-20 minutes over a lunch break scanning the feed on a game from my recent list of plays.

Whenever I pick up a new game and have a few plays under my belt, I like to dive in to see what everyone else thinks. The beauty of the BGG platform is that people love sharing their opinions here…the good, the bad, the ridiculous.

Sometimes, I come to validate those feelings with my own confirmation bias. I recently completed three plays of a new strategy title, and came in to confirm that some of the things I saw were also things that other players experienced. I also drop in to the Comments area when I play something I love but worry that no one else likes it…it might sound great that I liked it, but if no one else likes it, would anyone else bother to play it with me later?

But my favorite forums always end up being the ones for games like Rats of Wistar. Generally, people liked it, and most Luciani titles have gotten love over the years. Even with the negatives I sprinkled above, the reality is that most people have nice things to say about their experience with the game.

But when people don’t like a game, they flame it, and they flame it hard. I love reading the passion that some players bring to the table with their emotions in these things, and as someone who has also dropped a rant on the boards from time to time, I totally get it.

I really believe that I like a game more when there are some strong opinions, in all directions. I want to fight for the games I enjoy playing, and warding off some of the haters makes me feel a little better about my own thoughts, even in cases where I find myself in the minority. Everyone has a point of view, and now I just need to find other fans so that I can consistently get that game to the table.

BGG is a wonderful platform for everything: meeting people, sharing opinions, reading the news, learning about your next favorite new toy. And when it comes to opinions, so many people have so many interesting things to say!

by Johnny Chin

In March 2026, Game Market West returned to Guildhouse in San Jose, California. It was very exciting to appear on the local news! It’s not every day that indie tabletop designers get this kind of spotlight (editor's note: video linked at the bottom of this report). Seeing our community highlighted on a mainstream platform really shows that there’s growing interest in small, creative voices and the unique experiences they bring to games.

For the games at this event, several designs embraced cozy or wholesome play. Anti-Anxiety Card Game focused on mindfulness and connection, Barista of the Month captured the joy of serving customers, and Light Up The Night delivered a solo puzzle of chasing fireflies into star patterns. These games highlighted a trend toward emotionally driven and accessible gameplay.

Anti-Anxiety Card Game by Studio Cassava (Jared & Hannah)
It's a relaxing 1-2 player card game that helps reduce anxiety for college students and all ages through fun self-care prompts. Play alone or with a partner, connect with each other through mindfulness connections, and explore silly prompts like sharing your favorite joke, or Lo-fi song--or just forcing each other to go on a walk during the game!

Barista of the Month by Anthony Barbieri
Manage your ingredients to serve the perfect cup of coffee in this quick and competitive tabletop card game! I wanted to highlight this game as it was very much a labor of love. Each card was cut out by the designer one by one.

Light Up The Night by Andrew DiLullo
Run through fields of fireflies and chase them into the sky as a small child that believes that's how stars are formed. Light Up The Night is a single player puzzle game that sees you running through the firefly laden fields to chase as many fireflies as you can, while trying to form specific types of stars that tighten your movement choices. The fields wax and wane as you chase fireflies away, how many will you be able to launch into the sky in only 6 short rounds?

Designers also explored storytelling and RPGs.

Florafiora: The Storytelling Card Game by Emily Hancock
Co-op storytelling card game for 4 players. Each player takes a turn as the lead storyteller / (GM). Collaborate on a group backstory together, then explore the Storywheel (alternating location and encounter cards). Tell a full story with no additional game prep in an hour!

HeartBeasts by Charlie Huggins & Ajda Gokcen
HeartBeasts is a collaborative TTRPG filled with magical creatures and cinematic, episodic, fast-paced gameplay—inspired by video games and anime like Pokémon and Persona. Its flexible, unique system draws from "tabletalk" RPG favorites Ryuutama and Fabula Ultima to weave strategy with storytelling.

Overall, GMW Spring 2026 felt like a celebration of variety. Whether you came for quick party games, collaborative storytelling, or complex strategy, this season reinforced what we do best: showcasing bold ideas and the passionate designers behind them. We'll see you at the next Game Market West on September 13, 2026! You can sign up for updates or apply as a designer.

Youtube Video

by Steph Hodge

Are you into the darker themes such as the Cthulhu Mythos and Zombies? Well, here are some upcoming releases that might fit your fancy.

[imageid=9361246 medium rep]▪️ Asmodee recently sent out a newsletter with information about a new Arkham Horror: The Card Game (2026). This core set will now replace the 2021 version of the game, but everything is still compatible if you were to combine the sets. For those who are familiar with the game, it will have new discoveries. They are also releasing 5 new investigator packs.

From the Asmodee website:



If you love reading, they have also released a new book called Bullets in the Dark by Cath Lauria, the latest novel from Aconyte Books.



▪️ Bézier Games announced a few new card games for release this June. The first called Zombie Princess. A trick-taking card game with variable player powers, and is the follow-up to the successful Rebel Princess. For 3-6 players and takes about 30-60 minutes to play.

From BGG:



▪️ Haunted Mouse is another card game releasing soon from Bézier Games designed by Jonathan Cox. This plays 2-5 players in about 20-45 minutes.

From BGG:


How could you resist this adorable plushie?

by Beth Heile

The Preview lists for both Origins and Gen Con 2026 are both live.

Haven't heard of a Preview list yet? Don't worry! There are so many features on BGG it's hard to keep track of them all. A Preview serves as a list of new and upcoming games that will be available at a specific convention, either for sale or as a demo.

FOR ATTENDEES:
Users attending those conventions are able to search, filter, sort, and save information from this list to help them target games they want to try or buy. Preview lists also have the booth numbers to help you easily create maps to buy/try your favorite games as efficiently as possible.

FOR BGG USERS:
Users visiting BGG can view this list to see which new titles are popular and getting a lot of buzz before a large event. You can use those same search, filter, sort, and save features to create personal wishlists of games you want to learn or buy. If the game is available through a major retailer, you can click through to the retailer directly from the Preview list (full disclosure: BGG may earn a commission from purchases made through Preview links.)

FOR PUBLISHERS:
Posting on a Preview list is completely free but is limited to titles that have been for sale only in the last four months or available as playable demos to the public. Preview lists are a great way to promote your new titles and share any deals or discounts you might be running at your booth. And did we mention it's free?

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

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

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

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

by bruno faidutti

I became really interested in boardgame design in the early eighties. In these times, we had a handful of games and didn’t know much, if anything, about their designers. There were only a handful of names. David Parlett, the designer of Hare and Tortoise, was British. The other ones, Sid Sackson, Peter Olotka and the Future Pastimes team, were Americans. We vaguely knew something was beginning in Germany, but no names were famous yet. The polyglott and cosmopolitan Alex Randolph was the most fascinating character.

Alex Randolph

We knew that a after a golden childhood in very expensive Swiss boarding schools, this scion of a rich American family, whose parents were ambassadors, had studied philosophy and math, had worked as a secret agent, had brought a cute card game, Raj, from India, had lived in Japan and become a first rate Shogi player. He then settled in Venice where, with friends Leo Colovini and Dario de Toffoli, he had designed Inkognito, a secret agent game during the carnival of Venice. Alex Randolph was a character just out of a European novel, and I deeply regret having never met him.

Alex Randolph playing Shogi

Most of Alex Randolph’s designs are abstract, if not mathy. Twixt and Ricochet Robots are often said to be his masterworks, but I’ve never been much fond of them, as they feel too cold for me. I have played much more games of Inkognito, Intrigues à Venise in French, a deduction game in which one must first find out one’s partner before discreetly communicating with them about our common mission. Gorgeously edited, it revisits Clue with humor and subtleness. This game showed me that there was something more to do with Clue, and probably motivated me to design Mystery of the Abbey.

Games by Alex Randolph in my collection. I thought I also owned the tomato-vampire game, I don't remember its name, and Die Rüsselbande, but I probably gave them or left them in my old home.

There are many other Alex Randolph designs I played a lot and still occasionally play. Raj / Hol’s der Geier is inspired by a traditional Indian game about which I’d like to know more. Ghosts is a deceptively simple tactical and bluffing game. Camel Gois one of the most original racing games. Big Shot, recently republished by my Korean friends at Mandoo Games, is a gem of an auction game.

Alex Randolph in Venice, with a copy of Veleno

In the late eighties, I incidentally played a lesser know Randolph design, Veleno, an abstract with very simple mechanisms. Each player on turn moves a common pawn on a board, capturing a token on a neighboring space. Those who follow my creations know that while I am wary of cooperation games, I have always been interested in games with a single pawn moved by all players, and idea I had already used in Silk Road and Isla Dorada.

Gute Nachbarn, German edition of Veleno

The other fascinating aspect of Veleno is its tricky three- and four-player scoring system, in which each player adds their left neighbor’s score. This clever rule gave its name to the German edition of the game, Gute Nachbarn - the nice neighbor. In Veleno, you have a good neighbor on the left, a bad one on the right (like in real life), and you're the good neighbor of your bad neighbor. I've reused this rule in a completely different and more recent card game, Harvest Valley.

For years, I had this game in my thoughts. The simple and elegant system was fascinating, but the actual game play a bit lacking. The small playing board and the unbalanced values of the colored tokens often made for scripted games, in which movements were obvious and the winner determined in two or three turns. Then two years ago, on a whim, I dug up my old copy of Veleno and started to think of this game as I would like it, with a bigger board, more variety in the tokens and the scoring, and more interaction between players.

One of my first prototypes

I soon named my game Tonari, meaning neighbor in Japanese, because it sounded nice for an abstract, because Alex Randolph had had a Japanese life, because it reminded of the German name, Gute Nachbarn, and the central idea of the game, and because at that time I was trying, with little success, to learn some Japanese.

My final prototype

Like a novel or a piece of music, a board game never comes out of nowhere, is never entirely new and original, and it’s for the best. All my designs have been more or less influenced by other games, games I had liked or disliked, in an attempt to generate similar or dissimilar experiences. The truth is nevertheless that some games are more original than other ones, and Tonari belongs to the least innovative ones. It is not always easy, even for a seasoned game designer like me, to trace the line between minor development of an existing system and really new game. The line is often blurred.

While I was working on what will become Tonari, i was also designing a light card game inspired by another Alex Randolph’s design, Raj. This game, featuring an old lady giving breadcrumbs to pigeons, was finally published as Miaui. It is after both games were nearly finalized, when playing them with friends, that I decided the pigeon game was original enough to be considered a new creation, while Tonari was only a variation on Veleno / Gute Nachbarn, because while it added new pieces, it kept all the original elements in the game. Through his agent Smart Cookie Games, I contacted Michael Katz, Alex Randolph's nephew and heir, who kindly accepted that I could look for a publisher for Tonari, and that if I found one, royalties will be shared half and half.

Publishers are a bit wary nowadays of publishing abstract games. I proposed Tonari unsuccessfully to several of them, and it’s finally IDW which, probably encouraged by the success of Matt Loomis & Isaac Shalev’s Seikatsu, decided to publish it. They didn’t want to go full abstract, but finding the right setting wasn’t easy. There were too many recent games about witch cauldrons, including Wolfgang Warsch’s outstanding The Quacks of Quedlinburg. They finally settled on fishing, with the common pawn being a trawler, and the tokens of different colors representing different varieties of fish. Placing the action in the Southern Kuchinoshima island of Japan after a great tempest, even allows us to keep the name I had chosen for my prototype, Tonari. Even though it was an afterthought, the fishing theme works surprisingly well, and is well rendered by the art of Kwanchai Moriya, an artist with a very specific style with whom I had not worked before. I am particularly fond of the cover art.

Cover of Tonari with artwork by Kwanchai Moriya

When Tonari was published in 2019, it got good reviews, and I had some hope it would, if not become a classic, at least got steady sales for some years. Unfortunately, only a few months after it got on the shelves, IDW decided to quit the board gaming business and focus on what was its core business, comics. The first print run sold quite fast, and that was it.

Journey to Friendly Fishing
Even when, due to the aging audience, a few publisher have recently specialized in revamping older classics, it is still harder to find a new publisher for an older out of print game than for a brand new game. It was even harder for Tonari due to the high quality of the first edition to which the new one would inevitably be compared. That’s why I didn’t try very hard. I had added Tonari to the short list of about twenty older games looking for new editions I occasionally gave to publishers, but the ones I was pushing the hardest were Waka Tanka, Minstrels, Small Detectives and China Moon – if interested by these ones, please contact me!

In February 2025, I went to GAMA in Louisville, a really nice game fair I heartily recommend. I’ll probably attend it again when the political situation in the US will be back to sanity and foreigners will again be welcome. That’s where I met Paul Salomon and the small team of Gamehead, who was already planning to publish in the US two of my games, Venture Angels and Vabanque. I gave him my small catalog of new designs and older stuff available for publication. A few days later, I received an enthusiastic email from Paul, where he told me having not realized before that I was one of the designers of Tonari, one of his favorite games, and one he was certainly willing to republish.

The challenge was to make a new version that would be sufficiently different from the original game, and that will look as nice as the gorgeous first edition. I think we achieved it.

There has been a few major changes to the game itself. The cloth board is double-sided, with a larger board on the back of the original one, making for longer games with up to five players. Of course, this gave us the opportunity to add new types of fishes, like the Kingfish, which brings an instant victory if you get two or three, depending on the number of players, or the Lunker, which brings five points but only to the last player who caught one. This means that there can now be different set-ups with different types of fishes in the lake, because the Eastern sea setting has become a North American lake.

To avoid the occasional very short game, the publisher decided to change the end game trigger. The game now doesn’t end when it is not possible to catch a fish on the neighboring space, and the boat starts again from the central island, until this is not possible anymore. This was the rule we discussed the most because even when short games can be frustrating, the possibility for the players to trigger the end game was for me, especially in two player games, an important tactical element. I suggested a compromise: two rounds of fishing, morning and afternoon, and that’s how I now play.

The fishing storyline imagined by the first publisher worked perfectly, and we kept it for this edition. The setting is now a forest lake, and the fishes are more or less those one can find in North America. The cloth printed board is really nice, and the art by Alisha Giroux is as cute and colorful as that by Kwanchai Moriya for the first edition. The Japanese trawler has become a cute small wooden boat, and the fishermen anthropomorphic animals – a recent trend in boardgames I recently tried to explain in a long article.

Friendly Fishing looks gorgeous, and I wish it a longer success than that of Tonari.

by Justin Bell

I’m a father in a one-car family in Chicago—we don’t drive quite enough to need a second car, and with bikes and a Vespa-style scooter (and a bus line, multiple subway lines, and my own two feet) lying around, it just never made sense to pony up the cash for another vehicle.

Maybe once a month, I try to play board games during the daytime on a Saturday or Sunday. Everyone I know who has kids accepts that weekends are chock-full of kid activities that make it pretty hard—”impossible” might be a better term, based on the season—to break away and sell a partner on the idea that chucking dice is way more important than back-to-back soccer games, music practice, and shuttling children to the local trampoline park for yet another birthday party with 22 other cake-loving rugrats.

Friends were hosting a game day over Memorial Day weekend, so I carved out the negotiations at home to do games for a few hours that Saturday.

“All good,” said the wife. “But I’ll need the car to get the kids around. Can you take the scooter?”

No sweat. That meant I was limited to backpack-friendly games. When you are a trick-taking fanatic, a backpack might be too much space…and when I was hitting game nights at a bar near the Logan Square subway stop in Chicago years ago, I wielded a Quiver card-carrying case. The Quiver was perfect because I brought a few favorites every week that served as fillers between the chunkier titles brought by others. The standing list at the time: San Juan, Race for the Galaxy, UNO, Honshū, and a standard, 52-card deck just in case Spades, Hearts or Gin needed to hit the table.

But I was prepping for a heavier Saturday game day with serious players, and since we had the day, everyone was tasked with bringing one game so that we could hit a lot of different titles. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I was starting a series of review plays of Nippon: Zaibatsu, so I broke out my go-to board game backpack and tried to put Nippon: Zaibatsu into the bag.

Uhh…nope!



I had a moment of panic. To arrive on time by making the 45-minute drive to my friend’s house, I needed to act quickly. Do we have any bigger backpacks in the house? No, although I’ve got a bunch of larger duffle bags or a big board game caddy, but I hate wearing that caddy when I’m on the bike. Does my wife really need the car? Yes, because she is toting two kids to different parts of the suburbs in the afternoon and Uber isn’t gonna fit.

I stared at the Nippon: Zaibatsu box. While the box is fancy, it’s a little too wide with its insert…normally, a non-issue, but for backpack travel, a no-fly zone. So I got to work.

All four trays of individual player components came out, along with the four player boards and the two containers with general resources like crates, iron, and cardboard money chits. Rulebook and player aids? Clearly a requirement—this was a first play for everyone—but I was worried that all that jostling from the plastic trays might scratch the finish on the cover pages. (This is mission critical...I’m a nerd and I have to treat my toys like royalty!)

The worker meeples had their own dedicated cloth bag from the game box, so I threw that in. Then, I grabbed my handy BGG microfiber drawstring bags (the ones with the circular bottom, obviously) for the other bits: factory tiles, upgraded department tokens, expert worker tokens, round markers, local market demand tiles, starting tokens. The solo bits and the expansion extras were left behind—I never include mini expansions on my first play—and that left me with a very reasonable set of items in the backpack.



The best part about Nippon: Zaibatsu’s footprint might be its strangely normal-sized board. As a man expecting a double-sided, tri-fold board with a decent amount of heft, I was shocked (in a good way) to find that this game’s main board is the same size and weight as the board for your thousand-year-old copy of Monopoly or Clue.

All of this made throwing the game into the bag easier. I zipped up the bag and made it to game day a few minutes late. No one cared that I had thrown all the game’s components, piecemeal, into the bag, and the initial concerns of scratches on the player aids and game manual were as silly as they sounded when I made the argument above.

The world carried on, as one would expect. But now that I’ve gone through it—how have I not faced this issue before? Shouldn’t I just look at all my games and pick the one that can be dumped, in full, into my backpack for travel? I already toss a lot of the packaging extras when I consolidate SPIEL Essen pickups and try to jam 40 “large square” (12”x12”x3”) titles into two checked bags, so this shouldn’t be such a stretch.

The truth of it is that I love arriving at game night with the original packaging. I love posting up at a friend’s house or a game cafe with the game box at one end, with the box’s bottom half tucked behind, then into, the top half cover so that everyone can see the title of the game. There’s something satisfying for me when I wrap up a game and put everything back in its proper place with some help from a friend or two.

In many ways, teardown can be just as satisfying as setup, even if I don’t subscribe to the same philosophy as our old friend Eric.

For now, I’m a little more comfortable pivoting when needed. And I’m lucky to say that I can usually avoid any issues on this front most weeks…because I’m usually the one hosting game night.

by Steph Hodge

Gen Con quickly approaches, and I have already gotten a bunch of emails promoting their August and Summer releases. Here are just a handful of games coming soon!

[imageid=8650802 medium rep]▪️ Portal Games (Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island, Neuroshima Hex) announced a partnership with 1 More Time Games (Challengers!) to publish Abroad for a Gen Con release. This is a travel-themed board game that will play 1-4 players in about 60-90 minutes.

From the Newsletter:


▪️ Brotherwise Games announced a new game for release this June called Shards of Creation. A trick-taking card game with a set collection element. For 2-4 players and takes about 30 minutes to play.

From the newsletter:



▪️ From Oink Games, they announced a Gen Con release for North America. The Frozen Passage is a new cooperative card-laying game for 1-4 players and plays in 20 minutes.

From the press release:


▪️ There was another announcement from Oink that they are to release Compress at Gen Con as well. This plays 2-4 players in about 15-30minutes. This is Oink's take on a memory game.

From the announcement:

by David Gordon

Pinched! Designer Diary
Written By David Gordon

In the spring of 2021, I became fascinated with yomi (the Japanese term that means reading your opponent) and found myself exploring it in several designs. The famous goblet of wine scene from the Princess Bride is an illustrative example of the moment I wanted to capture. One iteration eventually became the core loop of Jonathan Gilmour-Long and my game Making Monsters, which is currently available in stores. In Making Monsters, you’re rewarded for correctly anticipating what your neighbor will do.

For this new game, Jon and I wanted to craft a group yomi experience of one vs. many. The core concept of a single player choosing a location and everyone else trying to guess where it was provided the forum for a group think. We imagined lively discussions about where they might go, inspiring provocative “Princess Briding”. Sparks and magic were there in play test #1, and we knew we had something special.

Bohnanza is one of Jon’s and my favorite games –we love the way the scoring is so simple, yet provides varying incentives to different players, facilitating trading. For our scoring, we simplified some of the math and made sure the maximum number of points per card was no more than 1, so that we could use the cards for scoring and avoid an additional currency.

For the theme, my son Ben said he’d been playing a video game that had an underwater lab, and I immediately knew that setting would work here. We would be marine scientists exploring the ocean from an international sea lab. Each day of the week, a different player would have access to a ship, and all the other scientists would have to guess whether that player would use the ship that explores the deep, the trench, or even the abyss.

Sea Lab Board, Player Board, and some cards from July, 2021
Over the course of many months, we tested all different player counts, lengths of games, tweaks to the points systems, special twists for different locations, and the ins and outs of every system. One turning point was a test with Gil Hova, where he recommended that the players who guess incorrectly at least get a card from the deck. Yes, it would be random, but they would get something to build around. This helped the game keep pushing forward but also extended a hand to a player who might be super unlucky. This eventually became what we know as the River in Pinched. We also tested various complexities. We added a system of Community Projects, where you could find use for cards that didn’t match in your hand. We ultimately found the extra complexity wasn’t necessary.

The game quickly became a play tester favorite among our friends. Some grew into huge fans and asked to play it over and over. This is generally a good sign! By the end of the summer of 2021, we were pitching Sea Lab and by September, a publisher offered to sign it if they could get an IP they thought would be a great fit. They tried for a long time but were unable to secure it, so in the spring of 2024, Jon and I started pitching it again. We showed it to David Chircop and Gordon Calleja in April, and on May 2, they offered us a contract! Jon and I had wanted to work with Mighty Boards for a long time, so we were super excited. And yeah, I liked the idea of the publisher’s names being David and Gordon.

Soon after we signed the contract, David approached us about a new setting concept, which Jon and I thought would fit perfectly. Over the next nine months or so, they worked hard to revise every system and make sure it all made sense and felt seamlessly integrated. Jon and I appreciated how often they checked in with us to make sure we agreed with all the editing and art. That was easy, because the art is amazing, and the theme is perfect!

And I personally want to thank Mighty Boards for including my own beagle Gordon Gordon (he was named Gordon before we got him!) on one of the cards in the game!

We truly hope you will enjoy Pinched! and thank you so much for reading this diary.

Play Testers
Michael Addison, Phil Amylon, Jessie Batzel, Chris Chan, Glenn Cotter, Lydia Gallant, Tara Gilmour-Long, Ari Gordon, Ben Gordon, Jen Gordon, Micheal Guigliano, Myles Heffernen, Gil Hova, Nolan James, Jacob Keiser, Suzannah Keiser, Jamie Lichty, Travis Magrum, Pat Moreno, Ian Moss, Daniel Newman, Bryan Oemler, Cici Ogden, Rocco Privetera, Dhaya Ramarajan, Ryan Rodriguez, Jack Rosetree, Micah Sawyer, Catherine Stippell, Max Swietnicki, TAM, Willa Tracy, Bill Ward, Adam Young

In loving memory, Kevin Dunkelberger.

by Justin Bell

Some of you are familiar with The Dusty Euro Series that I craft over at Meeple Mountain: one-off reviews of Euros that are at least 10 years old at the time the article goes up.

I’m lucky to know a lot of players who love to dig into the crates to dust off classics from time to time.

Every so often, I not only play a single older title for game night, but a few all at the same time. I will write about those nights here and discuss the good times shared at the table. I know some players are obsessed with “the cult of the new”, but there are thousands of “old”, great games out there and I will use this platform to ensure people keep getting all kinds of games to the table.

Enjoy!



My man Dan recently celebrated a birthday by hosting game night at his place. While the chatter leading up to the night was tied to some of Dan’s favorite games, such as Marco Polo II: In the Service of the Khan, Caylus, and Lost Ruins of Arnak, Dan claimed that he was open to playing almost anything, as long as folks could make the quick trip to his house.

After we worked through some pizza, Oreo Double Stuf cookies, Dot’s Pretzels, and something that looked like it was healthy (I am told the word I’m looking for is “carrots”), we broke out the bourbon and got to work. Dan’s birthday turned out to be a party of six, so we decided on Uwe Rosenberg’s 1997 negotiation classic Bohnanza to start the night.

Bohnanza is one of those old games that I think a lot of people have heard of, but I don’t think a lot of players—particularly younger players or those who are newer to the hobby—have run out and tried. You can find copies online and I’ve seen copies in stores, particularly hobby stores that have a used game area, but it’s rare that I see Bohnanza used as a “gateway” game for new players like other titles typically used in those circumstances.

That’s a shame, because while I’ve only played the game twice, I came away from this recent play thinking the same thing as some of the other people at the table that night: Bohnanza might be the designer’s best work, and it is absolutely the most straightforward Rosenberg design that I have tried.

Bohnanza is a negotiation game, where prospective bean planters use cards to plant beans into one of two “fields” (simply two empty spaces in front of a player) to earn coins…most coins wins. On a turn, a player must play one or two cards from the “front” of their hand (right or left, but a player must decide this at the beginning of the game and they can never rearrange the cards in their hand), to either continue a matching set of beans from their fields, or wipe a set to create a new field.

Depending on the number of cards in a player’s set—and depending on the number of that bean type in the entire deck, which makes some beans more rare than others—they can wipe a set with enough copies to convert some of those cards into coins, with each converted bean equal to one victory point. After playing cards, a player draws two cards from the top of the deck, flips them for all players to see, then (usually) adds those cards to their own fields if they match before opening negotiation for card trades with their opponents.

It is this last point that makes Bohnanza highly group dependent. Dan is a part of my Wednesday gaming group, with a lot of jokers who talk as much or more smack than I do (hard, but possible), and who prefer the yelling and screaming portions of any game night. Spoiler alert: Bohnanza has a lot of those moments, particularly when players are jockeying for one more blue bean, or trying to negotiate black-eyed bean “futures” by making empty promises for favors later in the game (favors that are absolutely not binding), or yelling because someone’s earlier promise for red beans resulted in that player throwing said red beans into the discard pile to make way for a new set on her next turn.

(Yes, that last part happened to me. Yes, I’m still angry about it, despite the fact that another player and I shared the victory thanks to a matching number of coins and leftover cards remaining in hand. Grudges run deep!)

Bohnanza does run a bit long for my tastes. Our six-player game went for about 70 minutes, mainly because all six of us yelled as much as we could to convince other players that each of us had “the best offer”, every single turn. That’s a LOT of negotiating. But still…

“I think this is the best game ever made,” one player said when we were wrapping up. That player, a game designer himself, got a couple nods from others at the table.

It also reminded me of something else I think about when I’m writing game reviews: when prospective game designers (or even established ones) play games like Bohnanza and they, themselves, are designing a negotiation game, do they think about the fact that making a game as good, or better, than Bohnanza should be the inspiration to make something great?

It’s a fascinating thought.



The second game of the night was the second edition of Camel Up, released in 2018, although the original came out in 2014, ensuring that it qualified for inclusion in this article. (In our play group, Camel Up 2E is known as “the version of Camel Up with box cover art that reads Camel Up, not Camel Cup.” Long-time players know what I am talking about!)

For a few years after the first edition of the game was released, one of the Wednesday night guys would always start the night with Camel Up, because it can accommodate up to eight players and we always had a couple folks showing up late. This also meant that I came to despise Camel Up for a period of time; good or bad, I just don’t want to play the exact same game every time I come to game night!

Camel Up, like Bohnanza, is also a yelling and screaming game. One player, who had played Hot Streak but was seeing Camel Up for the first time, listened to the teach and wondered “did Camel Up rip off Hot Streak?”

“No,” someone said, since Camel Up came out first. “But you are going to get some Hot Streak vibes for sure, especially when camels start going in the wrong direction.”

That’s because the second edition of Camel Up has the same shenanigans as the first edition—dice, camels, a random assortment of ways camels can move forward by moving on their own versus riding on the backs of other camels, betting on camels to finish first or last in both a round or the entire race—plus two new camels, one black and one white, that are moving BACKWARDS all game long.

When a forward-moving camel lands on a backwards-moving camel, that might mean that the pony you thought was certain to win might get carried three spots backwards on multiple turns, throwing an already precarious situation into further disarray. Oh, and did I mention that in the second edition version, there are six dice in the pyramid dice shaker (one for each of the five normal camels, then one die for both the white and black camels) but only five dice are rolled in each leg of the race??

The winner of our play of Camel Up guessed on his very first action of the entire game which camel would finish the race first…and he was right, winning by the difference his total gave him by guessing earlier than anyone else, three points. Camel Up is a gambling game through and through, and having NOT played it for years made it all the more enjoyable.



At this point, one of the guys in the group desperately wanted to get his copy of the also-old, also-brilliant Reiner Knizia game Samurai to the table, so we broke into two groups of three. It was about 9:30 PM on a school night, so my dreams of Dan picking Marco Polo II were off the table. Still, I wanted to honor the birthday boy with one last play.

“I’m good for another hour or so,” I said. “I’ll play whatever you want.”

“How about Puerto Rico?” he asked. Two of us raised our hands to join him; I hadn’t played Puerto Rico in a couple years, at least not “IRL.” (I play the Puerto Rico app all the time, plus I’m more of a San Juan guy than a Puerto Rico guy; San Juan plays faster and serves as a solid filler in my home while scratching most of the same itch.)

Puerto Rico is no stranger to you, the fine people who read our content, as a former #1 overall slot holder and a member of BGG’s Hall of Fame. (Shameless plug: I’m one of the folks featured in the video.) But I swear I say this every time I play Puerto Rico, even when I play it by myself on the app or online on Board Game Arena:

Why doesn’t Puerto Rico hit the table more often?

The other guy at our three-person table hadn’t played Puerto Rico in so long that he needed a full teach…eight, maybe nine minutes later, we were good to go. The production of the original game is gloriously basic; I don’t believe in using cardboard money, so it was both a personal insult and a genuine hoot to distribute coins that felt thinner than notepad paper. Setup was done in a flash, especially with three of us, and we were up and running quickly.

Puerto Rico, like Race for the Galaxy and other games that feature the hallmarks that made them so innovative “back in the day”, uses the nuances of the active player advantage or “privilege” to such great effect. Just picking a role each turn—especially the ones that had just enough coins piled on from previous-round neglect to make them attractive—was a joy, picking up the physical role tiles to kick off a new set of actions.

I went hard on the Settler action and quarry tiles, piling up four quarry tiles in what felt like a blink of an eye, making Builder actions really cheap later once I got enough colonists in place. One player went big on production and market benefits, and was the only player to participate in the coffee and tobacco markets. Another player decided early on that he needed his own boat for shipping, so he bought a Wharf tile then piled up a nice array of corn, sugar, and indigo fields to create a handsome shipping empire.

Turns were moving quickly, just the way I like it. I got to socialize my terrible British accent by saying “well ‘allo, Guvna!” every time we passed the Governor tile, dictating the new first player for a fresh round of actions. Taking turns that benefited only me was also a joy, a joy shared each time another player did it to the rest of us. (Curse you, Dan, for taking those three coins on the Trader tile and selling the final item to the Goods Market, closing the rest of us out of making money that turn!)

Scores were close at the end: 52, 47, 47. But I was happy to see the birthday boy go out a winner. I blamed myself for tossing a bunch of corn into the ocean—bad craftsman and captain timing, and haven’t we all been there?—but I can fix those problems another day.

In the meantime, I got to bask in the glory of enjoying old games with friends. I’m excited to hear about some of the classics all of you got to the table over the holiday weekend!

by Steph Hodge

▪️ Fort Circle Games has been busy at work creating so many games! There are four games scheduled for release this June, followed by three more games later this year in the Fall. Many have heard of their successful game called Votes for Women, which is also being restocked this summer.

[imageid=8535024 medium rep]▪️ The first game to catch my attention was Shakespeare's First Folio as I quite enjoy the theme. A game for 1-4 players and plays in about 45-60 minutes. The mechanisms listed on BGG are really what have me intrigued, as they list Set Collection, Trick-Taking, and Worker-Placement.

From the BGG Page:



▪️ Hunt for Blackbeard has just released. This is a game designed by Volko Ruhnke (Fire in the Lake, Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001 – ?). This is a game for 2 players and takes about 30-45 minutes to play.

From the BGG Page:



▪️ Next I noticed First Monday in October designed by my friend Talia Rosen, who loves the heavy thematic games. So, it makes sense to me that this would be a heavy thematic game. A game for 1-4 players and plays in 90-120 minutes. To release this June.

From the BGG Page:


▪️ The final game Fort Circle Games is releasing this June is The Halls of Montezuma. This is a wargame for 1-2players and plays in 60-90 minutes.

From the BGG Page:




The other games you should keep an eye out later this Fall are Night Witches, Peace 1905, and A More Perfect Union. Seems like a bunch of games to look forward to coming from Fort Circle Games.

by Sandro Blasich

It is a rather interesting story of how I came up with the idea for TEDOKU.

So, I finished a game for SPIEL Essen pitch and like every year I watched SPIEL Essen preview list and I saw a game that looked almost 90% as mine. It was so similar that I gave up on it and I didn't pitch it. That was a game with Tetris elements. However, since I like both sudoku and Tetris, suddenly an idea crossed my mind that I could actually combine those two elements in one game. As it usually happens, I had that idea in one of those rare quiet moments that you can have when you have kids: when you lock yourself in the bathroom 😊 So, I designed TEDOKU but I had no plans to pitch it at SPIEL Essen. I designed it for fun, just for myself like I said in my previous designer diary.

Basically, the first prototype was practically a final product. Everything just clicked from the beginning. It was easy to design it and it was even easier to make it.

During one board game night at my house, a friend saw a box with no name on my board games shelf and asked me about that game. I said that it was just a game I designed for myself. He was curious about it so we played it a few times and he really liked it. He told me that he thought the game was complete and ready for SPIEL Essen. I wasn't so sure but in the end I decided to pitch it and I managed to get some meetings at Essen for it.

And just like that I signed my first contract. I was very happy. I couldn't believe it but it seemed that I'm finally going to have a published game. As you know, it takes some time from the signing of the contract to the exact publishing date so it took several years for TEDOKU to be published. TEDOKU was my first signed game but in the meantime my other game got published first (Choconnect).

TEDOKU is a 'roll, flip and write game“ in which you try to fit special shapes called polyominoes into your own Sudoku-style grid. The result of a die tells you what to draw and a card flip limits where you can draw it. When drawing a shape you can rotate or mirror it in any direction. If you don't have enough space to draw it properly you must skip your turn. The game finishes after 20 rounds (after 20 cards have been drawn). Each player scores points based on the number of completed sectors, columns and rows in their grid. Also the replayabillity is huge because there are 27 cards in the deck and at setup you remove 7 cards at random. There are 6 pencils in the box but if you have more pencils you can play it with any number of players. The game is also great for solo play. TEDOKU is a small, cosy game but it's got a lot of substance due to a number of interesting choices that you can make. TEDOKU is also a perfect travel size game as well.

I'm very pleased with how Ares Games developed my game. Thank you Roberto Di Meglio.
And of course I must mention Matteo Ceresa, who made a great job with the illustrations and graphic design reminiscent of Japanese art. Thank you Matteo.

by Justin Bell

I checked my phone’s weather app for the upcoming week. The forecast showed a steady diet of inbound beauty in Chicago: lots of sunny days in the high 60s and low 70s (Fahrenheit, for my friends abroad), an outlook of blue skies, and a healthy dose of days where temperatures would rise into the 80s.

Most people in Chicago love it when the temperatures start to warm up; I still believe Chicago is the best place on Earth from Memorial Day to Labor Day. It’s just a totally different place when you add warm weather to the already solid roster of great people, great restaurants, great sports (well, maybe “good” is more appropriate for our pro teams) and great sightseeing, because we also have a beach ready to go when people don’t want to fly to places like Florida, and the summer street festival season is something else.

I, too, love warm weather. Unfortunately, when it gets warm in Chicago, every board gamer I know essentially stops playing games to take advantage of the weather. As a player, and as a game reviewer, it’s the toughest time of the year to find bodies.

***

One of my former steadies is a strategy gaming group formed during the early months of COVID. For a stretch of time, 6-8 of us would gather a few times a week and mask up to play games all over the city. The group was reliable, in part, because most of us had nothing else going on. We found each other strictly because of availability; the world had shut down, but gamers seem to always find a way to chuck those dice.

I’ve never played board games on a nearly daily basis like I did for the first two years post-COVID. I was playing games four, sometimes five days a week for stretches, especially in the dark days of winter when the best thing you could do was survive the trip from your house to a buddy’s place and find parking that wasn’t “dibbed” by some guy’s lawn chair in Avondale.

Even in that group, everyone scattered from early June through late August. It was like college let out for summer break, and you could only find your high school friends for drinks and mozzarella cheese stick specials at the local TGI Friday’s / Bennigan’s / Chili’s. (Gosh, I miss a good round of greasy cheese sticks.)

Nowadays, it sets in with my review crew right around the first week of May. I always put out the call the weekend before review crew night with the normal request: ”Games this Monday! Who’s free?” Usually, we fill seats within a few hours. But when summer approaches, the rapid response rate turns into a trickle.

“I can’t make it this week.”

“Yeah, I’m taking a vacation with the family all of next week.”

“Friends in town, we’re doing drinks on a patio in the city.”

“Out” (not even showing enough respect to end this already abbreviated sentence for formal punctuation!)

Now, some of this is the double-edged sword that I have set up for myself: I’m a nerd, but I prefer playing games with nerds who also have a pretty robust life away from the table. Part of this “mistake” is my own; I need more people in my life like me, who have kids, or are getting older, or have nothing going for themselves on Monday nights. (Like, seriously, who has hot plans on a Monday? It’s Monday, for crying out loud!)

And that’s usually in early May. By late May, it’s DEFCON 2 at my place. Review nights are so close to summer extinction that I begin refusing some review requests from publishers, because I know it’s going to be a challenge to get players often enough to get 3-4 plays of a new title in before posting a review.

***

Gaming at home is unaffected by the weather. My wife, or my two kids, or any mix of those three are around often enough on a rainy day or after Saturday morning cartoons or when I’ve tied the night’s dessert to playing a new card game. (“Yeah yeah yeah; we have ice cream coming up. But first…”)

Because I do at least one play of each review copy with the family, or we play a lot of the family classics for fun, I’m still playing games 2-3 times a week at home.

But for my other groups, those warm outdoor temperatures make it tough.

I love the Logged Plays feature on BGG. While I was drafting this article, I was curious about my recent summer activity, so I looked up my summer plays over the last five years. Each year’s lowest monthly count happens not in December for the holidays, or convention months like October where I’m out of pocket for a week or two. For me, it is ALWAYS summer.

In 2021, it was May, with 27 logged plays. 2022, it was March, with only 19, but then I went back and checked out why—I was in the final month of a job at another company, and I was out of town for almost the entire month. The second-lowest total was June, with 30 plays. In 2023, it was July, with 19.

You get the idea. Since a lot of the year’s big US releases hit at Gen Con, then the global releases hit SPIEL Essen, summer usually ends up being the time that I begin to clear the calendar for the hottest upcoming games and convention hauls. To cleanse the palate, I love to play games in my collection that don’t get enough love during other points of each year, and mix standing favorites with titles that can get a lot more love than usual, especially with the kids.

Last year, it was a solid mix. Union Stockyards hit the table, one of those fun, underappreciated one-hour Euros I love to whip out from time to time, in the family of Chicago-themed games that also happens to feature hogs, real-world businesses, and a solid, snipe-y area control battle. Stone Age came out! Rococo: Deluxe Edition was still great, and it was still ridiculously deluxe. My son fell in love with Mastermind and insisted on playing it a bunch in late June.

A few review copies got 2025 summer love as well. Since the Tiletum expansion, Prospect for Silver, arrived in July, that meant I had no choice but to get the base game out to refresh my memory. The same was true with Xylotar, an incredible trick-taking game, to prep for the Xylotar: Unhinged plays later in the month.

No matter what time of year it is, campaign game groups are really challenging for me. Still, I got in the first few chapters of Clank! Legacy 2: Acquisitions Incorporated—Darkest Magic before summer vacations killed off my campaign group.

That means the safest campaigns are with people who already live at the house…which made the first eight missions of Metal Gear Solid: The Board Game with my son a breeze. (“Snake? Snake? SNAAAAAAAAKE!!!!”)

Memories from last year are getting me hyped for the summer ahead, despite the lack of players. Fantastic Factories made its way to the table before dinner a few nights ago, after sitting quietly on a shelf for years. I mixed in a play of Brass: Lancashire with an upcoming hidden role game last week. I’m wrapping up reviews of a couple of the Pax titles from Ion Game Design, a family-weight card game called Circadia, and in the process of relearning Nippon on Board Game Arena, I’m also prepping plays of Nippon: Zaibatsu over the next few weeks. And now that Nucleum: Gibraltar has arrived, I’ll line up a few plays of that one soon.

So, I’ll still get some gaming in while the temperatures heat up. But, I won’t be sad at all when that cold air kicks up again this fall!

by Leonardo Alese

Hi! I am Leonardo, the a-bit-of-everything at Tablescope, including game design, taxes, app development, booth setup, editing, and community. But never art, I don’t do art.

This diary focuses on the decisions we made on how physical components interact with the companion software of Light Speed: Arena, the party game where players strategically aim lasers in real time and snap a picture to let the app unfold the battle. As this is quite a new territory, I hope our development process can spark an interesting conversation.

To provide some context, Light Speed: Arena reimplements the 2003 Light Speed by James Ernest and Tom Jolly, published by Cheapass Games. This is a unique card game where everyone slams their ships onto the table and then, using rulers and tokens, traces laser beams printed on the cards to see who hit whom. It was chaotic, clever, and unlike anything else at the time. But also fiddly and slow in the resolution phase.

In the Tablescope version, besides the photo-assisted resolution, we introduced new gameplay and customization options, components, and a new theme. This edition was funded and improved through Kickstarter in 2024, started retail at the end of 2025, and was freshly nominated for the Golden Geeks!

Let’s now dive into what cardboard does in Light Speed: Arena.

Cardboard is your input device
In a digital hybrid game, someone or something has to tell the app what to do.

We began with classic app menus and toggles for selecting game modes, but we quickly noticed a fundamental problem: there was no visual connection between what the app knew and what was happening on the table. It felt like an extra, detached layer that players had to manage mentally. That disconnect pushed us to rethink the entire setup philosophy.

Instead of asking players to select modes in the app, we explored whether the physical components themselves could communicate the game state. Over time, we shifted sponsors, team mode, unleashed factions, and more into purely physical configurations. If something is visible in the final photo, it is active. There are no hidden settings. This approach made the experience more consistent and more intuitive. Players express the game through cardboard, and the app simply reads reality.

Cardboard is harmless
A game that works through a photo has to look a bit weird, right? Right, Anakin?

In the beginning, we assumed so and decided it was perfectly fine if Light Speed: Arena had to look different. If the tech needed visible markers or unusual layouts to work properly, then so be it. Early prototypes reflected this mindset and showcased the flavor of an augmented reality demo project more than a memory-making board game.

As the system became more robust, we started challenging that assumption. We asked ourselves, “What if we removed that? And this?” From there, we began removing every visual crutch and hiding all detection information directly inside the artwork. Right now, the slightly peculiar feature someone might notice is the white border around the tiles. Still, we worked to match it with the comic-style art of the game. After all, even Magic: The Gathering cards used to have white borders…

During demos, we usually don’t tell players about the picture part. We carry a rubber band in the pocket and, after they finish placing ships, we pretend to start measuring lasers one by one. The terror on their faces is priceless, only topped by the wonder when the app instantly brings the battle to life.

Cardboard is independent
By teasing people and seeing how naturally they played without knowing about the app, we realized we wanted cardboard to not only look harmless but also to be fully independent of any non-game-related setup, avoiding what we feel is one of the most frustrating pitfalls a hybrid game can create: realizing the app doesn’t work with the way you are playing.

If a solution required players to prepare the table “for the app,” we would not use it. We avoided anchor tiles, special playmats, fixed orientations, and any requirements of the kind “place this here so the photo can see it.”

Only then could the app feel like a moment of magic rather than a requirement. You just need to stick to the game rules. Or not, which brings us to the next section.

Cardboard is sandbox
The harsh reality is that players bend rules, skip components, mix expansions, and generally do whatever feels fun in the moment. That means the app will often face a table state that is “wrong.” What should it do in those situations? No base of a color? No asteroids? Inconsistent number of spaceships? At first, we considered warning players or blocking the resolution, which felt like the perfect recipe for frustration at the table.

After debating it for a long time, we eventually chose just to run the battle anyway. If players changed something, it is probably intentional. If they forgot something, let them continue. House rules are part of the soul of board gaming, and digital hybrids should embrace that freedom, too.

That is why the app never stops you before the battle. You take a picture, confirm it, and the resolution begins. From that moment on, the digital companion gives players a superpower no analog game can offer: it applies every rule perfectly. If anything truly breaks, it is probably a (rare) bug ;)

Tech is magic
It took us more than four years to refine, and in the end, we are just glad we can describe it with two simple words: it works. We still sometimes find it hard to believe that we can live-demo it in a crowded fair booth (looking at you, Meta…).

Conclusion
Is Light Speed: Arena perfect? Of course not. I still lose sleep over questions: How to strengthen the app-to-table communication? How to make it more natural? More concise?

What Light Speed: Arena ended up being, we hope, is a unique, accessible board game that attempts a new route for digital-hybrid entertainment, with a step forward in tech and UX.

More importantly, we hope the approach sparks ideas for other designers as well. I myself look forward to seeing where we can go from here!

Thanks for reading, and see you in the Arena!

Bonus. The Telegram quest.
Between the very early prototype and Light Speed: Arena, there was one more geeky and extremely useful step. After the original publisher gave us the green light, and before we had any plan to make Light Speed: Arena, we built and released a two-player print-and-play version of the original Light Speed played through a Telegram* bot.

You would play the game, take a picture, send it to the chat, and it would reply with a visualization of the battlefield, a fast log, or a full commentary. And yes, the silly/trash commentary idea from Light Speed: Arena was already there back then.

With around 1,000 players and a ton of feedback collected, the Light Speed Telegram bot became a critical building block for everything that followed. It still works today, but honestly, you might prefer the free demo print-and-play version of Light Speed: Arena itself available on BGG ;)

*A WhatsApp-like messaging app

by Matthew Dunstan

It’s not often that you get a chance to revisit one of your old published games, and reimagine it for a new audience. Elysium, designed with Brett J. Gilbert, and published by Space Cowboys in 2015, is one of the games I am the most proud of in my ludography. There are a lot of fond memories I have about working on the game, developing it with the team at Space Cowboys, and my first trip to Berlin for the SdJ ceremony when it was nominated for the Kennerspiel des Jahres (even if we didn’t win!). The game has a lot of fans even to this day, and is a type of game that I personally really enjoy playing.

So back in 2022 when Space Cowboys asked Brett and I whether we would be interested in working on a new streamlined and simplified version of Elysium, we jumped at the chance to work on the game again. Repos had recently released 7 Wonders: Architects in 2021, a more accessible version of 7 Wonders, and it provided a useful signpost for thinking about how to approach our task.

The core gameplay of Elysium, while light on rules, is quite taxing for players - they have to manage their four different coloured columns to navigate taking three cards from a display that can start each round with as many as 13 cards, all the while having to keep an eye on what their opponents are doing so they don’t get screwed over by the cards they take. There are many cards with a huge variety of abilities, organised into eight different families, of which five are used in any game. Players also have to manage their cards and gold in order to move cards into their Elysium at the end of each round, where the family and level of a card become important in forming Legends (or sets) or cards which score points at the end of the game. In short, there’s a lot to think about!

A lot going on!
So the problem was how to distill the magic of Elysium while inevitably stripping out parts of the game to reduce the overall mental gymnastics required of players. I would love to say that we then embarked on a multi-year journey, trialling many many different versions of a new game, before finally reaching the end goal...but in reality we were much more fortunate, in two key ways.

The first was that I had a very good idea about how to streamline the game in an elegant way, almost at the start of the process. In the original version of Elysium, players have four turns each round, three turns they take a card from the central display, and one turn they claim a Quest which determines their income, how many cards they can transfer to their Elysium, and turn order for the next round. What if there was a way to remove all this round structure, and simply have a game where players on their turn either take a card, or transfer some cards to their Elysium? Then the game would have a lot less upkeep, have a better flow, and could present new interesting choices for players as to what to do on their turn while keeping the actual number of options manageable.

The answer lay in reimagining the columns from the original game. Formerly, you would spend one column after each of your turns, and then regain all four columns at the end of the round. As your turns went on, you had fewer columns available to you, tightening your options. But in this new game, what if you could choose to get back your columns at any time? And if we did this, you could tie that action, to regain your columns, to the action of moving cards to your Elysium.

But there is one problem - if we did this then the game loses all the tension from the former version, with players allowed to keep refreshing their columns and never having to experience being down to one or two columns and having few good options. The answer in the end was pretty simple: make the rewards you get - your income and the number of transfers - tied to the number of columns you get back when you refresh. That way, you can either keep refreshing one or two columns, maximizing your options but having minimal income. Or you could do the reverse, taking more turns before you refresh, having worse options as you go along, but in turn you are rewarded with more income and transfers when you do refresh. And thus the rule became when you refreshed your columns you gained one gold or transferred one card for every column you returned.

The second piece of good fortune isn’t really about luck, but rather about sheer design brilliance. Even with this new structure in place, there was still a lot of work - hundreds of cards and effects to reimagine, streamline and reorganise. And furthermore, I was in the middle of moving around the world from the Czech Republic to Australia, and didn’t really have much time to work on the project. I leave the project for a few weeks after discussing it with Brett, and when I land in Australia, an email is awaiting for me from Brett - which has a complete prototype with all the cards designed and ready to go! With Brett’s game design blitz the game is ready to be shown to Space Cowboys...and they love it!

A small sample of Brett's initial complete prototype of First Giants, still using the theme of Elysium
From this point on we continue to work with the team at Space Cowboys, refining the cards and rules. There were several important developments, even at this late stage, that further cemented First Giants as its own ‘beast’ (or dinosaur?), rather than simply an offshoot of Elysium. The central display became four different dig sites with two cards available in each, and players would simply place their marker on a dig site to take a card there. But, they could only go to a Dig Site that didn’t already have one of their markers - this both increased the tension for players, and provided a really clear visual marker of what players were capable of on their turn, a definite upgrade from the columns in Elysium. Exhibits utilized tokens to mark your increasing score, that could then be flipped once you completed your exhibition to both mark a bonus and the fact you had completed it. Small improvements like this greatly aided the ergonomy of the game, helping to achieve that elusive sense of flow in gameplay.

This was also the time to think about production and theming. Space Cowboys had an amazing idea for a new setting to place the game in - imagining the cards as Dinosaurs you are researching when you take the cards, and then are displayed in your museum when they are transferred. Jessica Cognard came on board the project to handle the illustrations of the many cards, and Maud Chalmel did an amazing job with the cover, evoking a touch of art deco to the overall museum and dinosaur theme. And Space Cowboys flexed their production prowess in managing to fit in a truly remarkable amount of material - the cards, glass beads for amber (the new currency in place of gold), wooden printed pieces and more - in a box less than half the size of the original game.

Finally I am able to hold a copy of First Giants in my hands, and I am as excited and thrilled as I was holding my first copy of Elysium more than a decade ago. I hope you will all get to enjoy the game that Brett and I were just grateful to get to spend a little more time in.

The evolution from our initial prototype, to the first iteration of a dinosaur theme, to the final published version of First Giants.

by Steph Hodge

[imageid=9444567 medium rep]▪️ Repos Production just released their new title Spooky Tower. With the attractive price point of $25 and the quick-playtime of 15 minutes, it seems like a risk worth taking. Here is the game description from the publisher:




▪️ For the Flip-and-Write fans out there, Spyworld was just released! From Don't Panic Games, this game plays simultaneously, so really any number of players can play in about 30 minutes. Don't you want to rule the world and build the best spy lair around? From the publisher:




▪️ New from The Op Games a small box card game called Frenzy Falls. If you enjoy a bit of frenzy and chaos in your quick card game, then look no further. You and your opponents will attempt to seize control over the different lines in the falls. If you don't win the majority of the row, no worries, you will get to spill down to the next row to try and capture that row instead. You have to look out for those special action cards that will pull and bump you from positions you probably don't want to move from. A great family game for 2-6 players, playing in 30-45 minutes.


▪️ Did someone say Similo? OH, HELLO! Similo: Wonders was just announced from Horrible Guild. My collection of Similo is ever-growing because they keep making new editions. If you aren't familiar with Similo, it is a quick cooperative deduction game. There is one correct card in the display, and the clue-giver needs to provide clues so you don't knock out that correct card. You can mix and match sets, so having just one more set is always a good thing. We can look for this new deck in July.

From the publisher:

by Justin Bell

“Call me as soon as you can man.”

My brother’s third text of the day chased back-to-back missed phone calls. When I’m not writing tabletop content, I work as a program manager for a consulting company. Thanks to a meeting with our company’s COO and Global People Officer, it had been a busy, stressful morning. My phone was on “do not disturb”, so when I flipped the phone over, my brother's communication thread made it clear that there was a real emergency.

Sadly, my fears were confirmed. After a series of alarming health changes over the past few months, our father had collapsed at his home in upstate New York. Even though CPR had been administered relatively quickly, my father’s pre-existing health issues and the morning collapse led to a visit to the emergency room, which quickly became a visit to the intensive care unit.

The situation quickly became tragic. Dad never regained consciousness, and he was placed on a ventilator. Suddenly, machines were the only thing keeping him alive. I booked a flight to Rochester and arrived about four hours before Dad was set to be taken off of life support.

You always think you will have more time.

“Immediate family only,” the signs outside the ICU said. That meant just five of us—stepmom, half-sisters, my brother, me—spent Dad’s final hours in a small hospital room, holding Dad’s hands and shedding plenty of tears. We also did what we loved to do any time the group was together: laugh about the memories that have lasted a lifetime.

A few of those memories were about games.

***

My father was never the person who suggested playing games; in fact, he never seemed to even enjoy playing them.

As a kid, we played a lot of the traditional “roll and move” games with Dad, like Monopoly and Parcheesi. From time to time, we tricked Dad into joining something like The Game of Life. UNO? Obviously. The Rummy family was always lurking nearby: Rummy, Rummy 500, Rummikub, Rummoli (the Poker/Rummy variant of Michigan Rummy that I grew up with).

It felt like Dad was always working late, so games were usually limited to weekends, and my time with him was further limited thanks to a divorce that changed our family dynamic when I was just a child. For my father, games clearly felt like work, so he was less inclined to playing games and more inclined to other leisure pursuits—long meals, action movies, road trips, televised golf tournaments (which mostly doubled as “dad naps”, a tradition we carry on in my home today).

Later in life, Dad could occasionally be tricked into playing games, but there was a limit to how many rules he would bother to learn before throwing up his hands. Like the relatives of many players in my network, Dad seemed to hate just about anything that was “too complicated.” (This is only funnier because my dad loved to play golf—itself a very complicated sport—and he worked in complex management roles throughout his career. I get it: everyone’s brain needs a break. But often, the “too complicated” label felt like lip service.)

Occasionally, the sibs and I pushed Dad to try something new. Seven or eight years ago, I brought a bunch of hobby games to a Thanksgiving family weekend, and forced my dad to play Luxor, the Rüdiger Dorn hand management game. (Although I love other Dorn designs, such as Istanbul and Goa, Luxor is still the Dorn title that hits the table the most.)

Luxor is a relatively rules-light experience that plays in about an hour. The main hook: players manage a hand of five movement cards and a small pool of adventurer tokens, tokens that must be moved forward on a track that ends with a treasure tomb in the middle of the board.

On a turn, players can only play either their left-most, or right-most, card from hand to move one of their tokens toward the tomb. (Cards in a player’s hand are never shuffled or moved, only played when they reach one side of their hand.) At the end of each turn, a player must add a new card to their hand from a draw pile, which must be inserted into the middle of their now-four-card hand to give them a new five-card hand for their next turn.

“This is ___ ridiculous!” Dad said, after hearing the hand management rule two minutes into the teach. (I’m leaving the profanity out, for the purposes of a family-friendly website.) “This game has too many rules.”

Still, Dad decided to play Luxor with my wife and stepmother…and almost won, coming in just a few points behind the eventual winner. At the end of the game, he begrudgingly admitted that he had fun thinking through the best ways to move his adventurer tokens around the map to pick up treasure tokens and sets of cards from the movement track. The best part? Dad didn’t really listen during the teach, so he only ever played his left-most card all game long, and only ever added new cards to the right side of his hand.

My father also hated the idea of cooperative games. “I want to have a chance to win,” he would say, because to Dad, winning meant “beating everyone else at the table.” So, whenever we floated co-op games by Dad (The Crew, anyone?), it was a hard pass.

Now, Dad WOULD play games with a team…as long as the goal was to beat the other team. The day we got Dad to play Codenames—a family favorite for everyone else in the household—is still one of the most shocking moments in Bell Family Vacay history. Codenames is always a riot with my family; when a team’s Spymaster goes on a one-word clue run that scores three or four cards on a single turn, that story becomes legend. (Naturally, when someone blows it and gives a clue that reveals the Assassin, that kind of story becomes legend, too!)

Most years, Dad would politely pass when given the chance to play Codenames. But when he finally did decide to join the family for a play, it was a moment. He didn’t want to play as a Spymaster that first time—let’s give the man a “try bite” first, right?—but simply being willing to join the whole family for once was such a thrill.

***

Ultimately, Dad’s favorite thing about games wasn’t playing games at all. It was grabbing a newspaper—or later, his iPad, since even my father had to come to grips with reading the news in the present—and being at the dining room table while others played games.

My dad loved being near the action. He was constantly looking up from his newspaper, smiling at his family, watching them enjoy themselves, laughing along with the group when something funny happened during a player’s turn.

I recently went to a friend’s game night…not to play, but to simply sit around. I’ve done that a few times over the years, and lately, my work schedule has been rough and I don’t always have the capacity to do much more than sit in the same space as my friends. (I am very good, however, at eating your snacks, drinking your bourbon…or, both.)

A friend was running a game of Blood on the Clocktower, and ten adults laughed their way through hours of fun as they ran two sessions back-to-back. The friends asked if I wanted to jump in, to take on a character role in-between rounds.

“Nah, I’m good,” I said. “I just love being here.” Watching innocent friends get eliminated by their peers was glorious. Standing in a corner of the room with two others as they plotted their way into the next night’s accusation was a blast, too. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but just being around others as they had fun on a game night made me think about how much Dad must have loved just being in the room with his kids.

***

The five of us at the hospital were rolling, laughing as we reminisced about so many great times with Dad. As a group, we laugh with and at each other all the time, and we laughed at some of the funny things Dad used to say, some of the bad fashion choices of the last 40 or 50 years we could remember, that time Dad claimed to be on a diet while pounding eight pieces of fried chicken at a local theme park, Dad’s everlasting appreciation for the musician Prince, and took a moment to appreciate the biggest laugh of anyone I have ever met.

And, the times when Dad would settle into his spot at the end of a large table, a glass of Cutty Sark and a plate of cheese and crackers nearby, watching everyone else having fun playing games.

Eventually, the harsh reality of the hospital situation returned. A nurse walked in; a doctor joined her. We had a few more minutes with Dad before…well, before.

I got in one more squeeze of Dad’s hand. Everyone gave him one more kiss on the forehead, then the doctors did what they could to offer him a peaceful passing.

I’ll miss you, Dad.

by Matteo Uguzzoni

Beastro is a team-based, trick-taking game with hidden roles where you have to figure out who is on your team, outsmart the other players, and collect as many tricks as possible for your team. You play as a mythical Beast Chef that is trying to open (or burn to the ground) a new pop-up restaurant.

We self-published the game in 2025 and released it during the Indie Games Night Market at Pax Unplugged in November 2025 (shot out to Daniel Newman from Newmill Industries for the great initiative!). In this designer diary we will talk about the ancestry of the game, our design journey, and a little about the self-publishing experience.

Enjoy the read!

Ancestry
Beastro is the nephew of an Italian traditional trick-taking game called Briscola Chiamata traditionally called Briscola. In my hometown it’s called Amico del Giaguaro, in English “Jaguar’s Friend”, and I’m sure there are as many names for it as there are bell towers in Italy.

Briscola, is the name for the family of card games that “Jaguar’s Friend” belongs to. It is one of the most popular, if not the most popular, may-follow trick-taking game in Italy (must-follow games are more rare, but if you’re interested I suggest you start with Tressette).

This person is not playing Briscola, but a solitaire version
The game is played with a Spanish suit deck, in the regional design variant that you find in your region (we play with the Piacentine design in Emilia Romagna, pictured above), with ten cards for each of the four suits: Coins, Cups, Wands and Spades.

Briscola is usually played in two teams of two players that have to score sixty-one (61) points to win. The Ace, the Three and the face cards count toward the scoring (awarding respectively 11, 10, 4, 3 and 2 points), while the trump suit is defined by flipping a card after giving the initial hand of three cards to each player. After you play into a trick, you draw a new card from the deck and refill your hand to three. Therefore, players have a very limited information at the beginning of the game.

The only cards that score in Briscola
Briscola Chiamata, the auntie of Beastro

Briscola Chiamata, the auntie of Beastro, is a five-player only game (2 vs 3) where the teams are defined by a wager phase. In “Jaguar’s Friend”, the variant we play in my area, every player declares how many points their team will score at the end of the round, starting from 61 and going up until the improbable 120 points, meaning all the points available in the deck. The winner of the wager becomes the Jaguar and they declare a card and a suit that they are looking for (for example the Ace of Wands), the player that has that card in their hand becomes the “Jaguar’s friend”. They are now a team - the Jaguar’s team - and their goal is to reach or pass the wager. The trump is defined by the Jaguar’s call, it’s the suit of the card they are looking for. Players that don’t have the called card are in the opposite team of three and their goal is to collective beat the Jaguar’s bet.

Briscola Chiamata is a may-follow through and through so not all tricks feel very meaningful. For example the initial tricks, although not very impactful toward the final score, become ways to gauge who is who. The game is very popular among young people (at least in my town) and while old folks rarely play this variant, I remember entire summers playing it. If I have to pick some reasons why Jaguar's Friend is so successful I will say it is social deduction aspect of it, the shifting alliances, and the wager are all unique features of the variant.

This is the way you play Briscola in Italy, shirtless and in the streets!
All right, if you read this far, you’re probably a trick-taking appassionat*, so it’s time to move on to our actual design!

A deck of cards crosses the Atlantic!

Unpub at Pax Unplugged, the best way to test your ideas
After my brother-in-law visited from Italy in September 2022, I was donated a traditional Briscola deck. I was very excited about it and I brought it to a game night with Jason Corace (designer of Lord and Ladies and Super Truffle Pig and half of Hello Mountain, our little publishing coop). The deck was so familiar to me. I vividly remember learning how to make sums playing games with Grandma, but this was alien to Jason. I was able to explain the Jaguar game to him with a traditional french poker deck and we started brainstorming on how to make a new game inspired by it.

We set up our design journey with few goals in mind. The first was a broader player count from five, which is the only number that Briscola Chiamata can allow, to the more traditional three-to-six players. The second goal was to make a must follow trick-taking (we were advised that may-follow are not loved in the US market). The third design goal was to keep the hidden roles without adding the classic social deduction parts. We were worried that adding that part will break the flow of the game and lose the straightforwardness that we like about trick-taking games.

We hosted our first playtest at Pax Unplugged that same winter in 2022. The game had a different theme back then, it was called Prestige and players were playing as Magicians setting up their magic show. We got a few so-and-so playtests - if you’re playtesting a trick-taking game and people have never played one, buckle up!. Then a family of five that used to play a lot of card games sat down and they had the best time! When the mom, always quiet, revealed that she was the Secret Assistant (a.k.a. Jaguar’s friend) the table almost exploded! She was able to trick everyone into thinking she was not.

Prestige's components ..magic tricks in a trick-taking game how original!
After PaxU, we pitched the title to many publishers and every time we got great feedback. The folks at Amigo and Pandasaurus were fantastic and the game improved from their generous feedback. In the end, everyone decided to pass on the design. We heard all the reasons (and if you are a designer you know what we mean): “it’s not different enough”, “it’s too niche”, “we already signed trick takers for the next three years”, “we are not publishing trick takers anymore” etc..

Prestige becomes Beastro
The following spring both Jason and I found ourselves surrounded by a lot of talented game designers, and with consistent playtesting we were able to bring the game to a completed state. Thank you Viditya, Marcy, Firex, Zach, Rook, Tori, Logan, Nat, George and everyone at the NYU Game Center, Pratt and Gumbo NYC. The game will not be where is it today if it wasn’t for the great discussions we had together.

External influences were important too. In that same period both Jason and I ended up being obsessed with the TV show The Bear, starring Jeremy Allen White and Ayo Edebiri, and so we decided to change the theme from magicians putting on their first show to a kitchen where players were up and coming chefs trying to sabotage the next hot restaurant in town for their own private interest or giant ego.

We needed a title for the game and Beastro came along and with it the idea that chefs and line cooks were mythical creatures (Beast) trying to open their own pop-up restaurant (a Beastro!). Everything fell into place when we decided to involve Jen Corace, an amazing illustrator from Providence, RI, that worked with Jason in his previous design Lords and Ladies. Jen happened to also be Jason’s sister so that helped the collaboration a lot and she happened to be incredibly talented and amazing. Even an onion is something that I will put on a poster if it's designed by Jen..look at this!

I want this on a t-shirt
What is unique in Jen’s style is that every illustration has a handpainted nature to it, and the reason is because every illustration is hand painted! So Beastro's deck is the work of a real artist that works with the non-digital medium at a mastery level.

Alright, enough of the history, below is a more in depth description of the design (thank you for reading this much!!). If you want to go deeper, here is the link to the ruleset and here’s a video of me pitching/explaining the game (Italian accent included).

P.S.: At the end there is also an appendix on how it was to sell the game during Pax Unplugged’ Indie Game Night Market and afterwards, if you are a designer that is just starting and is thinking about a first small self publishing experiment, maybe that part could be interesting for you!

BEASTRO the final design

The Wager
We simplified the wager vastly. Players get 13 cards at the beginning of the round and they pick one card from their hand that they sacrifice for the wager. Everyone reveals their card at the same time and whoever plays the highest card is the Head Chef and they immediately take the role deck. Starting from the lowest card, one player after the other flips over a Suit card, denying that suit to be trump for the round (a similar system is used in various designs, most notably Lunar by Masato Uesugi, Allplay, 2024). The suit that is left is the trump for the round. All the cards used in the wager are then discarded.

Team Formation
The Head Chef gives out the roles, picking their Secret Chef, and the only public role is the Head Chef.

Trick-Taking
We play a total of 12 tricks in a round. The Head Chef opens the round leading the first trick. The winner of the trick leads the next trick. It’s a traditional must-follow, so players are only allowed to play trump if they cannot follow suit, or if the trick was led with trump.

Special cards (exception to the must-follow rule)
There are two special cards that can be played at any time. The first is Secret Sauce, this card beats all the other cards, even trump. The only card that can beat a Secret Sauce is another Secret Sauce (there are two in the deck, or three in a six player game).

The second special card is Sabotage. This card is worth zero, so playing it means that you will not win the trick, but giving away Sabotage cards in other people’s tricks is good because the team with the most Sabotages at the end of the round will score negative points. Be careful not to give Sabotage to someone that will end up being on your team! Also the Sabotage card is the tie breaker in case the teams collect the same number of tricks (6 vs 6). The Sabotage card also does not follow the must-follow rule and can be played at any time.

Beast Chef Powers!
This is our latest addition to the design and we are very excited about it: every Beast Chef in the game has a special power action that can be used only once during the entire game. These are usually very powerful moves that can allow a last minute trick grabbing, but they are not enough to flip a game in your team’s direction (an inspiration for something similar is TRICKTAKERs Hiroken, Joyple Games, 2021).

Chupacabra helloooo?! Amazing illustrations by Jen Corace
Restaurants
Every round is played at a different pop-up restaurant that has two special scoring conditions that every player can score independently. This was Dan Thurot favorite features, read his review here.

Addendum - Self printing and selling Beastro!

We hope that this next section could be helpful for you. The reality is that every story of self-publishing is different but we learned a lot from this experience so why not share it?

The final product
While Beastro’s prototype had components, we decided that if we have to self-publish we should keep it simple. So we turned everything into a card, and our game is now a deck made of 86 cards: 62 playing cards, 12 restaurants cards, 6 Beast Chef cards and a role deck of 6 Cards.

The game was selected for the Indie Game Night Market in November 2025, and we got news of the selection in August so we sprinted into work! We started with the illustrations and in this section we were really lucky. We trusted Jen completely with her illustrations. She and Jason came up with the list of ingredients, Beast Chefs, and Restaurants, so she was able to complete her portion of the work in no time - I think it was less than two weeks.

After we got the illustrations we were ready to design the game's box. One insight I heard on a podcast from the folks at CMYK is that you should be able to understand how to play in three steps just by looking at the back of the box, so we tried that.

The three steps rule applied to Beastro
We decided to print in China, and in 2025, that was not a good idea. I mean, we were really happy with the result, but the tariffs, the rush fee, and the cost per unit turned out to be higher than we expected. Another mistake we made was not to print a demo copy before placing the full order. Even if it’s insanely expensive, it could save you money down the road if, for example, you have to re-print a card because of a typo or you forgot a card.

Someone ordered a Secrdt Sauce?

After Pax U
Selling Beastro at PaxU was incredibly rewarding. The evening was just a great experience of sharing our design, receiving compliments, and having a good time. We were sad that we were not able to go to other designers’ tables and learn more about their games, but we were able to connect the following days and on the festival’s discord.

Hello Mountain (us), selling Beastro. I'm beaten, Jason is rocking it
In the days afterwards we saw some reviews popping up. Some people shared that they got a copy and it felt very rewarding. With that momentum we decided to setup our website and try to sell copies online. The game was reviewed a couple of times more and with some social media activity we were able to sell a steady number of copies for the weeks preceding Christmas and some more in the new year. Some copies, together with the Italian ruleset, went to my hometown crew of “Jaguar’s friend” players in Italy, and some came with me to Tallahassee, Florida, where I relocated in the meantime.

A small selection of Beastro's enthusiasts - check out Courtyard Cafè and Games if you are in Tally
To conclude this designer diary: we would like to thank again everyone that helped us along the route and playtested the game - every playtest was incredibly helpful! To self-publish a design that is only cards is definitely something we will suggest if you trying to self-publish for the first time. It will lower the costs, simplify your work, and you will reach a level of quality that otherwise it will be very hard. We feel blessed to have such an active and open community of indie game designers that we can be part of and we hope to keep designing and bringing to life quirky, easy-to-play games in the next future.

Thanks for reading!
Matteo and Jason

Happy playing, courtesy Arianna Richeldi