by Gunho Kim

Where It Began

With Winterfall on the horizon, we wanted to take a moment to share how this expansion came to life. Honestly, we hadn’t planned on developing another expansion for Wondrous Creatures after Gargantuan Beasts. At least, that’s how we felt toward the end of 2024.

That started to change as we watched the game’s performance in the retail market. Wondrous Creatures climbed the BGG Hotness, sales were growing rapidly, and the response was strong not only in the US, but across other regions as well. Even though the game was still relatively new, players were already asking about the next expansion.

That was the turning point.

So in January 2025, we decided to start working on a new expansion.

Winterfall takes place several years after the events of the base game. As it turns out, Starbeak Island has a rather unusual climate. For years at a time, it enjoys mild, stable weather… and then, just as suddenly, everything changes. A brutal cold sets in. The terrain shifts. Auroras blaze across the sky. Strange phenomena begin to unfold.

And the Captains who once explored the island so comfortably now have to adapt to something entirely new.

Core Content #1: A Main Board That Changes

From the very beginning, one thing felt clear to us: the main board needed to feel more dynamic and interesting as the game progressed.

Placing a worker across two spaces and interacting with adjacent icons is what distinguishes Wondrous Creatures from other worker placement games. To build on this, the base game already introduces Habitat Tiles with various Special Effect icons as the game progresses. But players who replayed the game multiple times grew accustomed to these elements faster than we expected, which meant the worker placement began to feel somewhat predictable.

Since fresh, dynamic worker placement is such a core part of what makes Wondrous Creatures feel distinct, this was something our team kept coming back to during development. Very early on, we all agreed that the expansion should focus on bringing more variety and tension back into that experience.

So how could we make more things happen on the main board?

Our first idea was simply to expand the pool of Special Effect icons placed on the map during the game. But this approach quickly hit a wall. These icons are added permanently, and stacking strong abilities onto the map would clearly break the game’s balance. We realized the problem came from the permanence of these effects, and that led us to a key conclusion: we needed to add interesting effects that exist on the map only temporarily.

That’s how the central content of Winterfall, “Winterfall Events” and “Aurora Events,” was born.

As the game progresses, players reveal event cards and follow their instructions to place various tokens and tiles onto the main board. These can offer powerful one-time effects or impose new constraints.

As the map shifts, players are faced with more interesting decisions.
"Should I play this card now to power up my engine? Or is it better to use that strong effect on the map before another player gets to it?"

Throughout development, we tested an enormous variety of effects and constraints.The ones that made it into the final version became Aurora tiles, Blizzard tokens, and Snowflake tokens.

There were many other interesting ideas that didn’t make the cut. A new “Snowy Mountain” terrain that required flipping an egg to place a worker, a new resource called "Stardust" that could be collected to trigger various abilities, or an egg-tracking board that awarded bonus points for arranging eggs in specific patterns.

These ideas were promising at first, but fell short for various reasons. Sometimes the gameplay wasn’t as fun as we’d hoped, sometimes the balance suffered, and sometimes the rules became too complex. Some of these ideas were hard to let go of, and we may revisit them in a future expansion.

Core Content #2: A New Species — Spirits

The other major piece of new content in Winterfall is a brand-new creature species: Spirits.

Thematically, they're a mysterious species that only appears in winter, materializing on Starbeak Island as the cold sets in. Since Winterfall is the first major expansion for Wondrous Creatures, we felt that adding a new species was essential, and we started exploring them early on.

Before the idea of placing tokens and tiles on the main board had taken shape, the core concept for the Spirits was player interaction.

Their early abilities referenced the score markers of other players, with effects that triggered when you had the lowest score or the highest score. These created new ways to play, whether that meant racing ahead or deliberately staying behind.

These ideas were interesting, but their viability depended too heavily on circumstances and on what other players were doing. In some situations, reaching first place was effectively impossible. In others, falling to last place was so easy that the condition stopped feeling meaningful.

We went through several rounds of revision trying to make this work, but in the end, we decided to move in a different direction.

Once the idea of placing tokens and tiles on the map became the core of the expansion, the Spirits’ abilities shifted toward interacting with those tokens. Spirits gain benefits by removing tokens placed by Winterfall Events or by placing new ones themselves.

That doesn’t mean the early concepts focused on player interaction disappeared entirely. Cards 149 and 160 still carry traces of those original ideas, allowing players to use another player’s Recharge or Energy cards. In the original version, the player whose card was used would gain Victory Points as a reward. Later, to better fit the new token interaction concept, this was changed so that the card owner gains Snowflake tokens instead.

Cards #149 (Gruagail) and #160 (Titanorak) — the surviving traces of our early "player interaction" concept.

Why Winter?

In board game design, mechanisms are often completed first, with the theme developed afterward. In such cases, considerable effort is required to closely connect the two. Winterfall followed a slightly different process.

As mentioned earlier, the direction of a dynamically changing main board was clear from the beginning, and this naturally led us to the idea of shifting weather. From there, the concept of a fantasy winter filled with unusual weather phenomena emerged.

We did, however, consider other themes as well.

One was a rainforest setting, where dense vegetation spreads across the map. Another was an eclipse setting, where a prolonged solar eclipse brings darkness and mysterious events.

Rainforest theme — an early visual mockup we made to test the look and feel.

Eclipse theme — another early mockup we explored before settling on winter.
The rainforest theme was appealing because it allowed for a wide variety of plant life. However, its overall color palette would have been heavily green, making it too similar to the base game. As this is a major expansion, we wanted to create a more distinct visual shift.

The eclipse theme conveyed a strong sense of mystery, even more so than winter in some respects. However, its darker palette felt too muted overall, and it did not support the concept of a dynamically changing map as effectively.

In the end, we returned to winter. Its cool blue tones create a clear contrast with the base game, and the concept of unusual weather provides a natural explanation for the changing board.

Closing Thoughts

Winterfall also includes a wide range of additional content, including new creature cards, new Captains, new Achievements, a new solo mode, and more.

As development progressed, the scope of the expansion continued to grow. While we initially planned to complete it in under six months, the mechanism design phase alone took eight months, extending from January through August. Including art and component design, the full development process took over a year.

It demanded more time and resources than we'd anticipated, but the result has been worth it.

Working on a large-scale expansion like Winterfall reminds us that expansion development demands just as much care and effort as creating an entirely new game, though the nature of the challenge is different.

When creating a new game, the core system must be built from the ground up, often involving long periods of uncertainty for us. With an expansion, the challenge lies in introducing new elements without compromising what already works, which naturally leaves less room for experimentation.

Even so, through continued discussion and iteration, solutions tend to emerge at unexpected moments. Which was true for Winterfall as well.

We don’t yet know whether Winterfall will be the last expansion for Wondrous Creatures, or simply the beginning of something more. The journey had its share of challenges, but seeing players explore and enjoy a world we poured so much care into has already made it incredibly rewarding for us. We’re deeply grateful to everyone who has joined us along the way, and we hope Winterfall brings many memorable moments to your table.

by Steph Hodge

We might have GenCon right around the corner, but that doesn't stop Spiel announcements from happening! A few Spiel games and some new releases too!!

[imageid=9666028 medium rep]▪️ Czech Games Edition (CGE) Just announced a BIG release for this Spiel! It is currently sitting at the top of BGG Hotness called Kingdom Come: Deliverance – The Board Game. Designers Vlaada Chvátil (Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization, Mage Knight Board Game...)and Tomáš Holek (SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Galileo Galilei...) came together to create this mega game for 1-4 players that plays in 120-320 minutes.

From the newsletter:




▪️ Portal Games also sent out an announcement for their new Spiel release called Robo Run. This is a cooperative 2-player game with no talking allowed! Robots only speak in beeps and boops. There are 5 campaigns with many scenarios. Each scenario will be about 30 minutes.

From the Email:



▪️ Stonemaier Games Just announced some games to be released mid July and are on the GenCon preview list. The first on the list is Duel of Meloch. This is a very interesting mash-up of Scythe and Expeditions. This is a 1-2 player game, and one player takes on the Scythe mechanics role and the other player uses the Expeditions mechanics. The game plays in about 45 minutes. Seems like a great game for the fans of these two original games.

From the newsletter:




▪️ The second game that was announced was Wingspan Pocket. As you might expect, this will be a small-box condensed Wingspan experience. It will still support 1-5 players, but the playtime is listed as 25-35 minutes.

From the newsletter:


▪️ Finally, a new expansion for Origin Story called Origin Story: Heroes & Villains. This is a mini expansion pack that adds in new cards for more variety in your endings.

From BGG:

by Chok-Sien Hiew

Malaysia is a country which has many public holidays. We have three major ethnicities and many minor ones. We have different religions and traditions. We have national holidays as well as many state specific holidays. Every year towards the end of the year, I see infographics on social media helping people strategise when to apply for annual leave in the following year. For example if a public holiday falls on a Thursday, your strategy will be to take the Friday off, so that you have a stretch of four days to rest or go holidaying. If a public holiday falls on a Monday or a Friday, you can plan for a short getaway since you will have a long weekend. It was this kind of strategy guide that inspired me to make Malaysian Holidays. I wanted to design a game which the common Malaysian (i.e. non-gamers) can play. I wanted to look for a theme which most people can relate to and like. Public holidays and going on trips are something that unites everyone.

Malaysian Holidays is a simple set collection game. Most of the cards in the game are public holidays. Each card is set to be a specific day of the week, and you need to collect consecutive days in order to go on holidays. That means you want to go on holidays without even needing to apply for annual leave. For example you try to collect cards Monday to Friday, or cards Wednesday to Friday. Once you have a set, you get to go on a trip! In game terms this means discarding your set to score points. The first version of the rules featured a card drafting mechanism which is pretty straightforward.

If you are a boardgamer, you would have seen something similar elsewhere. However upon playtesting it I quickly discovered that this was a little overwhelming for non-gamers. They felt a little lost when I explained the game, and they got confused during play too. In the original rules, everyone draws two cards at the start of a round. You give one to the HR Manager and then the other will become available for drafting. Everyone reveals their card at the same time. The start player of the round gets first pick, and he must pick someone else's card. Whoever's card gets picked will go next. Eventually everyone will claim one card. The last player to claim a card has no choice. They will be start player next round. If you are a gamer, you probably have seen this somewhere else. The idea is I want people to offer good cards, because the more attractive your card is, the higher the likelihood that you'll get to choose a card early. The intention was good, but many non-gamers found this confusing. I needed to simplify the mechanism. Eventually I just let players take turns being start player. Also, all cards being offered are just placed at the centre of the table. Beginning with the start player and going clockwise, everyone picks a card. This is much easier to learn, and it still works well.

My prototype of Malaysian Holidays (photo courtesy of Choon Ean)
In Malaysia, if a public holiday falls on a Sunday, the subsequent Monday will be declared a replacement holiday. To represent this in the game, I have Sunday cards, and you get to use them like Monday cards. From the perspective of clean game design, I am adding rules overhead for the sake of the theme, which is a bad thing. However I feel this is worth the additional effort to create a fun experience for players. It is something they can relate to, so it is not a difficult rule to remember. There are no Saturday cards in the game. This is deliberate. If a public holiday falls on a Saturday, there is no replacement holiday on Monday or Friday. Saturdays are the worst day for public holidays. So no Saturdays!

Malaysia has both national and state holidays. Some state holidays are observed only in one or two states, some in several more. Some national holidays apply to every state except a few. All of these are represented in the game. If you want to win, state holidays are generally inferior to national holidays. Let's say I have collected Monday to Friday, but my Monday is a Penang state holiday, and my Friday is a Johor state holiday. I can't trade this set in to go on holidays. I either work in Penang, or I work in Johor. It is not possible that I make use of both the state holidays when they are for different states.

There is a total of 28 national and state holidays in Malaysia. Well, I count all the Sultan / governor birthdays as one. Every state has one. When working on Malaysian Holidays, I learned about several state holidays I had not known about before. I have never lived in those states. 28 cards is not enough for this game to work. In the first prototype, I had 36 holiday cards. Some major holidays like Hari Raya Puasa and Chinese New Year appeared twice. I found that the draw deck ran out too frequently, which was annoying. Eventually I modified the game to have 64 holiday cards. All holidays appear more than once, but they would be on different days. For example one Wesak Day card is a Sunday, and the other a Wednesday. The only exception is Good Friday. Both copies are on Friday, of course.

Do you know that under Malaysian law only five public holidays are mandated off days? And these don't include the big ones like Hari Raya Puasa and Chinese New Year? The real big five are: New Year's Day, Malaysia Day, Merdeka Day, Labour Day and Sultan or Governor's Birthday. In Malaysian Holidays, these five occur three times, while the others only twice.

I want to convey the Malaysian work culture through this game. The original inspiration is a very salaryman thing - a strategy guide for applying for annual leave. The festivals and holidays themselves already convey the multicultural society of Malaysia. What I also want to inject is some humour related to the typical salaryman mentality. There are two special holiday cards which are called MC. In Malaysia, MC means medical certificate, and it refers to sick leave. These MC cards are jokers, and you can treat them as any day of the week. That means they are the most powerful holidays in the game. In Malaysia there are employees with this mindset: sick leave is annual leave, and you want to fully utilise it and not waste it. There is one type of card in the game called memos. These are attack cards which add some player interaction. Memos are issued by the HR Manager, and they are used for discarding someone else's holiday card. That means cancelling someone's rest day. For example you still have to go to work on Christmas Day because of a system go-live.

When I playtested with Benz, Ruby and Edwin, they all wanted to go to Japan for holidays
Half the holiday destinations in the game are local, and the other half are overseas. During game development, Specky Studio and I discussed whether to change this. My originally intended target audience is Malaysians, so the holiday destinations are places which we Malaysians frequently visit. There are local attractions like Mount Kinabalu, Genting Highlands, Melaka and Pulau Redang, and also countries like Thailand, Indonesia, Japan and China. The reason we considered adjusting this was if we wanted to use the game to specifically promote Malaysian tourism and culture, then it might be more appropriate for all the holiday destinations to be local. This can help encourage local tourism, and if a foreign traveller buys a copy of the game, it would be a more meaningful souvenir, highlighting all Malaysian tourist attractions. Eventually we decided to stick to the original concept, so you will see other countries in Malaysian Holidays.

One very encouraging sign during the development of the game was how well received the theme was. My target audience for the game is non-gamers and casual gamers. Often when I managed to find such players to playtest the game, they instantly liked the game. One particularly memorable incident was when I met a local book publisher to pitch another game. I brought my repertoire of both published games and works-in-progress, to show them that I was a serious designer. Malaysian Holidays was just one of many games to be mentioned in passing. I did not plan to show it to them. At the time my prototype copy was packed in a recycled box originally for meal supplements. I only had a piece of paper glued to the box, and on it I had hand-written "Malaysian Holidays". It was just this "Malaysian Holidays" that caught the attention of the folks I met that day. They asked me what that was. I ended up playing the game with them. Malaysians really like public holidays.

And now I am holding this game in my hand. It is an amazing feeling physically holding the final product.

Game in play

Holiday cards

Local destination cards (1 point)

Overseas destination cards (2 points)

This is my favourite memo card. I read it, and I giggle to myself. Yeah, I laugh at my own jokes.

The art of Malaysian Holidays is done by Lim Chi Qing of Sunny Day. I love her style and she has presented Malaysian culture beautifully. Most of my games are published under my own indie publishing house Cili Padi Games. This is my second game published through someone else. My first such game was Dancing Queen with Matagot. I first released Dancing Queen myself under Cili Padi Games, and only after publication I managed to connect with Matagot to have an international edition published by them. The Malaysian Holidays publishing project was under Specky Studio right from the start. They specialise in using games in education, and they make games that can be used for educational purposes. They are connected to many schools and teachers. Malaysian Holidays contains many cultural and historical elements. There are many aspects that can be used in education. One important reason that Specky Studio wants to release the game in 2026 is this is Visit Malaysia Year! This is a great way to share Malaysian festivities and culture with the world. 28 illustrations of holidays celebrated in Malaysia, and 14 illustrations of travel destinations. I hope you will enjoy Malaysian Holidays too!

Now I imagine East Malaysians when you start reading this blog post you are already grumbling about the box cover of the game. Why is it only showing Peninsular Malaysia? Well the reason is that cover you see at the top is just half the cover. The box design for Malaysian Holidays has two covers, on opposite sides of the box. So East Malaysia is on the other side. Hey, I'm an East Malaysian, I certainly wouldn't allow East Malaysia to be short changed.

by Pete Wissinger

Taiki Shinzawa: The Master of Modern Trick-Taking
Scholars debate when exactly the modern “trick-taking renaissance” started, but it is undeniable that one designer has proven to be the movement’s inventive da Vinci: Taiki Shinzawa.

A prolific genius, Shinzawa has been churning out weird and wonderful card games for over a decade. Many of these games were printed in small batches to be sold at Tokyo Game Market, making them the whispered subjects of treasure hunts for many Western gamers starting to explore the trick-taking wilderness.

Playing a Shinzawa game for the first time is like encountering something from an alternate dimension. He takes the normal conventions of trick-taking and rebuilds them into something alien. His games are puzzling and playful, asking players to be precise in their hand management, but with completely alien tools to do so.

The first Shinzawa games I played were the first ones to get wide releases in the US: Ghosts of Christmas and 9 Lives. Both of these titles are bidding trick-takers, something I grew up playing through Spades and Euchre. These two games, though, pushed me into new territory in a way that was incredibly exciting. Ghosts of Christmas asked me to bid on how many tricks I would win, but then three tricks were available for me to play into at the same time! In 9 Lives I could see what suits players were holding and the hand has an unknown number of tricks, with cards going back into players’ hands throughout the round.

As I continued exploring Taiki Shinzawa’s catalog, I found that there were a few common hallmarks in many of his designs. One of the big ones was that scoring was often very brutal. In American Bookshop, a game where players are attempting to collect only suits of cards in tricks that they could capture the majority of. Any suits where you are not the majority holder? Negative points. Also in his bidding games, players often earn zero points if they don’t hit their bid exactly. The fact that these very opaque games were also so unforgiving is great for a player like me who enjoys the struggle of a difficult game. It feels incredible to pull off a risky gambit in these games. The highs are high, but the lows are also devastating.

Trick-Taking Twist: Bid as You Go
There is a reason bidding is so satisfying in these card games. Looking at the hand of cards dealt to you and making a plan for how you intend to play it is a way to smooth out the difference between a “good” hand and a “bad” one. Winning the most or fewest tricks isn’t necessarily the goal: you set your own goal. How well do you understand the game? Can you make plans that include tactical maneuvers if things go sideways? Hitting your bid requires skill that is difficult to master, creating a satisfying and delicious struggle that continues to be rewarding even after playing a game dozens (or hundreds) of times. There is a reason Bridge is a lifestyle game for so many people!

While precise bidding is a common feature in trick-taking games, it makes them difficult for new players to pick up. It’s intimidating! Before I’ve actually played a round, you’re asking me to predict how it will all go down? And if I’m wrong I don’t score? With so many players only giving a game one or two plays to make a good first impression, this can be a lot for folks who didn’t grow up playing classic card games.

Bidding, though, doesn’t have to always take place before the cardplay begins. Many modern trick-takers have systems that allow for a shifting or evolving bid, giving players the chance to narrow down on a target as the cards play out. For example, in Nokosu Dice, players draft a set of dice that are used as cards in tricks, but the last unplayed die in your supply is your bid. This means that through clever management of your resources, you can wait until the last possible moment to decide on what that magic number will be. In BiD Coin, you have a set of bid cards you are trying to spend before your opponents. Players start each hand bidding zero, but every time a trick pushes you above your current target, you must increase your bid. In Xylotar, players cannot see their hand of cards so knowing how many tricks will be won is impossible. However, at some point in the hand, once they have deduced their remaining numbers through tricks, a player will declare that one of those face down cards is their bid and then reveal it, hoping their deductions have been accurate.

These are just two examples that show how modern trick-taking designers have started to play with the idea that a bid does not need to be declared before the first trick is played. This creates a unique puzzle that can be just as exciting to solve as the long established norms. Giving players some sort of resource to steer towards a bid creates a dynamic arc to each round. In my mind, no game has pulled off this “bid as you go” concept better than Taiki Shinzawa’s Segment Trix.

The Genius of Segment Trix

Segment Trix was a game that I saw pictures of when I started my modern trick-taking obsession, and I couldn’t believe how novel the component hook was. Cards were made up of seven segment numbers like you’d see on a digital clock. There’s sort of a magic to how subtracting segments from that boxy “8” creates a legible shape for every number! This game is so playful in its use of those numerals.

The cards in Segment Trix looked like those digital clock numbers, but players were given a special resource: wooden segments. These little pieces could be added to a card to change its printed value! For example, with one extra segment on top, a 1 could become a 7. One in the middle could turn a 0 into an 8. This was already getting me excited before I learned what the REAL hook here was: the number of unused segments in a player’s supply at the end of a hand… is their bid of how many tricks they need to have won!

Unfortunately it was impossible to find a copy of Segment Trix for a long time until it was re-released as Twinkle Starship in a small print run. I grabbed a copy and was excited to see if it lived up to the legendary hype that had been building in this tiny corner of the hobby.

The gameplay turned out to be brilliant because of the flexible bidding system. This might seem easy enough at first. Couldn’t you just use enough sticks on the last trick to hit your bid? Naturally, it’s not that easy. For example, if a player is on the final trick, has two segments remaining, and has won one trick so far, shouldn't it be easy to just drop a segment on that final card? Not if that last card is a 4, which cannot make a legal number with one segment. Or an 8 which cannot use any segments. Also be careful not to accidentally win that trick you’re trying to dump a segment into!

The hand of cards and stock of segments work together to break your brain when you first get into it, but the game is not intimidating. It’s fun to change the numbers on cards! It is a thinky game that also manages to be sort of silly because players have such a high amount of agency to do strange things when playing into a trick. This is not a careful card counting game, but it also isn’t a totally random and chaotic experience either. There’s nothing quite like it and it lives up to the promise of that component hook.

Taking the Time
After the success of No Loose Ends, Paul Salomon from GameHead was eager to find the next Shinzawa game that deserved its time in the spotlight. I told him that the one I thought never got its fair shake but had mass appeal was Twinkle Starship. We played it together and he was immediately enthusiastic about publishing it. The game is just so immediately exciting. It may have seemed too niche when it was first released in Japan in 2020, but the greater hobby market was now ready for a trick-taker that was this innovative.

Like with No Loose Ends, the core gameplay didn’t need much in the way of major changes, so our first important task was to try to find an appropriate theme for the game. With No Loose Ends, we were able to reverse engineer Shut the Books into a theme-forward design that actually reinforced the mechanisms for the game. Twinkle Starship and Segment Trix were themeless in their presentation and lacked a strong identity that paired well with that rock-solid gameplay.

Going with something time related seemed correct since the digital numbers immediately reminds one of a clock. Manipulating clock numbers made me think of time travel. Sometimes the most obvious connection can really make a game sing. The little rods that change the numbers of the clock can represent fuel for the time machine. It was easy to imagine how a stellar production could bring this story to life and the time travel theme ended up informing all of the development decision we made for the game.

Segment Trix had impeccable trick-play and bidding so that didn’t need to change for Trick to the Future. The only areas that were lacking were the very harsh scoring and the inflexible player count.

This was the first themed prototype design from Paul Salomon
Going Beyond
Scoring in Segment Trix was simple: if you hit your final bid, you score two points per trick and one point per segment captured from cards in tricks. A player who did not win tricks equal to their remaining segments scored zero points. Ouch. If a player won zero tricks they scored ten points, but only if they could get rid of all of their segments.. A lot of great incentives were baked into this system. Using segments made a trick more valuable, it was important to be precise with your resources. However, the game was so odd to get the hang of that getting no points for being off by even a single trick seemed unreasonable for new players and could easily lead to a runaway leader, making people less likely to want to play more hands if they made even a small mistake.

Because of the time travel theme and the rods representing fuel for mad science, we changed the scoring to be a bit more forgiving but spicy in its own way. If using fuel segments in tricks represents your time machine operating, then using too little fuel wouldn’t be a big problem. You need enough fuel to return to your normal time. However, running out of fuel while time traveling would be a huge issue. This lended itself to incorporating a busting mechanism into the game. Winning too many tricks means you’re lost in time, winning too few is ok… but you could have traveled in time more!

What this means mechanically is that you get those points for tricks and segments like in the original game so long as you didn’t win more tricks than your remaining segments. However, using your fuel exactly right would double points so being precise was still important. This turns the bid into almost more of a push your luck mechanism. Since players have so much control early in the hand to win or lose tricks with fuel rods, it creates a feeling of standing on the edge of a cliff if you don’t play it safe.

Here are some concept sketches for the player boards used to track fuel rods
Paul and I went back and forth for a long time on how to incorporate the “nil” bid into this scoring system. The flat point value from the original game wouldn’t quite work here since we were dealing with numbers that could be doubled. Giving up all your fuel rods is such an interesting strategy because ultimately you are feeding point into trick that other players will be taking. The reward needs to make up for this to make it worth it to avoid all that potential doubling. A good shoot the moon zero bid mechanism needs to be more enticing to players than winning exactly one or two. It should be worth the risk to dodge the easy tricks. We landed on making the reward scale with the potential points you’re giving up. If a player wins no tricks, they score 3 points for each empty fuel space on their player board.. This was easy to internalize, thematic, and still rewarded zero trick players who didn’t manage to get rid of all their rods. It also scaled nicely with different player counts.

The Final Journey
As for playing the game beyond the original 3-4 player count, we had to run some experiments. It is common for tick-taking games to only list the option to play a game with a number of players that would give a similar, even experience. The main consideration tends to be the number of tricks that would be available per person or how the deck would need to be manipulated.

When Paul and I tested the game with five players, we found that all the core mechanisms worked, it was just a bit of a zanier experience. Scores could diverge wildly, but the bidding and segment play were still fun. By adjusting the number of segments each player received, the game totally worked as a bigger, swingier experience. While some players may not prefer this, it was a riot when we tested it with large groups.

As for the two-player experience, this turned out to be surprisingly satisfying. A key development was removing the trump suit at two players. This made bidding even more precarious, adding extra uncertainty. Because of the shifting bid system, this turned into a cutthroat game of trying to push your opponent over the edge by feeding them tricks they couldn’t handle. A dueling card game atmosphere emerged and players could be hyper attuned to their opponent’s bid in a way that lost very little of the game’s core promise.

Trick to the Future gives Taiki Shinzawa’s masterpiece the treatment it deserves. The thematic production is out of this world and has tons of meaningful quality of life enhancements. This includes dual-layer player boards for fuel that help track the new nil bid and keep your supply separate from those won in tricks. There is also player aid on every card as to what numbers the rank could be transformed into with rods. I’m thankful that Paul brought me back on to develop this one after No Loose Ends because these two games are the pinnacle of what the modern trick-taking renaissance represents for me. This isn’t just rehashing the same old thing. These show that there is brilliance to be found in iterative game design. Taking apart a well trodden system and putting the pieces back together into some sort of wonderful new creation that can take you from the past to the future.

by Ryan Migalla

I love trading card games. I don't love what they ask of you. In designing Quickdraw I found I can design a game that gives that TCG experience - deck design, synergy discovery, iterating against an asymmetric opponent - but without the endless commitment.

An interesting space. But more interesting? Quickdraw accomplishes this with just 18 cards.

A bold claim, delivered by a unique double-edged team building and resource system that I'm excited to apply to more ambitious projects. More on those plans later, first, how did Quickdraw come to be?


[heading]The Inspiration[/heading]
Like any good chemical reaction, Quickdraw was formed via a few core building blocks and a catalyst. These building blocks were 1) a design segment, 2) a form factor, and 3) an interesting mechanic.

Design Segment
I wanted to design a game that I myself wanted to play, and one I could actually finish without getting burnt out in year five of design. I landed on a 2-player, dueling, small-box game. It's a favorite genre of my wife and I. Grab a small box game with high replayability and head to the local brewery to sip delicious drinks while challenging each other. It's a very familiar segment, so I know what the player would want/expect. And seemed a lot easier than starting with whatever my version of Cones of Dunshire would be.

Form Factor
I was at Pax Unplugged when I first stumbled across Button Shy via the keynote by Elizabeth Hargrave. She explained their concept: games that consisted of just 18 cards and a rulebook that fit in an awesome ultraportable wallet. I was immediately intrigued by this as a design constraint.

I'm a person who loves design constraints. Give me a blank canvas and I'll flounder, but give me an interesting set of constraints and my creativity flourishes. The idea of building a deep game with just 18 cards excited me a lot. I went to the booth, bought two games, (Tussie Mussie by Elizabeth Hargrave and Revolver Noir by Xavier Davidson), and played them in line with my wife. They did not disappoint, and I knew I wanted to try and add my own unique flavor to this sub-genre.

Mechanic
In 2020 I had my most insane boardgame experience. My friend Kevin hosted a virtual Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth game where we all joined through Zoom and he managed everyone's had of cards physically over webcam. I won't go into that madness of "Kevin, I know it's Zach's turn but can you show me my hand? Thanks, wait what does that second card do?" But it's worth noting that what I took away from that game wasn't "never play games with Kevin again", it was "wait, that was actually an insanely interesting mechanic..."

The mechanic I'm talking about (because there are a lot in that game) was the skill check where you flipped a set number of cards from your deck based on your ability and then had to reveal a number of pips determined by the difficulty rating of the task. Cards had zero, one, or two pips. You generally needed to reveal a total 1-3 for a success. So, two pip cards were really valuable. However, the cards also had abilities on them you could use if they were in your hand. Do you see the tension coming? It became a very interesting decision space of do I want this card in my hand or in my deck.

It's a minor mechanic in Journeys in Middle Earth, and I honestly couldn't tell you how to play the rest of the game, but that simple interesting mechanic stayed in my brain.

(If I mis-explained any part of the game please direct your comment hate to Kevin.)

Catalyst
The catalyst arrived as many of my gaming ideas do, when listening to a board podcast (probably the Board Game Design Lab or Crowdfunding Nerds). Someone mentioned a Wild West game. I don't remember what the game was, other than it was a completely different game type, but that theme made my game fall into place. Time to build a Wild West shootout.

[heading]The Design[/heading]
The idea seemed to coalesce all at once. It would be eight Lawkeepers vs eight Bandits, where four are deployed with attacks and abilities and the other four form the ammo deck. The core tension stems from the best units to deploy are also the best ammo in your ammo deck.

Simple Game Mechanics
The key to any good card dueling game is that the rules are simple, and the intrigue comes from the card selection. Quickdraw accomplishes that with rules that can be summed up with four step.

The first part of each round is team building. Players look at their eight unique units and decide on a strategy and how to arrange cards between being deployed to fight, or in the ammo deck to support.

After deciding which four units to deploy, the remainder are shuffled as the ammo deck and randomly dealt face-down to each deployed unit. Players take turns activating units and win by being the last one standing at the end of the shootout.

On a player's turn a unit is selected to activate. Their attached ammo card is revealed, and if the Ammo Value of the revealed ammo card is greater or equal to the Ammo Needed for their attack, the attack succeeds. The target unit is dealt damage equal to the damage value of the attack. One damage and they are turned sideways, two damage and they are defeated and removed from the board.

Players take turns activating units that shoot back and forth across main street. The last team standing wins!

Intriguing Game Strategy
Pretty simple gameplay, but once you start dissecting the central tension, you find a whole lot more. Remember, the central tension in Quickdraw is that the units with the strongest attacks and abilities also have the highest Ammo Values. The distribution of Ammo Values for each team is 6, 5, 4, 4, 3, 2, 2, 1. So if you deploy your four strongest units, your ammo deck would only have ammo values of 3, 2, 2, 1.

Most attacks and abilities need a 3 or 4 to succeed, so the very strong units you deployed are going to be very useless without high enough ammo available. Conversely, deploying your weakest units will give you a very consistent ammo deck, but they might not have enough fire power to best your opponent.

This creates the central tension of the game. You're trying to find that balance between power and consistency and also looking at different card abilities to find synergies that allow cards to effectively play stronger than their ammo value.

A great example of how this plays out is with our favorite bandit pair- Brother and Sister.

Brother has the rare 2 damage attack. Incredibly powerful since with one shot, he can take an enemy unit off the board. However, it needs 5 ammo to succeed. As a reminder the ammo distribution is 6, 5, 4, 4, 3, 2, 2, 1.

If I deploy Brother and the three other strongest units, the ammo deck would comprise of 4, 2, 2, 1 – meaning a 0% chance for Brother to hit.

However, if instead of playing Captain Blythe (6 AV) and Bruiser (5 AV), I put them in the ammo deck, now Brother has a 50% chance to hit since the ammo deck would be: 6, 5, 2, 1.

That’s the basic math, but the card abilities let you stack the odds even further. If I also play Sister, she can give Brother her ammo after he shoots. So, his first shot has a 50% chance to hit, but if he misses, on the next turn he can take Sister’s ammo, which would then be a 66% to hit – bringing his chance to hit at least once up to 86%.

86% chance to one-shot a unit seems pretty good! But what about the opportunity cost? That strategy required two shots to do 2 damage. Two more consistent units might’ve been able to pull that off with similar accuracy and without painting a target on themselves like Brother. Plus is that strategy too Brother dependent, and when he’s defeated do the Bandits collapse?

Sure, there’s only eight cards in each team’s pool, but the interconnectivity of their synergies and the balance of deployed strength vs. ammo deck consistency means there’s plenty to think about in the team building phase, and in the shoot-out phase.

Locations
There is one last element to the game that provides another layer of strategic decision making – location abilities. The Battle for Silver City takes place across Main Street and units are deployed on either side to three different locations: the Street, the building, or the roof.

The locations provide simple but impactful abilities. A unit in the Building has cover, which means enemies targeting units in the building get a -1 ammo modifier. So, while Sheriff McGraw usually only needs a 2 to hit, if she’s shooting into the building, she’d need a 3 or higher. Units on the Roof get to cancel the effect of cover, but only one unit can be deployed to the Roof.

The Building is safer, the Roof is more accurate.

So now the deployment decision. Maybe you want to protect Brother to let him get more shots off, so you put him in the Building. But you realize that a -1 penalty dramatically affects his ability to hit opposing units in the Building, so maybe he's better on the Roof? Again, it’s the small decisions that stack up that influence your game plan and how your team will respond to your opponent.

The success in the design is that the limited card pool, the simple abilities, and the basic locations add together in a very dynamic but comprehendible way. You can visualize the probabilities and how the synergies will play out to craft a strong direction for your team. But chance and your opponent’s set up will mean there's never one right answer.

[heading]Challenges During Design[/heading]
Balance
Balancing small numbers is HARD. Just as small adjustments in your deployed team can have large impacts on your strategy, seemingly small design changes can have catastrophic impacts on balance.

As we saw above, Brother maxes out at 50% accuracy with an attack that needs 5 ammo to succeed when you stack the ammo deck with 6, 5, 4, 4. However, if you make the smallest possible positive adjustment to Brother’s attack so that he needs 4 ammo to succeed, now he’s 100% accurate and incredibly over powered. Go one point in the other direction with an attack that needs 6 ammo to succeed and now unless he’s on the roof, he can never hit a unit in the building.

It becomes easier to see why games like Pokémon and Yu-gi-oh use numbers in the hundreds and thousands. A balancing change from 120 HP to 130 HP is a much more fine-tuned lever to pull than an ammo value going from 4 to 5. But the small numbers are what gives Quickdraw its easily understood and punchy abilities. So, while it took a lot of iteration (on the order of hundreds of solo playtest games), the challenge was worth it for the gameplay it delivers.

Design Requirements to guide development
To make sure the game was as dynamic as possible, without losing track of the central tension, I implemented several high-level design requirements.

1. Every card should be playable as a deployed unit or as ammo. With only eight cards in the card pool, if a card that is unbalanced and never gets deployed, or is always deployed, this significantly limits team building decisions. This means each card must be balanced exactly to its Ammo Value. A card that performs worse than its Ammo Value ends up always being ammo since it's more effective than being deployed, and vice versa. The issue is exacerbated at either ends of the spectrum where the highest and lowest Ammo Values have the most impact in the ammo deck.

2. No specific team configuration should be unbeatable by all opposing team configurations. Similar to the first requirement, but possibly more important, if one configuration of cards is unbeatable, the game is broken. Once that configuration is found, then there's no point in playing.

3. Different core archetypes on each team should have a rock, paper, scissors relationship. Meaning for example, the archetypal Sherrif build should be able to beat the archetypal Captain build 70% of the time, but lose to the Bruiser build 70% of the time, and be evenly matched with the Brother/Sister build.

This is for sure the most aspirational of the requirements. To achieve this, after each iteration I would develop three favorite builds per team and then do a round robin each to see how they fared against each other. The balance percentages aren't perfect, but they are good enough where this requirement succeeded in its purpose of enabling meta decision making. Anticipate your opponent, build to counter, but be wary of the double bluff!

[heading]"It Feels Like a TCG"[/heading]
So back to my crazy statement about my 18-card game providing a substitute TCG experience. Does all of this design actually deliver on that claim? I very much think that it does, and that's not just my personal delusions talking.

As I brought my game around to conventions and events, my demos naturally attracted a lot of TCG fans. Beautiful cards laid out on a playmat creates that familiar and engaging feel.

The demos went very well, and what I didn't expect was how often conversation would turn towards TCG nostalgia. Talking about the old days of buying every set, favorite decks, keeping up with the local scene, and so on. The common thread here wasn't that players had fallen out of love with TCGs, but that TCGs ask a lot and eventually life had gotten in the way.

What these players appreciated about Quickdraw was that it provided what they loved about TCGs but in a manageable format - deck construction, a unique mana system, strategic/reactive decision making, and meta gameplay. We've already covered the bones of Quickdraw, but now let’s put it in the context of a TCG.

Deck Construction and Discovery
With Quickdraw, instead of a 60-card deck you're focused on eight cards. That means you can really feel the impact of each card and easily conceptualize it up front. I love that I can quickly build a team and then look and say, "hmm but now Crazy Carl is only 25% accurate, oh but if I move him to the roof he jumps to 50%!"

And even with these few cards there are exciting moments of discovery as board state changes and you find different end states. Don't believe me? See what happens the first time you leave Sheriff as the last unit standing...

My favorite part of running playtests was watching two new players learn the game, play a round, and then immediately re-review the units they didn't deploy to find better synergies.

A Unique Mana System
Nothing affects a TCG more than its mana system. It's why a Magic clone will always feel like a Magic clone even with completely different cards. And what is the ammo deck in Quickdraw if not an incredibly interesting and unique mana system?

Rather than adding mana until you have enough to cast your card or use your attack, the ammo deck serves as an RNG system to control the action. However, it's a rigged RNG system that you built yourself. You can't blame your draws if your units never get a shot off, you can only blame yourself for putting too many strong cards on the field instead of in your ammo deck.

Strategic, Reactive Decision Making
Building your team is only half the battle. Now you have to use them wisely to defeat your opponent’s key units before they do the same to you. And with only four units with 2 HP each, each shot that gets through hurts. The back-and-forth action, tough decisions and dramatic moments make the whole game feel like the final climactic rounds of a classic TCG game.

Meta Gameplay
What do you do when you lose an epic match in a TCG tournament? Go home and hope it goes better next time? No. You spread out your cards and think where you can make changes to do better next week.

Well, with Quickdraw you don't need a week. Rounds take 10 minutes, so start the next one right away to tweak your strategy and claim victory.

[heading]Up Next[/heading]
I definitely didn't start down this path planning on designing TCG adjacent games. But given that I've been playing dueling card games since my brother and I were in elementary school actually playing Pokémon, I might actually be the best person for the job.

I'm incredibly excited about the core Quickdraw system and its ability to provide powerfully unique experiences in this space.
The next item on the roadmap is a second set for Quickdraw that introduces new teams and new abilities, but with the same core system. Battle for Silver City has tight abilities, grounded play, and a beautiful western feel. So naturally set 2 will be Quickdraw: Aliens vs. Marshmallows!

Ok, maybe not super obvious, but that's the point. I want to show the other end of the spectrum, wacky concept with elevated abilities, to show what is possible with the Quickdraw system.

My vision is a whole host of standalone sets that constantly let players discover new synergies and strategies. And maybe a future where sets can be mixed and matched for exponentially more options! If you want to follow along and weigh in on future sets, sign up for my mailing list and/or come join the RAM Games Discord community.

Apart from coming out with more sets, I'm also thinking of other ways to implement this system to provide for unique gameplay experiences. To that end I've began working on a roguelike version of Quickdraw. The quick gameplay loop, high impact of upgrades, and the pyrrhic nature of victories in Westerns sets up Quickdraw as a perfect base to develop a tabletop roguelike on.

I don't have a ton to share with this yet, but again, for sneak peeks, including alpha tests when its ready, come join our Discord community!

[heading]Thanks for Reading![/heading]
I hope you find this interesting, and even better yet, took something away from it. I'm really excited to grow Quickdraw and come up with more ambitious projects that bring joy to my player segment.

Give me a shout out in the comments of what you think. Do you think I can really frame a game as TCG adjacent with only 18 cards? What other ways would you want to see this system implemented? What's your favorite game that feels like a TCG but isn’t?

by Steph Hodge

[imageid=9419162 medium rep]▪️ After the hit game Confusing Lands was released in 2024, Envy Born Games decided it was time to expand it with Confusing Lands: Icebound Isles. This new game is completely standalone, but if you want to combine the decks, you will create an epic game! If you are a fan of 2-player games, I think this will be right up your alley. This game plays exactly 2-players in about 10 minutes.

From the BGG Page:



▪️ Hey, another game that is both standalone and an expansion! This time we have Tag Team: Arthur's Legacy which can expand Tag Team. In the box you will find 6 new fighters, all characters from the Arthurian Legends, which includes Excalibur! Scorpion Masqué also teased the 3rd Tag Team game coming soon, "hinting at the arrival of an iconic franchise from the world of video games."

From the newsletter:



▪️ Happy Camper just announced a small card game called Beach Bandits. Seems to be a perfect Summer snag. This game plays 2-4 players in about 15 minutes.

From BGG:


It was also wicked cool that Happy Camper had an amazing offer in their newsletter to send one game from their catalog to a Summer Camp of your choice. The submissions are now closed, but I thought I would mention it. Make sure to follow them for future updates and cool offerings like that.

▪️ Looney Labs just announced a small card game called Seven Islands. This is a game for 1-4 players and will take 10-30 minutes. The race is on!

From the press release:



In other news:

▪️ If gaming on the computer is your jam, a big Summer Steam Sale is happening and tons of favorites from Dire Wolf are on sale like Dune: Imperium and Ark Nova. You can check out the Dire Wolf collection here.

by Karl Lange

Origin Story

In March 2020 I was lucky enough to meet the company that held the Studio Ghibli licence for North America at GAMA Expo - I asked them if they would be interested in games designed around the Ghibli movies and they said they would love to see what I could do.

My wife had introduced me to the Ghibli classics like Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Howl's Moving Castle, and Spirited Away a few years prior and I had instantly fell in love with them.

Once returning to Australia, and with lots of newfound time from COVID lockdowns, I set to work coming up with concepts for many of the titles. One idea I settled on was a game inspired by the bathhouse in Spirited Away where players are employees collecting ingredient tickets to make baths for spirits, cleaning the dirty baths once the spirits leave, and managers providing assistance to players via special abilities.

After four months of design and multiple playtests a week, I pitched the game back to the company I'd met at GAMA. Spoiler alert, although the publisher loved the game, due to licensing it was not to be. At that point I decided to keep working on the game and try my hand at self publishing.

Jumping back to the start, how did the design progress?

A lot of inspiration was taken from the movie. I set to re-watching the bath scenes to really understand how the baths worked.

Players would collect bath tickets with ingredients to satisfy the spirits’ wants. I started with five spirit types and five ingredient types. The bath tickets with ingredients were long rectangles in the movie which led me to have two ingredients on most, and some with some singles. This deck makeup led to the idea that players could overpay spirits ingredients to complete a treatment but would receive amber for giving spirits exactly what they wanted, creating an interesting dynamic of playing for efficiency vs accuracy. This tension is fundamental to the design and has survived every iteration.

The spirits themselves needed to start dirty and become clean, this was accomplished by using both sides of the card (dirty with their requirements, and clean with only the points shown on the back). Spirits had between three and six ingredients, with the harder spirits worth more points.
The other interesting dynamic was the cleaning the baths. After a spirit left, the bath should be dirty - achieved again by flipping the card over to a dirty side - and need to be cleaned before another spirit could enter.

An early prototype of what became Mythic Baths
As with a lot of my family-weight games, I tend to favour quick turns with a single action. So to incentivise cleaning the baths, I decided that all dirty baths would be cleaned at once. This action would earn you one amber per bath cleaned (as with Chihiro finding gold on the bottom of the bath from Noface) and fill the tableau with new spirits from the deck. As you can only take one action a turn, this gives the next player a full set of spirits to clean so the decision on how long to wait / how many dirty baths became a core balance in the game.

These core elements remained basically unchanged with balancing of points and resources over the coming iterations.

The managers, who add modifications to the basic rules (like event cards in other games) had many more changes, predominantly in how they entered and exited the bath house. In the early versions, the managers were simply shuffled in with the guests and once X managers were drawn the game ended. This ending was too random as the game length could be very long or very short, and managers could be in for only one round. After that they were added into the manager deck at regular intervals. This was in place for a time but was still not perfect and had more setup than I liked for game of this weight.

After many more iterations, I decided to detach the managers from the guests, and attach them to the ingredient deck, with a new manager appearing each time the deck ran out and was reshuffled. This kept managers in play for longer, but players may only see two managers throughout the game. From there they jumped to when the baths were cleaned, with a new manager starting after each time the 'clean the baths' action was taken. This worked relatively well with managers staying out long enough to be useful, and generally not cycling away too quickly so it was kept for the time being - more on managers later.

The last element with many, many changes was what happened when you collected sets of creatures. At the start, players scored additional points at the end of the game for pairs and sets of one of each creature. This worked well at lower player counts, but in 4- and 5-player games players finish with six creatures not leaving much room for set scoring which was not the feeling I wanted at the end of the game.

Mythic Baths at PAX Aus Collaboratory 2023.After many months of testing and feedback I decided to add an extra element to the game which replaced the set scoring - gaining favor from the creatures. Once you completed a pair of creatures you could choose to take that creature's special action, a set of 1 of each would let you choose any creature's action.

This added an engine building-like element to the game, giving it a much better arc overall, but still had similar issues at higher player counts. More on this later also!

Another element that came into play part way through the design was the reserve mechanic, as often I would have a player express they wanted to 'lock in' a creature they were aiming to complete, giving them more certainty at the cost of a turn.

Interestingly, once introduced this was one of the most divisive actions, with about half playtesters thinking it was the strongest action, and the other half thinking that it was useless, often debating with each other in the feedback sessions - to me, this said it was working perfectly as it allowed for many play styles.

At this point, I was confident that I had a good game and moved to finding an artist.

Art Direction of the Game

Deciding on how to theme the game was a tough decision. I had originally thought to use generic spirits, but after some consideration and consultation from others in the Australian tabletop industry, I decided to make the game its own and use mythical creatures from all over the world. I set to researching mythical creatures from around the world for an art brief and looking for an artist in a cute whimsical style.

The creatures I settled on were:
• Jackalope - a half jackrabbit half antelope from North American folk law
• Tatzelwurm - a half cat half snake from south central Europe
• Cerberus - three-headed dog from Greek mythology
• Sea-lion - half lion, half fish from the Philippines heraldry
• Owlbear - half owl, half bear from fantasy tropes

I spent many hours looking for artists on deviant art and art station before seeing some of Emily Hancock's art on the game Gift of Tulips. I remembered we had actually met at GAMA in 2020 and I hurriedly hunted down her business card to reach out.

Emily's cute animal drawings and vibrant plant drawings would fit perfectly in the world I was creating bringing color and life to the game so I jumped at the opportunity to work with her on the game.

As soon as Emily's sketches started to come through, I knew I'd made the right choice as her creatures were adorable.

Part of the brief was to have various clean and dirty elements that I could add to the creatures to make each image in the game unique - Emily did an amazing job making each creature look different while keeping everything coherent.

For the managers, I asked Emily for a diverse range of characters and let her creativity lead the art for eight of the ten characters with amazing results. The last two characters were to be of my wife and myself.

Look ma! I'm in a game!
But wait, you said you were going to self publish the game?!

You are correct dear reader, that was my original plan until Good Games Publishing expressed interest after playing at Pax Aus Collaboratory 2023. The game fit well into their catalogue and they liked how Emily's art was progressing, so the deal was made.

One big advantage of having a publisher on board was the additional development put into the game by Kim Brebach.

One of the first changes was to increase the frequency of being able to use the creature favors. To do this, we changed the favors from abilities that would trigger on sets, to a token you would earn if you used your nourish token (reserve action). These become a one-time use that you can use on any turn giving more flexibility, with the tokens refreshing each time any player completes another of the same creature. This change kept players more engaged out of turn while allowing players to go for breadth (collecting each creature to get all the actions) or depth (to trigger the same action multiple times).

Favour tokens and reference card.
Kim is also a huge fan of Japanese culture and Spirited Away so we leaned into the theme, changing the highest value creatures into troublesome guests. These creatures have global negative effects that restrict play to all players in some way and were designed to be the opposites of the same creatures favor action.

To bring in the sense of staff rushing around to remove the troublesome guests while trying to keep the other guests happy, we added a semi-cooperative element where players can partially complete troublesome guests, earning amber (points) for the ingredients you contribute. Alternatively, you might just ignore them and let someone else focus on them, or you may try to complete them entirely yourself, scoring big points. This allowed us to change how the managers functioned too, having the managers change when a new troublesome guests enters (the previous floor manager making a swift exit when they see trouble approaching!). This brings all the upkeep into one step (flip baths, welcome guests, change manager if a troublesome guest arrives) keeping the majority of the turns flowing fast around the table.

Who's a troublesome little puppy?
It was a great experience designing and art directing the game and I am so happy with how everything has turned out, I want to end on one of my favorite comments on the game from many players over the years that

Mythic Baths was released at UKGE 2026 and is now available around the world!

Youtube Video

by Justin Bell

Let’s talk about stuff for a moment, shall we? Because while we sometimes like to talk about how much we love playing games, today we’re going to remind ourselves why it is so much fun to just open the daggone box.

When a new game arrives—be it a deck of cards, or something bigger—I love to spend time absorbing the total package. That starts with all that stuff, a process that begins as soon as I rip off the shrink. In the case of a new game like Revenant, you sit back and really marvel at how far game production has come, especially when companies like Mindclash Games partner with Panda Game Manufacturing to get every single bit of the production and storage solution process just right.

Mindclash sent a review copy of the Admiral Edition of Revenant a couple weeks ago. I decided to set the game aside until I returned from a family vacation to spend an evening sifting through the goodies. I can see why so many BGG users are happy with their new toy based on the comments I see here on our site as well as other distant corners of the interwebs. It reminds me of the many reasons why I think tabletop production is at its peak. From a production perspective, there’s no better time than now to be a fan of these glorious, and admittedly somewhat overdone, packages.

My rule is simple: when it feels like everything in the box is one step too far, that means a company absolutely nailed it.



With Revenant, that starts with the box. It’s big, maybe even too big, with a sharp image of an endangered spaceship on the cover that can be seen from across the street. Revenant’s cover announces itself from across a large living room. It shouts “play me” from its position on a high shelf at your local board game cafe. The box is too big…and perfect for the purposes of this discussion.

Did I need both plastic Voidborn ship miniatures AND cardboard Voidborn tokens? Absolutely not…which also means I have just enough ships for the moment when my nine-year-old gets his hands on the Revenant box and decides to have a miniatures battle between the ships from the Voidfall Galactic Box and the ships from the Revenant box. It’s good to have options when your kids destroy your stuff.

(An aside: I know that some of you really do prefer the cardboard options in both Revenant and Voidfall over the plastic minis. Fine. Let’s just agree to disagree and move forward as friends.)

I don’t want a storage solution sheet or reboxing video. I want a full color, written guide that takes me through where each little bit, where each oblong cardboard bit, where each set of tarot-sized cards should go. Publishers can’t skimp on this. When I say deluxe, we mean deluxe. I want to feel like I just strolled onto the 18th green at Augusta National, living that country club life with all the fixins. I want to feel like a VIP, like the restaurant only exists to serve me. That “Employee of the Month” parking spot? It’s mine…all mine, every month, not just this one.



If I pony up Admiral, Deluxe, Ultimate, Kingpin, Anniversary, or Collector’s money, I want to see that money on my table and feel it in my soul. That means I need to know how to put away 400 components, from the people that built the storage solution, without the need to go online to watch my neighbor Stu doing it from his poorly-lit basement. (Stu’s a good guy. He just needs deluxe lighting to show us a deluxe unboxing, right?)

Oh, and that storage solution? I want it to look like the one I have in the Revenant Admiral Edition. Spaces for both the big stuff and things as small as a single token or a set of four small cards. Sections for each player’s bits. Pockets deep enough to comfortably fit cardboard components, both to place these tokens but also to easily get them out. Plastic covers that seal each layer real tight, because I am definitely taking this game to a friend’s house and need to ensure I can whip that thing out and get it set up quickly for the nerds in my life.

I’ll even take a little foamcore or sturdy cardboard to use around the edges, so that my rulebooks and my player mats and my common boards and my market boards and my solo boards and my player aids don’t move around when my car hits a speed bump at just the wrong speed. (I blame the bump, not my bad driving.) I’ll even accept a little “lid lift” as long as the bits don’t move around inside the box.



While I was arranging some of the Revenant cards, I found myself once again marveling at the graphic design from Ian O’Toole and the Mindclash team, some of which has carried over from the artist’s world-class work on Voidfall. (It’s shocking how well this works in Voidfall, isn’t it? For a game that has four rulebooks, I’m amazed to find that I never need to relearn the game thanks to the excellent iconography.)

Some of that marveling was also tied to the unnecessarily high quality of the card stock. I found myself sorting the Scanner and the Operations cards, flipping each one, making sure there were words or icons on the backs, as if the cards would have shown up accidentally blank or something. The cards look good in the light and feel great in the hands.

Should the unsleeved cards feel this good? No. That means the card stock is one step too far…which means it is just right.

All this deluxe toy business made me think back to some of my favorite all-in editions over the last couple years, ones I have bought, titles I have received as review copies, games I’ve been lucky enough to play thanks to the people in my network.

Nothing beats the moment a friend opened their Legendary Edition of Dwellings of Eldervale years ago. Things that we know to be standard now weren’t quite the standard five or six years ago, from a Game Trayz storage solution to a fancy rulebook to a box that, when thrown at just the right velocity, could take out an intruder thanks to the sheer weight of the thing.

But the Legendary Edition of Dwellings of Eldervale is legendary for another reason: miniature standee bases with sound effects built in. I don’t want to just see a large demon, troll or Kraken on the board…I want to hear it! Did these toys need sound effects? Of course not…which means we need to have them.

(Yes, I continue to remind the fine people at Cardboard Alchemy that Andromeda’s Edge—also known in my circles as “Dwellings, in space”—only missed on one part of their own gloriously massive All-In Deluxe edition: raiders like the Mortality Sphere need a base where I can hit a button and hear a sound effect. EVERYONE knows that this is a requirement. It is a requirement, because it is completely and totally unnecessary…meaning, you guessed it, that it is completely necessary for the needs of myself and every other self-respecting, dice-chucking fan of Andromeda’s Edge.)



I recently reviewed the Arkwright Anniversary Edition over at Meeple Mountain, and after finishing my review plays, I gave the game to a friend in my network. When this friend saw the rulebook, we both joked about the unbelievably massive size of the 50+ page manual. It feels like you are reading a copy of the 1982 Sears gift catalog (not Seers Catalog, but Sears, Roebuck & Co.!). The rulebook is so large and so readable and rich with so many pictured examples that I can’t think of another rulebook that went out of its way to be ridiculously, gloriously deluxe.

“That means the rulebook is just right,” I said to an empty room.

Sweet Lands. Oh my goodness, Sweet Lands! I still can’t believe how ridiculous the Sweet Lands components are, in part because the game’s components are the same in both the retail and the Deluxe version. (The Deluxe version has minor additions, such as card sleeves and different player tokens.) I’m not even sure I recommend playing Sweet Lands so much as I recommend seeing the production in person. The game looks fantastic, all the wooden bits look fantastic, and the cards are gorgeous, with illustrations that made me sit and stare for long stretches.

Everyone in my circles knows about titles like Galactic Cruise and Luthier, but I like that the publishers of those games (Kinson Key and Paverson, respectively) have branded themselves as newer publishers who care about both form and function in equal measure. That means everything about those productions feels over the top, in a way that makes those games easier to table. The games play well and they look sensational.

As I was putting the Admiral Edition of Revenant away, I snuck another look at the Tray Manual to make sure I had everything in its proper place. (Mindclash really does these Tray Manuals better than anyone; between Voidfall, Perseverance, and Revenant, putting the game away is almost as much fun as setting it up.) Signed, sealed, and delivered back to my review game stack, I admired the box one last time before making my way to bed.

Now the real fun begins: getting a game that looks great to the table, in the hopes that the game’s gameplay matches its stellar production.

Breaking out those shiny new toys is such a thrill. What’s your favorite deluxe version of a game? Share it in the comments…I’m excited to hear more about the toys you tabled this weekend!

by Erik Anderson Sundén

This designer diary will tell the story on how The Glorious Guilds of Buttonville came to be.

We, Christian Kudahl and Erik Andersson Sundén, started to explore joint designs less than four years ago. Erik had played Mindbug and loved it. Christian had heard of Erik from his adventures at Fastaval and Whirling Witchcraft and was curious. So we started to talk. Relatively soon we both agreed to try to make a game together.

We seem to thrive when we work intensely! So we tried a few ideas and shot them down after a few iterations. Especially Christian pushed the idea of abandoning things quickly if they didn’t show great promise already in the first test (as he can really be quite lazy). This can feel quite tough as you still may think “but I can fix it”, but exploring new ideas is just a lot more fun. We wanted a game that was immediately really fun, so that our job polishing the last few edges would be super easy.

And so one day we stumbled over the concept of Buttonville. We agreed to create the simplest of systems so the game rules were something like this:
1. Draw cards.
2. Play as many cards as you want from a set and trigger the ability of that set.

Each set has a cool ability which sometimes even gets more powerful the more cards you play. This was the core of the game and already from the first test, we saw something showing a ton of promise. We knew we had to continue down this rabbit hole to see what the game had to offer. It’s fun when you make games, you can yourself be surprised at the experiences they throw back at you. It is a bit like having a kid.

We saw that the system was simple enough to not get in the way, so the heart of the game was really the cards. Depending on what you put on those, the game could be a breezy experience playable with families or a brainburning puzzly hellhole that would make even heavy eurogamers quit in frustration. We aimed for a happy medium.

We made the game modular, so each game you select some number of stacks that are used in that game. (A stack consists of multiple copies of the same card). This gives a lot of variety between games and leaves new combinations to be discovered each play. This idea is certainly not new, and Dominionprovided some inspiration here. Not for the gameplay, as Glorious Guilds of Buttonville is not a deck builder, but for having a big box with stacks of cards, only some of which are used in every game. Other inspirations include Guildhall and Ethnos having abilities increasing in power based on the number of cards played.

And all of a sudden things exploded. We went into hyperspeed mode and more than 50 cards were created in less than a day. Erik loves to brainstorm ideas and just throw them out there, no thoughts of consequences and no sorting of good or bad effects. Page up and page down. Christian is great at finding the gold nuggets among those ideas and polishing them to crispy unique (and well-worded) effects. Christian even suggested that our rapid work pace made him think of us as he listened to MacGyver by They Might Be Giants.

Playtest at the lunch break of the division of applied nuclear physics at Uppsala University
After working on the game for what feels like only about a month, Erik proposed sending it to Thorsten Gimmler at Ravensburger. Usually it is a good idea to make your idea really refined before showing it to a publisher - if they don’t like it, they might not want to see a more polished version again later. On the other hand, we are both quite impatient (especially Erik), so we decided to send it away. And then we waited. What did we learn from the waiting? Erik is WAY less relaxed in a waiting state. He probably checked his mail every 5th minute. Christian was much more Zen.

Thorsten: ”From the very first test game, I was captivated by the game. Many games have extensive rules that ensure complexity and replayability. Buttonville, however, has such simple and few rules, yet the combinations of cards ensure that the game remains exciting. Since the games don't take long, I played three games in a row during my first test. Further tests quickly followed, especially since it was easy to find test players for the game, as everyone wanted to test it again and again. So it quickly became clear to us that we definitely wanted to make the game.”

An early playtest of the prototype at Ravensburger in June 2024
Thorsten came back to us and started by saying. “This game sure has a LOT of cards in it! I can’t believe that I spent so much time crafting this first prototype, but I’m glad I did! Because I REALLY like the game!” and a few months later a contract was signed.

We had a great development process with Ravensburger. Thorsten proposed that instead of picking the card sets completely random, we could group them into sets of similar effects, for example drawing, getting currency, spending currency etc. This was a great call and allowed us some freedom in designing cards. If a card for example rewards you for spending coins, you really need there to be another card giving you coins or that first card will just be a dead draw.

Erik and Christian (especially Erik) created well over 100 more card stacks. Some were super simple and some more advanced (Christian even used the expression “crazy mess” now and then). We playtested the cards and sorted them back and forth in good and bad, simple and hard. Together with our editorial team at Ravensburger, we decided to mostly focus on the simple and easy to understand card effects, and only one or two of the crazy messes snuck their way into the final game (You know who you are, Slimebob!).

Photo Credit: [user=W Eric Martin][/user]
Thorsten: “Working with Christian and Erik was really great and a lot of fun. We coordinated with each other regularly and discussed our test results in video calls. It was great that we always had the same vision for the game. It just worked really well. We made small improvements again and again, replacing some cards with new ones or simply improving and adjusting others slightly. We also made a big leap forward by designing the entire system to be modular. This allows everyone to freely assemble their own set. Of course, this also had the practical benefit of not having to test each set multiple times. ;-) But this means you are not limited to previously tested sets. You can keep putting together new sets and be sure that they will work!

The signing event at SPIEL 2025.
The game premiered at SPIEL Essen 2025. We were happy to be assigned a signing slot at the booth of Ravensburger. We had a decent number of visitors who wanted a signed copy, a fair amount were happy designer friends who congratulated us. We had a great time! And then! As the time was getting close to the end, something started to happen. A huge queue started to build up and we started to get excited. Did the hype spread to the entire convention already? Christian, the more observant of the two of us, noticed that every single one in the queue was also carrying a green box… hmm.. As we turn around Stefan Feld is standing behind us: “I will take over from here.” (Just kidding, Stefan was super friendly and congratulated us on our game.)

Almost a year has passed, and now it is time for the game to be presented at Gen Con! We look forward to its American reception!

From the left: Erik Andersson Sundén, Thorsten Gimmler, and Christian Kudahl

by Steph Hodge

Capstone Games recently announced their Gen Con lineup of games! Here are the details!

[imageid=9526276 medium rep]▪️ It gives me great pleasure to talk about All Mine! because it reimplements Scharfe Schoten, a game I hold on to tightly in my collection because it never made its way to the US market. I am very pleased to learn of this new release from Capstone Games. It does seem to be a new age of trick-taking games, so it doesn't surprise me to see All Mine show up and essentially resurface. This game is played by 3-4 players in about 30 minutes.

From the BGG Page:



▪️ Ants was originally released from Cranio Creations at Spiel 2025, but now will be available in the US market from Capstone. It is a heavier strategy game for 2-4 players and plays in about 90 minutes.

From BGG:



▪️ Night at the Zoo is a new tile-placement game for 1-4 players that will play in about 30 minutes. The catch is that you need to program your movement and understand the patterns to do that.

From BGG:


▪️ Along with the base game, you can acquire the expansion Night at the Zoo: Latecomers. Now with more animals and added variety!

From BGG:


▪️ Finally, another big game called Papyria. This game is originally from Irongames, but will now be available in the US from Capstone. It has a Rondel mechanic, which is very intriguing. The game plays 1-4 players and takes 90-120 minutes.

From BGG:

by Kristian Karlberg

The Birth of Jackpot
Version 0 - 2020
The earliest version of Jackpot: Set the Reel was born at KalCon, a small Swedish board game convention where Kristian was demoing and recruiting backers for Goetia: Nine Kings of Solomon. During the event, inspiration struck and this childhood memory of us playing slot machines on the ferry between Finland and Sweden made us tinker with the idea of making a deck builder slot machine.

Even back then, we were fascinated by slot machines as a physical and emotional experience. There’s something universally recognizable about the rhythm of spinning symbols lining up. Part of the original vision was simply recreating that feeling in tabletop form: revealing three cards at a time like the reels of a slot machine and letting players chase combinations.

Kristian likes to take picture of the very first versions of a game. This is the very first hotel-room-prototype of Jackpot.
Breaking the Bank
Early in the development, players were trying to hit three-of-a-kind as often as possible in order to gain coins - just the way the old slot machines worked. The coins in the bank eventually became the timer of the game thus making the working title “Jackpot: Break the Bank”.

Artwork
People say that you should not spend money on artwork for prototypes, but Kristian stumbled upon some beautiful cherries somewhere and decided to track down the artist, who was surprised that Kristian had found some of his old artworks.

He agreed to sell us the art pieces to use, since Kristian was convinced that he would make this into another Kickstarter, so he might as well get the rights to use his artwork straight away. The artwork would end up being used to draw looks and raise interest, but these art pieces never ended up in the final version.

Early Artwork used in Prototype
Designing Variants
That “breaking the bank” concept stayed at the heart of the game for a long time. Every decision players made brought the table collectively closer to the end.

Early versions experimented with all kinds of mechanics. There was a hold mechanic inspired directly by video poker, where players could lock certain symbols while rerolling others. At one point the game drifted surprisingly close to being a memory game, asking players to track information across turns. We also introduced income mechanics tied to clover symbols, giving players more long-term strategic engines to build around.

One early mechanic that Kristian thought was interesting was the fact that you gave your cards to your opponents, and if they used those cards when they won some coins, you gained some coins because your cards were used. This caused the players to get an influx of coins out of turn. The coins could then be used to purchase new cards to improve your hand.

Early on, the game used achievements with decrementing values, so the first player to hit a three-of-a-kind would get the highest victory point token. Variants of this remained in the game and eventually ended up becoming simply cards that were awarded to the players.

Decreasingly valued VP cards awarded when hitting 3 of a kind
Later iterations used a game board where players were moving between casinos and trying to break each and every one of the banks.

A version had players move between casinos and collect poker chips

The hold mechanic showed promise, but caused the timing of the game to become strange. Players needed to be finished with their turn at the same time to create order.

The Pitch Project
The game eventually took shape into something representable. During the peak of Covid, Jay Cormier and Sen-Foong Lim realized the lack of opportunities for designers to pitch games to publishers, so they organized an event called the Pitch Project. The workshops during this event built the foundation and taught us how to properly pitch games to publishers.

Sell Sheets
The requirement to enter the competition was to make a Sell Sheet and use that to qualify for the online pitch where dozens of publishers would look at your game.

The sell sheets went through many iterations. Initial versions had too much text, then later versions were too rules-heavy, and slowly the feedback shaped them into something more refined.

Evolution of the sell sheet
First Contract
Jackpot qualified for the Top 50 out of roughly 750 submitted sell sheets and was set to hold a two minute video pitch for publishers. Shortly after the Pitch Project, the game was evaluated by multiple publishers and was eventually signed by an American publisher and entered a longer development process.

Development
Seeing another team engage deeply with the design was exciting and slowly but surely made improvements to the game.

The development team aimed to improve Jackpot’s pacing and deck-building feel by reducing or removing the coins while keeping and refining popular features like wild cards, and allowing longer gameplay for better progression. Some of the ideas explored during that period still echo in the current version of the game. Hold was scrapped, coins were cut, and eventually clovers were introduced as currency, shifting the focus towards pacing, accessibility, and making every turn feel active for all players.

Game Is Put On Hold
Unfortunately, the publisher later ran into internal difficulties and had to let the project go. After a couple of years, the rights reverted back to Kristian, along with a huge amount of valuable feedback gathered during development.

Jackpot was put on ice whilst other designs were made. Two years went by.

Enter Kenny Zetterberg
For the next couple of years, Kristian and Kenny Zetterberg started to make multiple designs together. At some point, they revisited Jackpot and began tweaking it further, while also exploring what else could be done with the jackpot mechanic.

Jackpot itself remained on ice while other designs explored what we now call the “jackpot mechanic”. This was added as an action selection system in other projects, eventually leading to a eurogame using that core idea.

Prototype of the eurogame Kalix using the Jackpot mechanic
Exploring the jackpot mechanic in other designs proved valuable. We realized that, contrary to traditional slot machines, partial matches needed to be rewarded. Matching one or two symbols still gave players something. The game became more generous, more energetic, and far less swingy, keeping players emotionally engaged even when narrowly missing the perfect result.

A crucial discovery during this period was the income phase. At the end of each round, players received income that could be used to purchase more cards, whereas earlier versions only rewarded wins directly.

Clover indicating income at the end of a round
Jackpot was occasionally revisited, and bonus actions were introduced when players achieved two-of-a-kind, which felt like the missing piece. The game timer was changed to “first to 33 VP wins,” and the game was ready to be pitched again.

Reddit
During the sell sheet design, Kristian posted in the r/tabletopgamedesign subreddit for feedback. Dranda Games had seen Jackpot during the Pitch Project and noticed that several years had passed without release. An old sell sheet post caught their attention, and they reached out to test the game.

Conversations started, prototypes were sent, and before long Jackpot had found a new home.

Dranda Games
The development team at Dranda Games loved the game but felt there was more design space to explore, particularly inspired by mini-games found in modern slot machines.

We began experimenting with very small mini-games integrated into the core gameplay. Designing these was an interesting challenge, as players would only experience them for a few turns. They added variety and created playful breaks in the flow of the game.

Some experiments proved too complex and were cut, including Roulette and Minotaurs Maze, which required too many components and slowed the experience.

Mini-game development exploration

Seven Seas mini game Prototype
Kickstarter - Jackpot: Set the Reel
What started as a simple idea in a hotel room opened up many doors and possibilities, and six years later found a home with Dranda Games. Jackpot reached its funding goal on September 5th and has its official release at UKGE 2026.

As a bonus, Jackpot: Set the Reel is now in the beta stage of development on BoardGameArena.

Kenny Zetterberg & Kristian Karlberg at Essen Spiel 2025

We couldn’t be happier with the game and we truly hope you will enjoy playing it!
Thank you for taking the time to read about our journey.

by Justin Bell

Ray Charles and I agree: night time really IS the right time, particularly when it comes to my energy level.

Some of that is tied to the fact that I have children (ages 12 and 9) and I have a wife, all of whom typically go to bed by 9 or 10 PM every night. That means Dedicated Justin Time starts around 10, and I try to squeeze a lot in between 10 PM and maybe 1 AM every day.

In some ways, nights for me start as soon as my typical weekend afternoon siesta ends around 4 or 4:30 PM, because I try to take a nap each day on the weekends and select days during the week, especially if I can find or create a gap somewhere each afternoon when “that 2:30 PM feeling” kicks in.

So even though I love mornings, I find that my body’s peak energy sweet spot typically runs from about 5 PM until 1 AM. I have a passion for things like happy hour, dinner parties, evening networking events, and the Chicago nightlife. I also have a passion for playing board games at night, typically starting after 7 PM and running late, if I can find the right people to hang with me.

For me, the body clock is set. Board games exist in my world as an evening activity, and that activity is not limited to playing lighter fare at night either. In fact, some of my best memories of the last 10+ years are playing heavy games that ran late, that went past midnight, that featured people squawking at each other into the wee hours of the morning.



Conventions are sometimes worse for me because I will always find a way to start a game late when “free play” halls are open 24 hours a day. I have many memories of doing what I consider the absolute worst thing one can do at a show: opening a new treasure at like 10 PM, then ripping off the shrink and trying to table a new game by learning that game from the rulebook (“Justin…NOT FROM THE RULEBOOK!!”) when I have no business trying something like that.

You know the situation. “Yeah, I just picked up a copy of [insert new strategy title here]…we should DEFINITELY play it tonight. No, there are no teach or learn-while-playing videos out there because the game is so new. Yes, this is the right time to punch the cardboard chits, set it up then learn it by reading the 24-page rulebook tonight.”

“Is there any chance we finish this by 1 or 2 in the morning?” a brave soul, doubling as your group’s voice of reason, will offer.

“Absolutely. All we have to do is get through the rulebook; I’ll bet we are up and running in 20, maybe 30 minutes.”

Then you try to play the game…and find that you’ve just finished the first of four rounds, and it is already 1 AM.

But thanks to Ray Charles’ voice in the back of my head, my body is always telling me that night time is the right time to do just about anything. So, I’m the joker who tries this or just agrees with your plan—learning a new game from the rulebook is absolutely the right idea late at night during a show, so we should go ahead and commit to learning it. Strike while the iron is hot, even when it looks like everyone else is essentially asleep.

I still remember when a friend tried to get a game of 1861: Railways of the Russian Empire rolling, a first play we started at like 10 PM. (No, we didn’t finish.) A first play of Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory that went from a teach to a final turn that ended just after 1 AM on a Monday night? No sweat; those five hours just flew by.

Rebel Princess: Deluxe Edition at a convention free play space that started after midnight? Home, sweet home. A five-player game of Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy that started at 9 PM and required a teach? Count me in, even as one player hid in the corner of the map to earn a victory while the other players space-battled their way into a four-hour slugfest at the center of the playspace. (Naturally, that was the second game of a very long night of chucking dice.)

I’ve got dozens of stories like this, and I’m thankful that I’ve found other players who love playing games late at night as much as I do. That’s because I struggle carving out the time to play games during the day.



I certainly like the idea of playing board games starting at, say, 11 AM or noon on a Saturday. But the reality is that being a dad also means trying to avoid tough conversations at home.

“Honey, listen…my friend Beth is doing a game day from 12-6 PM. I’m thinking that, well, maybe I just bail on the family all day long, and you can run the kids to soccer, then band practice, then that third-grader birthday party downtown. We’re cool, right?”

Talk about a recipe for divorce! Instead, I try to carve out one day each month when I actually do bail on my family and tackle daytime gaming. Lately, that means starting around 4 PM with friends in the suburbs on a Sunday here and there. But getting out of parental responsibilities is tough and it never feels great, so I try to balance the day gaming option where I can.

Even if I wasn’t a dad, my body still loves afternoon down time. That makes my already-legendary lack of patience a bigger issue, so I try to avoid these trouble spots by not making critical board game decisions at 2 or 3 PM on a Saturday. Plus, no one I know plays games early, and I’m not a part of a 6 AM commuter game day where I can do card games with folks at a coffee shop downtown or something. (Maybe I need older gamers to join my network, since the people I know who love early mornings the most are also seniors. Some of those folks have already retired, so I’ll have to start making a list of potential gaming buds out of local retirees.)

Maybe it’s different in other parts of the world. There have to be people playing Grand Austria Hotel in an actual hotel lobby somewhere at 8 AM, right? Wargamers who kick off new campaigns at the crack of dawn? Post-yoga trick-taking game mornings with folks from a local gym?

I’ll keep an eye out; maybe mornings give me a chance to shake up the night owl formula that has worked wonders over the years.

In the meantime, nights will do. Thankfully, my body prefers late nights anyway.

by Danielle Reynolds

“Love” for many can be a roller coaster of ups and downs. I had a six-year relationship with a woman I almost married and after that break up my friends were pushing me to go on apps because they wanted to play “swipe” (and probably have me find love). Most of them were in monogamous relationships and never got to experience Tinder, Hinge, Bumble or whatever the flavor-of-the-week app was.

No offense to my friends but I didn’t trust them to just take my phone and pick what girls I should date so I’d watch to make sure they knew what I liked before I let them play “swipe”. This concept is what inspired the design of Perfectly Imperfect. I wanted players to learn from dating profiles what each other’s red and green flags were in the form of a conversation party game.

This design spent years changing names and directions before it found its way to becoming Perfectly Imperfect. The cousin of this game was a design I attempted based on the concept of getting ghosted but I ditched the concept in 2019. In 2021, a yearish after my breakup, the first form of Perfectly Imperfect began as Date or Hate. Profiles were written to resemble public domain characters like Robin Hood. Each card was double-sided with a girl profile on one side and a boy on the other. That way you could turn the deck depending on a player’s preference. It was cute but people knew these characters. They had many pre-existing opinions and didn’t learn as much about each other as I had wanted.

So I took a second stab at the content with the help of my uncle Terry. We wrote historically bad people/fictional characters into the game. You’re now dating the worst of the worst. The problem is, not only was that not fun, people didn’t want to think about dating a tyrant even if it was written comedically.

So I tried again on my own. This time I wrote them all as gender neutral, researching names that could work for all the profiles. By this point it was 2023 and I was playtesting the game with David Gordon and TAM in New York City. We did some brainstorming and TAM suggested a new take for the look of the game. With the new gender neutral profiles I needed a name that better fit and he suggested Abstract Love. I loved the idea of leaning into something I’m very passionate about, gender identity and sexuality. As a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, I love seeing games with gender neutral writing and characters. I updated the prototype and made fun abstract art for the 60ish profiles I had made for pitching the game. The new look also got printed in a much nicer box thanks to a short sponsorship from Launch Tabletop.

The mechanics up until this point had one player as the Dater and the others as the Friends each round. Three profiles got read and players placed a yes, no or maybe token facedown under each profile. Then the Dater would place theirs and flip to see what matched. You’d score one point per match and rotate Daters each round until you played 1-3 rounds depending on player count. The only additional element was a suggestion offered by David to add a confidence token that gained you an extra point when you matched up. Funny enough, the future publisher Randolph would later relate this mechanic in what was in their successful Oh, Really? game insisting they would have added it had it not been there.

The content hadn’t changed but the facelift gave it a new fresh look that caught publishers' eyes. In 2025, at the Gathering of Friends Joël Gagnon, who I'd met two years before, sat down for a pitch between me and Randolph. When pitching, I explained the journey of the game but it was the fact that most of the content was based on reality and that I had actually done most of the playtesting of the game on actual dates that made them ask to play. I pulled out my prototype and we played. They saw the parallels between Abstract Love and Oh, Really? knowing it would perform well in Montreal at their cafes. They especially loved this game played great at two-players as well as eight-players, giving a slightly different experience but still causing laughter, conversation, and tales that left the gaming table.

Joël took a prototype and a few months later we had a contract signed with a fast turnaround for me to write the content. As most party game designers know, the written content can make or break a game so I did a lot of playtesting to get the game up to the 200 profile cards you see in the final version. Randolph had also loved the gender neutral profiles but suggested switching from real names to user names which gave me a fun way to add plenty of cheeky jokes in. They also wanted to go back to each profile having three interests and there being no images like the Date or Hate version had. We worked to balance these interests with the profile text to make the people seem interesting and allow players to focus on different details. We also added a scoring mechanism for the Dater to receive the same amount of points as the highest scoring Friend.

A challenge that came when writing the profiles was receiving a head injury when returning from Gen Con in August 2025. The passenger next to me dropped their suitcase from the overhead bin onto my head before deboarding the plane. This led to an ER visit and my fifth diagnosed concussion with a new barrier of limited to no screen time as I recovered. So I channeled my inner middle schooler and journaled my thoughts creating all the original profile drafts in my design journal then using the talk to text feature added them into a spreadsheet to share with my publisher. My friend Amanda Rivera was incredibly helpful in reviewing the profiles to fix the talk to text typos, playtesting and helping me brainstorm funny profile names. The journey of this game really showed me how important my friendships were.

Due to my head injury I was restricted in how much screen time I was allowed for months so whenever I got stuck on what to write in the next profile I’d read, call a friend or work on an art project to help with inspiration. One project included two paintings based on the art of my Abstract Love prototype that still hangs above my bedroom.

A huge hurdle came in what to call this version of the game. Abstract Love no longer made sense with the illustrations being removed and didn’t scream dating game. We spent most of September going through different name suggestions until they landed on Perfectly Imperfect which had been one of the profile user names based on the popular saying. It was short, simple, elegant and would end up being quoted many times in casual conversation still to this day by me and my friends.

The timeline for this game had been sped up due to Hachette taking the game and deciding to distribute it in English before Randolph put it out in Canada. Their goal was a Spring 2026 release so I spent August and September 2025 playtesting non-stop in my freetime and tweaking the profiles along with Randolph’s translator Matthew Legault reviewing changed content. The English edition of the game would have me as the writer while the French would be a combination of translations and original profiles that related to French Canadian locations/sayings - so no more Trader Joe’s jokes!

In October 2025 while I was traveling through France after SPIEL I was receiving proofs of the cards and box to review. The illustrator for the game was the same as Oh, Really?. MC Marquis was an incredibly talented artist that made the box look like a piece of art that should stay out indefinitely on people’s coffee tables. I e-mailed feedback from trains and pulled my friends Elizabeth Hargrave, Mattand Donna Leacock to give their thoughts while doing the final playtests in Europe. I appreciated the amount of collaboration that the Randolph team had with me to get this game to the finish line. Not all publishers let the designer be this involved but this game was years in the making and I wanted to see it through to the end.

Fast forward to New York Toy Fair 2026 I got to hold a mass production copy of the game in my hands and make a few videos about the inspiration behind this game. It’s wild to think how many bad dates went into this game between the content and the playtests. A few years ago I had made playtesting at breweries my go to first date idea. Figuring if the date didn’t go well I’d at least have a good story and some more playtesting data. I learned that the game could be just as fun with people you didn’t know as the ones you did. It also helped me learn if a second date would happen or not (there was never a second date back then). I even used the published version of the game to play with my now girlfriend to see how well we matched each other. I always hated dating apps and the pressure people put on me to use them to find love but hey, I eventually found my perfectly imperfect partner and I couldn’t be happier where that relationship or this game is going. I hope people enjoy the game as much as I do now that it’s out!

by Scott Brady

I think this is the first time I will have two major releases of my games occur at the same convention. June marks my annual trek to Columbus for Origins Game Fair. Two years ago my co-design with Danielle Reynolds, Caution Signs, premiered there. Hues and Cues would have in 2020 hadn’t it been for the shutdown. Everything else I’ve made typically debuted in the fall or was silently released into retail whenever they were ready.

I talked about boop. Shuffle previously and am anxious to see how it is accepted by the typical abstract-loving public. It was technically released in May, but this will be the first convention it will be available for sale.

The other title is being flown in from China and will be available at Origins in limited quantities – I’m told only around 100 will be for sale. Size Wise from GameHead has been in development for some time and is proof of how game design can lead from one idea to another organically.

Concept

For quite some time I had been tossing around the idea of a game about measurements. We’ve all seen plenty of trivia games where you guess how tall something is or how much it weighs. I’m not a fan of this type of game because replayability could be an issue. Over time people will memorize the answers.

I’m much more a proponent of groupthink, like Hues and Cues, where the correct answer doesn’t matter. Scoring points is about how well you match up with what other players think. This means that even if you have the same challenge in a different game, the answers might be very different depending upon the other players’ perspective.

First Crack

I began working on a game I tentatively called “Size Matters”. That progressed to “On the Scale of…” and then the final prototype name, “Banana for Scale”. It featured a board with a grid going from one to one hundred. Cards featured questions in different measurement categories with questions like “In millimeters, how long is a centipede?” and “What are the odds of aliens landing on Earth by 2050?”.

Questions could have actual answers, like the average length of a centipede, or be opinion-based like the alien one. In both cases, points are scored if you matched the answer within a range of the active player. It didn’t matter about the size of the insect or whether aliens arrived or not!

It was while doing a little dev work on this game, trying to decide what the interface would be for the consumer that I thought of the situation where a fisherman is trying to describe the size of the fish they caught using their hands as measurement tools. I knew this type of description wouldn’t work for “Banana for Scale” as it was only about size and not predictions or any of the other categories. I still felt like there was something cool about those fish tales and how it could be used in a game.

Prototypes

The game itself turned out to be rather simple, which I was fine with. I’ve learned that simple sells. Mass-market consumers don’t want long rulebooks or teach. They just want to play. Using your hands to describe the size of something is natural and familiar. How would I control the game though if I allowed the players to hold their hands up and tried to compare them?

Plus, why would they even need to buy the game if we didn’t supply a unique experience with custom components!

The first, obvious answer to me was a measuring tape. I envisioned each player having a player-color measuring tape with no markings. I figured players would extend their tapes for the lengths they were estimating and hold them next to each other to compare. I purchased a lot from Amazon to play around with. It was then I discovered something important.

Cheap measuring tapes only click and hold in certain increments. The ones I bought extended in 1.5” segments. Traditional measuring tapes like what you might have in your garage are much more accurate…and expensive.

Second Attempt

I was struggling to figure out a way to implement the ideas of this game inexpensively yet still being unique and appealing. My mind went back to the fish analogy. That’s when I thought of a bobber on a fishing line.

A ball on a string – that would work! The clasps on a bobber would allow it to slide up and down the line and become a pseudo measuring device! Off to Amazon again to shop for bobbers.

What became difficult was that bobbers are designed for thin fishing lines. At best I could use color nylon string, but that is very thin and doesn’t come in easily differentiated colors. Neither do bobbers. They’re mostly neon yellow, neon orange or white. Not nearly enough for player colors.

Third Attempt

Bobbers were out. So were tape measures. My next idea was utilizing those little spring-loading things you see on backpacks or sweatshirts (see photo above). I’m sure they have an official name, but I have no idea what it is (editor's note - spring cord locks). I managed to find a batch on Amazon to test. They didn’t hang consistently due to their odd shape and lack of weight, so comparing lengths was a bit of a chore. There was also the issue of the weight of string I was using.

Solution

Eventually, I somehow landed on shoestrings as they came in a broad range of colorful hues (see what I did there?!) and were very inexpensive. Because of the Amazon searches I had made for bobbers and balls, it magically recommended I look at beads. I found a set of ¾” diameter color beads that conveniently matched many of the shoestring colors! My hypothesis was that I could put the shoestring through the tiny bead hole and friction alone would hold it in place.

OSHA Violation

My theory was correct. Except the holes weren’t quite large enough. Using the bead holes as a pilot hole, I hand-drilled them to be larger, to the dismay of my wife who had already dialed “91” on the phone so she could complete the call to Emergency Dispatch quicker. Looking back, I admit it probably wasn’t the safest way I could have made them.

This is a case of the risk being worth the reward. They performed perfectly! I tied one end of the shoestring to a keyring and threaded the ball onto the other end. A tied knot would keep the ball from falling off and now I had player-colored measuring devices for each player!

Testing

I went through many scoring options, eventually landing on a player just not wanting to be in the extremes. Shortest and longest receive strikes. Everyone else is safe. Person with the fewest strikes wins!

Luckily, I had several design retreats, Protospiels and conventions on my schedule. “OutSized” (what I was calling it) was tested by dozens and dozens of players over the next few months. I was also able to curate a number of fun clue challenges thanks to playtester contributions. They are all mentioned in the rulebook!

Pitching

I was carrying both OutSized and Banana for Scale in my pitch bag at Pax Unplugged, mostly focused on the latter. I did show OutSized to a couple people once I got a better feel of the market and price point they were trying to hit. Paul Salomon from GameHead was one of those people. He didn’t jump right away but was obviously still thinking about it later as he followed up and told me about the company and what they were doing.

They are a newer publisher, but not new to the industry. GameHead is the publishing arm of GamerMats and they hired Paul (Honey Buzz) to act as inventor relations and developer. To his credit, the dev experience working with him has been one of the best I’ve experienced to date.

They were about to release their first six games (2025) and he was building out a slate of six potential 2026 titles. He saw the same simplicity and elegance in what I had made and committed to the game. It was now his job to turn my shoestrings and beads into something worth buying!

Done!

As you can see from the final product, he incorporated Schoolhouse Rocks styled artwork and one of the best laid out rulebooks I’ve ever been associated with! After testing a few different possible names for the game, we agreed on Size Wise.

I mentioned earlier that Size Wise will make its retail debut at Origins this month. While preparing for the show, GameHead was able to have the manufacturer make a giant-sized version to show off during demos! If the giant version is as popular as I think it will be, maybe you’ll see it available for purchase via crowdfunding! 😉It's double the size with six foot strings! How big is a donkey?!

I’ll be at both Origins and Gen Con and would love to teach it to you myself! Come by booth #1908 at Origins to grab one of the first 100 advance copies! Expect a general release at Gen Con booth #1629! See you there!

Scott Brady

NOTE TO ANY PUBLISHERS READING THIS! Banana for Scale is still available for licensing! 😉

by Steph Hodge

How about some games that will play with a higher player count? Here are a whole bunch of releases coming soon that will handle 6 or more players!

[imageid=9389228 medium rep]▪️ Synapses Games announced Medium: The Hand of Fate to be released Q3 2026. This will be able to combine with any previous Medium game you currently have. This game handles 2-8 players and is designed by Danielle Deley (Medium, That Old Wallpaper) and Nathan Thornton (Green Team Wins, Medium, That Old Wallpaper). This is a new standalone title.

From the announcement:



▪️ Pandasaurus Games just announced Moustache. Originally published by Lumberjacks Studio in 2025. Now Pandasaurus is bringing us this team-based trick-taking game for 3-6 players. Look for this game at the end of August 2026.

From the newsletter:



▪️ Gigamic announced a new edition of Panic Lab is set to be released at the end of June 2026. This game was originally released in 2012 and has seen many iterations over the years. It's real-time chaos is back and will host 2-10 players in about a 30-minute playtime!

From the newsletter:


▪️ Shapely is a new party game from R&R Games for 3-6 players! Your goal is to arrange your shapes so that other players can guess your word. You can play in just 30 minutes. I believe it is already available.

From the newsletter:


▪️ Finally, we have Who's Next? from Don't Panic Games. A new musical party game for 3-7 players. This is a hand management card game.

From the newsletter:

by Steph Hodge

How about some games that will play with a higher player count? Here are a whole bunch of releases coming soon that will handle up to 6 or more players!

[imageid=9389228 medium rep]▪️ Synapses Games announced Medium: The Hand of Fate to be released Q3 2026. This will be able to combine with any previous Medium game you currently have. This game handles 2-8 players and is designed by Danielle Deley (Medium, That Old Wallpaper) and Nathan Thornton (Green Team Wins, Medium, That Old Wallpaper). This is a new standalone title.

From the announcement:



▪️ Pandasaurus Games just announced Moustache. Originally published by Lumberjacks Studio in 2025. Now Pandasaurus is bringing us this team-based trick-taking game for 3-6 players. Look for this game at the end of August 2026.

From the newsletter:



▪️ Gigamic announced a new edition of Panic Lab is set to be released at the end of June 2026. This game was originally released in 2012 and has seen many iterations over the years. It's real-time chaos is back and will host 2-10 players in about a 30-minute playtime!

From the newsletter:


▪️ Shapely is a new party game from R&R Games for 3-6 players! Your goal is to arrange your shapes so that other players can guess your word. You can play in just 30 minutes. I believe it is already available.

From the newsletter:


▪️ Finally, we have Who's Next? from Don't Panic Games. A new musical party game for 3-7 players. This is a hand management card game.

From the newsletter:

by Scott Brady

Three years later and I am no better at keeping ongoing notes about my design journey than I was when I penned the Designer Diary for boop. I usually become so focused on my projects that I’ve never found space to step back and write down what works and what doesn’t. Sadly, many of those processes will never be known and I know I’m the one to blame.

I am immensely proud of what we (Smirk & Dagger and I) have accomplished with the release of boop.and its subsequent releases, Boooop. and boop the Halls! With each new edition I wanted to make sure to give the consumers something more than just a cool skin. Each game needed to offer something new and different. Making changes to the tight, elegant gameplay of the original proved much harder than I anticipated. In the end, the right solution for both versions was to introduce unique rule-changing characters and items that supplemented gameplay and didn’t change the core.

Progression of the Brand

We have been discussing the future of the boop. line for some time, wondering if it should ever expand beyond being a true combinatorial abstract game. So far, we had followed the same pattern and still have one more unannounced entry coming in 2027! Don’t worry, it’s not another holiday-themed version. And the gameplay is my personal favorite of the series! I cannot wait to tell the world more!

Conception

In the meantime, I began thinking about how the boop. experience might be utilized in other game types, either by theme or mechanic. I’ve often heard stories about how people made bags for their copies of boop. to make it more portable. I began playing around with the idea of playing cards and what I would need to do to make an official travel version.

It would have been easy enough to just make a 1:1 conversion of boop. into cards with no rule changes. Basically, just a component twist. This would have been the exact opposite of my philosophy above where I wanted it to be more than just a reskin. The game needed to stand on its own with something unique. That’s when the idea hit me – you could play each other’s felines!

How the Game Grew

The cool thing about using cards is you get to shuffle a deck. No longer do you have a choice of what to play, you must play the card drawn. Not only did this mean you didn’t know if you were going to play a cat or kitten, because all the cards are shuffled into one deck (instead of player decks), it meant you could end up playing a cat or kitten of your opponent’s!

Hence the final name – boop. Shuffle!

Talk about an instant strategy change! The mechanics remained the same, but the thought of leaving behind one of your opponent’s cards instead of your own changed the game quite a bit. I also envisioned the bed to be virtual, allowing for play on any surface.

The edges of the bed would shift as the play area filled with cats. I felt this simple change with the deck of cards and virtual bed was the right thing to show to Smirk & Dagger for consideration.

They liked it…kinda…

Rejection?

They agreed it was a great interpretation of the original game, but they wanted more. Their vision of a card game version was less focused towards a classic abstract, but one that had more surprises and thematic elements. I admitted I could see that too.

As any great partner, they came up with several ideas which we ended up working together on implementing. There are wild cards that can be used by either player. Actions on certain kittens and cats you might recognize from boop the Halls! And then there was the blankie…

In what I will call the cutest mechanic to ever be in a board game, boop. Shuffle includes a blanket card. When drawn, you place it on top of any kitten or cat on the bed. While napping under the blankie, they don’t exist in the playfield. In order to count them towards a 3-in-a-row they must be uncovered! The blanket can be booped like any other item. When they are booped onto another cat, they now nap! If they are booped into an open space, the blankie is removed from the board and put into the discard pile.

Cutbacks

All of a sudden we have a lot more chaos happening with the blanket, action cards, wild cats and a virtual bed. Maybe a little too much overhead for the market we’re targeting, so we elected to remove the virtual bed, relegating those rules to an “advanced version” in the back of the rulebook.

Instead, we include neoprene bed skirts to define the board edges. These also roll up nice and tight to remain portable without adding too much cost to the product. In the end we were able to offer this new boop. experience for half of the retail price of the original game!

Release

boop. Shuffle had an official release date in the US of May 1 and you can already find it on the shelves at your favorite local game store and Barnes & Noble. Smirk & Dagger offers it directly on their website and will have copies available at Origins Game Fair, Gen Con and PAX Unplugged. I’ll be in attendance as well if you would like me to teach it to you myself!

Scott Brady

by Jeff Grisenthwaite

I’ve been playing games on BGA since 2014, but it wasn’t until this past year that I made the leap to developing games on BGA.

My goal is to start a discussion about what I’ve learned about making gameplay feel just right within the unique environment of BGA, using examples from a couple of my games, Soothsayers and Positano.

Simulating that Board Game Feeling

BGA is weird.

It’s a huge collection of online games that bear little resemblance to the experience of console, PC, or mobile games. Instead, BGA strives to replicate the feeling of playing board games together in real life for all those times when we can’t actually be gaming together.

And they connect players with the whole world. One of the tenets of BGA development is to stick to pretty basic, vanilla code, in order to make the games widely accessible, regardless of players’ hardware or browsers.
For Positano, the big challenge was to capture the 3D look and feel that people love about the game but to do so in the 2D non-dynamic world of BGA.

Side-by-side images of Positano in real life and Positano on BGA
The solution was to simulate the 3D hillside and buildings simply by layering images at a fixed angle. It retains the beauty of the physical game, while keeping the technical approach as basic and widely accessible as possible.

Teach Through Play

I don’t know about you, but I try to use BGA as a shortcut to avoid reading rulebooks. The tutorials are great (shoutout to Nekonyancer!), but what can be even better is when the BGA adaptation teaches players as they play.

Here are a few techniques that help to teach the game to new players:

Tooltips: When players hover over a card or other component, showing a zoomed-in display of that component, along with explanatory text, helps players to access additional information when needed.

In Soothsayers, players can hover over any card to view detailed information about it.

Title Bar Text & Buttons: BGA’s standard convention is to present the choices available to a player on a given turn as buttons in the title bar. To help players learn the game, dynamically update the text in the title bar and the text and icons on the buttons to best inform players of their options.

In Soothsayers, buttons explain the costs and effects of each action.

Player Panels: Summarizing key information within player panels, particularly scoring, reinforces for players the important metrics to pay attention to.

In Positano, the player panels help players to understand how each building they construct affects not just their overall scores, but provides detailed scoring for sea views, gelato, and three different public goals.

Animation: Using animation in key places can help players understand the effects of their actions and notice changes in the game state. For example, in Soothsayers, when you use the Judgement tarot to steal a Fate token, the Fate token flies from the rival’s card to yours.

How To Play Rules: Because BGA automates the setup and administrative steps between turns and enforces the rules during play, the text of the How to Play tab below the game can likely be 90% shorter than the full rulebook.

Undo

Before I started development, I asked game communities within Discord and on Bluesky what are their biggest points of frustration with games on BGA. The most common complaint was when games don’t provide the ability to undo your last action or reset your turn.

There are two main reasons for providing the ability to undo at key points:

1. New players are learning the game. After seeing the consequences of their actions, they may need to retry a few turns.

2. Errant clicks. BGA is trying to simulate the tabletop game feeling with as high of fidelity as possible, which is why it feels so bad to have your turn ruined by accidentally clicking or tapping on something and having no recourse.

Not every single action needs an undo, though. Providing too many can slow down games, and players should never be able to undo an action after hidden information is revealed.

In Soothsayers, after completing your turn, a Confirm button displays with a 5 second countdown before it auto-confirms. If you’re not satisfied with your turn, you can choose to reset.


Layout Considerations

The second biggest player complaint is when BGA games require too much vertical scrolling to understand the game state, so here are a few techniques to reduce the need to scroll:

Robust Player Panels: By displaying all the key information within player panels, players often can bypass needing to view opponents’ tableaus or auxiliary boards.

In Soothsayers, the player panels display the levels of all 8 cards in each player’s tableau, who holds the Fate tokens, coins, and the number of cards in each player’s hand.

Floating Hands: Many games demand that you play a card or tile from a hand to a tableau or place on the board. By anchoring the hands to the bottom of the screen and allowing them to float over everything else, players can always view the cards in hand when making the decision for where to play them.

Responsive Design: To accommodate players on tiny mobile screens, on ultra-wide monitors, and everywhere in between, responsive design techniques should be employed to make the best use of every screen size.

In Positano, the goal cards are displayed below the beach board on mobile, but when on a larger monitor, they're displayed to the left of the hillside.

Player Preferences: We’re all different people. BGA games should reflect that by providing ample player preferences to tailor the game experience to your needs.

Soothsayers player preferences include options to change the card size, remove pulsing animations, and more.

Turn-Based Play

Some games work really well in BGA’s turn-based (asynchronous) play mode. These tend to be games with chunky turns, in which you’re making big moves each turn, as opposed to micro-decisions interrupted by other players. Turn-based play on BGA lets you luxuriate in over-analyzing your strategy without worrying about holding up the game.

A few techniques for making turn-based play go a bit smoother include:

Automate Non-Choices: By identifying the spots in the game in which players don’t have an actual choice to make, you can save everyone a lot of time by automating those decisions.

Provide a Robust Log: Sometimes days pass between turns, and other times players are playing multiple turn-based instances of the same game at once, so it’s important to provide a detailed, easy-to-scan log that players can use to catch up on the most recent turns.

In Soothsayers, the log provides small renditions of the cards drafted or played to make it easier to scan.

Simultaneous Decisions: BGA offers a mode in which players can all take their turns at the same time, which can massively reduce the amount of time it takes to complete a turn-based game.

Developing on BGA

Programming games on BGA is not easy. It takes a long time, and the documentation could be more robust. The upside is that BGA connects your game with a global audience who can compete at the highest levels.

My hope with this article is to share what I’ve learned as I strive to provide an ideal BGA experience for my own games.

I’m also hoping to start a conversation! What else can developers do to provide better BGA experiences?

Jeff Grisenthwaite is the designer of Positano and Soothsayers, both available in stores and on BoardGameArena.

by Justin Bell

One morning this past February, I was standing on a scale in my bathroom, doing my normal routine of knocking out the weigh-in before getting the kids ready for school. The number that came back wasn’t to my liking, the third or fourth or tenth week in a row where it was not to my liking. After I helped get the kids on their way, I dropped about $100 on a 12-month subscription to the Weight Watchers app to start tracking my meals and committed to a goal of losing at least 20, and ideally 30, pounds by the end of the summer.

As of this posting, I’ve lost 25 pounds, and assuming I stay on track with continuing to build better eating habits, I should cross the weight-loss finish line soon. But I think a lot about that day in February; I just hit a breaking point, and I got so angry when I saw the scale that fateful morning that it pushed for immediate action.

A similar thing happened this week, across three consecutive nights of gaming where players sent me to the breaking point. This article is both a love letter to some of the recent changes I’ve observed from publishers, and some interesting opportunities for players.



Last Monday, my review crew and I had the chance to play our first game of Entropy, the new Board&Dice release designed by Tommaso Battista, Simone Luciani, and Nestore Mangone. The game doesn’t have much video content on the interwebs yet, so I taught the game live to a group for this four-player game.

Teaching a game on site and in person to any group of players is typically a minefield, a minefield that gets progressively more dangerous as a game’s complexity rises.

I’m still scarred by the experience I had watching a person try to teach me Feudum almost six years ago. I see in my Logged Play notes that the teach took 80 minutes, for a game that ultimately took only a little longer than that to actually play. When you see a game’s Complexity Rating land in the 4.5-and-above range, it usually means you are in for quite a sit as you try to learn a game.

Entropy is certainly not that—I think the game’s complexity rating here on BGG will land in the 3.5-ish range once you, the people, begin to share your thoughts in volume—and it took only about 25 minutes to explain the game’s core concepts, main actions, and end-game scoring conditions.

But one thing was key during my Entropy teach, a hallmark of how far we have come as a community: I taught the entire game from the included player aid cards, and asked players to follow along from the aid, in part because everyone had their own. (My only gripe with publishers for this article: please, please, please include one player aid for each player! Competitive gamers don’t have a “share” gene! This is why they like competitive games! One player aid per box is not going to cut it, people!!)

With our teach complete and our snack bowls filled—it was a Kit Kat “Bunnies” night, alongside zero-calorie sodas, a selection of bottom-shelf bourbons, and the Kirkland Signature Kettle Brand Krinkle Cut “Pink Salt” potato chip night, because Costco recently decided that the words “Himalayan Salt” were simply too difficult for a standard American consumer to comprehend—we got to work playing the game. But something interesting happened as we began play:

Everything I had just taught, from the basic movement of a player’s worker pawn, to how actions worked, to scoring conditions, to limitations of components that can be placed on a player’s planets, quietly left the brains of these usually reliable players, almost as if I had taught the game in Dutch, but everyone at the table pretended they spoke fluent Dutch as they nodded along during the teach.

“Hey, sorry about this, but before I move…I know you said that I can move up to three spaces, but in which direction?”

“If you look at the ‘On Your Turn’ portion of the player aid,” I began, “that’s where it shows the rules for movement.” (There are also chevrons on the board that point in a clockwise direction near each space, and we will come back to this.) The text on the player aid: “Movement: move 1-3 spaces clockwise. Finish on either outer or inner space.”

“When I take the Create Life action, I see the icon that means I have to drop the matching action marker there to take the action, so I’m good there. But how many cards can I discard to take the place of icons I am missing from my planet-star combo to play a card?”

“If you look at the ‘Actions’ area of the player aid, on the side that has the major actions—yep, that side—you’ll see that you can discard one other card with one of the four icons you are missing to play the card you want. And don’t forget about the part you see in that same section of the aid: each planet can only accommodate three life cards.”

Although my basement gaming lair is pretty chilly during the summer when the air conditioning kicks in, I could feel my temperature rising a beat. Oh, another question:

“I’m trying to understand the icons for my Focus cards.” (In Entropy, each player gets their own asymmetric, lettered set (A, B, C, or D) of bonuses, which power each of the game’s three major actions. Think of this like the Experiment boards in Nucleum, where players can upgrade some of the standard actions they take to earn additional bonuses.) “What does this first symbol mean?”

“I don’t know, but I also can’t see your Focus cards from where I’m sitting,” I commented. “What does your player aid say for the set of Focus cards you have?”

“Oh, right, thanks, I forgot that was on the back of the ‘On Your Turn’ player aid card. Looks like I get…”

This continued for the majority of our experience, although like all games, the rules began to settle in for everyone—myself included—by the end of our first game. And, I can’t fault human nature: it’s simply easier to ask the rules guru at the table a thousand questions, since they know the game better than everyone else does. You’ve done it, I’ve done it, we’ve all done it…although, I take listening to a teach very seriously, because I teach so often myself.

The problem with this is the play experience for the rules explainer. I have been a vocal supporter of not only thanking your tabletop teacher for spending the time to both learn a game and be willing to teach it thoroughly to new players, but also acknowledging that it is so difficult to both teach a game and enjoy playing that same game.

That’s not because the game is new to the teacher, assuming this is their first time playing it. That’s because the learners at the table don’t take the time to consider all the tools available to them while playing, and being able to answer 75-100% of the questions that can be answered. That starts with the player aid.

Some of you know that I write an article each year on Meeple Mountain summarizing not only the best and worst games I played in a year, but also summarizes my thoughts on the stuff we really care about: the best rules for deciding a first player, the best individual components, the best dice. One of the categories is best player aid, and I love how far player aids have come over the last 3-4 years as highly complex games get summarized on a sheet or double-sided cards.

Recent titles such as SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Galactic Cruise, Covenant, Arcs, Salton Sea, the Perseverance games, and La Pâtisserie Rococo provide excellent player aids, sometimes with little cues such as specific rulebook page numbers where a player can get more info even when the aid isn’t enough. (The aid for SETI is the gold standard in this category.)

Some of my favorite games of the last few years didn’t have a player aid, such as Clinic: Deluxe Edition and Railway Boom, but I can get over that if there are strong visual cues and a sort of board-based player aid on the main play area. Clinic has one of the best in the business, and Railway Boom does a great job with the information loaded into the auction area on the bottom third of the board. Sometimes, even a game’s player boards have enough turn action and clean-up/maintenance information to get by.

All of this provided information is great…but only if players bother to read the aid or look for other visual cues around the play area.

I’m certainly biased because I teach a lot of games, and I know how hard it can be for a person to spend a lot of time on the front end to get to know the game well enough to be comfortable teaching that game to others. It’s a lot! But players need to own their share of the investment. I’ve just spent 10, 30, 80 minutes teaching you the game…could you do me a favor, and simply listen??? Could you first look at the player aid before asking me another question, a question that may have just been answered because another player asked the exact same question two turns ago???



Over the next two days, I did another play of Nippon: Zaibatsu (with the upcoming Genro expansion) and a second multiplayer game of Entropy with two new players at a game night with a strategy gaming group in downtown Chicago. Many of the same things popped up, with questions about some of the game basics that could have been answered by the player aid, had a player acknowledged its existence first. (Kudos, as well, to the makers of the excellent “Player Handbook” included in Nippon: Zaibatsu, another game that can be taught from the player aid.)

By the end of that third straight day of beginning multiple responses with the prompt “if you look at the player aid...”, I snapped. (OK, you’re right: “snapped” for me is pretty light in the scheme of things. I happily went about my evening and watched the wild ending of the fourth game of the NBA Finals later that night…then immediately began to write this column.)

I’ve been thinking about ways to solve my own problems. Do I need to be more forceful with players as they consider their questions? Like my buddy John, should I start mining the Files area on BGG for every game in my collection that doesn’t have a player aid, so that I can start printing my own? (Thanks, BGG community; some of you have made great aids from scratch, particularly for older titles.) Where possible, should I send out PDFs of the player aid files in advance, so that players can have those handy on their phones while they study up on a new game?

Publishers have begun to do their part. And the drum I beat is not just tied to these medium or heavy-weight strategy games…because I say it every week: every single game needs a player aid. UNO needs a player aid just like SETI does. That’s because new players forget rules all the time. Heck, I forget a rule or two all the time with games I’ve been playing for years. Now that most games have player aids, we as a gaming community need to level up…and review those player aids when we have questions about a rule.

That’s the least we can do, right?