by Steph Hodge

[imageid=8951049 medium rep]▪️ CrowD Games announced pre-orders for Railway Boom with expected delivery this September. From designers Hisashi Hayashi (Bomb Busters) and Simone Luciani (Barrage). Did someone say Trains? Did someone say Auctions? Did someone say network building? Did someone say YES PLEASE!? This game plays 2-4 players in about 60-120 minutes

From BGG:





▪️ The Op Games released Oasis: New Life on A Distant World recently. From designers of Risk Strike: George Feledichuk, David "Duvey" Rudow, and Leo Taylor. This is a new tableau-building card game where you want to keep your tableau lush with cards but also cleared to acquire new cards, it is a fine balance. For 1-5 players and plays in 45-60 minutes.

From the newsletter:



▪️ Greylune from Sorry We Are French & now Pandasaurus Games should be available in the US this September. From designer William Attia (Caylus), this game reimplements Spyrium. For 2-4 players and plays in 45-60 minutes. Spyrium has a unique worker-placement mechanic, so it will be interesting to see how this new game evolves that original system.

From the newsletter:




▪️ Jibber Jabble from Allplay Is coming really soon. From designer Cassie Sikes, this is a new party game for 3-10 players that plays in 15 minutes.

From BGG:

by Chus Rivel

ASHES Blackout Protocol began as an in-house design, and as an almost inevitable next step after the intense development work of our previous projects. It is rooted in the universe of Phoenix New Horizon, and this is its story.

From Phoenix to ASHES
For us, the best part of Phoenix New Horizon was the development itself. Together we managed to pull together a hugely ambitious team, one capable of hitting some big milestones, and we did it with incredible humanity and a sense of fun that has turned Thursday into the big day of the week: no matter how often we see each other otherwise, we all know that, whatever happens, we will be around the table on Thursday to play and to talk at length, without being afraid of getting things wrong.

After the warm reception of Phoenix New Horizon, and while we were working flat out on Orloj: The Prague Astronomical Clock, an idea started coming up at the table more and more often: going back to that universe. We didn't want to make an expansion; we wanted a completely new game.

Orloj was still being illustrated when we were already jotting down ideas and setting out the key points of what this title had to be, a game that was born as a prequel from the very first moment. As a starting point, we found it really interesting to design something built around an alarm and an evacuation of the Earth, like The Downfall of Pompeii, Anachrony or Evacuation.

And if the first game in the saga was called Phoenix, the prequel could only be called Ashes. We liked giving it a more technological edge by turning its letters into the acronym of the evacuation protocol used after the nuclear catastrophe: Artificial Shelter & Human Evacuation Sequence

For anyone who doesn't know Phoenix New Horizon: the game takes us to a retro-dystopia in which humanity has survived by taking refuge underground after a nuclear war. It begins at the moment civilization comes up from the depths, ready to recolonize the Earth by carrying out the Phoenix Project, a network of regenerators capable of making the planet habitable again.

ASHES had to take us to the moment right before that. We wanted players to build shelters, rescue survivors on the board and work toward one big common goal: developing the Phoenix Project. Without knowing it, we had just defined the three main actions of the game.

First Contact

That was when Jorge brought us a first draft that helped us pin down a lot of the ideas we had been throwing around. It barely worked as a game, but it hid some very interesting concepts that ended up surviving the whole development: a vehicle to interact with the map, the Phoenix Project as the scoring system, a resource crafting system and, of course, radiation. If we were in the middle of a nuclear emergency, we wanted the game to have radiation.

That first prototype already had a pick & delivery system, a mechanism we have never been especially keen on at Perro Loko Games and one that tends to put a lot of players off. Even so, it fit the theme perfectly and we were sure we could give it a twist. Over time it became one of the parts of the game we are proudest of and, in fact, we think plenty of people won't even spot it as a traditional pick & delivery.

A shot of the first prototype
Setting a New Starting Point

Of all the ideas we had been writing down, there was one we fell in love with from the very first moment: ASHES would be a worker placement game in which the workers could die if they didn't get their anti-rad dose. That idea ended up becoming one of the pillars of the design.

We also settled on the elements that had to connect ASHES with Phoenix New Horizon: managing commandos as your workers, and completing missions as extra actions during your turn. It was important that any player could tell at a glance that both games share the same universe.

A full evacuation has to be a titanic project for humanity and, the way we see it, a shared one, so we had our first challenge right there: several parts of the game had to feel cooperative, but under an atmosphere of tension and survival. That led us to two conclusions. The first: rescuing survivors would be a common good even though we were all competing for it. The second: building the Phoenix Project had to benefit the other players indirectly.

If rescuing survivors is a common good, losing them had to hurt the players, and that idea turned into the happiness track, which for many versions was almost useless until we found the real engine of the game.

The Engine of the Game

While the rest of the design kept evolving game after game, there was one feeling that wouldn't go away: the action engine still wasn't convincing us. Phoenix New Horizon had a central mechanism that had surprised the community, and we felt ASHES needed to find its own.

After discarding several proposals, we got to a first serious version of the engine: an action programming system split into two zones, the outside world and the colony. Resources were produced in the colony and the workers were safe there; actions were carried out outside. At the end of each round you had to supply anti-rad doses to every worker who had been left exposed.

The prototype in the picture is version 7.0 of the game; you can see the action programming system on the right-hand side of the board
Although that proposal was eventually dropped as well, it turned out to be surprisingly useful. For months it worked as a temporary engine that let us develop the rest of the game. It was fascinating to see how we could later swap the engine out without it affecting the rest of the components too much.

Across all those versions, one of the ideas that would end up defining ASHES completely started to take shape: survivors would be a resource shared by every player. Rescuing one wouldn't only make your colony grow, it would also increase the number of actions available to you. In other words, ASHES would end up being a worker placement game in which you have to go out and rescue your workers. Getting new ones would be part of the competition too.

We were convinced that a big part of the game's character was right there, but it was also the source of some of the worst headaches of the whole development. Snowballs appeared hard to control, turns got too long and games ran on longer than they should. To fix it we took an important step: we dropped the shared area where the actions took place and moved that system onto the personal colony board. Action spaces there would be limited, and any extra rescued survivors would go into a separate flow made up of the shelter cards.

And then, finally, everything started to click.

Rescue survivors to turn them into your workers, then decide which ones stay active in the colony and which ones find shelter inside it. Without realizing it, we had gone back to the original idea of the two zones, outside and inside, but now in a much more natural way.

The system was easy to understand, it let the rest of the game shine, and it made rescuing one more survivor always feel like an important decision. That was when we started to feel that ASHES finally had an identity of its own.

How the colony board of ASHES Blackout Protocol evolved
Active Survivors, Essential Survivors, and the Final Picture

Normally, once we have a working engine, we like to pin down what the final picture of the game looks like and what we want to see on the table when the game ends: how many spaces will be filled, how many objectives completed, how far each player will have got. In a way, what we're working on at this point is the satisfaction you get from looking at everything you built during the game. To get there, we sometimes have to slow the engine down or speed it up until that final picture works.

If the survival of humanity is the ultimate goal in an emergency, it helps to have survivor profiles with different roles within the dynamics of the game. So we defined two categories, essential and active, deliberately neutral names chosen to avoid associations that might be uncomfortable. As a visual cue, the two are told apart by color, with yellow for one of them because of its association with radiation protection suits, a visual code that is widely recognized in the world of safety and protection.

Both would help us fill up our shelters, but only active survivors can work outside the colony. On top of that, saving essential survivors would be easier for the players, which let us speed the engine up and fine-tune the final picture of the game.

One of the main challenges with this game was that it only has three main actions (Build, Rescue and Develop), and that could easily start to feel repetitive: we had to break the sequence.

Phoenix New Horizon was a really interesting design exercise as a game with a single resource, fuel, so in ASHES fuel had to play a big part again. This time it would be used to move the evacuation vehicle and carry survivors to the shelters.

But moving the vehicle around the board wasn't enough on its own. We wanted every move to be an interesting decision, and that's how the idea of the area tiles came about: as it travels across the map, the vehicle triggers main actions and turns movement into much more than just getting from one place to another. The board stopped being somewhere you pass through and started to become a key part of the game, and all of a sudden you could find yourself thinking:

"I'm stuck... but if I move over here I get fuel, I trigger this action and I can still stretch my turn out a little further."

You weren't only watching your own colony any more. You were also keeping an eye on the central board the whole time, making sure nobody else rescued the survivors you needed or claimed that action you had been setting up for several turns.

That was when we felt the vehicle had stopped being a thematic element and become one of the most important pieces in the game. Movement wasn't about going from one point to another any more: it had turned into a way of building little spatial combos in which both the route and the order of your actions mattered. It was one of those days when you get up from the table thinking: "Now we're talking."

The prototyping process
The Asymmetric Factions

When the game was already pretty well tuned and we were starting to feel comfortable with it, we had another one of those ideas that seem fantastic... until you have to develop them.

We'd had a great time creating asymmetric factions in Orloj, but with ASHES we wanted to go a step further. Our goal was for each faction to really change the way you play, not just hand you a small advantage at the start.

If Phoenix taught us that balancing a game built around a single resource could be maddening, ASHES showed us that doing it with twelve different factions was, quite simply, a small hell.

We reckon we've tested them over more than eighty games. On top of that, we played countless solo games with every single one of them to check that they all worked exactly the way we wanted.

I'm convinced that once the game hits people's tables, someone will say that one of the factions is broken.

I'll give you the answer in advance: they probably all are.

Or, to put it another way, they're all very powerful.

The difference is that some show their full potential from the very first game, while others need the player to know the game much better to get the most out of them. And funnily enough, those are the ones that scare us the most when they fall into the hands of an experienced player.

The Team

ASHES is a completely collective game, and that wouldn't be complete without Jorge Tabanera, who climbed into the van with us from the very first moment.

Working with him is an absolute delight. He understands exactly the world we want to build, the feeling we want to get across and the visual tone we're after. He blew us away the first time we saw the cover, and he has managed to create a color palette that gives Phoenix and ASHES a very recognizable shared identity.

It's hard to imagine this game without Jorge. He is as much a part of the development as any of us. Even if he still loses every single game.

But this game wouldn't exist without you either.

It might not look like it, but we read every comment, every review, every post and every message we get. We watch all the videos that show up on YouTube and we take note of everything (our German and our Korean have improved a lot over these last few years).

The rulebook has been revised with enormous care, taking in a lot of the improvements we learned while making Orloj. We have also put a huge amount of work into making the board easier to read and all the information clear and intuitive, while keeping the visual language of Phoenix.

We honestly believe ASHES is the most demanding game Perro Loko has made so far. It is a game that, with barely four rules, keeps you thinking about how to optimize every single decision.

You don't need to have played Phoenix to enjoy it, but if you did you'll find plenty of nods that we hope will put a smile on your face. Will there be a third part to this universe?

That's in your hands now.

For now, all we hope is that you enjoy ASHES as much as we have enjoyed creating it and playing it.

Evolution of the box cover

by Justin Bell

Every week, usually on Monday afternoons, someone in our Wednesday night game group starts a new round of messages to set up that week’s game schedule.

Someone agrees to host; sometimes, it’s the guy whose partner is out of town and can’t travel anywhere unless they host (those kids will get you!). Sometimes, a person has a game they want to get to the table that is too large to transport easily, a big piece of chicken with a hundred minis, a massive board, a 400-piece poker chip set.

In other cases, we need someone with a house or apartment big enough to host; when we have just 5-6 players, everyone in the group has space. But from time to time, a 10+ person group needs a place to go, and not everyone has the table space to take on 3-4 tables at the same time.

Once that process is locked up, we get into the real business of the week: the board game horse trading. Everyone has something they would like to get to the table, and subtly nudging the group is just as powerful as using a word avalanche sledgehammer to get commitments.

One table is always a non-negotiable: whoever hosts gets to put out whatever they want on “Table One”, as it is known in the thread. “Guys, it’s my birthday this week, so I’m gonna put _____ on Table One, so I’m looking for people to join me. The rest of you: play whatever you want.”

Sometimes, even the host pick becomes a warzone. When the host of our night two weeks ago threw out Obsession as his game of choice, just as many people raised their hand to say yes as did those who vehemently tried to argue that Obsession is a different beast depending on player count. After a steady back-and-forth, the host relented, and got The Castles of Mad King Ludwig out instead. (The poor guy couldn’t even get the first-choice game he wanted to the table on his birthday!!!)

When you are excited about something, you’re expecting everyone else to be excited about it, too.

Until they are not.



Last week, I got in line early.

I didn’t want to host, but I did have that all-too-familiar train game itch. (Everyone gets this itch, right?) I gently lobbed two options into the thread: Landmarks of the Lost Atlas—the new expansion for Railways of the Lost Atlas, which I picked up a few weeks ago—and Railway Boom, one of my top 10 picks from 2025.

I was happy to table either one. (Yes, train game purists: Railway Boom is more auction game than train game. Railway Boom doesn’t have diesels, “double O” city locations, certificate limits, or private companies. But there are nominal routes built on a map, train cards, station tokens, and operating costs. Most importantly, there’s a train illustrated on the box cover. Train game.)

The hosts had their eyes on Águeda: City of Umbrellas (a title sitting squarely on the hosts’ Maybe Pile), so Águeda was reserved for the first play on Table One. I waited to see how many other people might want to play one of the train games on Table Two.

I was excited. Everyone knows how great these games are, right? The responses should begin piling up in the next few minutes…and now all I need to figure out is the poker chip situation and we’ll be all set.

But that’s not what happened. One guy threw me a curveball, knowing that I can be persuaded if we stay roughly adjacent to the family of games I tossed into the ring.

“Could I sway you towards 1889 or 1894 instead?” he offered. (This, from the other consistent train game regular in our group, the one who brings Age of Steam to every game night like I used to do with Brass: Lancashire a couple years ago.)

I do love Shikoku 1889 (the Grand Trunk Games update of 1889: History of Shikoku Railways is gorgeous and a weeknight train game) and I badly want to try 1894 (the words “dynamic” and “brutal” show up a lot in the game’s BGG comments area). But my mind was made up: I want to table Landmarks of the Lost Atlas, with Railway Boom being a reliably excellent route-building auction game as my backup plan.

“Nope, not this week,” I responded to Mr. Age of Steam. “But in future weeks, absolutely.”

My confidence was still high. Any minute now, other players will kneel at the altar of the choo choo.

“Any minute now” turned into the rest of the day. No one else threw any titles into the chat, but Mr. Age of Steam made it clear that my message did make it out. Do I need to find new friends if I can’t get some buy-in on train game time this week?

The mind games carried into the next day. I’m not pushy, so I didn’t send out a reminder—”ahem, guys, who’s with me on the choo choo situation?”—but I considered it.

No one bit. I was so excited to get a train game to the table…why aren’t you?



Wednesday night rolled around, and I arrived at the host’s house with Landmarks of the Lost Atlas and the base game in tow. No one else had a burning desire to get anything else to the table, so Landmarks made its way to Table Two after all.

That was great, and I had a great time playing. We had a train game rookie with us for a four-player game that included Mr. Age of Steam. A short teach, a long setup (we used a pre-built map for the “Short” game), and a surprise bankruptcy meant that we got the thrill of adventure, the agony of defeat, and the commentary from everyone on what they did and didn’t like all packaged up into a two-hour gaming event.

As it turned out, no one was as excited as I was…and, I can live with that. I think using everyone else’s passion and energy as a gauge is usually a mistake; at almost every sitting, even for a game that is brand new to all players, someone at the table is significantly more excited for the play than others.

It’s usually easy to get me to agree to play a game that someone else is really fired up to get to the table. I may or may not buy in during the play; it’s your game, or it’s the “hot” game, or it’s a game that another reviewer has to work through in the course of their travels, so they are obligated to play it. (As a reviewer myself, those can sometimes be the toughest nights.)

I try my best to match the excitement others have for a game if possible, at least as long as the game remains fun and competitive. That’s where the passion can really fall off quickly. A runaway leader saps a game of its chance to shine. Rules complexity—or, worse, a poorly-written rulebook—throws people off the scent of what the designers imagined when they put the game together. Even a single frustrated player can make life tough on everyone; at times, I am that player. That has made it easier to imagine the moment when a play experience derails.

Fortunately, none of that happened during our play of Landmarks of the Lost Atlas. And now, my choo choo cup has been refilled; I am excited to pay it forward and join up for someone else’s big night soon. Just a couple weeks before, we had a person that desperately wanted to get Lisboa to the table; happy to oblige. A night full of party and/or trick-taking games? It’s your night, partner.

I know how excited you are. I’ll try my best to get fired up, too!

by David Bernal

Introduction

(written by designer David Bernal)

Oddly enough, for a long time Níjar wasn't Níjar. This is the diary of how, thanks to the work done together by its designer (me) and the development team at Perro Loko Games, that first prototype ended up becoming the game it is today.

The Inspiration That Got the Design Going

Designing a board game is not an easy job. I always need some inspiration, a spark that makes all the ideas I've been storing up fall into place.

The case of Níjar was a curious one. I remember sitting on the sofa at home when I thought of a theme based on the Barcelona '92 Olympics, something completely different from what the game has ended up being.

The idea was that each player would be an Olympic bid, competing in the race to become the host city of the Games. To do that you would have to develop your own city and meet the IOC's demands: the best stadiums, transport, hotel capacity, waste management... all the things you need in place to host an event on that scale.

When something excites me, what usually happens is that the rest of the ideas and mechanisms start turning up like a whirlwind. That's when the time comes to put some order into everything you're generating.

Fitting Into a Design Pattern

There is a publisher in Spain with a line this theme fit perfectly, so I got in touch with them to see whether the project might interest them. With no commitment, but with their blessing, I started working on the idea while sticking to production parameters that are very characteristic of their games.

I had the theme, I had ideas about how to develop the game and I had the publisher's encouragement to start building something, so I got my hands dirty with the proto.

The part I was most convinced about was the player area. It had to show the evolution of the city you represented and how it grew. That would be one of the cores of the game. To fit the idea into the publisher's parameters, the best approach was to build that area out of cards and, to get real development out of very few components, I made the cards interact with each other through horizontal and vertical connections.

I soon realized I was walking straight into designing a tableau building game with synergies.

At the bottom of the picture you can see the player area with the connections between cards. At the top, the main board with a matrix of discs as the action selection space and the first card selection method
The Action Engine

One of the problems I had was action selection. I didn't know exactly what mechanism to use to get interesting interaction between players. An action selection system with discs in limited spaces could make sense, but it needed an interesting twist.

Anyone who knows me will know that majorities are one of my favorite mechanisms, and the new idea in action selection was that a player could return another player's disc or discs as long as, when placing their own, they went over the number of discs in that action space. Once returned, those discs were available to their owner again.

The icing on the cake for the action system was arranging those spaces in a matrix, so that by taking a particular space you could choose one of the main actions matching the X coordinate of that space and a secondary action matching its Y coordinate.

All of this sounded great, to be honest. The problems arrived when we played it.

The picture shows an action selection matrix already using the Níjar theme and much further along
Card Selection

Another part of the process was designing the card selection, which was the main engine of the game. The first proposal focused on creating different types of cards and putting them all in the same deck. To add a decision point, the cards would be laid out on one side of the deck or the other, forcing players to choose one of the two available groups.

I knew this would cause problems too, but I needed to play the game before designing a more complex card selection mechanism.

The game was ready to be tested and, as always, when the playtests start, the real problems start.

The First Problems

The action selection grid with the stacked discs was interesting, but it didn't work the way I intended. Some players could be left with nothing to do for a long stretch because they had used up all their discs on the matrix and no other player returned them.

To fix it, we opened up the possibility of taking secondary actions on the turn of players who no longer had discs available. That gave the players who still had discs a reason to close the round as soon as possible, so as not to hand out extra actions. The action system became richer, and it started to work.

Another problem we spotted was that card selection could end up very unbalanced depending on the type of cards showing up in each part of the matrix. The dilemma dissolved and the choice ended up being fairly obvious.

The first changes came from the card deck. We had to organize the cards by year and balance them so that they gradually increased in cost and value, making them come out in a more orderly way.

We also expanded the matrix so that cards from earlier years were still available during later rounds and didn't just fade away.

And so, little by little, over months of playtesting, the game took shape until it became the prototype I ended up showing to Chus.

This picture was taken during Protos y Tipos, an event for designers in Spain. You can see the card selection matrix a little further along
Meeting Perro Loko

I remember the session where I showed the game to Chus. It was pretty casual. We're good friends and my intention wasn't to pitch him a game, but to ask his opinion on how he saw the prototype. After all, they had already worked on a city building game, a mechanism that shares certain aspects with the tableau building I was working on.

To my surprise, he asked for a bit of time to think about the game. It looked like he had enjoyed it and was after a game with those characteristics. That's where the metamorphosis started...

Perro Loko is known for putting a lot of work into both game development and the product concept, and the first thing he suggested was a change of theme. The same thing happened with Orloj and, although we didn't know yet how successful it would be, it shows he usually has a good nose for these things. His proposal was a theme he had wanted to work on for a long time: pottery making.

A change of theme, with everything that comes with it, can call for very significant changes to a game. Chus took charge of the development and they started working on it. From here on the work was intense and constant alongside the development team at Perro Loko Games, so I think it's better to hand over to Chus and let him finish explaining the process.

An Andalusian Theme

Written by publisher Chus Fuentes

As an Andalusian almost from birth, I feel deeply rooted in this land. A special place, full of history, incredible landscapes and enormous cultural richness. That's why I had been turning over the idea of starting a line of games that would show the light of this land.

I love games that tell stories and invite you to travel to other cultures, like Japanese, Mexican or Indian culture, but what about the land that took me in, its streets and its long conversations? The time had come to pay tribute to it.

I live in Seville, a city with a great pottery tradition, especially in Triana. Real works of art in clay have come out of its workshops. Granada also has a very distinctive ceramic style, as do Úbeda and Bailén. A trip to the Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park changed my mind, though, and Níjar was the one: a town bathed by the Mediterranean where the pottery tradition goes back to the Bronze Age.

On my first trip to Níjar I had the chance to visit Loli and Ángel's workshop, a family craft workshop. Loli is 79 and still works there. She says it's what she has always loved most; it relaxes her and keeps her entertained. When I arrived she was painting next to her granddaughter and, honestly, I think Loli could make it to 200 with the calm, the good sense and the peace she radiates.

On a second trip I wanted to go back to Níjar with the factory printing proof, to show the game to her and to her whole family. They were absolutely thrilled. Her grandson even showed me around the inside of the workshop, which is enormous.

From top to bottom and from left to right. 1 Loli and her granddaughter painting in the workshop. 2 The game in the glazing area. 3 The game in the shop area of the workshop. 4 The game in one of the prettiest corners of Níjar. 5 The game in another part of Ángel and Loli's workshop. 6 Me at the workshop, in the sweltering heat
At first nobody on the team agreed with taking on this theme, so from the very first moment I worked on the prototype with a lot of care, to try to win them over.

For this phase of development I used AI-generated illustrations purely as visual support for the prototype. The aim was to communicate the proposal better during development. The final product was always meant to be illustrated by an artist.

Meeting David

David and I are great friends. We had already published Tholos before he became known with Salton Sea and, later, Koinobori. I would have loved to publish Salton Sea, but back then Perro Loko's finances barely let us go beyond smaller formats.

We loved the game he brought us. After all, we were looking for a midweight euro with few components and, after signing Phoenix New Horizon with Devir for the United States and getting access to new markets, developing a product designed especially for that market struck us as a great idea. We took the box size of The White Castle, one of their big hits, as our reference. Changing a game's theme, though, sometimes means radical changes. Once again we were up to our elbows in mud, and never was the expression more fitting.

The Transformation

Pottery is a traditional industry. If we wanted to see it represented in the game, we had to build a production chain with all of its steps: extracting the clay, throwing, drying, firing, painting and glazing.

David's game was ideal for this transformation. It had stadium cards that were built using a crane token going around a track inside them: there were our potter's wheels. It also had a main resource, influence; that would become the clay. The hard part was fitting in the rest, so we chose to replace the right-hand side of the player area, bringing in the kilns and the painting area.

The production chain would work by moving the pieces from top to bottom, from the drying area at the top down to the glaze kiln at the bottom, passing through the different steps along the way. The pieces would be cardboard: unpainted on one side and painted on the other, so they could be flipped to show the process. On top of that, each kiln or workshop would only have room for one piece, forcing players to manage the whole chain carefully.

A piece sitting in a kiln could be sold. With that one detail, players could sell both unpainted and painted pieces.

In the picture, the player board of the first adaptation of David's game to Níjar. On the right, the production chain. In the upper kilns, fired pieces that are not painted yet; in the lower ones, fired pieces that are already painted and glazed
The production chain didn't work in the first few games. There were too many steps to make a decent number of pieces in the time a game lasts. We had to speed the process up. The key came with the Fire action: instead of firing a single piece, you could make every possible movement of pieces into your kilns. As well as speeding up the chain, we went from making two or three pieces per game to nine or 10. The best part was that the production chain had picked up a very distinctive rhythm that you had to manage in order to optimize it.

We extended the same system to the Paint action to unify the whole chain. At last we started to feel the satisfaction of knowing we were on the right track.

In the picture, an example from the Níjar rulebook showing three pieces being fired at once with a single Fire action
Bringing in the production chain and the new actions meant redoing all the cards. It wasn't only a matter of swapping icons, but nobody thought it was going to be easy.

The New Action Selection Matrix

David's action matrix was a very original idea, but a bit rigid. The actions were printed on the board and, right from the start, we wanted them to be able to swap positions so that every game would feel different.

I don't want to spend too long explaining this, so as not to make this diary too long; I'll just add that it took us a long time to get all the actions to have a similar importance and to be able to swap positions.

In Níjar, the most important action in the game, by a distance, is Play a Card. To make everything work, we decided to link the First Player Action to a wild action. That way we reduced the interaction over the Play a Card action and got the matrix working, letting every action swap positions and making each game different.

Card Selection

After working on the cards, we decided to separate them by type and group them in twos to form three decks. We would reveal five cards from each deck, forming a 3×5 matrix. The mechanism was as simple as it was effective: a two-axis river market in which you could change the point of origin by moving your pawn (later on, the Donkey). In other words, if a card was one orthogonal step away from your pawn, you would pay one coin; each additional step costs one coin more.

This example from the rulebook makes the two-axis market easier to understand. After the acquire action, you move your Donkey to change the origin of the costs.
On top of that, the cards under your pawn could not be taken by other players, which added one more point of interaction to the system.

At first there was a huge variety of cards, but it was hard for players to judge which ones were good or bad without knowing the game. So we decided to unify them, changing only the combo actions. Now it was easier to choose what you wanted, and card selection generated far more interaction.

The Customers and the Market

The point of making pieces was to sell them and, through that, to score victory points.

At first we had a customer system. Each round we revealed as many customers as there were players, and each of them asked for a set of pieces. At the end of the round, starting with the first player, players chose a customer to sell their pieces to.

The interaction was fierce and turn order was hugely important with that system. It was great fun watching which pieces the other players were making over the course of the round.

Some customer cards for the end of the second round. Each piece sold gave 7 or 4 points, depending on whether it was painted or not. You could sell painted or unpainted pieces to fill the shaded requirements. Completing a customer card also gave 2 victory points.
We did get that system working, but we decided to swap it for a market where the score drops with every sale, turning selling into an action that uses up a turn instead of happening at the end of the round. It was a way of enriching a system that tended toward a rigid produce-then-sell sequence. Now pieces could stay in your kilns between rounds, waiting for the best moment to sell them.

What came out of it was a system with a lot of interaction, more strategic and less punishing. It works with a roll of three custom dice that push up the value of each type of piece, painted or not, at the start of each round. On top of that, the first player can reroll the dice and is the first to sell, which gives even more weight to the turn order action.

The Scoring Cards

The game was already finished, but we wanted to invite players to explore different strategies. That's what we designed the Endgame Scoring Cards for.

At the end of each round you could play one of these cards to score it at the end of the game, but you could also discard it during your turn to take a wild action. It's an interesting decision: lock in points for the end of the game, or have an extra action this round to make more pieces and score more points right away.

Six of these cards score for collecting as many cards of the same type as possible. We worked hard on that balance so that any strategy would be competitive. Some are more obvious than others, but we ran a huge number of tests to make sure they all offered players the same opportunities.

The Product

Since we were also working with Jorge Tabanera on ASHES: Blackout Protocol, I couldn't help telling him about this new project. My surprise came when he told me that his father had been a potter. There was no doubt left: this project had to be for Jorge as well. Nobody would convey what the world of pottery craft means with the same sensitivity as he does.

I showed him photographs of Níjar and told him about my experience there. We set the game roughly in the 1920s so that we could use the perra gorda, a coin with a strongly popular, traditional character. We decided to create a cover inspired by the traditional posters for local patron saint festivals and, as usual with Jorge, the rest of the work came about very naturally until it took the shape of the product it is today. We're very proud of the result. He has captured the light of Andalusia.

We hope you enjoy Níjar as much as we have enjoyed developing it. Designing a game this compact and, at the same time, this strategically deep has been a challenge. Don't be fooled by its size: Níjar isn't your typical family game, and we think it will be a very pleasant surprise for lovers of strategy games.

In the picture, some of the steps taken during the design of the cover

by Kristian Amundsen Østby

Kristian’s Origin Story

One time, when I was 11 years old, my father came home from a business trip in Canada. He had bought a gift for me. I was a little disappointed when I saw the beige, dull-looking cover. But despite its dull look, it was indeed a computer game. And in Norway in the nineties, you appreciated any computer game you could get! So, I booted it up, and while the digital 8-bit theme music sounded, white letters appeared on the screen, spelling out Sid Meier’s Civilization. The game started, and I quickly got to move around a piece that I thought looked like a pair of scissors (I would later learn it was a settler wagon). The cover hadn’t lied: This *was* dull.

Still, this being 1991, I as an eleven-year-old nerd did actually have time to read the manual over the next days. And I gave the game another try. And over the next weeks and months, I gradually learnt the important lesson to never judge a game by its beige cover.

When I later started designing board games, civilization games had become a holy grail to me.

Kenneth’s Origin Story

Since I discovered the joy and magic of board games, I have had a spark inside, a dream of making a board game with the ultimate theme: building a civilization. Back in 2007 I did my first take on it. A card game with three ages and a lot of cards. On my way to SPIEL in Essen, on a ferry between Norway and Germany, I met a board game designer, Kristian. To make a long story short, the game itself was not very good. But from that failed design came something much more valuable: a friendship built on respect, affection, and endless creativity.

For me, the motivation to make Timespan came from a lecture in Venice. It was about how the Italian city had once been a center of world trade. It was about how trade throughout history has driven development and technological progress, and about the impact of individuals who influenced their contemporary era. Right there and then, I knew I wanted to make a game about that. And above all, a game about historical figures and how they shaped both their own time and world history for generations.

Kristian & Kenneth: Time to Megazord!

The best part of a civilization game is often the first turns, where things are tight and every move matters: the first movements of your scissor-like piece, or when you increase your production with that one extra crucial piece of food. However, building an economic engine is fun, but as you get more and more resources, this resource inflation sometimes makes you care less. Similarly, building and customizing your actions is fun, but sometimes specialization forces you into a specific strategy that you end up following the whole game. And for a civilization game to feel epic, the game must develop and change. Is it even possible for players to get an “epic feel” without the game lasting six hours?

Ok, let’s try to design a civilization game.

We have previously designed two games together: Automania and Bad Company. We share the idea that games should be fun, streamlined, efficient and playful. And we don’t want to waste the players’ time. We played with the idea of making a game that spanned the entire human history, from the stone age to the space age.

One of our first game design dilemmas occurred quite early. How could we compress the entire history of humans into a 90-minute board game experience?

If all players were to have meaningful, epic experiences in such a game, a lot of the players’ decisions had to be carried out simultaneously, and we had to reduce direct interaction. We decided on a two-phase structure: In the action phases, players act simultaneously, building their civilization and performing actions without waiting for turn. Then, we would focus most of the player interaction in a separate exploration phase. With simultaneous play, we managed to cut the playing time from 360 minutes in the early tests to 90.

Another dilemma in our search for a epic gaming experience was the focus on an aggressive vs peaceful experience.

In civilization games we *love* building our economy, developing our culture, exploring new technologies and sciences. Having your economy and buildings torn down is not as satisfying. We decided we would design a civilization game that celebrated the peaceful, constructive and positive sides of humanity: The culture, the science, the economy. No warfare this time - there are enough games covering that.

Building a peaceful, harmonious civilization became the goal, and in the mentioned exploration phase – the phase with most of the interaction – players would act in order of their peace level.

We also wanted the player interaction to be mostly friendly. In Timespan, players build wonders with powerful effects that can really impact the game, and you may benefit from other players’ wonders by visiting them with your camel caravan. When your wonders are visited by other players, you score points, so you wish to build them early to attract more visitors. You will of course find the classic wonders: the Pyramids, the Great Library etc, but there are also Stonehenge, Templo Mayor, the Oracle of Delphi, and even Area 51 (finally a civilization game that Erich von Däniken might have approved?).

The resource system was streamlined from one of Kristian’s previous prototypes (a variant of this was also used in Saltfjord). This system helps with the potential problem of resource inflation. Timespan has several levels of resources, and each resource can be upgraded to one on the next level. As the game advances through three ages, we made sure cards from newer ages would require resources of higher levels. The early resources don’t become worthless, but you’ll often want to upgrade them for use in later ages.

The most important breakthrough in the development of this game was the realization of how we could simulate time while also adding interesting dilemmas to the gameplay.

Each player plays cards into their own “timeline”, consisting of four spaces: When you play a card, you place it to the left, pushing other cards to the right, eventually moving cards out of your timeline, into your graveyard. The four cards visible in your timeline can be activated with your workers. As the game progresses, the actions available to you will therefore change.

This means that players cannot simply do the same actions over and over, and your strategies will change. In one period your civilization may specialize in exploration and the movement of your ship, in a later period your civilization may switch to focusing on science.

We also wanted the cards in themselves not to be static. When you play a character into your timeline, we wanted it to still feel “alive”. So, we came up with the luxury tiles. Luxury tiles are mainly acquired through exploration and represent rare or exotic resources. Most of the cards in Timespan request a certain luxury tile. If you place the given luxury tile onto the card, you gain a bonus whenever you activate the card with a worker. Each luxury tile has a different bonus, meaning you are effectively customizing your own worker placement spaces. For example, Nefertiti wants pottery. You can simply activate her card for some nice effects, but if you first deliver pottery to her, she will also provide science.

If you build up a strong card effect with luxuries, why would you ever want to pass time and move that card into your timeline? This was solved by giving all luxuries a passive income effect whenever they are moved into your graveyard. This creates a dilemma: Do you want to keep your strong worker-placement effect, or move it into your graveyard to build your economic engine with passive income? For us, this was the final breakthrough in the design, and the responses from the play testers were great: We now had a very strong game that provided lots of variation and interesting dilemmas in a short playing time.

Side note: One of the more exotic luxuries can only be acquired in outer space. Its name, "Umulium", is an obscure reference to Norwegian pop-culture from the 1980s.

What if?

Developing board games is largely about asking creative questions. Sometimes the ideas don’t work, sometimes they become new, fun features in the game.

Players begin Timespan with a few cards representing the stone age. Then the game goes through three ages: antiquity, renaissance, and modern. But what if you could draw cards from the future? Would that be fun? Of course it would.

Most often, you are gaining cards from the current age, but every now and then it is possible to have a “breakthrough” that lets you draw a card from the next age. This allows you to change history: What if the printing press was available in the antiquity? What if Einstein had been born during the renaissance?

The game lasts for three ages, but since you sometimes get to draw cards from the next age, we also needed some cards of age four. Designing a game built on history can sometimes feel a little restrictive, so we really appreciated the freedom of coming up with next-gen technologies for the age four deck. We could draw inspiration from interesting thematical concepts, or we could come up with specific effects and then find thematical concepts that worked well with those. We do for example have the obvious “Interplanetary travel”, the more esoteric “Human cloning”, but also the “Dream recorder”, which was a new mechanism relating to your workers when they are in your sleeping area. The game system felt like a playground where we could really be creative with the cards’ effects.

A game is never truly finished until it has been refined, polished, and tested, again and again.

In October 2025, at SPIEL in Essen, we met with Richard Ham (Rahdo), and we told him about our new project. We showed him the prototype, and his reaction was enthusiastic: He loves conveyor belt mechanisms, and the timeline seemed like such a fun conveyor belt. He was right. We hadn’t thought of the timeline as a conveyor belt. But of course, it was. And of course, we should add more “conveyor belt effects” to the game, for example cards that become stronger as they move through your timeline. We also added the book luxury, which activates the action box *below* the activated card, meaning the effect of a card can drastically change depending on when you activate it.

The name of the game was also not yet determined. We discussed “Timeframe”, but it didn’t really hit. “Timeline” was already taken. And we finally landed on “Timespan”. This name wasn’t taken. Or was it? There are some well-known games with titles ending in “-span”. So maybe we should ask, just to be sure? Arnaud Charpentier (of Matagot) put us in contact with Jamey Stegmaier, and we explained the situation. He kindly replied that he had no issues with us using this name, as the games in question are obviously very different.

An epic game deserves an epic look. We searched the internet for talented illustrators, and about six months before we finalized the game, we were lucky enough that the extremely talented Nilanjan Malakar agreed to make the box and card illustrations. For a game as big as this, we needed to get the illustrator started working before we were done with the game design. Nilanjan began illustrating, every character, wonder, invention, and construction, in great detail. In such detail, in fact, that we started getting worried:

Could he possibly manage to get all the illustrations ready in time? (Nope)

And would people believe this was AI? (Yep) ..more about this later.

Luckily, we also got another great artist onboard, Gjermund Bohne, who we have been working with before, both on Automania and Bad Company, and also more recently on Revive and Recall. He is excellent and flexible, and he would do all the additional art for the game, the iconography, the luxury tiles, and all the graphical design and layout. We worked with the two artists in parallel: Gjermund preparing new cards as soon as Nilanjan completed another illustration. As we were nearing deadline, we had increased the number of cards in the age four deck and were lacking a few illustrations. But this was fine, as this was the deck of next-gen technologies that allowed us to be creative. The “Gravity inverter”, the “Black hole generator” and the “Invisible Yacht” were born out of this. We also added some references to previous games with “Robot factory” (Sparks) and “Modern Boardgames” (Automania).

With regards to the quality of the illustrations, this was so much better than what we had dared to hope for. But this level of detail also made some question whether the illustrations were AI, and the first thread on the game’s BGG forum also asked about this. But, no, Nilanjan has shared his process on art forums and Facebook along the way, and if you zoom in on his illustrations, you will see that they are simply beautiful and very high quality. Also, he has hidden easter eggs in many of the illustrations, which I hope you will enjoy discovering.

In total, we had to come up with about 160 history cards, spanning these four ages. We have four main categories of cards: persons, inventions, constructions and special.

In a historical game, most of the featured characters will have lived a long time ago. One exception to this was the primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall, which is probably most famous for her work with chimpanzees. She unfortunately passed away in 2025, but as she was an impressive scientist and human figure, we wanted to include her in the game. We contacted the Jane Goodall Institute, asking for permission to feature her in Timespan. We showed them the image Nilanjan has made, which is inspired by a photograph of Dr Goodall carrying a chimpanzee. Their reply was that they did not want us to use that image. It was too late for our artist Nilanjan to make a new illustration, so we either had to use this image or drop Jane Goodall from the game entirely. While we had just seen the illustration as a beautiful image of the connection between Goodall and the chimpanzee, the Goodall Institute was worried: because humans should never treat chimpanzees like this in the wild. This particular image, however, was of Goodall treating an orphan sanctuary chimpanzee. We therefore asked if we could still use the image if we included a disclaimer, explaining this, and they were kind enough to agree. So, this is the reason why this card has additional text.

As we write in the game’s rules: Throughout much of history, pursuing the arts or sciences was a luxury not affordable or available to everyone. People who were economically or politically oppressed – such as cultural minorities, women in general, and those oppressed by colonization – simply had fewer opportunities to make their mark in these areas and are therefore underrepresented in large parts of recorded history. We have tried to include a wide range of historical people in our game, but we also do not try to pretend that this oppression never happened. Being from Norway, a small, Northern European country, we are fully aware that our game is built from a Western perspective.

Human history is full of atrocities and serious issues. Creating a “fun game” within this framework is not always an easy balance. There were so many historical figures we wanted to include out of respect, but we of course also needed to pay attention to the gameplay. Rosa Parks is one such example. All Norwegians learn about the American civil rights movement in school, and Rosa Parks was one of many great figures from that time whose fights and suffering deserve our deepest respect. Her character serves as inspiration to opposition against oppression all over the world, and we hope that including her in our game is seen as an expression of our respect, and not as a banalization of her impact and importance.

It has been hard to balance our many aims here: We wanted diversity, both in gender and ethnicity, but we also needed to have a balanced number of the different types of cards in each age, and also the effects of the various cards, to make sure we have a balanced production of science, culture and resources. On top of this, given our perspective, it is easy and intuitive to come up with fitting effects for Einstein and Newton. It is not as obvious how to find a fitting effect for Chien-Shiung Wu, honoring her extensive work on particle physics.

Despite these many potential issues, we hope that we have managed to make a respectful and enjoyable game that can be played by anyone.



And we sincerely apologize to everyone for the Power Rangers reference in the earlier heading. That was absolutely unnecessary and uncalled for. We are deeply ashamed.


Best wishes from Norway,
Kenneth and Kristian


Further reading: At one point during the design process we were contacted by the Norwegian national broadcaster as they wanted to write an article about game design and our work on Timespan and other games. You can read the article here.

by Beth Heile

The Minnesota State Fair is underway right now, and as always, it is a delightful spectacle of agriculture, crafts, and food. For those reading this who are unfamiliar with US state fairs, nearly every state in the US holds a state fair once a year, and Minnesota's is the second largest in the country. State fairs each have their own specialties, but all feature various contests and competitions like butter sculptures (yes, really), largest fruit and veg, various awards for livestock, and contests for crafts like needlepoint, garment making, and quilts.

But the one piece every state fair has in common is FOOD: both food trucks to satisfy attendees and contests for all manner of baked goods. Minnesota State Fair holds 106 unique food-related competitions, including a cake decorating contest. This year the theme was "Game On!", featuring all board game designs. Many submissions focused on traditional mainstream classics like Monopoly, The Game of Life, and Scrabble, but there were definitely some modern strategy games in the mix as well.

Shout out to Greg Sorenson who took these photos and kindly gave permission to repost here on BGG. So please enjoy this photo journey of some of the cakes from the Game On! competition at the MN State Fair!

Group Pictures

The Operation cake in the middle of this photo won third place and the Scrabble cake on the left won second place.

The Agricola cake in the center bottom won first place! Check out the bottom of this article for an up close picture.

Individual Pictures by Game

Hungry Hungry Hippos
Fun fact: The hippos names are Happy Hippo (pink), Henry Hippo (orange), Homer Hippo (green), and Harry Hippo (yellow)

Hi Ho Cherry-O
Fun fact: The first version was called "Let's Pick Cherries" and was designer by elementary school teacher Lorraine Landfried from Door County, Wisconsin to help her students learn math skills

The Game of Life
Fun Fact: The Game of Life was Milton Bradley's first game and used a spinner (called a teetotum) to avoid dice and thus any connections to gambling

Monopoly
If you are wondering why there are different characters on the tops of these cakes instead of Mr. Monopoly (a.k.a. Milburn Pennybags), they are the mascots of the MN State Fair

Clue
Fun fact: Clue was designed by Anthony Pratt while he was holed up in his home in his Birmingham, UK during WWII air raids. The original name of Cluedo was a combination of "clue" and "ludo" which is Latin for "I play"

Candy Land
Fun fact: Eleanor Abbott invented Candy Land in 1948 while recovering from polio.

Don't Break the Ice
Fun fact: Don't Break the Ice was a Schaper game, invented in Minnesota

Jenga
Fun fact: Jenga was designed by Leslie Scott from Tanzania and the name is Swahili for “build”

Operation
Fun fact - the man you are operating on is called Cavity Sam.

Scrabble
Fun fact: The letter point values each Scrabble tile are based on how often those letters appeared on the front page of The New York Times

Ticket to Ride

Wavelength

Wingspan

Catan

Bohnanza

And winner of the Game On! contest was this stunning Agricola cake (photo credit: cake designer and blue ribbon winner @daftspunk5x5)

BONUS! Crop Art
Don't worry - art made from corn and other food products are a thing too! While the theme wasn't board games for this competition, two exhibits went in that direction all the same (again thanks to Greg Sorenson for the photos!).

by Steph Hodge

[imageid=9083318 medium rep]▪️ GEM Games is releasing DECKO this fall. From designer Haakon Gaarder )Villagers), this is a new poker-style game for 2-5 players that plays in 20-60 minutes!

From BGG:






▪️ Ares Games released Viking Route last week. This follows the hit Mini Rogue. From designers Guido Albini (The Faceless), Martino Chiacchiera, Luca Maragno. This is a new cooperative game that uses magnets as a compass to move the ship. This plays 1-4 players in about 60-120 minutes.

From the newsletter:



▪️ Worms: The Board Game has a new 30th Anniversary edition that is just releasing this week from Mantic Games. From designers Tamsin Caesar and Matt Gilbert. This game is based on the videogame series by Team17; it plays 2-6 players in about 45 minutes.

From the newsletter:




▪️ Founders from This Way! is just releasing this fall with availablity at Spiel. From designers Bragou and Sams: (I C E). This is a hidden role game for 2-5 players that plays in 35-60 minutes

From BGG:

by Katerina Xerovasila

World Order, much like Hegemony, is not what you'd call a simple game. It's a simulation of how the real world actually works, translated into a tabletop game. A complex system of interconnected parts that all need to work together to give players the educational but actually fun experience the designers had in mind. Graphic design follows the same rule. The visuals need to be coherent, logical, immersive, intuitive, and somewhere in there, nice to look at too. That's an overwhelming thought to have at the start of a project. I wouldn’t recommend it but I had it anyway.

It wasn't the first time either. Hegemony taught me that you can't hold an entire complex system in your head at once and still get anything done. So this time I took it one piece at a time.

Setting the Direction
Before graphic design even started, the game designers already knew what they wanted thematically and (to a degree) mechanically. Everything else got decided along the way, starting with setting the overall visual direction. World Order simulates international relations and geopolitics, the players are actual countries, the board is an actual map of the world. So the direction was obvious: realism, in both illustration and graphics. No fantasy environment. No WWII history game vibes. It happens now, and the theme doesn't leave much room for playful or comic style imagery either.

That left us with a short list of tools and a long list of things we weren’t allowed to touch. The real challenge was making it look good, with academic weight, without looking like it fell out of a university textbook on international relations. "Serious but not boring" is a narrower lane than it sounds.

Cover Art & Logo
Once we had the thematic direction, cover art came next, and it took more passes than I'd like to admit before it felt right. The logo was the opposite kind of problem. For both Hegemony and World Order we ended up landing on less is more. In both Hegemony and World Order it is the words and taglines that do all the heavy-lifting.

The Map
Then came the big one. The biggest piece of table presence in the whole game. THE MAP, always in capitals in my head.

It's the clearest thematic image the game has, and it also has to physically hold everything: all the regions, the scoring system, the country card marketplace, the turn order track, the scoring track, the round track, army markers that actually have to fit inside their own regions. All that without really obstructing the actual map, so the players can get a feel of how a country’s geographical position plays in the big picture. No pressure.

Each region needed its own clear color, one that wouldn't get confused with its neighbors and wouldn't clash with any player's flag colors. Sounds simple until you actually try to assign four superpowers a color each. China had to be red, because, well, its flag. That took red off the table for the USA, so the USA got blue, the other color on its own flag. Which meant the EU, whose flag is mostly blue, couldn't have blue either, so it got yellow. Then Russia showed up with a flag that's red, white, and blue, all of it already spoken for, leaving white as the only option standing. Four superpowers, one game of musical chairs.

Once the players were sorted we still had seven regions left needing distinct, appropriate colors that didn't clash with any of that. The Americas got a deep orange, MENA got green, and so on down the line. Country card colors matched their regions too, so once a card appears on the marketplace on the board, you can tell at a glance where it belongs.

We also had to decide between a light board and a dark board, the shape and size of the board (table real estate is something we take seriously). None of these is a small decision; change one and you get a whole new table feel of the game.

Player Boards
Player boards come right after the game board in importance. In World Order each one reflects a Superpower’s internal organization and so needed to hold a lot of information arranged logically and clearly. They're also dual layered, which sounds fine until you're the one accounting for every factory instruction that comes with dual layering. Seeing the more primitive ones again… well it brings up a lot of feelings!

Cards
Next, the cards. Some illustrated, some not, but the challenge on all of them is the same: fit every piece of text and icon somewhere the player can find it instantly, and still make it look good. Gameplay details that would seem insignificant are actually very important. For example when a player holds the cards in their hand like a fan, are all the important details and icons (value, ability etc.) visible at once? That’s where the game designer’s experience comes in handy! We went through a lot of versions here. Several looked genuinely nice but were also nowhere near the academic tone we were aiming for. Looking good and being correct turned out to be two different jobs.

Ability Cards

Country Cards
Iconography
At some point in every project we hit the same fork: what becomes an icon, and what gets spelled out. Icons are basically tiny logos. They have to be clear both in meaning and appearance, even at the smallest possible scale, or they haven't done their one job. Some graduate into markers and tokens, like the tanks, which get a special place on the board and become part of the actual action instead of just sitting there!

Coins
One of the trickiest components to get right was the coins. Our first attempts leaned into a more vintage aesthetic, the kind of "old money" look that's a natural instinct for coin design. It looked good in isolation, but it clashed with everything else we were building: World Order is a modern simulation, and the coins needed to feel like they belonged in the same world as the rest of the components.

What we actually wanted was something much more literal: coins clean and precise enough that you could almost mistake them for real currency, like crisp architectural depictions, no ornamentation getting in the way of legibility. But getting that level of realism in flat vector art has real limits, because coins have depth, light, relief. So I taught myself Blender, a program I had almost no experience with, specifically to get the embossed, dimensional look I couldn't achieve in Illustrator and of course produce the actual files that the factory could use for production. I was fully expecting a steep learning curve, but it turned out to be far more approachable than I feared. Quite soon, I had a workflow that worked.

The nicest confirmation came after the game was out: a backer commented that the coins looked so realistic they could almost pass for real currency, which was exactly the goal from day one.

The Part Nobody Sees
The visual design process, all of the above, is roughly 20% of the game's total production timeline. Most of the big decisions land early. We generally know what we like when we see it, and very little changes drastically after that. What does happen, over and over, is tweaking and correcting after every playtest, for the next one.

We also produce prototypes early, first in house, then at the factory, which is the real test of how everything looks once it's actually printed rather than on a screen. Those prototypes go to expos and reviewers, so getting them right matters well beyond our own approval.

The most serious stretch of the whole job is file prep, for the factory and for localization both. Everything has to be spotless, because mistakes at this stage don't stay small. Then there's the single most stressful moment in the entire process: giving the final go ahead to the factory for mass production. No more revisions. No more "let's just tweak this one thing." It's happening now.

Concepts
And just when you thought you were done, well, you weren't. There was a whole book left to produce. World Order Concepts, the theoretical backbone of the entire game, in both softcover and hardcover. Not a rulebook, not a component, a real book, the kind you'd expect to find a bibliography in (which you will). Our academics team put a huge amount of work into it, because it's the part that actually proves the point behind both of our games: that something can be properly educational and still be fun to sit down and play. The board and the cards teach you by playing. Concepts is there for the people who finish a game and want to know how and why any of it actually works that way in real life.

The best moment comes much later. People get the game in their hands, and they love it, or they hate it, and either way it becomes something they actually talk about. Forum threads, reviews, arguments about whether a rule makes sense or a color is confusing. You made a thing and now it exists outside of you, which is a strange feeling the first few times it happens.

And then there are the expos. We go present and sell the game ourselves, face to face, at a table, watching people pick up a card or look at the board for the first time with no idea what to expect. You get instant, unfiltered reactions there in a way a review never gives you. Someone squints at an icon and you watch, in real time, whether it works or not. It's the most exposed part of the whole job, and also the part that makes the other 95% feel like it was worth doing.

by Justin Bell

Hell of a Deal was hot the entire four days of Gen Con a few weeks ago. It was so hot that the game’s publisher, Smirk & Dagger, sold out almost immediately on the show’s first day. This was doubly impressive because the game wasn’t tracking as high on BGG’s own Gen Con preview.

The booth was so jammed each time I walked by, it looked like the publisher’s owner and “Chief Instigator,” Curt Covert, had offered guests actual cash winnings to stand around the booth’s demo tables. (What say you, Curt?)

Hell of a Deal stayed so hot throughout the show that Covert sent members of his team to an offsite warehouse (do we even need to guess where this faraway warehouse was?) on the second day of Gen Con to retrieve more product…and then, that second drop of games sold out on the show’s third day.

When you’re hot, you’re hot!

Many, many hundreds of people bought a game about poker—to the tune of its $75 MSRP—in a year where I thought poker wasn’t nearly as hot as it had been in years past. Hell of a Deal was the classic example of a “con” game, a convention title that served as a winner both because of its gameplay and because of the walk-up business it offered. Poker is such an increasingly familiar product to both hobby and non-hobby gamers alike.



Last week, while I was prepping both this article and my upcoming review of Hell of a Deal over at Meeple Mountain, I fired up the Xbox to play Balatro, the poker-with-powers rogue-like video game that gets love from time to time when I’m not working through other rogue-likes such as Brotato, Dead Cells (the video game, not the board game), and Slay the Spire (again, the video game, not the board game).

I don’t play poker in real life, but I do enjoy a quick game of Balatro. Or four games of Balatro. Often, I look up, realize that I wanted to do “a quick game of Balatro”, then discover that it is 1:47 AM on a school night.

I think this is part of the allure of poker-themed board/card games right now, even if the sample size is relatively small: the hook and the gameplay loop are very, very simple to grasp. I was really surprised—borderline shocked—by the number of crowds I saw standing near the Hell of a Deal demo tables all Gen Con weekend long, full of observers who didn’t seem like they had any interest in lining up to actually try the game.

Certainly, many of those observers bought Hell of a Deal…games don’t buy themselves (yet). However, those observers seemed very interested in simply watching other players work together to play poker.

I pulled some numbers from the interwebs. The World Series of Poker’s 2026 main event ended a few weeks ago, with a kid from Spokane, Washington netting $10,000,000 for a first-place finish. That’s cool, but I was more intrigued by some of the WSOP viewing numbers…378 MILLION impressions on socials, with players in this year’s tourney hailing from more than a hundred different countries. More than 70 countries registered a total north of 300 million views of the tournament; I still have dozens of friends in the US who watch poker on TV.

Like many of you, I played the KOSMOS release The Gang when it was released a couple years ago. I was enthralled by the chance to play cooperative poker with friends in my gaming groups. I don’t gamble, so poker in a safe space was music to my ears, and The Gang’s hook of silently influencing the table with those star-laden hint chips kept us coming back over and over again.

A couple years prior to that, I reviewed the Gamelyn release Tiny Epic Western. It had a nice mix of cowboy-themed worker placement and poker-style hand management, and for a guy who wasn’t a Texas hold ‘em player, Tiny Epic Western has a nice array of training wheels to guide peasants like me who don’t play poker at all.

I played the heck out of Ace of Spades last year—and again, earlier this year, when the Ace of Spades expansion Call of the Zombie arrived on my doorstep—and found that I might have an addiction to solo poker attack games, regardless of platform.

(Uhh, no…I certainly have not played Ace of Spades on Board Game Arena a dozen times…or, eh, maybe more. Ha, it’s hard to keep track, but it’s encouraging to see that I’m not the only one to enjoy the sweet, sweet taste of just one more run.)



Which brings us back to Hell of a Deal.

Between a demo play, a surprisingly easy-to-administer solo play, and a four-player game with the folks from my review group, I can see why Hell of a Deal was both a fun “con” game and a keeper outside of the convention environment. I didn’t think I needed more poker-themed board games than the titles I named above, but Hell of a Deal challenged that notion immediately.

Co-op poker clearly sings to me, if The Gang is any indication. But a game like Hell of a Deal that encourages cheating? Like, you need to cheat to win, and the cheating is built into the game’s design because you have to outcheat a cheater?

Count me in.

Designer Cameron Reid and the team at Smirk & Dagger have come up with a nice formula here. First, players love bling, so while Hell of a Deal could have probably been just fine with cardboard player mats and plastic tokens, Reid & Co. knew this wouldn’t fly with players. So, neoprene is everywhere. Poker chips? Certainly. And it’s great that those chips can be shoved into a betting area on each player’s personal board (whoops, personal neoprene mat!!), and the chips have the appropriate amount of heft.

Tarot-sized boss cards are a nice touch, with silly boss names like Dedly Aloor and Nick Hauss waiting to torment the players. There are powerful favor cards and equally distressing curse cards to add variety and challenge. Players can swap hand cards with other players or grab cards from the discard pile to make average hands sexier…all with the aim of cheating just enough to play a hand better than the current round’s boss character.

Hell of a Deal is a poker game, evolved from some of the other poker-themed board games I’ve tried before. It leans into poker’s growing global footprint by catering to both seasoned poker players and folks who have never played poker before. I was encouraged by my Gen Con demo, a four-player table that included three people who know poker and one who never plays. The co-op elements made the “newb” comfortable in a way that other games may not have, making it fun to watch their reactions to the proceedings and their general appreciation for the game.

Here was the wild part: looking around to see the number of people who stood around during our nearly hour-long demo to simply watch us play poker. People who were curious because it was poker on the table, a game that has become so approachable that people around the world continue to casually watch poker online or on TV.

Trick-taking games have exploded in the last few years; according to a search I ran here on BGG, there are about 3,200 games that feature trick-taking as a mechanic…and more than 800 of those were released in just the last three years. I wonder if poker will catch fire in a similar way, where we find ourselves drowning in an avalanche of other poker-themed titles.

I won’t go all-in on that idea just yet, though. It’s clear that poker is hot!

by Michi Die

I am Michael and Cherry on Top is my first published game. The publisher is Piatnik - all very exciting! I thought people might be interested in the game itself and how it came to life. Aspiring game designers might also find the thought process behind it useful.

HOW IT WORKS
I think it makes sense to explain a bit about how the final game works before diving into its development. Otherwise, I fear it might be difficult to follow.
The game consists of 49 cards: seven different colors and seven different fruits, each featuring one unique combination of each color and fruit. The game is a ladder climber where you must play a larger group than the previous player or pass. Larger groups consist of connected cards of the same fruit or color. For example, if a player puts out two cherry cards, you need to build a group of three cards somehow. The first twist is that you can use cards already played by another player. In our example, I could simply add one cherry to the existing two to build a group of three cherries. The next player could then add a fourth cherry, or play four of something else—like melons or blue cards. The second twist is that you can cover up cards when playing to build a larger group. If a player puts down two cherries and you don’t have any cherries, you can cover those cherries with three cards of a different matching color or fruit. If you play a group and everyone else passes, you get to start a new group of any size. Whoever gets rid of all their cards first wins the game.

Example (with the prototype art*): Another person played two cherries. The next person must somehow get to a group of three and can make use of cards being played previously. He could for example simply add another cherry (A) or he could play two additional purple cards to get to three (B).

* fruits designed by Freepik - Magnificent.com
DESIGNING CHERRY ON TOP
The core concept of Cherry on Top is that players contribute to a shared display, and cards already played can be utilized by everyone else. Turning this into a ladder climber felt like a natural next step, as the genre inherently involves moving from smaller groups to larger or better ones. For example, if I play a group of two cards, the next player must either play a group of three or more cards, or a group of two cards that beats mine. I originally started with numbered cards across different colors. Since many card games start with a hand of about eight cards per person (and I wanted to support up to five players), using numbers 1 through 7 with seven different colors was a great starting point. It gave us exactly 49 cards to work with, a number that stuck around for the final game.

While the concept worked, numbered cards proved problematic because they conflicted with the color mechanics. Numbers inherently imply a specific value, prompting players to want to sort them—a 1 is usually seen as less valuable than a 4, for example. Furthermore, making the specific number matter created too many restrictions. That is why I ultimately chose fruits over numbers. At that point, the design was already 80-90% there. Players could build groups using either matching colors or matching fruits. Initially, groups had to be formed in a straight line or row. In the final game, this restriction was removed, and cards now just need to touch adjacently in some way. This opens up the game significantly, allowing groups to form in various shapes. It makes reading the board much more engaging because there are so many more opportunities to spot. For instance, you can form a group of five cards by adding just two cards to the display that bridge three cards that weren’t initially connected.

The final major addition was the ability to cover up cards already on the table. This was a crucial fix; without it, players could simply hoard "safe" cards and play them whenever they wanted. For example, if there were six red cards on the board and you held the seventh, you would have a guaranteed win for that round since seven cards is the maximum group size. Allowing players to stack cards on top of each other turns that hoard into a dangerous liability, especially against experienced players who will eagerly destroy any color or fruit group they don't hold. The idea of covering cards actually came from the title itself. My wife suggested Cherry on Top would be a great name, and that instantly sparked the idea of stacking cards. In the end, the game is very simple, but it took a few vital, small adjustments to truly make it work. It has been a fascinating journey for me.

WHAT MAKES CHERRY ON TOP A DIFFERENT LADDER CLIMBER?
I love highly interactive games that share a common ecosystem, where one player's action directly impacts everyone else. I also enjoy ladder climbers, but I dislike how much pure luck is usually involved in the opening deal—leaving you with either "good" or "bad" cards. Cherry on Top works differently. First, the board state is permanently shifting, which keeps every player engaged and the tension high. Second, there are no truly bad cards. Every single card gives you both a color and a fruit to work with. Plus, if you only hold a single cherry, it means the other cherries are out there in opponents' hands, allowing you to piggyback on their plays later. There is also a nice dilemma that you want to get rid of your cards on the one hand but you also want to play them as late as possible because in general cards get more valuable over time because they will be part of a larger group (unless the group is destroyed by other players). So timing is a crucial part of this game.

WHO IS IT FOR
I think Cherry on Top works really nice as a family game. It has very simple rules and plays very fast, yet the rounds remain tense and engaging enough that people usually want to play several games in a row. It also appeals to seasoned hobby gamers who enjoy interaction and clever plays. While there are definitely ways to play skillfully, playing well doesn't guarantee a win—so there is still a healthy dose of luck involved. The game rewards clever, tactical adaptations rather than long-term strategy, which I think is important to know.

I hope you found this interesting.

Best regards,
Michael

by Daniel Zhang

By Daniel Zhang, CEO and Lead Designer of Tumor Tactics

When I was nine, my grandmother was diagnosed with stage 3 pancreatic cancer. For months, I watched her move in and out of hospitals while treatments that were supposed to help her also seemed to make her weaker. I knew words like chemotherapy, but knowing the word and understanding what it meant were two very different things. Why would medicine make someone lose their hair? Why could a treatment hurt healthy parts of the body while still helping a patient? Why would doctors choose one treatment instead of another?

Years later, when my family encountered cancer again, those questions came back. By then I knew considerably more biology, but I started thinking about how strange it was that a subject could affect a kid's family so directly and still feel completely inaccessible to them. My co-designer Zachary Tou had grown up playing strategy card games like Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!, and we eventually started asking a pretty unusual design question: Could we turn real cancer treatment into a strategy game without making the science inaccurate, the subject insensitive, or the game miserable to play?

The project was originally called "CellQuest", and we started with a small group of friends, shared Google Docs full of half-finished ideas, rough cards, and a lot more confidence than game-design experience. The goal sounded simple: take cancer biology and make it something kids could learn by playing rather than memorizing from a textbook. Actually doing that turned out to require us to rebuild the game again and again.

Our First Mistake Was Trying to Put All of Biology Into the Game

Biology is not naturally game-shaped. It does not come with turns, victory conditions, damage values, or neatly balanced cards, so our first instinct was to translate biological concepts almost one-to-one into familiar card-game mechanics. Mutations became threats. Treatments became defenses. Healthy cells became lives. Scans let you look ahead in the deck. If there was an interesting biological concept, we wanted a card for it.

Some of our earliest mutation ideas were genuinely wild. A frameshift mutation could disable another card. Gene amplification could double an effect. A deletion could make a threat harder to stop. Another early idea gave players healthy-cell cards such as hair, skin, and lung cells, then made treatments carry side effects. Chemotherapy might stop the cancer, for example, but cost the player a hair-cell card. The biological reasoning was there: cancer damages the body, but some treatments can damage healthy tissue too.

The problem was that every piece of science seemed to demand another rule. Mutation needed one system. Treatment needed another. Side effects needed another. Cancer progression needed another. Then we wanted screening, metastasis, resistance, immune evasion, and research. We were slowly building a biology simulator instead of a card game. The more scientifically ambitious we became, the harder it was for anyone to actually play. Eventually we realized that a mechanic does not become educational just because it represents something scientific. If a player spends the entire game trying to remember rules, the biology disappears anyway. We started asking a harsher question about every idea: Does this scientific concept create an interesting decision? If the answer was no, being accurate was not enough to save it.

Then We Realized We Did Not Even Know What Kind of Game We Were Making

For a surprisingly long time, we could not decide whether Tumor Tactics should be cooperative or competitive. One major prototype was completely cooperative. Players represented different parts of the body or different medical roles and worked together to survive increasingly difficult stages of cancer. At one point we experimented with organ roles such as the lungs, heart, and immune system, each with different abilities. Another version had players progressing together through Stage I, Stage II, and Stage III cancer decks.

Thematically, cooperation worked. Cancer care involves teams, and nobody had to do anything uncomfortable like deliberately giving another player's patient cancer. Mechanically, though, some versions became too defensive. Players were mostly waiting for the game to produce a problem and then responding to it. We worried that once a group understood the optimal response, there was not enough reason to play differently the next time.

So we explored competition, which immediately created the opposite problem. Competition was fun, but what did "attacking" another player mean in a game about cancer? Making their tumor worse? Giving their patient a mutation? Even if the mechanic worked, the theme felt wrong. During an early game-design consultation, we were pushed toward a compromise: rather than having players harm one another, have multiple doctors or teams race to cure their own patients. Competition could come from solving the medical problem faster, not from making somebody else's illness worse.

That basic idea eventually became the foundation of the current game. Every player is a doctor managing their own patient and trying to cure the same three tumor types: lung, colorectal, and skin. You are competing, but your primary opponent is your own patient's disease. Other players can affect the table through Utility cards and shared Events, but you are not winning by giving someone cancer. You are winning by making better decisions about the cancer already in front of you.

The Mechanic We Liked Enough to Keep Fixing, Until We Finally Killed It

One of our longest-running early systems was something we called cancer siphoning. An untreated tumor would remain in front of a player and continuously drain cards or health. The larger the tumor became, the more resources it siphoned away. We liked the idea because it created pressure: ignoring cancer should be costly, and a growing tumor should become harder to manage.

Playtesting quickly exposed the problem. Our internal notes literally say, "cancer siphoning was confusing," followed by another issue: "players die too quickly." Keeping track of which tumors were siphoning, how much each one removed, when the loss happened, and how that interacted with everything else was annoying for us and much worse for younger players. If somebody drew a difficult cancer early, the game could also collapse before they had a meaningful chance to respond.

We tried to repair the system before admitting the system itself was the problem. We changed starting hand sizes, reduced cancer counts, adjusted how much health tumors drained, and tested different stage structures. Eventually we stopped asking how to improve siphoning and instead asked what it was supposed to accomplish. The answer was simple: we wanted players to feel that waiting makes cancer harder to treat.

There was a much cleaner way to do that. In the current game, tumors have visible HP and stages. If you draw another Cancer card corresponding to a tumor that is still active, that tumor advances a stage and gains HP. Later stages also make treatments increasingly uncertain: Stage 1 treatments succeed automatically, while Stages 2 through 4 require progressively harder die rolls. A failed treatment deals no damage, the card is still discarded, and the tumor regains HP.

That teaches the same underlying idea without requiring players to maintain a miniature accounting department. A player who leaves a tumor alone long enough will eventually discover that the treatment they were saving is now much less reliable. We do not need to stop the game and explain that earlier-stage cancers are generally easier to treat. The player feels the difference through the rules.

The Best Science Became the Decisions, Not the Card Text

Once we started simplifying, we realized that the game's strongest educational moments came from very ordinary-looking rules. One of the most important is that players can normally play only one Tactic card per turn. Earlier versions occasionally let players unload multiple treatments at once, which made turns feel powerful but destroyed most of the prioritization. If you can solve every visible problem immediately, there is no real reason to choose.

Limiting treatment actions changes that. If I have several active tumors, I have to decide which problem matters most right now. Do I finish the almost-cured tumor? Do I focus on the tumor that has already advanced? Do I use a flexible treatment now, or save a more specialized card for later? After making that choice, I still have to draw a card, which might advance a tumor I neglected or even bring back one I previously cured.

Treatment design went through a similar simplification. Early prototypes gave many cards elaborate unique abilities because we wanted every treatment to feel scientifically distinct. That created variety, but it also created a lot of text and memorization. We eventually moved toward a cleaner idea: different actions should create different tradeoffs, but players should be able to understand those tradeoffs without rereading the rulebook every turn.

That is why treatment specificity matters. Some cards are most useful against particular cancer types, while broader treatments provide flexibility. Stage also affects how dependable a treatment is. The most powerful-looking card in your hand is therefore not automatically the best card to play. Its value depends on the tumor, its stage, your other options, and what you think you can afford to leave untreated.

Uncertainty became another important part of that system. One of our early playtest conversations began when somebody challenged why an immunotherapy card took effect immediately, as though a real treatment outcome were guaranteed the second it was selected. We experimented with delayed effects, but keeping track of different timers created exactly the kind of complexity we were trying to remove. Eventually, dice gave us a simpler abstraction. They obviously do not simulate oncology, but they communicate something important: making a medically reasonable decision does not guarantee a successful outcome.

During one of our later student workshops, a fifth grader watched a treatment roll and asked, "So the die roll is like whether the chemo actually works?" That question was more valuable to me than having another paragraph about chemotherapy printed on the card. He had inferred the idea from playing.

Most of Our Good Mechanics Started as Problems

Several systems in Tumor Tactics grew from trying to stop players from finding one obvious strategy. Treatment resistance was one of our early experiments. We tested ideas where repeatedly relying on the same treatment type could eventually make that strategy less effective, reflecting the real challenge of tumors developing resistance. Mutation modifiers similarly introduced uncertainty by changing how cancer behaved from game to game.

Not every one of those mechanics survived in its original form. Resistance, in particular, went through multiple versions rather than becoming a permanent standalone system. But the design problem survived: the game should not reward playing the same strongest card over and over. In the current version, staging, treatment specificity, relapse, Utilities, and Events help create that pressure without requiring another complicated subsystem.

Events became especially useful because they gave us somewhere to put chaos without making every card complicated. At one point, nearly every card had a special exception. Eventually we concentrated unusual table-wide effects into a dedicated Event category. The normal turn stays readable: play a Tactic, play a Utility, draw a card. Then an Event can temporarily change the situation for everyone. A cancer that was cured may return later. A shared Event can alter what players are allowed to do. Utilities let players plan ahead, manipulate information, or interfere tactically.

That separation helped us make the game both simpler and more replayable. Cancer and Tactic cards carry the central medical decisions. Utilities reward strategy. Events make sure a plan cannot be followed mechanically every game. We did not need every biological concept to receive its own permanent rule.

Kids Are Ruthless Playtesters

The biggest improvement came when we stopped designing almost entirely around ourselves and started putting the game in front of elementary and middle school students. Kids are extremely efficient game-design critics because they have no reason to pretend something is interesting. If the terminology is confusing, they stop reading. If turns take too long, they start talking to somebody else. If one card is clearly stronger than the rest, they find it and exploit it. If a rule takes three minutes to explain, you probably do not have a rule yet.

Those sessions forced us to keep reducing unnecessary complexity, but they also produced moments that convinced us not to oversimplify the science itself. At one elementary workshop, a fourth grader spent several minutes looking through his options before choosing targeted therapy for a specific tumor. When I asked why, he explained that chemotherapy could affect healthy cells while targeted therapy was aimed more specifically at the cancer. Then he looked at me and asked, "So why don't doctors just use this all the time?"

That question opened a discussion about why not every cancer has the same targetable features, why therapies do not work equally well for every patient, and why broader treatments are sometimes still necessary. What mattered was that nobody had prompted him with a worksheet question asking for the "advantages and disadvantages of targeted therapy." The game had created a decision. The decision exposed a tradeoff. The tradeoff made him ask why.

That became the clearest explanation I have found for what we are trying to do. Educational games can easily become quizzes wearing costumes: answer the biology question correctly and you earn a point. We wanted the opposite. The player should need the biology because it helps explain the game state they are already trying to solve.

Playtesting also showed us where that philosophy could go too far. Some of our scientific vocabulary was simply too difficult for younger players. Terms such as carcinogen, metastasis, and immunotherapy could become barriers before a student even reached the underlying idea. Instead of removing those terms entirely, we began simplifying descriptions and developing supporting explanations so students could learn the real vocabulary without needing prior biology knowledge.

What Survived

The current Tumor Tactics is a 72-card strategy game for 2–4 players ages eight and up. Each player begins as a doctor treating lung, colorectal, and skin tumors. Turns are deliberately short: play up to one Tactic, play up to one Utility, then draw. Cancer cards can advance active tumors or cause cured cancers to relapse. Higher-stage tumors become increasingly difficult to treat, and Events can temporarily affect the whole table. The first doctor who gets all three tumors into their Cured pile at the same time wins.

That description is much simpler than almost every version that came before it, which is probably the best evidence that the design improved. Over the course of development, we experimented with healthy-cell lives, mutation/defuse systems, cooperative organs, multiple stage decks, cancer siphoning, research mechanics, resistance systems, different health models, different victory conditions, different player roles, and multiple ways of representing treatment uncertainty. Some of those ideas were genuinely interesting. They just did not all belong in the same game.

The finished artwork and game materials were also created manually by our team without generative AI. Even the visual design followed the same process as the mechanics: remove anything that stopped a player from immediately seeing what matters. A card for a ten-year-old cannot look like a miniature oncology textbook.

This summer, an ASCB COMPASS Outreach Grant supported a five-workshop Tumor Tactics series reaching 150 San Diego students, and 95% of participating students improved their score on a short cancer-biology assessment from before to after the workshop. We have also brought the game to more than 1,000 students at the San Diego County Fair and distributed decks through Scripps and Rady Children's Hospital.

Those numbers are useful evidence that the project has moved beyond our kitchen table, but the moments I remember are still the individual questions: the student frustrated that a tumor advanced before he could treat it, the fifth grader realizing what the die represented, and the fourth grader demanding to know why doctors could not simply use targeted therapy on everybody.

When we began CellQuest, I thought our job was to fit as much accurate science as possible into a deck of cards. Now I think that was the wrong goal. Information printed on a card is still just information. The more interesting challenge is designing a system where that information explains something the player already cares about.

A player understands why advanced cancer is difficult because the tumor they neglected has become harder to treat. They understand specificity because a useful card does not work equally well against every tumor. They understand uncertainty because the treatment they planned around can fail. They understand prioritization because they cannot fix every problem in one turn. They start asking about tradeoffs because the game has made those tradeoffs matter to them.

Tumor Tactics is far more polished now than the first collection of chaotic documents and paper prototypes, but we still treat it as something that can improve. We continue to collect feedback from students, teachers, healthcare professionals, and cancer-support organizations. There are still cards whose wording can become clearer, terminology that needs better explanation, and situations where the balance can change.

The best revisions have usually begun the same way: somebody looks at a mechanic we are proud of and asks, "Why does it work like that?" Sometimes we have a strong biological answer. Sometimes we have a strong gameplay answer. The dangerous moments are when we realize we have neither. Those are usually the rules worth changing.

Tumor Tactics began with questions I had as a kid trying to understand what was happening to someone I loved. Designing it has left me with a different question: If a player can understand a difficult idea by making the decision themselves, how much do we actually need to simplify the idea?

We are still figuring that out one playtest at a time.

You can learn more about Tumor Tactics and download the rulebook at playtumortactics.com, or follow us on Instagram at @playtumortactics

by Steph Hodge

[imageid=9389693 medium rep]▪️ The Op Games released Evenglow. From designer Jason Katzwinkel, this is a super puzzly new tile-placement game that plays in 30-45 minutes. Will you have the right balance of tiles to score the most points?

From BGG:






▪️ Ares Games announced Mini Rogue: The Council coming this month from Nuts! Publishing. This follows the hit Mini Rogue. From designers Paolo Di Stefano and Gabriel Gendron. This is a standalone expansion that plays 1-3 players in about 40-60 minutes.

From the newsletter:



▪️ Kronologic: Babylon 2500 is the 3rd installment in the Kronologic Series from Origames & Super Meeple. From designers Fabien Gridel, Yoann Levet (Turing Machine). This is a deduction game for 1-4 players and takes about 30 minutes to play.

From the newsletter:




▪️ Sniper Elite: Operation Kraken from Rebellion Unplugged is a brand new expansion for the popular Sniper Elite: The Board Game. From designers: Roger Tankersley (Witchcraft!), David Thompson (I) (War Chest, Undaunted: Normandy). This expansion adds new maps, minis, and tokens, with plenty of content to explore, but you still need the base game to play.

From the newsletter:

by Martin Oddino

Board games have a funny way of taking unexpected paths. Bariloche is one of those projects that started small and ended up surprising us in more than one way.

It all began in 2024 with a casual chat between friends (and fellow designers) Julian Tunni, Julian Veccione, and myself, about launching PnP games through crowdfunding. The idea was simple: easy to assemble games that avoided the roll-and-write genre. We sketched out a project framework, brainstormed names, and then… we needed actual games. After some time, Bariloche emerged almost naturally.

What surprised me during the first tests was how quickly the game’s core clicked. Bariloche felt fun from the start. Of course, we tweaked some balance aspects and scoring conditions, but the foundation stayed intact. The spark was scissors: players would print sheets and cut them as the game progressed. To keep things approachable, I designed just a grid of colored squares for players to cut into rectangles of varying sizes, then used to build scoring patterns in front of them.

From there, simultaneous turns felt obvious—cutting takes time, so why wait around? But interaction was missing, I wanted the game to have something to tell at the end. That’s where two key ideas came in: one active player chooses the cut size each round, and after cutting, sheets are passed to the player on the left. Suddenly, choices mattered not just for yourself, but for what you left behind. While thinking about the scoring conditions, another layer came into my mind: some grid spaces could have secondary elements, creating puzzles in two levels, much like Cascadia.

The gameplay and mood of the game was set: a family weight game of “cut and pass” where players cut and place pieces turn by turn, competing for majorities, racing for different objectives and creating the best possible patterns. Testing confirmed the fun was there, so we focused on refining scoring and the endgame trigger. Eventually, we landed on a system where each cut size could only be chosen a limited number of times. That gave us a new interactive aspect, the decision of ending the game or not is in the hands of the players.

The theme, however, was trickier. I have a mechanical approach to most of my games, but thankfully I wasn’t alone. Julito dove into thematic development and expanded scoring for replayability. Tunni brought the visuals to life, transforming flat colored squares into something vibrant. After several group sessions, the concept crystallized: players were assembling trays of chocolates, wrapped in the cozy atmosphere of Bariloche’s chocolaterías. It was the perfect metaphor for the warmth we wanted the players to feel.

Next came the campaign. Crowdfunding from Argentina is complicated as best, and we needed external support. That’s when we showed the project to Pepe from Detestable Games. He loved the game but pushed us further: instead of a simple print-and-play, why not a full product for retail? Scissors were still central, but including them in a box was impractical. That’s when William stepped in with a brilliant twist: die cut sheets. So no scissors needed. And then another twist: why sell the game in a box? The game could be sold as a notebook, self contained and ready to play.

Adapting to the notebook format was its own design puzzle: how many sheets, which scoring criteria, how to structure the rulebook. Working closely with the publisher, we watched Bariloche evolve from a quirky scissor cutting prototype into a unique product.

The public debut came at the Rolla Game Festival in Guadalajara, 2026. Seeing players with their Bariloche notebooks was a joy.
Now the true journey of Bariloche begins, the game is ready to hit new markets and surprise new players around the world. Bariloche has already surprised us once, we can’t wait to see how far it goes.

Martin Oddino

by Justin Bell

A few weeks ago, my wife sent me a link to an article on Slate titled “Have We Been Playing Monopoly Wrong All Along?” written by Luke Winkie. It was a great read, in part because there are references not only to BGG but also some of the legend behind what makes Monopoly the devil for so many players and why the game’s house rules have set in so deeply since the dawn of time (or 1935, whichever you think is older in board game terms).

The article also serves as a great read for anyone who has defended Monopoly for years. A bit like Catan, Scotland Yard, and The Game of Life, Monopoly is a game I am almost always willing to play in a landscape where most friends and family members swear that some games aren’t nearly as good as their legacy suggests they should be. I will happily play any of those games—as a point of reference, I will play any game once—but, whenever I tell someone that, they swear that there are millions and billions of games better than those archaic reminders of yesteryear.

Got it. The difference for me hits at home, because my nine-year-old really will play anything.



“Daddy, do you want to play Monopoly?”

“Sure, buddy” I said. “I’ll play Monopoly.”

My son is the main pusher of family games in the Bell compound, and he will play both brand new titles as well as the oldest games we have in the house. He is also the purveyor of almost everything “old” that we do regularly: he listens to clean versions of rap songs from the 80s and 90s, he has a Nintendo Entertainment System (yes, an NES, albeit the NES Mini) set up in our kitchen, and he likes the 1981 adventure flick Raiders of the Lost Ark almost as much as I do.

His normal go-to game is Pay Day, another game that BGG enthusiasts regularly murder because of its archaic “roll to move” mechanics and randomness tied to event cards, here represented by pieces of mail. (This is the beauty of games from the 1970s: if you never went to your physical mailbox, you never got any bills. Ahh, the good ol’ days!)

My wife is usually the person who gets tapped on the shoulder for Monopoly, and I’m the one who gets tapped for Pay Day. However, I hadn’t played Monopoly since we bought a new copy of the game earlier this year. (We have Monopoly Deal, and we have Monopoly on a couple of our video game systems, but the physical copy of Monopoly was a welcome addition.)

We placed the Monopoly board in the center of our basement gaming table and got to work on the setup. Laid out all the property cards; he selected the Battleship token, while I went with my standard, the Racecar. While every player has a backup choice—mine in the Thimble, although I can be talked into the Wheelbarrow for the right price—the Racecar is the piece I always chose growing up, so it brings all the memories back in a rush.

Although I am typically adamant that I will only use poker chips to substitute for cardboard chits or paper money with modern games, I almost always use the paper money for Monopoly. Yes, I know: the paper money slows games down immensely. But I like the rush of childhood memories that come with my plays of both Monopoly and The Game of Life as a kid, particularly the moment when I used the main board to serve as a tuckbox for each flavor of bill along my side of the table.

You remember this, right? Your $1 bills tucked under the far left edge of your side of the board, then your $5 bills, then the $10s, $20s, $50s, $100s (“hundos”), and $500s.

I always insisted on being the banker as a kid…so, it’s been a thrill to pass along that responsibility to my son, who now insists on being the banker for this and every other game where someone is responsible for handing out cash. He’ll even serve in this capacity if he is not playing the game, because he loves fanning out those bills to every player in sight.

After we each took $1,500 in starting capital, he rolled the dice and we were off.



The article on Slate highlighted a lot of the things that players hate about Monopoly. The thing that has always struck me about these complaints is the fact that most people do not play Monopoly correctly.

When it is played the right way, Monopoly is almost comically fast, and it’s a lot better than a 4.4 average rating would suggest. (I’ve played a half-dozen new releases this year alone that are leagues worse than Monopoly.)

A sidebar: one of my favorite tabletop videos ever went up only a year or so ago. It was the Watch It Played video Rodney Smith and Rich Sommer put up regarding the game UNO. No, UNO is not a new game that really requires a teach video…but it IS a game that people almost always play incorrectly.

I’m shocked at how many times I have played UNO with friends and had to correct them about the rules. Yes, the first discard established during setup affects the game’s first player. Yes, a player only has to draw one card if they can’t play something from their hand. No, a player doesn’t get to play a card after getting hit with a Draw Four card.

Most people just assume that UNO is over when a player wins a hand. I can’t ever get people to play UNO like a game of Rummikub—officially, UNO winners score points based on what everyone else still has in their hands, then play to a predetermined scoring threshold—so I don’t ever fight that one, but that’s how the game was drawn up.

I’m a rules guy, so it was fun to be able to find someone that took the time to emphasize how UNO should be played. The same should be true for Monopoly…so when we taught our nine-year-old how to play Monopoly, we taught him how to play the right way.

No, there’s no money from Community Chest fee cards going into the center of the board. No, you don’t move on your third doubles roll in a row…you go directly to jail. The big one: whether you choose to buy a property or not is important, because if you don’t buy it, it gets auctioned to the highest bidder right then and there. And that’s an important, game-changing element of Monopoly that I was taught incorrectly during my first few plays as a kid. Auctioning off every property makes the game so much shorter and so much more interesting, strategically.

That also means deals, baby. And my son likes to deal.

“So, I see that you have Virginia Avenue and I have St. Charles Place…when someone gets States Avenue, we are gonna have to make a deal, Daddy.”

At one point, I was low on cash. My son, seeing blood in the water, made an offer. “Can I make a donation to you?” [No; donations are not allowed in Monopoly, even as you watch a family member burning.] “If not, how about we make a deal where you can buy $100 from me for a dollar and one of your other properties?”

“I see that you only have about $60 right now, so I’m going to auction Pennsylvania Avenue for $61. I want to see if you will mortgage another property!!”

My son found himself in jail four times in the game’s first 30 minutes. I got a monopoly of the red properties, so between that and a deal I had made earlier to acquire both of the cheap brown locations had me feeling good about my chances. Sure, he already had two of the four railroads, but his other holdings were crap and he was low on funds…I liked my chances.

Then, on back-to-back turns following his release from prison jail, he was able to buy B&O Railroad and Short Line thanks to the good fortune of doubles and an exact landing…giving him all four railroad properties. I didn’t like this development, in part because I remember how the Chance and Community Chest decks have cards which move players directly to railroad spaces. And there was trouble on every edge of the board now…a couple wrong moves might lead to immediate disaster.

My son kept dodging my properties, and save for the occasional $6 rent I was collecting from him when he landed on Oriental Avenue, my funds were on life support. Then, the killshot: one of those dreaded Community Chest cards bit me in the rear, moving me past Go and onto Reading Railroad. It also required the active player to pay double rent if the property was already owned. That meant I was suddenly out $400, when I had zero cash and a portfolio of properties that had a half-dozen mortgaged properties.

I mortgaged more properties; good night, New York Avenue, and good luck, Atlantic Avenue. I was down to the red properties, the brown properties, and Electric Company…all my other holdings were mortgaged.

My son continued to find ways to dance safely through my real estate, and I kept finding disaster. Luxury Tax? Obviously. Landing there on my run to reach Go unscathed ended badly. I passed Go only to land on Reading Railroad again, handing my income directly to the waiting paws of a nine-year-old terrorist. As I considered my options, I knew I was out of options…meaning I was forced to admit defeat, as my son already had north of $1600 and I had no cash and no hope.

Total playtime: 55 minutes. There was action, there was drama, there was romance (I felt the love when I landed on Indiana Avenue, allowing me the chance to lock up the red properties), there was horror, there was tragedy.

My son and I shook hands; every game, win or lose, must end with a handshake. Despite the loss, I reveled in the high that was getting Monopoly to the table.

I’ll play Monopoly any time. When you play it correctly, there’s a lot to like.

by Jakov J

What's This?
Countryball Cards is a chaotic card game in which you attack your friends with the British navy, Swedish vikings or the Polish winged hussars, then build Romanian forts, Chinese factories or even heal your team with French baguettes or Hungarian goulash.

At its core, it is a fast combat game (1v1 and 2v2, around 25 minutes) where players draft teams of countryballs, trade on a dice-driven market, and chain abilities to eliminate the other team.

As I write this, the first finished copies are arriving at players’ doors. A year ago, the entire game was a stack of cards printed on photocopier cardboard. This diary covers the path in between, with notes on the parts that were harder than expected.

I’m Jakov Jandrić, based in Zagreb, Croatia. I run Glare Studios, a one-person studio, and Countryball Cards is my first physical product. I hope you enjoy it!

The Idea
If it isn’t already clear from the name, countryballs are spherical personifications of countries that often appear in webcomics, with each country having its own running jokes. The online community is large, especially on Reddit.

The design goal was to take that humor and pair it with a fast, strategy-driven combat system: drafting, resource management, and ability chains rather than a straightforward play-a-card-end-turn structure. One thing worth saying about the theme: countryball humor can run in a few different registers, and I deliberately kept this one light. Abilities lean on geography, history, and recognizable cultural shorthand like Australia's kangaroos, Switzerland's banks, Germany's roads (autobahn) or Canadian hockey. The target was webcomic-warm, family-table-safe.

The Mechanics
The current version plays like this:
→ Draft: Each player picks 3 countryballs for their team. There are 20 to choose from in the base set, 10 additional in the Extended Edition. Each has 2 unique abilities.
→ Economy: Coins come in each turn (10 on the first turn, five thereafter). Four resource dice (D6) are rolled each round to set prices for a shared market with iron, oil, horses, and grain. Players trade in that market to use the abilities, or even flip the resources for profit (although the sell price is always 1 lower than the buy price).
→ Combat: Each countryball can take up to three damage tokens. At three, it’s eliminated (removed from the game). Abilities often deal damage, debuff, heal, create project cards that bring passive bonuses or directly generate resources. A lot of them require a combat die (D20) roll to succeed.
→ Win condition: Eliminate all enemy countryballs.

Each country plays differently because of its abilities. Here’s an example of what some cards can do:
→ Switzerland can create a bank and passively collect coins.
→ Romania can create forts to protect its allies.
→ Norway can use its navy to make its attacks more powerful.
→ Hungary can heal its whole team with some goulash.
→ Croatia can gain coins with the Tourist Season.
→ Netherlands can attack with bicycle infantry.
→ and so on...

Each card has two abilities and there are 30 cards so it would take a while to describe it all here.
There are 1v1 and 2v2 modes. Average game length is around 25 minutes.
More information about the cards + the rulebook can be found on countryballcards.com.

Game Development
Game design took the longest of anything, as it should. Asymmetric card games live or die on ability balance, and the early playtests made that brutally clear. I couldn't have done it without friends willing to keep showing up. I was going to my local retail store every other week just to print a new set of cards on their photocopier’s nice cardboard. Got some weird looks from the cashiers, as people usually use it to print family photographs.

The first stable version had three abilities per countryball, and that turned out to be too many. Players spent more time reading their own cards than playing. I’ve cut it to two.

The harder question was what those two abilities should look like. A lot of abilities I prototyped got scrapped not because they were unbalanced but because they were too hard for the opponent to track. If your card does something situational, your opponent either knows it cold or has to read it before every decision. That hidden-information overhead is, I think, a common failure mode in asymmetric card games. The game stops being about strategy and starts being about who can memorize twenty ability texts faster.

What I landed on, with some exceptions, is a two-slot template: the first ability is an attack, and the second is open. It could create a project card, generate resources, heal, buff, or even be a second attack.

Here's how that played out for Sweden, from early prototype to final version:

2v2 took its own design pass. The first version just doubled 1v1. Three countryballs per player, twelve cards on the table. Nobody could track the board. Dropping to two countryballs per player got it to eight cards, which is busy but readable. Turn order also got reworked so teammates don't play back-to-back. Teams alternate, which stops one side from stacking ten attacks in a row and ending things before the other team can react. The mode is meant to feel louder and more chaotic than 1v1; the work was making sure the chaos stayed fun.

Flipping the Market!
The market was the part I tuned the most. There are four resources on the market: iron, oil, horses and grain. They get priced each round by a die roll across faces 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, and players can buy and sell freely.

The first version had buy and sell prices identical. Within two playtests the game stopped being about countryballs. Buy horses (or whatever resource) at two, sell at five the next turn, repeat, ignore combat until both players have a ton of coins. Wealth grew exponentially and the actual game began after 10 minutes of flipping the market. Two changes fixed it. Sell price is one coin below buy, so the spread eats into the compounding. And maximum available amount of resource was set to 15, which kills the "hoard cheap iron forever" strategy. Investing still works, but it's just no longer the only thing worth doing. Most turns the real question is whether to attack, spend on a project, or trade, and the dice change the answer.

On Luck
A lot of abilities require a D20 roll. Choosing your strategy, picking your abilities, drafting and market decisions are yours; the dice decide whether plans survive contact. The result is a swingy game where it's often unclear who's winning until the final turn. For a game about countryballs hitting each other, that felt right. If you want zero luck, this isn't it.

The Kickstarter Hurdle
Kickstarter does not currently accept creators based in Croatia. The list of accepted countries is fairly short and mostly Western. To launch a campaign I needed a US entity.

Thus, on my 18th birthday, I formed a US LLC. It took me a bit to obtain all the documentation, but after all was done, I was finally able to launch a successful campaign! There’s a fair amount of ongoing admin that comes with a US entity as a non-resident... but it’s out of scope for a designer diary. If there’s interest, I’m happy to write a separate post about that side of things.

Where It Stands
The Kickstarter funded at $6,000+. The official website has added almost a hundred orders since! Production is complete, the pallets arrived at the warehouse in June, and fulfillment is now live: every backer and pre-order shipment is going out, and the first copies are already in players’ hands!

More information can be found on the official website countryballcards.com and on BoardGameGeek. The full set of cards and the rulebook, along with a showcase + tutorial video, are free to browse there.

With fulfillment underway, the focus shifts to what comes next, and I hope that will be even more cards! There are a lot of countries (and mechanics) that didn't fit into the base game, or even the Extended Edition, that might be nice to see in the future. Currently considering a Jungles & Deserts expansion which would include some SE Asian, South American & Arabic countries, as well as an expansion that would have ancient empires as cards instead of modern countries. All of this is work in progress and far from actually being made, but seriously considered, especially if there's interest.

Questions Welcome!
Happy to answer questions on any part of the game development or even the factory selection, the LLC & admin work behind it, and fulfillment. Contact details are on the site and there’s a Discord link on the homepage. If you've played it, a rating and an honest comment on the game's BGG page, good and bad, would mean a lot. ⭐

Thank you for reading my story!

Jakov Jandrić
countryballcards.com

by fernando marecos

I'm Fernando Marecos, an industrial designer, teacher, illustrator, and for the past few years, also a board game designer. In 2025, I published Pintó, the game of drawing bad. A party game where whoever draws the worst wins.

All You Need Is a Deadline

I have fantasized about designing my own games since 2009. When I finally did, I did it as a hobby. I had many incompleted secret projects that never saw the light of day. But by the end of 2023, I had published my first little game, Flyswatter, which encouraged me to take this "hobby" more seriously.
There are many reasons to participate in a design contest. For me, the most important one is the deadline. I came across the contest by the Chilean publisher Fractal, “Llevalo a la mesa” party games edition of 2024, and I decided that I was going to participate. I had never designed a party game, so I had to start from scratch against the clock—a big challenge.

How Difficult Can It Be to Design a Party Game?

From the beginning, I knew I wanted to design a game that, from my point of view, was lacking in the market. I felt drawing had to be a central part of the game's premise so I thought about some classic games that, while popular, had something about them that didn’t work out for me.

With drawing games like Pictionary, many people feel they don't have the skill to win. As a drawing teacher, I know everyone can make themselves understood through drawing, some better than others. This made me realize I'd never heard of a game where drawing badly actually increases your chances of winning.
Everyone knows Telestrations is lots of fun, but for it to be hilarious there must be bad drawers playing. I also have always been bothered by the scoring system—yes, it has one. It doesn´t incentivize players to draw in a way that makes the game better. If points did matter, how would it be implemented?
On this matter, the points system in Dixitperfectly incentivizes players to tell ambiguous stories. But what interested me the most was the fact that, as a passive player, you earn points for players who incorrectly voted your card. I realized that this aspect wasn't being fully explored: couldn't players be incentivized so that the fewer people guess your card, the better?

Taking Shape

I was onto something here. I made some conclusions that guided the direction of the game:
The scoring system had to encourage players to draw badly: you earned points for each player who didn’t guess correctly, but at least one person had to guess right. If the focus is on how the drawing is done rather than what is drawn, then players can choose what to draw. This adds an important decision and allows players to self-regulate the difficulty.
To make the drawings guessable, I needed to narrow down the universe of drawable words, so defining a common category was necessary.
It was important that everyone drew at the same time; simultaneous play is essential in games with high player counts.

Since the game involved intentionally drawing badly, I thought of Joan Miró, a Spanish painter who drew like a child. "Miró" felt like a good title. Once I had established my guidelines, I grabbed some paper, sketched the playing areas, and playtested the game as soon as possible with my family while on summer vacation.

For such an early-stage concept, it worked remarkably well. It was important to confirm that aiming for ambiguity led to hilariously funny drawings, and the attempts to explain them were even funnier. The humor emerged naturally from the players. I was beginning to get truly excited.

There Is a Game Here

The next step was to start thinking about components. I put together a black and white prototype to put in a plastic sleeve for it to be played with dry-erase markers. During playtests with some designer friends, I cut apart the drawing and guessing areas to facilitate simultaneous play. I also found that narrowing the categories even more encouraged creativity by reducing common repetitions like "kangaroo" for animals or "Sydney" for cities—Apparently Australia is very present in people's subconscious.

An important revelation regarding scoring occurred when I made it so that guessers earn the same points as the drawer. This allowed players to even win just by guessing, fulfilling the promise that this really was "the game for bad artists". This also led to epic "high five" moments when a single person guessed correctly and both players were immensely rewarded.

Convinced that I had a good game for the contest, I poured everything I had learned in those two months of testing into a much more concrete version of the game and recorded the video to present it.

Show, Don't Tell

For the video I implemented category cards with a set of subcategories—the selection method wasn’t fully clear yet, but later it would evolve into the final system. Scoring was tracked on a shared sheet by one player, jokingly assigned to "the best drawer". I also created cardboard easels to display drawings; not ideal, but functional for the prototype.

This is the video I submitted to the Fractal contest: Pintó Videopitch

After rewatching it, I would now focus more on the hook rather than spending too much time on the components. What worked really well was to show actual gameplay with fun moments that make viewers feel involved.

Before sending the files, I added colors to help identify players on the guessing sheet, but this ended up complicating the set up unnecessarily. Despite these issues, Miró still reached the final.

The Long Wait

During this period, I stopped testing Miró. Partly because I wanted to focus on other projects, but also to take a break from the game—time away from a project often helps me return to it with a new perspective.

Meanwhile, many friends who had played the game began playing on their own. Nahuel was a prime example; he played it repeatedly with countless groups and kept me updated on how much fun everyone was having.

Finally, in mid-August of that year, the competition results were announced—and I came in second, just barely missing the top spot! Despite my initial disappointment, I immediately began thinking about how I could improve the game.

Shortly after, Nahuel Di Stefano and Julián Vechione— who partnered to launch a new publishing house focused on family games— met with me to say they were very happy I hadn't won the contest: They wanted to publish the game themselves. I didn’t hesitate—if anyone had believed in my game from the start, it was them. They also invited me to join the team as a graphic designer. I was excited to also be part of that process.

From Prototype to Product

The editorial perspective was key in transforming Miró into Pintó. The main changes were:

- Scraped the central score sheet; now each player keeps track of their own points, which improves game flow.

- Reduced the maximum players from 10 to 8 for shorter, for smoother games and a smaller box.

- Changed the rule so players lose a point if no one guesses their drawing, adding tension and expected consequences.

- Replaced number identifiers for racks with player initials for a more natural feel.

- Renamed the game to Pintó, a familiar Argentinian expression meaning "I did it because I felt like it” that resonates better and has a fun double meaning.

The graphic development of this game could fill an entire new diary: failed print tests, scale adjustments, designing the user interface, laying out the rules, collaborating with the talented Argentine illustrator Pancho Pepe, and much more. But I’ll save that story for the next chapter.

A Game Belong to the Players

The game was launched at the Encuentro Nacional de Juegos de Mesa (ENJM) in November 2025 to an incredible reception. People were playing it nonstop on many tables, during and after the event. Seeing players laugh at their own and each other’s creations made me realize the whole process had led to the best possible outcome: everyone having fun and sharing a joyful moment.

The most important lesson from this project to me is that game design can’t happen in isolation. You have to see the game in action to identify weak points and be open to experimenting—even if you suspect some ideas won’t work. You have to allow yourself to be surprised. Playing other games helps you understand how to differentiate yours and combine elements to create something new. Often, the simplest ideas turn out to be the most fun.

This journal comes to a close, but Pintó’s story doesn’t end here. Thanks to the efforts of many, the game will soon reach many countries. I hope you have a chance to come across a Pintó soon—and get inspired to draw badly.

by Steph Hodge

[imageid=8317240 medium rep]▪️ Falling is a new release shipping now from Capstone Games. From designer Kentaro Yazawa (矢沢 賢太郎) (Master of Respect), this is a big 90-120 minute game for 1-4 players. My understanding is that there is now an updated rulebook found here: FALLING Rulebook - Capstone EN - v1.1.

From the capstone Website:




▪️ Adam's Apple Games, LLC released The Bird . Designed by Adam Rehberg (Planet Unknown), The Bird is a cooperative dexterity party game for 2-8 players!

From the newsletter:



▪️ The Mandalorian: Adventures – Sworn to the Creed Expansion was recently released by Unexpected Games. If you are a fan of The Mandalorian: Adventures, this is the second expansion released. You may want to also check out The Mandalorian: Adventures – Clan of Two Expansion! New characters, new missions, an epic cooperative adventure for all!

From the BGG page:




▪️ Coming soon from Road To Infamy Games (R2i Games) is Pop Art. From the designers of Canvas, Jeff Chin and Andrew Nerger, you will use transparent cards to create your next Pop Art sensation. This game plays 1-8 players in 20 minutes.

From BGG:

by Beth Heile

A few weeks ago at Gen Con, I interviewed Felicia Day to talk about The Guild's anniversary movie and The Guild's card game, Swords & Sweethearts (Gen Con article and interview available HERE) Earlier that day, Felicia has announced that one of the stretch goals for the movie's Kickstarter campaign was to fund a new show with Wil Wheaton called Conludo. My focus for that Gen Con interview was to discuss the card game and the Guild's TTRPG, but the brief mention of Conludo was intriguing. After we both got home from Gen Con, Felicia and I managed to wrangle everyone together and hop on a call with Wil to talk exclusively about Conludo.

Our conversation was surprisingly poignant for me, as we talked about how games can bring us together and counter the barrage of negative events and emotions of the last 10 years. While I'm sure many of us will enjoy their new show for ourselves, Conludo is a project for Wil and Felicia themselves: a framework to come together as friends, tell some stories, and do an activity they both happen to love - playing tabletop games. I think amidst the FOMO, Cult of the New, shelfies, convention hauls, and crowdfunding, it is easy to forget that games can have such an impact on relationships and mental health. This conversation reminded me WHY I'm proud to be in the board game industry and that was an unexpected outcome for a quick conversation on a Friday afternoon.

The Guild's Kickstarter campaign runs through Aug 21, and includes funding to support filming both the movie and episodes of Conludo.

Youtube Video

by Justin Bell

I’m a deal hunter.

In part, this is because I have a somewhat limited amount of discretionary spend. I like to joke that “the kids ate all my money”, but this is somewhat aligned with reality…I’m surprised how often I realize that kids cost a LOT more than my imaginary New Parent Handbook told me they would cost. (I still cringe each time I think about how many times I had to buy new shoes for those kids when they were just a few years old. Clothing a child is an expensive endeavor.)

Board games are a leisure item, so beyond the review copies I receive from publishers, I don’t really buy many additional games for myself. I try to cover games that I think would interest me, but for the other half of the year, I like to pick up titles where I don’t have any background on what those games are all about. Coming in fresh is exciting, and offers real opportunity to make a discovery outside my normal swim lanes.

When I do buy new games, I ask a lot of questions before dropping any amount of cash. You can’t blame a guy who enjoys doing the research before making a financial commitment, regardless of the size of that commitment. Does one or more of my groups already have the same game? Am I really going to get enough plays to make this purchase worth it? I’m a reviewer, but I still have a pool of my own media sources who I trust when it comes to their gaming tastes…I always check my sources first.

While I did score the best deal I’ve ever found at a game convention this year—La Granja: Deluxe Master Set for just $45 at Board&Dice’s Gen Con booth, a deal I still can’t believe—I am usually the complete opposite of an impulse buyer. At least, that’s what I tell myself before I go to a show or a brick-and-mortar hobby shop.

Because when I am walking the aisles of a show or a store then spot a deal, I’m all over it…especially when a game is priced to move.



I recently came back from a weeklong trip to Rochester, NY to spend time with family. Part of the reason for that trip was to bury my father, who passed away earlier this summer. A week is a long time, and in between funeral activities, my wife and I still had to find time to entertain the kids and offer a layer of “everything’s gonna be alright” by taking them to Seabreeze, a local theme park, as well as the excellent Strong National Museum of Play downtown.

One day, I decided to take the wife and kids to a local game store near our hotel called Millennium Games. I hadn’t been to Millennium before; usually, my time in Rochester gets eaten up with family activities, holiday naps, and runs to enjoy the local delicacies of places ranging from Pittsford Dairy (the black-and-white) to Wegmans (donuts) to Nick Tahou Hots (the garbage plate). But if I’m in town for a week, I need my board game fix…I always try to eyeball games on shelves if I can fit it in.

I don’t shop at physical stores of any kind—games or not—much any more; online retailers just make it easier for me, and sometimes you can find some filthy deals for games online. But I like strolling the aisles when I do get the chance to go shopping. As a man of a certain age, a leisurely stroll brings calm. And if a store has a sale or used games section, I make a beeline for that section first.

Millennium Games is a veritable gold mine when it comes to used games. It’s actually a pretty sweet location whether you are there to shop for used games or not, with a massive retail area and dedicated play space (there must be room for at least a hundred players, maybe much more) and a wide mix of both hobby tabletop offerings as well as all the fixins any gamer would need, be it TCG/CCG products, RPG goodies, toys, wargaming, card games, or your garden variety board game. Save for maybe the lack of a dedicated 18xx area (hint hint), I think Millennium Games is the only board game store I have ever been to that I really would say has it all, no matter what kind of gamer you are.

The used game area was so large that it was spread across a couple of carts near the front of the store, a nook to the right of the register area, and then spread slowly across a number of additional shelves that border the northwestern outer ring of the retail space.

“Leave me,” I told my family. “Daddy’s gonna need to dig into the crates to find himself some deals!”

My wife, confused by the movie-style voice I had just taken on mixed with my sudden use of that voice in the third person, took the kids to another part of the store. Meanwhile, I got to work.



When I mine a store’s used games area, I look at every single box. Price is important, for the reasons I highlighted earlier. But for me, value is king.

It would be ideal to find games that come in at a price point that is significantly lower than buying something new. Despite my love for a beautifully blinged-out product, the reality is that I’m digging deep in the crates to find a game that will bring me joy for at least a few plays, or a game that I have heard good things about but haven’t tried myself.

On rare occasions, I buy (or math trade for) a game that has left my collection; silly me, I should have never let so-and-so out of my life. (Titles like Lorenzo il Magnifico have gone through that journey; my old copy of La Granja was also like that, before it was replaced by the deluxe edition recently.)

Another big thing with used games: acquiring hard-to-find titles that someone else decided to part with. This is why I love going over every single box in the used games area, especially the older games that people move out of their collection. These days, you’re probably not finding vintage wares tucked onto the bottom shelf at a place like Millennium; savvy investors have gone to the BGG GeekMarket to sell games like that for top dollar, and I don’t blame them. If you’ve got something magical that only got a single print run, and people are fighting for ways to find original copies, I’ll respect you more if you hawk that puppy to the open market.

When I go to a used game store, I’m looking for games that were special to me—or, could become special for me!—and I see something in a title that others didn’t. One man’s trash, so the saying goes. I am always shocked to see games that received nothing more than maybe a single play—in some cases, no plays at all!—and now find themselves in the bargain bin of a local hobby shop.

I scanned every box at Millenium that day, and after going over everything, I did a second pass. That’s when I saw it: a 1995 Avalon Hill edition of the Sid Sackson classic Acquire. For years, I knew I needed to have a copy of the game in my collection…not the many Acquire-adjacent games I have played over the years that use its main mechanics in other, sometimes creative ways. I wanted the OG.

Now, this wasn’t the OG edition; no sensible adult is letting the 1960s-era 3M version of Acquire out of their sight, let alone their collection. But the cover art, the aging box and components, the double-sided one-page “rulebook” (!!!)...it was a match made in heaven.

I flipped the box over to find the used price tag. Ten dollars. Ten dollars for a classic, and when it comes off my shelf once or twice a year, it will create memories just by hitting the table: olden-time paper money (I’m normally a poker chip man, unless money creates the kinds of memories only paper money can), shares in one of seven different companies with hotel brand names like “Festival”, “Continental”, or “Imperial”, and special power tokens that look like bingo chits from an era long gone.

I bought other games that day, but Acquire was the find. I strolled up to the counter like I was a big shot, the king of the castle, to see if the person behind the counter would share in the joy of the find like I did.

Nope. “That’ll be $35 for everything,” he said. The associate was friendly, but very much in the “there’s other customers in line, pal” way a store associate can be friendly.

All good. Millennium made sure that my copy of Acquire was priced to move, so I obliged. I’m already looking forward to my next trip to Rochester…and next time, I won’t bring the kids with me!!

by Chok-Sien Hiew

Pilgrim Poker is named so because the setting is Journey to the West, the Chinese classic novel. The characters are transported to a modern setting. They are on the first leg of their pilgrimage, taking the train to Dunhuang. Guess what they are bringing on this trip? Pilgrim Poker of course! Five years ago when I started working on this game, it was very different. It certainly was an unexpected journey for me.

The core idea in Pilgrim Poker is that everyone gets one card and holds it up facing forward. You can see everyone else's card, but not your own. Based on this, you need to bet on whether you are going to win. Only the highest card will win. The game was inspired by Hanabi and Kobayakawa. In Hanabi, you can't see your own cards. There are other games using this concept, like Pikoko and Luz. In Kobayakawa, you do just one round of betting, to decide whether you're in or out. Very minimalistic, but the decision-making can be tricky. Pilgrim Poker was initially called Saikoyu, which is "psycho you" modified to sound Japanese, a nod to both the games which inspired it.

The first prototype had Malaysian fruits and four suits
In the first version of the game, after cards are drawn and held up, you take turns naming a bet amount. This is done for only one round. After everyone has named an amount, the bet which everyone must place into the pool is the second highest named amount. The reason for this is if most people think one particular player will win, they can all name a low amount, so that even if that single player names a high amount, he won't be able to win much. This is done in turn order as opposed to simultaneously because whenever a player names an amount, it is a clue to the other players. A player who names a low amount is likely seeing a high card. If you don't see any high card, then you might be holding that high card.

There are some special cards which modify the core rules. Anyone holding the 10 wins or loses double. 10 is strong, but it is not the strongest. The numbers go from 1 to 13. Getting 10 is good, but it will be painful if you lose to an even higher number. If the 4 is in play, it is the smallest card which wins instead. When you hold the 4 and you see that everyone has high cards, you might think there is no hope of winning, but you would be wrong. If anyone holds the 8, it turns all odd numbers to zero. That means the 8 beats 9, 11 and 13. It only loses to 10 and 12. These cards add a twist to the game. You have to think carefully as you observe the actions and expressions of your opponents.

Playtesting session

The Control Problem: Players Feel There Is Little Control

One big problem I had was players feeling helpless. When two players feel confident (or desperate) enough to want to name a high bet amount, you will be forced to put in a large bet, even when you are pretty sure you will lose it. This feels bad. I didn't want to add more rules to handle such a feel-bad situation. I thought maybe that should just be what the game was. But still, I had a nagging feeling this wouldn't work. I was stuck for a long time, and I had to set the game aside. It took more than two years for me to revisit the game. I am glad I did, because I had an idea that helped to move this design forward. Well, it wasn't exactly my idea. It was just poker. I applied the poker mechanism to the game.

Everyone must commit to an ante. During a round, it is possible to raise, and when anyone raises, you can decide to fold, sacrificing your ante. This is simple, and most people understand this, because most people know a little about poker. By using a tried-and-true mechanism, I not only solved my problem about the feeling of control, I also made the game more intuitive to learn.

Prototype in play

The Information Problem: How Much Information Is Enough?

When a round starts, you have no idea what your card is. I want to make sure there are ways for you to get clues. Your opponents can't and won't tell you, but I want to make sure their actions will give you hints. Or there are things you can do to try to get information. One mechanism I introduced for the purpose of helping players gain information was the Side Bet. Making a Side Bet means challenging another player to a duel. You state a bet amount. If your target agrees, you resolve this at the end of the round. If your target declines, he must pay you half the bet amount immediately. As you can see, this is a chance for you to bluff and intimidate an opponent into giving you money. Of course, if you happen to be holding the 1, this will backfire, and everyone will laugh at you. The Side Bet action gives information. Normally the player with the lowest card will be targeted. If you are being targeted, you probably have a low card. The bet amount named is also a clue. If you are being targeted but the bet amount is low, then maybe your card isn't too low.

Here is one hilarious situation that I came across when playtesting. One player was the target of a Side Bet, but he saw that another player had a lowly 2. Since the active player did not target the 2 and targeted him instead, he knew he probably had an even smaller card, the 1. Throughout my playtesting, it was moments of realisation like this which truly tickled the players.

Another funny situation was the player holding the 4 confidently issuing a Side Bet to the lowly 1. When 4 is in play, the lowly 1 becomes the strongest card. The active player didn't know he had a 4, well, at least until the other players started giggling.

Game prototype

The Existential Problem: Isn't This Just Indian Poker?

I found out rather late in my development journey that there is already a public domain game very similar to Pilgrim Poker called Indian Poker. Indian Poker is not widely known in Malaysia where I live, so I had no idea there is such a thing. It was depressing to find out what I had been working on was something someone else had already made. Eventually I decided to still proceed with the project. Pilgrim Poker is not exactly Indian Poker, due to the special characters and also the action cards. So I felt I still had something new to offer.

The Theme Problem: Why Journey to the West?

I must admit, Pilgrim Poker has a pasted on theme. This is a mechanism-first game. I did not start with any theme. Most of the other games I have published under the Cili Padi Games brand have fairy tale themes - Snow White, Ali Baba and Pinocchio. This time I thought why not pick a Chinese fairy tale. I chose Journey to the West because it is a story every Chinese knows, and many non-Chinese too. A familiar theme will attract attention, make the play experience more enjoyable, and also make learning the game a little easier. I do feel a little guilty because Journey to the West is supposed to be about Buddhism, and here I am with a gambling game...

The final pilgrimage team in the game
There are many characters in Journey to the West, so I had more than enough source material to use. The pilgrimage team consists of four main characters, Master Tang Sanzang, eldest disciple Sun Wukong the Monkey King, second disciple Zhu Bajie (Pigsy), and junior disciple Sha Wujing (Sandy). Among the number cards, only three of them - 4, 8 and 10 - have special powers. That means I had to exclude Sha Wujing and move him to one of the action cards. Strictly speaking the pilgrimage team has five members, the fifth one being the horse. That horse is not just any horse. He is a dragon prince. I did not include him at all, since most people think of the team as just those four.

10 became Sun Wukong, because he is the strongest fighter. 4 became Zhu Bajie. Zhu Bajie is often depicted as the greedy and lustful one. His flaws remind us that we are just human.

Other characters in the game
For regular number cards (i.e. other than 4, 8 and 10) my original idea was to put some generic minor demon character. Some minions. My artist Edwin Chong suggested the Bull Demon King. Now the Bull Demon King is certainly no minor character. He is a big shot demon. I loved how Edwin turned him into a tired modern day salaryman, carrying a laptop bag and standing in the train. In Pilgrim Poker when you initiate a Side Bet, that's an act of aggression. I thought Red Boy would be most fitting. He is the fiery character in the story. In many chapters, it was the Goddess of Mercy (Guan Yin) who came to save the day, when the pilgrimage team got really stuck. So I put her on the Change Card action card. This is a card that can completely turn things around. Halfway through a round, you can discard your card and draw a new one.

Pilgrim Poker was released in Malaysia in August 2026. It started as "Saikoyu", and now it has a theme of Journey to the West, which in Japanese is "Saiyuki". If this game ever gets a Japanese edition, it might be called Saiyuki Poker.

Finally, the end product

Game components

Action cards

Number cards

Start player card (night side)

94 coins

Game page at Cili Padi Games website: https://www.cilipadigames.com/pilgrimpoker