Three-year-old Dutch board game publisher DSV Games has continued its rapid rise by securing three nominations in this year’s Dutch game of the year awards, a year after picking up its first win in the contest.
DSV has landed a nomination in each of the three Nederlandse Spellenprijs categories with Reiner Knizia design Rebirth, Tomáš Holek’s Pondscape and Ants from Renato Ciervo and Andrea Robbiani – equalling veteran Dutch publisher White Goblin Games and industry giant Asmodee as the most-nominated company this year.
The entirety of this year’s nominations are split between those three publishers, with White Goblin selected for Grégory Grard and Mathieu Roussel’s design Castle Combo in the Family category, and Keith Piggott-created River of Gold and Hisashi Hayashi’s Yokohama among the Expert games.
The remaining nominations are from Asmodee studios: Alexi Piovesan and Julien Prothière’s Take Time from Libellud in Family, and Space Cowboys’ Dewan (Johannes Goupy, Yoann Levet) and Office Dog’s two The Lord of the Rings: Trick-Taking Game releases (Bryan Bornmueller), which were judged as a single title, completing the Connoisseurs’ game shortlist.
The result sees DSV and Asmodee join White Goblin and fellow Dutch board game publishing veteran 999 Games as the only publishers to score at least three nominations in a single year since the Nederlandse Spellenprijs moved to its current three-category format in 2020.
999 Games was the only company to secure two nominations last year, and ultimately won both categories it contested, with Hisashi Hayashi design Bomb Busters taking the Family award and Botanicus (Samuele Tabellini Ferrari, Vieri Masseini) triumphing among the Connoisseurs games. DSV won the remaining Expert award with Tomáš Holek’s SETI.
This year 999 Games has no nominees at all – a not unprecedented situation, with the publisher also having missed the shortlist in 2021, but one that marks a sharp turnaround from its five nominations across 2024 and 2025. They included Sky Team winning the Family award two years ago.
DSV Games was launched in 2023 by online shop De Spelletjes Vrienden, with a focus on visually appealing titles which offer exceptional gameplay – making use of “stunning artwork, high-quality components, and well-crafted mechanics”, according to its website.
Its debut release slate in 2024 comprised four games including Rats of Wistar, designed by Simone Luciani and Danilo Sabia, which secured the publisher its first Nederlandse Spellenprijs nomination. The publisher increased its output to nine releases in 2025, and put out another 11 releases between January and the end of June this year – the cut-off point for games eligible for the 2026 award.
DSV co-owner Marieke Kuit-van Woesik said after the Nederlandse Spellenprijs victory last year, “We are really proud that as a publisher, which has only been around for two years, we receive this wonderful confirmation that we are on the right track with our small team.”
DSV Games co-owner Marieke Kuit – van Woesik collects the Nederlandse Spellenprijs Expert Game award for SETI in 2025
This year’s nominations take DSV into territory previously reached under the current award system only by two of the most established names in Dutch-language board game publishing.
The Nederlandse Spellenprijs added its intermediate ‘Connoisseurs’ category in 2020, creating the current annual line-up of three nominees apiece across Family, Connoisseurs and Expert games.
999 Games took five of those nine nominations in 2020, with White Goblin taking three. White Goblin followed with four nominations in 2021, while 999 again reached three in 2024. No other publishers bar those had scored three nominations in one year under the current format prior to 2026.
More than 100 board and card games released for the Dutch market during this year’s eligibility period were played by the Nederlandse Spellenprijs jury, which selects its nominees with a focus on quality, playability and originality.
The winners of the Family, Connoisseurs and Expert categories are due to be announced on October 10 at BumbleBeez Spellenwinkel in Bergen op Zoom.
Nederlandse Spellenprijs nominees2026
Family Castle Combo – designed by Grégory Grard and Mathieu Roussel (Published by White Goblin Games) Rebirth – Reiner Knizia (DSV Games) Take Time – Alexi Piovesan and Julien Prothière (Libellud / Asmodee)
Connoisseurs Dewan – Johannes Goupy and Yoann Levet (Space Cowboys / Asmodee) Pondscape – designed by Tomáš Holek (Published by DSV Games) The Lord of the Rings: Trick-Taking Game (Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers) – designed by Bryan Bornmueller (Office Dog / Asmodee)
Experts Ants – Renato Ciervo and Andrea Robbiani (DSV Games) River of Gold – Keith Piggott (White Goblin Games) Yokohama – (White Goblin Games)
Gaming convention major PAX is doubling down on the success of its tabletop-focused Unplugged show by launching a second event in Houston, after growing the original into the second-largest tabletop gaming convention in the US after Gen Con.
PAX Unplugged Houston is set to take place at the George R Brown Convention Center from June 25 to 27 next year – marking the first expansion of the Unplugged brand since the dedicated tabletop convention debuted in Philadelphia in 2017.
Company event manager Sean Gonzalez told GamesBeat that PAX had considered several major cities while investigating the feasibility of a second Unplugged show, adding that Houston stood out based on infrastructure, demographics, data from other ReedPop events and demand from the industry.
“Most importantly though, Houston is where exhibitors wanted us to place the event,” he said.
PAX said in a separate announcement that Unplugged Houston will feature an expo floor for tabletop exhibitors alongside panels, tournaments and community events, although it is yet to reveal exhibitors, floor space, expected attendance or badge prices.
The show marks a return to Texas for the business, which previously ran PAX South in San Antonio from 2015 to 2020.
Gonzalez told GamesBeat Houston offered an opportunity to bring PAX back to the community which had attended PAX South, while giving the new event a more specific tabletop focus.
He added, “While we know that the current state of the economy impacts everyone, we are extremely confident based on the tremendous success we continue to see with the PAX events, particularly our Philadelphia PAX Unplugged, that the market will support PAX Unplugged Houston.”
PAX was launched by Penny Arcade web comic creators Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik in 2004 as the Penny Arcade Expo, after the pair decided they wanted a show exclusively to celebrate video gaming and game culture.
Attendees at PAX Unplugged in 2024 || Photo Credit: PAX/ReedPop
About 3,300 people attended the inaugural show, but that attendance had already soared to 58,500 by the 2008 event, leading to organiser to team up with New York Comic Con organiser ReedPop in 2009, and to launch a second con, PAX East, in 2010.
The company expanded again with PAX Australia in 2013 and the short-lived PAX South two years later, before launching the inaugural PAX Unplugged in 2017 after seeing the tabletop sections of its existing PAX conventions continue to expand.
PAX does not disclose precise attendance figures for PAX Unplugged, but says the Philadelphia event draws “tens of thousands” of visitors each year – believed to be north of the 30,000 mark. Its record 2024 show sold out all three days for the first time, filling all 528,000 sq ft of exhibition hall space with more than 350 exhibitors.
But Pax Unplugged’s success has seen it displace long-running peer Origins as the second-largest tabletop gaming convention in the US – and its decision to launch a second event just 12 days after Origins 2027 is due to take place puts further pressure on the latter event.
Origins has been rebuilding its attendance since the pandemic, but unlike other major tabletop conventions such as Gen Con, Spiel Essen and the UK Games Expo has yet to regain its pre-Covid record of about 20,600.
The show’s attendance fell 2.5% this year to 18,700 – its first annual decline since the pandemic, although the fall came as other measures of activity at Origins remained stable or continued to grow. Exhibitor numbers increased marginally from 410 in 2025 to 413 this year, while the number of scheduled events climbed about 10% from 7,810 to more than 8,600.
PAX has not overtly positioned Houston as a competitor to Origins, but publishers weighing whether to exhibit at both now face the prospect of getting their teams and products to two major US tabletop shows within less than two weeks, alongside the associated staffing, travel, freight and booth costs.
Badges for PAX Unplugged Houston are due to go on sale later this year, with applications for media and content creators also opening before the end of 2026.
The original PAX Unplugged returns to Philadelphia for its tenth show between December 4 and 6 this year.
What recourse is there for the public when their leaders will not listen, their employers have broken the compacts that bind society, and their bellies gnaw with hunger?
If two examples are sufficient to draw a motif, that seems to be the recurring question at the center of Yoni Goldstein’s work. Last year’s Chicago ’68 was a refreshing look at civil disobedience in the streets; now Goldstein and the Dietz Foundation are publishing The Nights of King Ludd, which raises similar questions about resistance and state repression despite being translocated across an ocean and 150 years.
Gettim, lads!
I’ve been twice called a Luddite. The second time was not that long ago, after publishing an article explaining why I wouldn’t be reviewing any board game that used non-human artwork. A few years before that, it was because I mentioned to a friend that I thought it was wrong for corporations to use programmed obsolescence to spur consumers to purchase replacement cell phones.
In both cases, the response felt similar. “Get with the times. You can’t fight progress. This technology is inevitable. Go with the tide or get washed away by it.”
At the turn of the 18th to 19th century, English stockingers and woolworkers were hearing similar sentiments. Their trade, which had been conducted by domestic labor for over a century, was facing upheaval. The stocking frame was not a new technology — it had been invented in Nottingham way back in 1589 — but gradual improvements, such as rotary-, water-, and steam-powered frames and Jebediah Strutt’s derby rib, made it possible to turn out greater quantities than ever before.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t easier work better than harder work? In theory, absolutely. I’m as lazy as they come, so you won’t hear a peep out of me on that count.
But the people who made their living knitting stockings weren’t the ones who benefited from these improvements. Over the course of a few short decades, mill owners used one dirty trick after another to dispossess an entire class of laborer. They violated price-collaboration laws. They used enclosure acts to drive commoners from the lands they had occupied for centuries, producing hordes of desperate workers who would work for almost nothing. They used their superior access to parliament to lobby for frame-breaking protections and outlaw collective bargaining. They churned out cheaper but less durable products. They employed children with no care for the blood their amputated limbs left in the machines. They used war as a pretext to declare their industries essential and therefore in need of military protection.
With every peaceful recourse blocked off, some textile workers took matters in a different direction. They took up their hammers not to work the machine, but to break it. And they did so under the fictional name of Ned Ludd.
Roles are dynamic, with self-interested goals and unique abilities.
This is where The Nights of King Ludd deposits us. The mills are roaring. Thousands have already been displaced. It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
Goldstein presents the Luddite movement from two vantages. There’s the sky-high perspective, showing the three epicenters of Luddite activity in Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire. This portion has the look of a traditional historical simulation game: there are enclosures for unemployed laborers, mills where workers or mobs can congregate, and a chess knight making the rounds to crack down on anyone threatening the supply of cheap stockings and lace.
But there’s another, more intimate perspective, and it’s here that Goldstein’s approach to the Luddite movement becomes clearer. Rather than embodying the Luddites as a faceless mass, as they’ve customarily been represented by the intervening two centuries of Oxford tut-tutting, here they’re given names and faces — and, above even those signifiers, personal aspirations and fears.
It works like this. When the game opens, everybody adopts an identity. You might become George Mellor, King Ludd’s “right-hand man” who infamously assassinated the wealthiest mill owner of Yorkshire and hanged for it. Everybody at the table loses the game together if they don’t burn the map’s three mills, but Mellor must also assassinate the manufacturer, a nasty piece of work who sits at the side of the board and hoovers up cards from the deck with each passing round. This is a dangerous proposition, liable to bring the military down on the movement’s head sooner than later, ensuring that Mellor’s appearance lends the session a riotous edge.
That’s the extreme end of things. The remaining identities provide other objectives, like sisters Mary and Lydia Molyneux’s desire to hold onto their family’s position in society and John Baines’ fear that the price of goods will collapse. These characters necessitate a more cautious approach, one that strives to keep as many weavers employed as possible rather than whipping everyone into a frenzy. These figures have been brought together by a manufactured crisis, but they have stark differences of opinion on the movement’s operation.
Crucially, these identities are more than clusters of special abilities and personal objectives. Each character seeds a woe into the deck, representing a personal problem that might rear its head at any moment. They also have personal lines they refuse to cross. Elizabeth Studham has joined the Luddites to save her home and community. Will she eventually become so impassioned — some would say radicalized — by the cause that she risks exile to the colonies? The celebrity parliamentarian Lord Byron is another option, his distance from the movement reflected by a weaker pool of conspirators. Will he throw away his standing in polite society to champion laborers who hold so little in common with him? These are the questions The Nights of King Ludd asks early and often, presenting the movement as a tangle of competing interests and concerns.
The Regency gets up to no good in response to the Luddites’ no good.
The Luddite movement has always eluded easy classification. Given the revolutionary fervor on the Continent, some historians portray it as a similar moment of English class consciousness. Others interpret it as the earliest stirrings of what would become later labor reform and even Marxism.
Perhaps it’s appropriate, then, that Goldstein presents the movement in such contradictory terms. Just as the game tells its story via two vastly different scopes, and just as its characters squabble over the appropriate course of action, the game itself is suspended between identities.
On the one hand, there are familiar elements of both card-driven wargames and paxgames. There’s the river-style market, which recalls Pax Porfiriana and its many successors, while the cards themselves are multitools that hew closer to the system found in Mark Herman’s We the People and popularized by Twilight Struggle. Much of the game revolves around figuring out which cards to purchase and when to deploy them, familiar fare for anyone who’s been involved in the historical gaming scene at any point over the past three decades.
But the cards play second fiddle to the game’s real core: its dice. At heart, The Nights of King Ludd is about building a pool of dice and then rolling them to determine whether your frame-breakers have successfully broken enough frames to put a mill out of commission. This is a multi-step process. First your conspirators must organize unemployed weavers, bringing them into the movement and assembling them at the sites where their agitation will do the most good. Then they must be persuaded to take up arms and occupy the mills — both of which are testy affairs, drawing ire from the Regency and the patrolling militia. All the while, you must assemble a pool of dice that can be spent for those workers, now suitably organized and positioned, to assault the mill.
If everything goes right, a mob of weavers will enter a mill, burn it down, and disappear back into the moonlight. No need for anybody to get hurt. No trials, no hangings, no masses of deportations to Australia. Some property will be ruined, but like the historical Luddite movement these attacks will shock authorities with their targeted precision.
The hitch, as you can probably discern for yourself, it that it is exceedingly rare for everything to go right.
Hm. I knew those Aussies were up to something.
In practice, The Nights of King Ludd plays out like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces keep getting hidden beneath the tablecloth, squirreled away by cranky uncles, and sometimes fed to the family dog.
Consider this. To wreck a mill, you must organize those unemployed weavers. But the passing militia will lock down entire counties at a time, sometimes for extended durations. This makes it near-impossible to organize with any precision, especially if your character is currently in hiding in the affected portion of the board. It may become necessary to wait out the occupation. Or even to bait the militia into removing itself to another region. Just be careful you don’t draw them toward a mill where your workers are on the verge of an uprising; that will exile the entire lot to Australia, severely limiting the movement’s access to manpower.
Okay, so you’re keeping an eye on the local garrison. But what about the Regency in London? Certain actions force you to draw a card from the Regency deck, and these cards are, to use the terminology of the day, a right burr in the arse. Their effects are far-ranging. Government spies tip off the authorities before a mob can act. Preemptive hangings permanently lower the ceiling on your dice pool. The cavalry show up to move the militia token two spaces instead of the usual one. Child labor and sixteen-hour workdays and workplace accidents ensure that laborers are too exhausted to resist their plight.
There are other, more transformative consequences as well. Somewhere in the game’s midsection, the card row shifts from a common pool to a laissez-faire market that’s open to those with capital — hint hint: Lord Byron still does okay — but not so much to those who actually produce its goods. This alters how players access cards. No longer is every card the same price. Now their values are tiered, requiring greater expenditures to purchase until they slide leftward in the market. It’s a remarkable flourish, illustrating the radical changes this industrializing generation underwent as food prices soared, their livelihoods were stripped, and their legal representatives were bought out by moneyed interests.
Swear me an oath!
Put together, these elements give the game the sensation of trying to keep a sinking ship afloat even as you commit mutiny. There are occasional refreshing breezes: an ambush that delays the militia’s approach, such a mass of unemployed workers that their grievances become impossible to ignore, even early attempts at establishing labor cooperatives. But make no mistake, what initially seems like a straightforward task will soon be stymied from all directions. Even when the movement’s success is secured, it often comes at the expense of a conspirator’s personal goal.
At times, it’s also an uneven task, and not only because the Regency is scrambling to protect the people with the most from having slightly less. Thanks to Goldstein’s hybrid system, The Nights of King Ludd can be tricky to operate. At any given moment, you’re operating along multiple vectors. There’s the strategic layer, with its emphasis on timing and positioning. The personal level, with its diverse objectives and abilities. The card market, always in flux, plus the gradual attentions of the Regency. Keeping in mind that I’ve only played a prototype, it’s a lot to unpick.
And then, of course, there are the dice. Goldstein provides opportunities to mitigate a flubbed roll, not to mention a few alternate tricks for damaging mills, but these options are few and far between. Most of the time, the only path forward is a healthy dice pool, a well-armed mob, and a prayer in one’s heart. There’s nothing as uniquely irksome as showing up to a mill-burning with torches and hammers, only to somehow roll all misses. Those who balked at John Company’s retirement rolls will likely find themselves similarly disappointed here.
It takes a village to burn a mill.
For my part, The Nights of King Ludd is a strange, evocative thing, as much a machine as those it seeks to break. It’s a more radical experiment than Chicago ’68, but Goldstein leverages it to similar ends, asking hard questions about who societies prioritize. Put somebody in a sack and don’t be surprised when they choose to fight their way out.
Were the Luddites doomed? Maybe. The textiles industry was transforming with or without powered mills and innovative knitting frames. Trousers were soon to supplant hosiery in popularity. Cotton and silk were growing more affordable. The United States was starting to throw their economic weight around. And, pardon my French, Napoleon was being a real butthole.
But some men chose to oil their machinery with blood. The response was fire and fury. And, yes, sometimes blood for blood. A few droplets pattered into an ocean. Once again, Goldstein has crafted a challenging, thought-provoking rumination on an oft-misplaced history, collective anger, and the depths power and capital will plumb to protect their interests. Stark, sobering, and sometimes hopeful, The Nights of King Ludd is an essential work for students of labor history and new-wave historical simulation.
A prototype of The Nights of King Ludd was temporarily provided by the designer. It is on Kickstarter right now.
(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)
Spiel Essen has launched a dedicated B2B matchmaking system aimed at helping publishers, designers, retailers and other industry professionals find potential business partners and arrange meetings before arriving at the world’s biggest board game fair.
The new service, which is restricted to exhibitors and people with business visitor tickets, lets users create profiles detailing what they are looking for and what they can offer, send specific business inquiries, connect via chat and schedule appointments at the show using the built-in calendar.
Spiel said today that the system will be integrated directly into its dedicated app, adding that the move is intended to make networking between trade visitors, professionals and publishers “more targeted, simple, and effective”.
Business has long been an important part of Spiel despite its status as a public-facing convention, with major publishers operating their own dedicated B2B areas for meetings with retailers and other industry professionals.
B2B-specific companies such as manufacturers, crowdfunding services and trade organisations were still scattered across various halls in 2019, but that situation began to change after Spiel was taken over in 2022 by Merz Verlag – whose core event, Spielwarenmesse, is one of the world’s biggest B2B toy trade fairs.
Those companies began to be more concentrated in Hall 4 during the 2022 event – a move which intensified the following year amid a major reorganisation of the halls which attempted to more obviously split the fair into themed segments such as children’s games, family and light-to-medium games, expert games, tabletop and miniature games, roleplaying games and TCGs.
Florian Hess, managing director of Merz Verlag, said after last year’s record-breaking Spiel, “For exhibitors at the fair the focus is also on the joy of the games. At the same time, an incredible number of effective business developments emerge here – and this happens naturally alongside everything else.
“I don’t know of any other event that is as strong a springboard for a business’s launch as Spiel. I have met exhibitors who started here a few years ago with a small booth and are now occupying several hundred square meters and selling games internationally.
“Experiencing this kind of B2B rocket launch never ceases to fascinate me.”
Hall 3 at Spiel Essen 2025
The new system arrives as Spiel prepares for its biggest-ever event from October 22 to 25 this year – with an expansion into all eight main halls at the Messe Essen exhibition centre for the first time expected to see the event challenge its record 220,000 attendance set last year.
But despite the show bumping against its space limits at its long-time home, a Merz Verlag spokesperson told BoardGameWire in March, “We love Essen – as a venue and the city – and have no intention of leaving. For the foreseeable future SPIEL will remain in Essen as it has for more than 40 years now.”
The fair’s expansion into a seventh hall last year helped the four-day show to its record 220,000 attendance, outstripping the 209,000 visitor record it set just before the Covid-19 pandemic.
Spiel might have broken its attendance record in 2024 were it not for a self-imposed visitor cap, which limited the number of attendees each day to about 50,000 – a measure introduced alongside wider aisles post-pandemic to help visitors move around the often crowded halls more easily.
More than 920 exhibitors from 53 countries are expected at this year’s event, with Merz Verlag saying in March that demand had come both from long-term exhibitors keen to “significantly increase” their booth space, as well as an “impressive number” of first-time exhibitors hoping to attend this year.
About half of the available tickets for Thursday, Friday and Saturday have already been sold, seven weeks before the show opens, with Sunday sales currently “lagging slightly behind”, the show announced today.
Access to the matchmaking platform comes as part of Spiel’s €46 business visitor ticket, which compares with €25 for a standard adult day ticket.
Spiel Essen 2026 takes place at Messe Essen from October 22 to 25.
Galactic Cruise could extend its run of major award wins after being named a top-three finalist in this year’s Deutscher Spiele Preis, the biggest community-voted board game award in Germany.
The space tourism-themed worker placement title faces competition in the final from Ark Nova creator Mathias Wigge, who could win the award again with just his second major design – the similarly zoo-themed Sanctuary.
A win for Sanctuary would double down on Matthias Wigge’s success following the colossal performance of his debut design Ark Nova, which as well as becoming the second-highest ranked game on BoardGameGeek has been a sensation on digital gaming platform BoardGameArena, with more than 13 million games played since its online launch in May 2023..
That latter title, which made designer Reiner Knizia the first person to complete a clean sweep of the Spiel des Jahres, Kennerspiel des Jahres and Kinderspiel des Jahres awards, finished sixth in this year’s DSP vote.
The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship, another game which has already enjoyed significant awards success this year, finished just outside the top three finalists in this year’s DSP.
Take Time, which won the Austrian game of the year and Swiss Gamers Award this year, took fifth place in the DSP, ahead of Rebirth, Cozy Stickerville, River of Gold, Star Trek: Captain’s Chair and Forest Shuffle – Dartmoor.
Asmodee-owned studios secured four places in the Top 10: Z-Man with Fate of the Fellowship, Libellud with Take Time, Unexpected Games with Cozy Stickerville and Lookout with Forest Shuffle – Dartmoore – although none managed to break into the top three.
Other recent DSP winners have included Planet Unknown in 2023, Ark Nova in 2022 and Lost Ruins of Arnak in 2021, following The Crew, Wingspan, Azul and Terraforming Mars among winners from the previous decade.
The 2026 DSP is open to standalone games released in German between May 1, 2025 and April 30 this year, with voting open to people living in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Merz Verlag, which has presented the award since 1990, said “many thousands” of people voted during the three-month voting period.
The children’s DSP has also named its top three finalists: Mooki Island from designer Florian Sirieix, Paleolino from Marco Teubner, and Toriki: The Castaway Island by Wojciech Grajkowski.
The smallest but most persistent indignity of our current digital age is the way we have all, every one of us, been press-ganged into service as human CAPTCHAs. You know, the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, as tortured an acronym as ever there was. How many bicycles are there in this image? Is that a stop sign or merely a reflection of a stop sign? Is this story real or fake? The computer can’t tell the difference. Which means you can’t ping your lost iPhone without decoding the golem’s underlying logic.
Kasper Lapp, it seems, fashions games with my discomfort as their first design principle. First it was That’s Not a Hat. Now it’s Totally Human.
I dislike Totally Human. But at least I dislike it for reasons that mark it as a very interesting game indeed.
Uh oh. I’m an alien. No worries. I’ll just have you for dinner.
Imagine this. Your society, previously flawed but functional enough in principle, has been overrun by aliens. Aliens who eat humans. These aliens look like us, talk like us, even make art like us. But these things made by aliens are not human in nature. Oh no. They are the regurgitated mass of all that is human. Always backward, never forward. Remixed, never created. Always the tiniest scooch off.
That’s because the aliens are ChatGPT, hahahaaaaaaaaa
Calm down, Dan. Sometimes an alien is an alien.
You draw three numbered cards. If the whole trio shows the outline of an ordinary human, congratulations, you are an ensouled being fashioned through millions of years of evolution and perhaps the consciousness of the universe itself. If, on the other hand, even a single one of these cards shows an alien, sorry, you’re an alien. Your sole purpose in life is to snack on humans.
Because of the alien invasion, the humans are boarding shuttles to start new colonies somewhere far from Earth. But first, they need to sort through who’s who, lest the colonists get eaten en route like the crew in that one movie (spoiler). How will they accomplish this — DNA scans? Deep behavioral analyses? Having the applicants draw a picture of a person that doesn’t look like a bizarre homunculus?
No. By answering three abstract questions that set the hairs on the back of our neck prickling. The world’s ending, and we’re gonna Voight-Kampff our way through to the other side.
So. What’s the answer? Punk.
These questions are procedurally generated — not unlike a CAPTCHA. There are three components. First, the question. Second, a bunch of adjectives. Third, some nouns. This produces a five-fold multiple-choice test.
For example, you might be asked about the best name for a punk band. Is it (1) Slimy Cloud (2) Slow River (3) Unreliable Volcano (4) Well-Oiled Tree (5) Noisy Flower. Everybody simultaneously plays a card that reveals their chosen answer.
Here’s the catch that might force an alien to tip its tentacle. Humans can answer the questions however they like. But the aliens among us, they’re more limited. When they drew those three cards at the beginning, they received three numbers. Those are the digits they must use to answer the three questions posed by the game. They can choose the order they use the numbers, spending them like, I dunno, digital tokens or whatever, but they’re required to use those exact numbers.
In the case of the above question, the table’s answers will hopefully prove revealing. You’ll discover which of your friends listen to punk, those whose entire conception of punk is Green Day, and perhaps, if you aren’t so snobby that you airlock anyone who can sing all nine minutes of “Jesus of Suburbia,” which of your buddies is actually a stochastic nightmare that repeatedly consumes, vomits, and re-consumes humanity’s efforts at culture.
Once all three questions have been asked and answered, it’s time to climb aboard the rocket ships. Humans win by securing a spot on the most-populous colony ship. For genetic diversity in reproduction, obviously. Also, they would prefer to not be torn limb from limb. Aliens, meanwhile, win by eating a human. Usually this results in a spectrum of success, with a few humans blasting off into the cosmos while one or two aliens secure the necessary calories to survive for one more day.
Three questions. That’s all you get.
Conceptually, Totally Human is intriguing. It taps into that wonky space of our brains that’s more intuitive than logical, especially when it comes to in- and out-grouping. While some questions are more obvious than others, plenty are full of gray spaces for players to squabble over and, sometimes, to get lost in. Is it harder to break a rusty hippopotamus (because hippopotamuses are the sturdiest animal on land) or a metal giraffe (because it’s metal)? Is there really a “best” thing to put into a hundred-year time capsule? Is Green Day punk?
And then, when it comes time to load the rockets, the ensuing debates are also vibe-based, reaching into a rucksack of mammalian instincts. On Bluesky, there was recently some discussion about the value of small talk beyond allaying boredom at a social event, such as establishing to fellow apes that you’re a friend rather than an aggressor — and, as an extension of that, the way neurodivergent folks might feel alienated by such a state of affairs. Totally Human could function as a ludic expression of that entire conversation. When there are aliens in our ranks, it’s often better to move with the crowd than to have a good reason for why you stand slightly apart from baseline. When one is perhaps a little alien, the consequences can be severe no matter how benign the distinction.
This makes Totally Human interesting to talk about, but not always enjoyable to experience. And I don’t mean in the usual way for social deduction games, where deception sometimes rankles those who prefer forthrightness. Totally Human wrings the concealment angle of the genre into a sort of social deduction distillate. It’s about hiding in plain sight and little else. You’re given the option to discuss and defend the team’s Q&A sessions, but either the questions are so binary that folks either fit the metric or they don’t, or else they’re so vague that very little can be gleaned from them. In either case, either you hide with at least one of your fellows or you wind up on the outside looking in, human or no.
Blastoff! Hope you aren’t hobnobbing with a flesh-eating alien.
As a get-to-know-you game, there’s some value to be had here. Not only because you get to ask and answer silly questions, which provides an avenue for further insight into the socially anxious apes seated at your kitchen table, but also because those questions often lead down more interesting avenues. Provided you don’t shy away from all forms of small talk. In which case, you really should avoid this particular campfire.
For everyone else, Totally Human is totally fine. Personally, I wish its gameplay lived up to its premise. Beyond illustrating our tendency to cluster more closely with those who say the right words in the right sequences, there’s very little to see here. Maybe it’s a question of fatigue. In a world where every feed has become an extended CAPTCHA, it turns out I would rather not role-play as one, even for a mere quarter hour. My verdict: interesting but unsatisfying.
A complimentary copy of Totally Human was provided by the publisher.
(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)
At long last, we’re nearing the end. After Uruguay, Peru, and Nicaragua, El Salvador is the fourth and final scenario in Stephen Rangazas’s The Guerrilla Generation. We’ve seen urban resistance movements that neglected to reach the people they were bent on liberating, a cult-of-personality communist party who went to any lengths to maintain their doctrines, and far-right death squads whose activities were so vicious that they became invaders of their own country. Now, in El Salvador, we’re going to see a little bit of everything as the FMLN launches its first offensive against the government in January 1981.
But the story doesn’t begin there. It never does. History is a story, and stories need beginnings. But reality is not a story. There are any number of root causes to this particular insurrection. We might begin with Farabundo Martí, from whom the FMLN drew its name. He was executed by firing squad in 1938 after his uprising of peasants was massacred by the government. Or we could start with that regime’s formation in 1931 through coup d’état and its repressive rule for more than four decades.
This time, however, the most suitable starting point is a priest: Óscar Romero.
One of the many murals of Óscar Romero.
Óscar Romero was appointed the fourth archbishop of San Salvador in 1977. A native Salvadoran, Romero was a social conservative, and indeed this was one of the reasons his appointment had been considered. The priesthood of El Salvador had long been divided along social lines, with some priests supporting stability while others favored “liberation theology.” This was a relatively new strain of Catholic thought, born out of the Latin American revolutions and foreign interventions of the ’60s. As with any issue of dogma, there were contrasting definitions of liberation theology, but the gist was that the poor and downtrodden were being deliberately kept in place by both individuals and systems, and that good Christians were therefore called upon to reflect the living ministry of Jesus Christ by rectifying their suffering. Priests who supported liberation theology, then, tended to be sympathetic toward Marxist thought and communist guerrillas, while those critical of it fell into the opposite camp. Romero’s appointment was accepted with relief by the regime. Unsurprisingly, the liberationists were bitterly disappointed.
(Sidenote: North American and European readers might note a similarity between liberation theology and the concept of “woke” as it originated among African-Americans in the Jim Crow-era United States. These strands of thought arose from different sources, but as a quick and dirty analog one could do a lot worse. Short version: you are being kept poor on purpose, the jackboots have it in for you, and it behooves young people to get woke to reality so they can survive this hostile state of affairs.)
Only a month after Romero’s appointment to San Salvador, one of his personal friends, the Jesuit priest Rutilio Grande, was assassinated. This came as a shock to Romero. After all, Grande had been one of the good ones. Despite speaking out against the government on certain issues, he had also argued for a pastoral ministry that was disconnected from Marxism. After every effort to walk a middle path, he had still been gunned down by state security forces only a few miles from where he had been born. Romero requested an investigation. He was met with silence.
Another mural.
In his own words, Romero became devoted to following Grande’s path. He spoke to the people via weekly radio broadcasts, his diocese newspaper, and his sermons, repeatedly listing the government’s killings, tortures, and disappearances. When the joint military-civilian Revolutionary Government Junta proved as brutal as the military dictatorship it had replaced, he appealed to President Jimmy Carter to halt the flow of U.S. military aid and Pope John Paul II to condemn the regime. Again, silence. Even as his popularity among the people grew, it seemed everybody with access to real power was content to ignore his pleas.
Despite his inability to effect change, somebody was listening. Because that’s always how it goes with those who live by the gun. One must not only be victimized. One must be grateful for their place in life. One must submit.
In March 1980, Archbishop Romero called upon Salvadoran soldiers to reject the government’s crimes against humanity. The next day, he was shot through the heart by a gunman as he delivered a sermon at a small chapel attached to Hospital de la Divina Providencia. His funeral was attended by a massacre in the streets. The shooters fired from rooftops with rifles and threw smoke bombs into the crowds of mourners. At least thirty were killed. In response, José Napoleón Duarte, four years in advance of his presidency, blamed both sides of the political spectrum for the violence, and used it as pretext to decline an official inquiry into Romero’s murder. The meddlesome Archbishop, whom the regime had welcomed only three years earlier, had been silenced for good.
The FMLN launches one of their offensives.
Nine months later, the FMLN launched its first offensive against the government.
This is where the fourth scenario of The Guerrilla Generation begins. The FMLN, fed up with the government’s constant human rights abuses, rolls from the highlands into the coastal and urban portions of the country. Potentially, large numbers of blue government cubes will be removed in an instant and the guerrillas will possess large swaths of territory. For a system that usually portrays insurgent forces as incapable of such a concerted assault, it’s a shocking opening gambit.
To accomplish this, Rangazas takes cues from a handful of earlier titles, most notably the “pivotal event” cards that made their first appearance in Mark Herman’s Fire in the Lake. At the time, these were a profound departure for the series. For those who don’t know the COIN System very well, events are normally seeded at random throughout the deck. Thanks to their chaotic appearance, they represent occurrences that fall beyond the factions’ ability to set into motion, but which one of them might leverage to their advantage. When Volko Ruhnke designed Andean Abyss, the first volume in the series, it represented a change in the way card-driven wargames presented player agency. Rather than putting every event into players’ hands — both literally and figuratively — factions were now presented as reactive. Something would happen: a massacre, the death of a politician, an influx of war materiel from an interested third-party nation. And then you, the player, would decide whether that event was worth acting upon.
Fire in the Lake presented another option. Some events, Herman’s system argued, represented moments of clear player agency. It wouldn’t make any sense for the Tet Offensive to blindside the Viet Cong, for example. So each player was given a single pivotal event. One card in their hand, which could be used at the player’s discretion to cancel an ordinary event and launch a special action.
The El Salvador scenario begins with one such event. Only in this case, the event has already been played. “FMLN Offensive Rocks Country” starts on the table. All at once, the FMLN, which the game presumes is largely in its historical situation as of January 1981, undertakes a country-spanning sweep. It won’t be enough to topple the regime, as FMLN leaders had hoped historically. But it sets the tone for what’s to come. This is a knock-down drag-out fight. The FMLN is significantly tougher than most of the series’ insurgencies; the Government, significantly weaker. But the Government has a prize trainer in its corner. The United States. Duh. And the U.S. is currently packing the Government’s gloves with enough silver eagles for a knockout punch.
Uncovering the regime’s war crimes.
From there, the scenario settles back into the system’s usual rhythm of events and faction activities. It isn’t long before both sides begin to have money trouble. The FMLN isn’t as willing to extort the local populace as some of its peers in other volumes. Managing its finances is a slow process, requiring careful spending and hard tradeoffs between building local support or using local resources to maintain their momentum.
The Government, meanwhile, is similarly pressed. There simply isn’t enough in the coffers to resist the FMLN’s offensive. This is where the United States rears its head. As in many previous volumes, the Government’s resources are bolstered by an Aid marker. Rather than releasing a trickle of resources at pre-appointed intervals, however, here Aid functions as a secondary cash reserve, with the niggling problem that the Government can only avail themselves of this pool for certain operations. Basically, while the U.S. is happy to send endless bundles of cash to resupply Government forces in urban centers, Congress balks when a massacre shows up on the evening news. It’s a testy relationship, one that encourages the appearance of stability even as the FMLN claims additional territory outside the cities.
It’s also the COIN System at its most ideological. In the past, I’ve critiqued the series as being frustratingly “blind” when it comes to ideology — and by extension, of defaulting to a conservative position that elides the nuances that underpin these conflicts. Basically, COIN’s emphasis on procedure excels at “what” and “how,” but usually flubs the “why.” We see the outcomes of ideology — the tanks and planes, the massacres and coverups, the boots on the ground — but not so much the reason those tanks were delivered to faraway places, the regime’s need to conceal those massacres, or the half-truths that were sold to the public to convince them to sacrifice their young men and women to fight a war that has nothing to do with them. It’s not especially far-fetched to see in titles like Land and Freedom, Versailles 1919, and Revolutions an ideological intervention into a system that was, itself, a procedural intervention on the card-driven wargames that came before it.
“Reform” can be misleading.
I don’t know if Stephen Rangazas is the strongest designer to handle the COIN System to date, but he makes a good case for being the most clear-eyed. Both of El Salvador’s factions are uniquely hemmed in by ideological concerns. In addition to their desire to govern the populace, the FMLN must uncover and promulgate the reason for their offensive. The why to the what. They do this by revealing cards from a personal deck to demonstrate the Government’s crimes against its citizens. Crimes that would continue over the twelve-year course of the Civil War, with the post-war commission stating that security forces were responsible for eighty-five percent of civilian casualties. By revealing these crimes, the FMLN doesn’t bolster their position immediately, and even risks the occasional backfire when the wrong card is revealed. They are, in effect, building a case during wartime for how the peace will be conducted.
For the Government’s part, they’re asked to walk a tightrope between taking a hard rightist stance toward the insurgency or introducing reforms to rein in their troops. (And secure greater U.S. Aid, but surely that isn’t the prime motivator. Right?) As these reforms are embraced, it becomes harder to conduct reprisals. And the Government is positively horny to conduct reprisals. It’s the easiest way to batter the population into… well, not supporting the Government, but at least they won’t be supporting the FMLN either.
It isn’t long before El Salvador becomes a zombie state, completely bankrupted and in thrall to foreign funding. It’s a stark ludic representation of a regime that has bought its continued right to abuse its citizenry by indebting itself to a hemispheric hegemony whose interests shift with the wind. Or, in game terms, with a whole bunch of event cards.
In some ways, the scenario pulls up short. There is no card for Óscar Romero. Perhaps his assassination came too early for the game to model. Robert D’Aubuisson, the death squad commander who ordered Romero’s death, he has a card. It isn’t flattering, reflecting his antagonistic nature and inability to avoid controversy. That’s as close to the Archbishop as the game gets. His absence is a reminder that no simulation reaches every corner, no matter how long the broom’s handle.
I’m in there somewhere. Don’t look, though. Please don’t.
The one time I visited El Salvador, as a member of an ophthalmic surgical mission in early 2019, Óscar Romero was everywhere. We were hosted in Juayúa by a Catholic retreat, so the imagery of St. Romero was unsurprising, especially given his canonization only a few months earlier. But his visage appeared everywhere beyond the compound walls as well. On the streets of San Salvador, beside the walls of coffee plantations, inside coffee shops. A plaque marked where bullets had penetrated the wall during his funeral massacre.
Growing up, my Father was deeply conservative, but with a compassionate streak that suited his status as a medical doctor. When he began visiting Latin America to perform cataract surgeries — one eye per patient so the surgical team could double how many people they treated — he underwent a transformation. His nature grew more thoughtful; his veneration of Ronald Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt melted away. He began reading books about saints. Little by little, he started talking with more frustration and less condemnation about the state of the poor.
We also started getting along a bit better. But that’s neither here nor there.
I went with him in 2019 because he sensed this might be one of the last trips he had in him. The pandemic hadn’t been declared in our hemisphere yet, but the medical community could see the writing on the wall, and political changes were threatening to make El Salvador even harder to visit. So I accepted his invitation, renewed my expired passport in a panic, and off we went.
There’s no need to bore you with the details. The indigence was extreme, but all poverty has the same leanness. The defining moment came a few months after the trip, when I related how one of our fellow volunteers had called the people “lazy.” Dad, who all my life had complained about panhandlers and freeloaders and takers, suddenly roared, with such force that I think it surprised him as much as me, “They’re not lazy. They’re poor.”
I’ve always been proud of my Father. For his work ethic. For how much he reads. For putting up with a son who’s totally unlike him. But in that moment, I became proud of his ability to change.
It’s possible for the government to find their footing. But at what cost?
When it comes to the COIN Series, El Salvador and The Guerrilla Generation more broadly also represent a change. As a system, COIN has sometimes been insightful and sometimes been blinkered. Often it has been both things in the same volume. With Rangazas’s work in this multipack and The British Way, it becomes something else. It tells a slightly different story, one less about counterinsurgent procedures and more about the systems that brought about these insurgencies in the first place.
Or, as Óscar Romero put it in his second pastoral letter, delivered at the Feast of the Transfiguration shortly after his appointment to San Salvador and the murder of his friend Rutilio Grande: “The Church has, quite rightly, denounced sin. Certainly she has denounced personal sins, and she has also denounced the sin that perverts relationships between persons, especially at the family level. But she has begun to recall now something that, at the Church’s beginning, was fundamental: social sin — the crystallization of individual sins into permanent structures that keep sin in being, and make its force to be felt by the majority of the people.”
Next time, we’ll examine those systems from afar via The Guerrilla Generation’s meta-campaign, which combines Nicaragua and El Salvador in Resisting Reagan.
A complimentary copy of The Guerrilla Generation was provided by the publisher.
(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)
Asmodee has continued its revived acquisitions spree by picking up the Welcome To… IP and game range from French publisher Blue Cocker.
The deal hands the board game publishing and distribution giant control of a flip-and-write series which has sold hundreds of thousands of copies since Benoit Turpin’s breakout design Welcome To Your Perfect Home was released in 2018.
Subsequent releases have included standalone sequels Welcome to the Moon and Welcome to New Las Vegas, while its implementation on online platform Board Game Arena has racked up more than 3 million played games, and averages over 3,000 unique players daily.
More new versions seem likely to be on the way following the acquisition, with Asmodee head of collections Mathieu Aubert saying, “This acquisition goes beyond bringing a strong IP into our portfolio. We see huge potential to expand the Welcome To… universe, and the team already has plenty of ideas to bring it to life. I look forward to sharing more about our projects in the coming month.”
Asmodee CEO Thomas Koegler said during the announcement of the revived M&A strategy that many of its targets were businesses it already knew “in and out” through existing commercial relationships.
Asmodee CEO Thomas Koegler
Hespecifically highlighted publishers behind successful games it already distributed as potential targets, alongside social and party game businesses and IPs, hobby game studios and local distributors.
Welcome To… fits withing that strategy, with Asmodee already handling Blue Cocker titles in markets including the UK and US. In Asmodee’s home market of France, however, Welcome To… and other Blue Cocker Games are currently distributed by Hachette subsidiary BlackRock.
The original game helped popularise the flip-and-write format, replacing dice rolls common to roll-and-write games with shared cards which allow players to make their choices simultaneously.
Asmodee SVP of tabletop games Benoit Clerc said, “Welcome To… established itself as landmark titles in modern board gaming, combining elegant game design with exceptional accessibility.
“We have tremendous respect for the work accomplished by the Blue Cocker team, Benoit Turpin, and everyone who contributed to the success of the game and their different iterations.
“We are excited to welcome this intellectual property into Asmodee’s portfolio and join our line-up of great family games and look forward to building its future.”
Blue Cocker founder Alain Balay added, “From the very beginning, our ambition was to create a game that would stand the test of time and bring people together around the table.
“We are incredibly proud of everything Welcome To… has achieved over the past years, and we are confident Asmodee will now carry the brand forward and introduce it to even more players around the world.”
Blue Cocker was launched by former aeronautical engineer Balay in 2013, and operated as a one-person business until the success of Welcome To… and the company’s international sales allowed it to expand to a five-person operation in 2019, he recently told French newspaper La Gazette du Midi.
He said exports accounted for 60% of Blue Cocker’s revenue at that point, but have since fallen to just 10% amid ongoing global financial and political uncertainty.
Balay added that despite that, the French market has held up well despite concerns about a resurgence in inflation in the country.
Blue Cocker’s remaining titles include 2014’s Medieval Academy, 2016 release Meeple War and 2025’s The Last Droids, while its main 2026 release so far has been corporate deckbuilder SAN.
The company’s 15th release, the two-player cooperative title Les Yeux Fermés designed by Antonin Boccara and Julien Prothière, is slated for a 2027 release according to its BoardGameGeek page.
Forthcoming Blue Cocker release Les Yeux Fermés, designed by Antonin Boccara and Julien Prothière
Asmodee has kept its potential acquisitions tightly under wraps, but has plenty of financial firepower for further deals.
The company’s net debt, meanwhile, stood at 1.6x adjusted EBITDA at the end of June, rising to 1.7 times once M&A commitments were included – down from 2.1 times a year earlier and comfortably below the company’s 2.5-times leverage target, given it significant headroom for M&A.
Despite Asmodee’s long-time image as a board game publishing heavyweight, more than 72% of its revenue now comes via its distribution of other companies’ games – up from an already hefty 63% in the previous financial year to March 31, 2025.
TCGs make up the lion’s share of Asmodee’s annual net sales – about 60% in the 2025/26 financial year, up from just over 50% across the preceding 12 month period.
The company’s own board game publishing operation, meanwhile, saw its net sales fall 5.8% in the last financial year – while net sales for the first quarter of this year were down 9.8% compared to the same period in 2025.
He said in response, “We have insisted a lot on the fact that one of the strengths of Asmodee is to be a publisher, but the first strength that we do have is our global reach across all categories, from TCGs and board games.
“That’s the superpower of Asmodee – and then being a very strong publisher is a way of accelerating performance.
“So I would say that there is no change, we continue to capture opportunities across the board wherever they come from… our aim is to be a dominant player, bringing all games to the market, anywhere they can.”
The move puts McGinnis into a hugely influential position within the tabletop industry. Asmodee’s chief product officer has responsibility for its studios, franchise development, licensing and studio marketing, according to the organisational structure the company published ahead of its stock market listing last year.
Ask my twelve-year-old about her favorite games and she’ll list a bunch of titles she consistently beats me at. Case in point: Six-Sided Seas. Inspired by the laminated game boards Chris Solis witnessed in Thailand board game cafes, this is a design by Kroze Kresky that limits itself to a single roll-up mat and a bunch of dice.
Forget inspirations. I keep losing to a child. A literal child. Twelve years of age, and already acquainted with an eyepatch and peg leg. She yearns for the galleon.
(sound: the distant thunder of a broadside)
As befits Six-Sided Seas’ simple format, the gameplay is a rapid-fire exchange of cannon fire, island-hopping conquest, and desperate carpentry. The whole thing takes between ten and twenty minutes, depending on how poorly one fares. If my experience is anything to go by, it’s one of those games that demands two or even three sessions in sequence. If I wanted to be reductive, I’d call it Pirate Yahtzee. You roll dice and assign them to your ship’s various stations. Once a station is full, you can remove all the dice banked there to activate its ability. The whole thing is dead simple.
But there are unexpected complexities beneath the surface. The first has to do with the way dice operate. Your crew has a certain amount of plunder, which sets the ceiling for your rolls. You can throw as many dice as you like, but busting that number means assigning a few of them to your evasion pool and tossing the rest, a paltry pity prize indeed. Hitting your plunder number, on the other hand, lets you either bump it up a space or earn an extra roll for free, effectively stretching how much you can accomplish either this turn or in the future. So you’re always playing the odds, pushing your crew a little further, and then enjoying or suffering the consequences when they rise to the occasion — or snap under the pressure.
To roll or not to roll? ‘Tis the question.
Meanwhile, the actions themselves are nicely varied. There’s the usual cannon fire, of course, and a few disruptive abilities like one that sends a barrel of grog to the enemy ship to disable the first rolled die on their next turn or another that wipes out your defensive pool of evasion dice to ram the enemy ship for beaucoup damage. Three contrasting win conditions give these pursuits some edge. Sinking the enemy is the honest option, but even a limping vessel might earn enough plunder or secure four of the contested (and bonus-bestowing) islands in the middle to win without splintering an enemy timber.
It’s minor, but it was also designed to be minor, and its minorness is one of its greatest strengths. For example, I’m compelled to lament the ram action, which I believe is horribly overpowered, especially when doubled, but it’s a maneuver that requires multiple turns to set up, strips away your protection, and may be a reflection of my daughter’s favorite strategy more than an actual imbalance. Anyway, what’s an imbalance in a game that I’ve set a world record for by losing in four minutes? As soon as I’ve been scuttled, we’re halfway positioned for the next duel. This time I’ll ram her ship. (Spoiler: She rammed my ship twice and sent it to the bottom of the ocean.)
It takes fifteen, twenty minutes to sink one of these ships.
I don’t want to damn Six-Sided Seas with faint praise; its brevity belies a real understanding of what makes dice so joyous to handle. The decisions are micro-sized, but they matter. Should I seize the island that gives me an all-important reroll — one that might prevent an untimely bust — or double the impact of my cannons? If I’m falling behind, should I play it safe with my dice or push my crew as hard as possible? There are no easy answers.
So, yes, the format matters. Six-Sided Seas is small, brief, and in some respects limited, especially with its two-player count. But I’m impressed with what Kresky and Solis have done with said format. This one would feel right at home in a game cafe, on a picnic table, or beneath the dim light of a cramped starboard cabin.
A complimentary copy of Six-Sided Seas was provided by the publisher.
(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)
For today’s Space-Cast!, we’re revisiting some jerk’s nasty review from five years ago, investigating some excellent indie games, and discussing the ups and downs (but mostly ups) of self-publishing. Our guide for this journey is none other than Connor Wake, creator of Umbra Via, Out of Sorts, That’s the Spirit!, and many others.
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
TIMESTAMPS
1:05 — a reckoning with Umbra Via
28:49 — persisting through Hedged In and Hedge Mage
37:09 — Out of Sorts
58:16 — That’s the Spirit!
1:10:20 — self-publishing
(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)
Every so often — although not as often as I’d like — a publisher will release a more affordable version of a beloved game, and it’s always interesting to see where they’re able to shave a buck off the original production. Cardboard becomes cardstock. Plastic miniatures lose detail or transform into standees. In the absolute worst cases, the game is streamlined. “Streamlined.” The doubt-quotes are important. Pared down, more like. Cut short. Decapitated.
Thunder Road: Ignition trails the lavish Thunder Road: Vendetta. In some ways, this is what you would expect from a product that’s more of the same but costs a third as much as the original box. Cardstock and single-injection molds. The usual.
What’s surprising about Ignition, though, is where it departs from the save-a-buck formula. It isn’t that I expected the folks at Restoration Games to churn out garbage. Far from it. But Ignition isn’t just Thunder Road Done Cheap. After only a handful of plays, my daughters, who had previously declared Vendetta one of their all-time faves, insisted Ignition was superior. To my own surprise, in many ways I agree with them.
Another day on the road.
Not that you’d know it right away. Thunder Road was a maximalist design. You could see it in every detail, even if you didn’t have access to the multi-tiered Maximum Chrome edition. The cars were assembled from multiple pieces. The helicopters had a spinning rotor. The boards and dice were chunky. And that’s before the expansions added trucks and motorcycles and super-weapons and a deathmatch arena.
By contrast, Ignition is smaller. Suitably so, but still smaller. As before, players command three vehicles as they race across the wasteland, dodging potholes and taking potshots at one another. The accoutrements are gone, none more fundamental than the original game’s whirlybirds, the toy helicopters that served to pursue anyone who broke away from the pack.
Honestly… I don’t miss all that stuff. At least not as much as I thought I would. Ignition is a return to basics. Which might present a problem if those basics weren’t superheated and accelerated to 2400 feet per second.
These are paper mats rather than heavy cardboard. There isn’t much difference.
First, the dice. The foundations are the same as before. Each round, everyone rolls four dice, then takes turns placing them one at a time on those various rigs to hurtle them down the highway. That last die could be used once per round to activate a special bonus, like weaving through traffic or sending your helicopter to bomb someone.
Very little has changed. For the most part, the dice-play is identical. Roll four. Spend three on movement. The last one goes toward a bonus action. It’s every bit as smooth and chancy as ever.
The first little differences only rear their heads once you look closer at those bonus actions. The helicopters are gone, replaced by an action that serves more or less the same purpose. This time it’s a missile, presumably launched from one of your cars, and capable of targeting anyone on the road. The only difference is that the missile doesn’t take up space on the road the way Vendetta’s helicopters did.
Or there’s the way nitro no longer moves a car by the value of the die placed on it. Instead, you get to roll the trick die and move that far. It’s a subtle but smart alteration, reducing the effect of a strong opening roll and making breakaway vehicles less likely to speed across a dozen spaces in a turn.
Or there’s the absence of the repair action. Now, if you know Thunder Road, that might sound as cracked as a wasteland warrior’s sense of self after their warlord has imparted some considerable brainwashing. No repairs? How will you keep your cars from being wrecked?
About that…
Checkpoints allow demolished vehicles to return to the race.
In Ignition, cars don’t get wrecked.
Oh, they can still crash. Or get machine-gunned to bits. Or have a missile turn them into a crater. Or speed across too much gravel after their transmission has been shredded by a landmine. Two hits and a car is out of commission.
But only for a while. Only until the next time you activate it with a die.
The answer is checkpoints. When a car is destroyed, it goes to the most recent checkpoint. From there, it reenters the race, albeit probably a little farther back then before. Also, it will be slower. It takes the car’s entire turn just to reappear on the road.
That is, unless you spend your bonus action on the option that stands in for the old repair action. Now, when you roll your car back onto the road, the jump-start action will allow it to make its full move. In most cases, this is enough to get back into the thick of things. And if not… well, maybe in those cases it’s smarter to save your bonus dice on heat-seeking missiles.
The curved roads look great and add a few new considerations.
The ramifications of this change from permanent destruction to temporary setback are far-reaching. First, I won’t pretend there aren’t any negatives. There are no more car wrecks. These were one of the original game’s coolest sights, the burnt-out husks of defeated racers turned into serious obstacles for the drivers behind them.
That said, this completely removes one of the system’s larger problems: that the back half of Vendetta’s races were considerably less interesting than their opening moments. As players lost their vehicles, turns grew shorter and more perfunctory. Fewer decisions were present. Usually the last third of the track felt like a foregone conclusion.
Now the victory condition has changed. This is a race, pure and simple, and whomever crosses the finish line with two cars is declared the winner. There’s no longer a situation — and a common situation at that — where you’ve lost so any cars that you no longer have anything to do with those remaining dice. Now you just wheel them back onto the track and keep going.
This eases some of the game’s chancier elements. Thunder Road has never been a serious game, but dulling the consequences helps to emphasize its better portions. Namely, that this is also a rather funny game. Smashing a tank into a dune buggy, only for the tank to get thrown into a wall of trash, is now wholly amusing rather than frustrating. By the same token, getting slapped with a missile right before you reach the next checkpoint offers a shadow of the finish-line blues, but its easier recovery means you haven’t lost the race. If anything, this adds some strategy to the game. Rather than investing every one of your best rolls into your fastest car, it’s often worthwhile to spread them around to ensure a damaged vehicle reaches the next checkpoint rather than getting booted back to the start of the track.
Which is all very clever. Because Ignition is definitely the smaller of these siblings, but it doesn’t feel short so much as lean and muscular. Its matches are focused and mean and hilarious. An improbable emotional blend, but one that works thanks to some ruthless development work.
Smoosh!
Everything else survives intact, at least if we’re starting from the baseline rather than the expansion stuff. The special dice, which oversee ramming and damage and shooting, are still a joy to contemplate and handle. The cars still feel distinct without needing any additional rules. The race… well, it’s still Thunder Road. Just better, in most ways.
As my seven-year-old put it, “It was so crazy when my car hit your car into the garbage!” Like the best of the recent resplendence of comedy racing games — Hot Streak, Magical Athlete, and Dino Racer — Thunder Road: Ignition feels like it was custom-built to appeal to everyone in my family, adult and child alike. Vroom vroom, sucka.
A complimentary copy of Thunder Road: Ignition was provided by the publisher.
(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)
California tabletop publisher and game development studio Solis Game Studio is expanding its reach into US hobby retail through a new distribution deal with Southern Hobby, following several years of building its own catalogue through crowdfunding and direct sales.
The Massive-Verse Fighting Card Game, designed by Brian McKay, from Solis Game Studio
Its contracting work has included projects such as the Cyberpunk TCG, with Solis having led game design and development of a prototype that secured licensing for a new game.
Solis also did development work on Emerson Matsuuchi-designed Metal Gear Solid: The Board Game, and last month announced it would be the developer for the official card game of battle royale video game PUBG.
The company said Southern Hobby will distribute new Solis release Six-Sided Seas, as well as Treat, Please! and The Massive-Verse Fighting Card Game, describing the deal as a “major step forward” for the business.
The publisher has previously used crowdfunding to bring several of its games to market, with its biggest success to date 2024’s licensed Massive-Verse Fighting Card Game, designed by Brian McKay, which raised just over $50,000 from about 800 backers.
Solis has also already been selling directly to retailers through its own wholesale programme.
The publisher’s newest release, push-your-luck worker placement game Six-Sided Seas, will enter US distribution on October 2 with a $24.95 MSRP.
The two-player pirate game, designed by Kroze Kresky, is built around an unusual component format, consisting of 32 dice and a 14in by 24in edge-stitched playmat which is rolled inside the game’s box – allowing the title to be presented vertically, horizontally, or with a collapsible hangtab in retail.
Solis has previously said the idea grew from a visit to game stores in Thailand, where Chris Solis saw a store employee laminating a game board to protect it and began considering whether the board itself could instead be made from playmat material.
He said in the blog post, “When I returned home I issued an internal design challenge to my community. What does a game that is a playmat and single component look like?
“We explored a ton of really interesting designs and even did a limited release for one of them but none captured me like Six-Sided Seas by Kroze.”
Solis launched the game at Gen Con earlier this month, and said it sold all the copies it brought to the convention. Several of its scheduled learn-to-play sessions at Gen Con also sold out, according to the convention’s event listings.
In addition to founder and owner Chris Solis, the studio’s team includes developer Bryan McKay, business operations specialist John Brieger, graphic designer Katherine Boils, marketing manager Courtney Shernan, convention manager Sara Jordan and community manager Antonio Gil.
Hench is a strange, lovely beast. It’s as far as it gets from Edward Damon’s previous title, Rex Regnat, and not only because its Saturday morning cartoon vibe is a sharp contrast with that game’s public domain portraiture. They operate in distinct modes. Where Rex Regnat functioned best when everybody was attentive, Hench is a little sloppier. It’s raucous. It doesn’t mind getting grease on its shirt. It wants to throw stuff against the wall.
Players are, rather obviously, a supervillain’s henchmen. Henchpeople, according to union guidelines. It’s a role that rewards those who steal recognition for the most basic of tasks.
Observe my nefarious deeds.
When you get down to it, Hench is about a single question. Really, it’s the same question that undergirds much of modern society. On the one side, there are tangled and mutually beneficial incentives that allow us to have raspberries in winter and mass transit and airplanes that don’t fall immediately out of the sky. On the other, there’s the need to “get that bag,” as the kids say. To benefit yourself. To stay afloat at everybody else’s expense.
Perhaps Lord Nefarious, your supervillain overboss, is the stand-in for capitalism in this particular arrangement. Because in Hench, it’s necessary to work as a team to succeed. But in order to succeed succeed, you also need to stab that team in the back as often as possible.
Picture this: multiple missions, ranging from the banal (dry-clean the boss’s outfit, bully a child) to the labyrinthine (build a volcano lair, file the evil org’s taxes). Even the most trivial of these tasks requires investment from multiple henchpeople. Especially because those do-gooder heroes are always out foiling your plans, requiring regular confrontations that may well end with your face purpled and swollen, but at least you’ve kept Dr. Hero away from Evilcon East for the week.
But then, the problem. The real problem, because heroes are but the first hurdle on this particular marathon. (Marathons have hurdles now??) Everyone who contributes to a mission will earn Lord Nefarious’s esteem. But whomever contributes last to the task, the mook who’s putting the finishing touches on the job when the overboss slouches around — well, they get more credit than everybody else.
This social conundrum informs everything. Whether you bother to help a fellow henchperson fix the deathray. Whether you intercept a hero on the verge of tanking an objective. How obnoxious — how loud — you become at the table.
Everything, from the henchpeople to the heroes to the missions, are done in good humor.
For the most part, Damon leaves the answer to this question — really the answers, plural, because there’s no singular way to respond — up to the players. Hench is a restrained design in that regard. Turns, which are simultaneous, consist of picking cards and then, according to their initiative number, playing them to those various jobs. Within that rubric, there’s room to collaborate or to be as snide as possible. Even to sabotage a rival’s mission on the brink of its success. Hench isn’t proscriptive about it.
I will say, the center of this cake is a little doughy, and not only because we baked a saw into its midsection. Whether we’re talking about the missions, the heroes, or the limited henchperson powers, the tuning never feels entirely right. Hench feels like a game that would have benefited from wackier occurrences, the occasional landmine or salt-water taffy, to keep events lively.
The biggest example is the minions. Each character receives a passive ability and a couple of cards with special abilities. For a game with so much potential, it’s a limited approach. Not even the game’s cooldown system, which prevents any henchperson from playing the same one or two cards over and over again, can break its hold. Instead, players tend to play their best three cards over and over again. Some additional tinkering wouldn’t have gone amiss.
Still, I appreciate a design that keeps the focus where it’s due. Hench might not be the best imaginable version of itself, but there’s no denying that its attention never strays. The whole thing takes maybe half an hour, just long enough to let a few interoffice rivalries develop, but not so long that they grow stale. It’s a thought experiment written… not large, but big enough to illustrate its point. There’s no such thing as ethical collaboration under a dark lord. That’s my takeaway.
Nefarious deeds on cooldown.
Or maybe I just like hanging out with these weirdos. To be sure, the cast is colorful, and while their abilities are limited, they each gesture toward a more robust personality. There’s the Worm, who thrives on punishment and thus seeks out minor failures. The Brain, always out-thinking everybody around him. (Or at least imagining he is.) The Brute is a gigantic hippo. I don’t remember its abilities. But being a giant hippo’s got to count for something.
All in all, Hench is a minor but still appealing second act from an exciting up-and-comer. It isn’t as dense or piercing as Damon’s previous title, but still offers a tight half-hour experience that understands the virtue of getting out of its own way. Very much unlike a dark lord, come to think of it.
A complimentary copy of Hench was provided by the designer. It will be available at Pax West next week.
(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)
Asmodee has named Exploding Kittens CEO Carly McGinnis as head of its global publishing operation, putting an executive who helped transform a record-breaking Kickstarter game into an international brand in charge of a portfolio including Catan, Ticket to Ride, 7 Wonders and Dobble/Spot It.
McGinnis has been appointed Asmodee’s chief product officer and EVP publishing to replace Jean-Sébastien de Barros, who leaves the board game giant after almost a decade at the company. She will report directly to CEO Thomas Kœgler and join Asmodee’s executive management team.
The move puts McGinnis into a hugely influential position within the tabletop industry. Asmodee’s chief product officer has responsibility for its studios, franchise development, licensing and studio marketing, according to the organisational structure the company published ahead of its stock market listing last year.
McGinnis’ promotion – Asmodee bought a 55% majority stake in Exploding Kittens at the end of 2021, and exercised its option to purchase the remaining 45% minority stake last year – also comes at an interesting point for Asmodee’s publishing business.
The company has enjoyed huge revenue growth over the past year, but much of that has been powered by its distribution operation and the booming trading card game market rather than sales of its own board games.
That picture improved during April to June, when Asmodee’s own published board game sales returned to growth – albeit by just 1.8% year-on-year – compared with a 16% increase for board games overall.
McGinnis brings to the role experience of helping build one of the board game industry’s most striking success stories of the past decade.
Last year Exploding Kittens revealed it had sold more than 60 million games as it marked a decade in business – with the company’s growth having extended well beyond the tabletop.
McGinnis helped develop Exploding Kittens’ partnership with Netflix, which expanded the property into mobile gaming and an animated series, and she was a co-executive producer on the latter.
That deal, which covers “scripted and unscripted projects” across film, television series, and other formats, came four months after Asmodee agreed a similar deal with Netflix for screen adaptations of its fellow bestseller Catan.
Netflix first teamed up with Asmodee in 2022, when the board game giant worked in the other direction to create a trio of titles based on Netflix shows Squid Game, Stranger Things and Ozark.
Those games have been followed by a Bridgerton-themed version of Love Letter, while Netflix brought Asmodee’s creations to screens for the first time in 2024 with French film Family Pack, which is based on the Werewolves of Miller’s Hollow card game.
McGinnis said of her new role, “I’ve spent the last decade building Exploding Kittens from one game into a global business, and I’m excited to bring what I’ve learned to the broader asmodee portfolio.
“We have incredible games, studios and people around the world, and I see a huge opportunity to build on those strengths, creating great new games while investing in the brands and franchises with the potential to grow for decades.”
Exploding Kittens has continued to stand out within Asmodee’s portfolio during a difficult period for parts of the US board game market.
The promotion comes as Asmodee is making a wider push into social and party games – a category where Exploding Kittens has been one of its strongest brands.
In March the company agreed to pay up to €250m for French social and party game publisher ATM Gaming, with Kœgler saying the acquisition would combine ATM’s strength in Europe with Exploding Kittens’ strong position in the US. Asmodee has said it expects the social games category to grow at between 4% and 8% annually between 2025 and 2030, compared with about 4% for the broader board games market.
It also launched US party game studio Moodbox Games last year, a move de Barros described at the time as strengthening Asmodee’s presence in a category where Exploding Kittens and Zygomatic were already seeing strong success.
McGinnis’ promotion is the latest in a string of senior personnel changes at the top of Asmodee.
In April Asmodee co-founder Philippe Mouret stepped back from his leadership role, with Julia Marcelin taking responsibility for five studios – Days of Wonder, Repos Production, Libellud, Next Move and Space Cowboys – while veteran Catan Studio head Pete Fenlon handed control of that business to former Spin Master executive Mike Bisogno.
Last November company COO Steve Buckmaster stepped down from his role driving the board game giant’s global distribution operation after almost 24 years with the company and its predecessor business in the UK, replaced by then deputy COO Marjolein Lubberman.
Asmodee said he had helped build its publishing capabilities, diversify its brand and IP portfolio and oversee the launch of what it described as its biggest trading card game to date, Star Wars: Unlimited.
Kœgler said, “I want to sincerely thank Jean-Sébastien de Barros for his instrumental leadership and contribution to asmodee over the years.
“As Chief Product Officer, he brought a strong strategic and structured approach to our product organization and built strong cross-functional teams along the way.
“With these elevated publishing capabilities of asmodee that Jean-Sébastien spearheaded, asmodee successfully launched its biggest trading card game to date and broadly diversified its brand and IP portfolios – laying an important foundation for our next phase of growth. I wish him all the best in his next chapter.”
He added, “It is with great pride that I welcome Carly to the position of chief product officer and EVP publishing, reflecting the strength of the talent within our company.
“Her product vision, international experience and collaborative leadership will be invaluable as we strengthen our global portfolio and partnerships.”
Asmodee is yet to announce McGinnis’ successor as CEO of Exploding Kittens.
2023 feels like a zillion years ago. That’s what I get for having the brain of an old-growth redwood. According to tradition, New Year, Old Year is how I revisit the titles that I declared to be the “best” in any given year. Best Week 2023 featured thirty titles over five days. Let’s see how they stack up today.
Day One! Family Stuff!
Aw. The first day of Best Week 2023 is a snapshot of a slightly younger family. These are all games I played with my kids, then aged four and nine, and it’s interesting to see which have survived the intervening two years and change.
In terms of family play, the big losers of the bunch are Fugitive and Race to the Raft, although not so much because the games aren’t good as because they’re too heady. I’d still be happy to play either of them, but their absence from my daily life is rather pronounced.
Somewhere in the middle, I would put Beacon Patrol and Lacuna. I’m actually pretty regretful that I passed along the former. Given how smitten with Blorp! my children are, despite being grossed out by its overabundance of orifices, I think they would appreciate Beacon Patrol’s gentler setting and more interesting placement puzzle. Lacuna, on the other hand, is still sitting on Cate’s shelf. She always gives it a place of priority when she rearranges her games, and insists she isn’t too old for it. I think it might be time to pull it down to see how it fares between her and her little sister. For whatever reason, though, it’s been cemented in her head as a game that’s worthwhile, something to be treasured, even if we haven’t played it in a good long while.
That leaves two titles. Fit to Print is such a banger. I wouldn’t say it’s appeared much at family time, but I tabled it again earlier this year to show some friends what could be accomplished with that Galaxy Trucker formula, and it was a hit all over again. This is another good candidate for reintroduction. (How’s that for a phrase that makes me sound like a mad scientist?) I think even the younger kiddo could now grasp the basics.
The undisputed leader of the pack is none other than Spots. Honestly, I’m not sure why I didn’t give it the number one position. Contrarianism, most likely. Cate recently introduced it to a group of friends at one of the game days she’s been hosting, and it warmed my heart to see yet another pack of children giggling over the cow that thinks it’s a dog. What a perfect game.
Road to Essen, a competition designed to showcase Vietnam’s burgeoning tabletop design scene at the world’s biggest board game fair, has returned for its second year – with organisers changing things up in the hope of helping turn publisher interest into commercial deals.
The contest was launched last year by Vietnamese board game publisher Everjoy Publishing and its global arm Everjoy Global, in an attempt to help designs from Vietnamese creators break out internationally.
Entrants receive access to workshops and playtesting, while later-stage contestants receive mentoring and jury feedback, with selected games ultimately presented to the international industry at the giant Spiel Essen board game fair in Germany.
Thinh LeHuu’s co-operative card game July, themed around Vietnam’s seventh lunar month and its Hungry Ghost festival, was named the inaugural champion last year from about 160 entries – winning over a judging panel that included Cascadia designer Randy Flynn with its “clever gameplay, polished design and cultural message”.
The 2026 competition is now under way with a theme of ‘Vietnamese Culture’, encouraging designers to draw on areas including the country’s history, legends, beliefs, festivals, folk arts, cuisine, crafts and architecture.
Rulebook cover for July, designed by Thinh LeHuu
But there is a significant change to the timetable this time around: rather than taking the winner to Spiel just weeks after the competition concludes, organisers have scheduled their next international showcase for Spiel Essen 2027.
Claire Ton, head of the organising committee for Road to Essen 2026, told BoardGameWire, “It’s a deliberate decision to give the work its best possible shot.
“A winner chosen in late 2026 can’t have a polished, publisher‑ready game on the Essen floor a few weeks later – and a rushed debut serves the designer least of all.
“Aiming this edition at SPIEL 2027 gives the winning team close to a full year to develop the game, act on the judges’ feedback, line up a publishing or distribution partner, and arrive ready to actually do business.
“It also lets us plan the Vietnamese presence at the fair properly. Getting a Vietnamese game to Essen was never really the goal – getting it there ready to sell is.”
The extra development period addresses one of the main barriers Road to Essen was created to tackle: getting games from Vietnam’s rapidly-growing community of local designers into a form that can be presented effectively to publishers and distributors outside the country.
Everjoy Global co-founder and CEO Ionah Nguyen told BoardGameWire in 2025 that Vietnam had experienced a roughly 400% increase in locally-designed games entering its market in just two years – but said designers continued to face a lack of international publishing and distribution connections, language differences, unfamiliarity with global supply chains and the cost of attending overseas shows.
Almost a year later, Ton told BoardGameWire, “The first edition did exactly what a first edition should: it put Vietnamese design in front of the world and proved there’s real appetite for it.
“We brought the games to SPIEL Essen 2025 and the response was genuinely exciting – our winning title, July, drew particular attention.
“That interest is now powering the next stage. Most of our finalists are deep in development, sharpening their games with everything they took from our international judges and from the fair floor.
“We’re building deliberately for lasting outcomes rather than quick headlines – the first publishing deals to come out of Road to Essen should be the right ones, and we’d rather bring a title to market ready to succeed than rush it out early.
“There’s a lot moving beneath the surface, and the next year is where it starts to show.”
Ton added, “We’re in the relationship‑building phase, and it’s an encouraging one. A lot of conversations were sparked at Essen – publishers wanting to understand the scene, see what’s emerging from Vietnam, and stay close to what comes next.
Thinh LeHuu collects his champion award at the Road to Essen competition in 2025
“What’s promising is that this feels less like one‑off interest in a single title and more like the early groundwork of lasting partnerships, which is exactly what a young design ecosystem needs to grow.
“The titles generating the most conversation share a clear profile: culturally distinctive, visually striking, and easy to pick up and play. Our focus this year is turning that momentum into concrete meetings and, ultimately, deals.”
That intermediary role directly addresses one of the problems Nguyen identified when Road to Essen launched: many Vietnamese designers lacked direct connections to international publishers and distributors.
She told BoardGameWire last year, “There’s no shortage of creativity in Vietnam. What we lack are bridges.”
But there are signs outside the competition that Vietnamese designers are beginning to find international publishing routes.
Mighty Boards edition of Yotei, designed by Huy Pham
Meanwhile Bunny 100 – designed by Hoang Vo and originally published by Everjoy Publishing – has secured a European release through Italian publisher DV Games.
Those developments come as designers elsewhere in Asia have had a striking 12 months in achieving recognition in the European market.
Ton said Vietnamese games’ biggest sales numbers nevertheless remain overwhelmingly driven by the country’s domestic market rather than exports, telling BoardGameWire research suggested Vietnam’s board game market reached about $100m last year at a roughly 10% growth rate.
She said, “Importantly, more of that is original Vietnamese design rather than imports, supported by a fast‑growing creator community and better retail distribution.”
Several Vietnamese-designed games are now reporting sales in the tens or hundreds of thousands of copies – like Bunny 100, Zodiac Rush and Galactic Super Beasts – thanks to the snowballing domestic market.
Ton told BoardGameWire, “The vast majority of those numbers come from Vietnam itself – and I’d argue that’s the most important part of the story, not a limitation.
“It proves there’s a large, real domestic market here: a home audience big enough to make original Vietnamese design commercially viable on its own. That’s the foundation everything else is built on.
“Export is the newer chapter – Bunny 100 into Europe through DV Games and across several Asian markets – and it’s growing, but the headline sales figures today are a signal of domestic strength first.”
This year’s contest will have an overall prize pool of about 500 million Vietnamese Dong – roughly $20,000 – split between the winner and a set of other award finalists.
They include awards for fan favourite board game, best visual design, most innovative board games, the game with most commercial potential, and best cultural representation – as well as categories for best junior creator (aged six to 15) and outstanding teen designer (ages 15 to 18).
Fledgling Dubai board game convention tabletop.me is facing a very different challenge as it prepares for its second year: persuading overseas publishers the commercial opportunity of reaching the Gulf’s growing tabletop market is worth pursuing amid safety concerns around the US-Iran war.
The three-day event, which debuted last November as the Middle East’s first dedicated board game convention, attracted about 3,000 attendees and 55 publishers according to founder Mark Azzam. He told BoardGameWire ahead of the convention’s 2025 launch that he ultimately hoped to create something akin to a “Gen Con of Dubai”, drawing visitors from the UAE and across the region.
The show is aiming for at least 5,000 visitors when it returns between November 6 and 8 this year, Azzam said – but he added that the US war with near-neighbour Iran had already caused some publishers not to return for this year’s event, while others plan to wait until September or October before making a firm decision.
Azzam told BoardGameWire, “The main concern has been staff traveling here. Several publishers have told us that, because of the current situation, their companies are simply not allowing employees to travel to the region for the time being.”
He said that although tabletop.me offers the option to take care of booth builds, staffing, game demonstrator training and product logistics without a publisher representative being present, tighter publisher budgets this year were also factoring into its challenges.
“Many publishers are being more selective this year and focusing on their established convention schedule, such as Gen Con and Essen”, Azzam said, but added: “We believe emerging markets like the Middle East are exactly where brands should invest for long-term growth.”
This year’s show has already signed up companies including Asmodee, Allplay, Dice Throne, Oink Games and Blue Orange Games, alongside TCG brands that participated last year and seven publishers which did not attend the first event, according to Azzam.
But the continuing uncertainty around the US-Iran war makes the task of building an international exhibitor base considerably more complicated than it appeared when tabletop.me first launched.
Dubai and the wider UAE have continued operating as major international business and aviation hubs since the war began in February this year, but the conflict has affected air travel and freight through the region.
Azzam said those developments had clearly affected publisher decision-making, despite day-to-day life and business activity in Dubai having largely normalised following the most intense period earlier this year.
He said, “From our perspective on the ground, the situation has been much calmer than many people outside the region may have perceived. The first few weeks were a little shocking, as you had never experienced anything like this here before, but the UAE authorities responded extremely well.
“Since the ceasefire on April 8, things have largely returned to normal. The airspace is fully open again, flights have normalised, and Emirates and Etihad Airways are operating as usual. From what we see day to day, life in Dubai feels very safe and business has picked up again over the past couple of months. I have remained in the UAE throughout the entire period and have always felt safe here.
“There has definitely been a difference between the international perception, mostly due to the media, and the reality on the ground in the region. While the news coverage naturally focused on the wider conflict, daily life in Dubai has continued largely as normal, and confidence is steadily returning.”
Azzam, who also runs a trio of Back to Games board game stores across Abu Dhabi and Dubai, said that rather than the conflict denting his retail business, demand had actually risen at points during the last few months.
He told BoardGameWire, “Interestingly, it has almost been the opposite of what we expected! It reminded me a little of the early days of Covid, where more people started spending time at home and looking for ways to connect with friends and family.
“We saw a noticeable increase in demand for tabletop games, particularly TCGs and board games. With many large events cancelled or postponed over the past few months, people seemed to turn toward tabletop gaming instead.
“Rather than seeing a decline, our retail business actually grew during that initial period when the conflict started. It was a pleasant surprise, and now that things have settled down, business has largely returned to normal.”
When asked what he would say to publishers whose management has ruled out attending because of regional tensions, Azzam said, “I would tell them that, if anything, the conflict increased demand for tabletop gaming rather than reducing it. We saw that directly through our retail business, where sales, particularly in TCGs and board games, actually increased as more people turned to the hobby.
“Distribution was affected for the first month or so while freight and logistics adjusted, but that has now completely recovered. Products are arriving on schedule again, and the market continues to grow, with new game stores and cafés opening across the region every month.
“From what we are seeing, thankfully, the long-term opportunity in the Middle East remains just as strong as it was before.”
Azzam has spent more than a decade building businesses around that opportunity.
Spotting a gap in the market, the former airline captain funnelled his savings into launching a small kiosk in The Dubai Mall in 2015, before launching his first Back to Games store in Abu Dhabi six months later.
He subsequently built Back to Games into a three-store operation and became co-owner of publisher and distributor Boardgame Space in 2017. BoardGameWire reported last year that Boardgame Space had localised more than 55 games.
Speaking about the Gulf market for board games in general, Azzam told BoardGameWire, “I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that an internationally successful game will automatically sell well here just because it succeeded elsewhere. In reality, brand awareness and marketing are incredibly important in the Gulf.
“People are much more likely to buy a game they have already seen in social media or online, heard about through creators, or know is trending internationally.
“Presentation also matters. The box needs to clearly communicate the game and look visually appealing, as that first impression is often what generates interest.
“Also, publishers should be aware of some cultural considerations, which is exactly where local partners like us can manage easily. We understand the market and can help publishers present their products in the best possible way for the region.”
Azzam added that the show was spending more heavily on marketing this year, using budget freed up from the “significant” first-year setup costs that came with launching the event.
The show is also introducing a rewards programme designed to encourage attendees to try out unfamiliar publishers and games.
Two years might not seem like enough of an interval to warrant a second edition, but Connor Wake’s Out of Sorts is not your average board game. Actually, it’s become something of a counterpoint for me. While Wilmot’s Warehouse has become the proof of concept for what a modern memory game can accomplish, to such a degree that I have played it something like fifty times, Out of Sorts is that but bizarre, that but frightening, that but even more unwilling to guide its players by the hand. Because it is weird, my appreciation is even more boundless.
How weird is it? Here’s the premise: You’ve been abducted by an alien and put to work categorizing their spacefaring library. Presumably the delay of lightspeed means they’ve only recently learned of Melvil Dewey’s book classification system. “There are less racist alternatives!” one might protest. Yes. We have more pressing problems at the moment, but too true. Unfortunately, the alien doesn’t know about those Dewey-free alternatives. All it knows is that humans are good at sorting books. And it owns a lot of books.
What’s this nonsense?
So you sort. And sort. And sort.
I’ve always found it beautiful, our human tendency to see shapes in foliage and gods in static. We are thing-ordering machines, if you want to go that way, with such a talent for hearing music and witnessing divine geometries that we sometimes drive ourselves mad. When we look at the cards Wake has illustrated, we don’t see nonsensical scribbles. We see — so many things. Little projections of our selves. Examinations of our private pareidolia. Here is a hand-tied fly, ready to be cast into the river. There is a tadpole bopping along to a song. Which song? “Barbara Ann” by the Beach Boys. It could be none other.
When the game begins, we receive three categories. These, like everything else in Out of Sorts, have been retouched from the original edition. Perhaps we have been tasked by our alien overlord to organize their xenic scrawl into Death, Math, and Art History. Or perhaps Royalty, Life, and Rituals. Some combinations are easier than others. Some seem impossible. What’s the crucial visual distinction between Reptiles and Monsters? How about Thermodynamics versus Cosmos? Best of luck. We’re gonna need it.
There are two roles. One player is the Sorter, responsible for shelving these cards. In game terms, assembling them into a hand. Everyone else is a Finder. They find the cards, both at the beginning of each round and then when the alien decides to check our homework.
This latter portion is the game’s version of a pop quiz. One by one, the Finders reveal cards from the deck and put them into an order that matches the hand built by the Sorter. It’s analogous to diving into a card catalog for some random book, then immediately identifying where in your personal ordering system you’ve decided to place it. Structural Dynamics of Flow, easy, that’s in the middle. Noblesse Oblige & Other Obsoletions, that goes after the first one. Wheels: The Denunciation. Uh oh, that’s in the same category as the previous title. Fortunately, we created a sub-category that lands it squarely before that one.
Except here we’re faced with alien squiggles rather than readily-identifiable classics of the Western Canon. Sometimes the symbols collapse into a mental mishmash. Other times we spark the magic that is our capacity to organize even the most nebulous of concepts. Within a century, pedants will grouse at one another over which category is truer than the other. Mostly, we’re spinning these categories on the fly, terrified of being fed out the airlock.
These surveillance measures are getting out of hand.
Where this latter edition departs from the original is in its open-ended nature and overall fluidity. The original, if you haven’t played it, was a march to a finish line that probably never arrived. Victory required passing through every one of the game’s checks. Nine in total. I’ve never managed it. Frankly, I’m not actually sure it was possible for normies to accomplish.
This time around, Wake has grown more playful. As before, the game begins with a twenty-minute timer, followed by escalating requests from the alien. Only this time, rather than hoping you’ll make it through all nine rounds, the game assumes you’ll falter. Maybe we’ll deplete our limited supply of minutes. Or maybe the alien will notice the errors in our categorization system. (Adorably, it peeks suspiciously from behind its alien magazine. What we cannot know is that its reading material is smut.)
Either way, we’re given one last chance to sort the deck we’ve created, ordering the entire thing in a panic. The more checks we passed previously, the more we have to sort, but also the longer the alien gives us to accomplish our task. Our performance awards us a final score, tallied for every card we put into its correct place. As conclusions go, it’s far smoother than what Out of Sorts provided before, more of a crescendo than an abrupt termination.
But that’s not all. While our score matters, Wake also rips a page from Jon Perry’s Hot Streak by assigning our rank a post-script to this whole debacle, a one-sentence note right out of a ’90s sports flick. “Bobby went on to play in the Majors. Tom married Queenie. Jerry died of lung cancer at 34 from smoking eight packs a day.” That sort of thing. Only more likely to involve airlocks.
These changes make the new edition gentler in some ways, more approachable, but this isn’t to say it’s been defanged. If anything, the game has been given a rounder shape, one that suits its gameplay so perfectly that it’s hard to imagine it ever occupied a different vessel. In fact, I’d half-convinced myself that it was always this way. I had to go back to the original rulebook to make sure I wasn’t imagining a slightly worse version of the same game.
There are other little additions. The biggest is a variant that sees the alien librarian occasionally interjecting its own recommendations. Sometimes these are helpful, like having the Sorter flip a card around so everybody can see it. More often, they’re petty annoyances, like tossing a book onto the front of the stack or having the Finders assign a title in the Sorter’s place. It’s a small alteration, but worthwhile in how it forces your squad of unwilling astro-librarians to adapt to further impositions.
There’s now an ultra-mean variant where the alien proposes ideas.
All told, Out of Sorts is every bit as good as I remember. Partly that’s because it’s such an improvement that it retroactively persuaded me that this is how the game was always played, a suitable trick for a game about both the fuzziness and indefatigability of creative memory.
But the real reason is because it’s still that same weird memory game, only improved in nearly every way from Wake’s earlier effort. For a game about alien libraries, Out of Sorts is defiantly human. Its illustrations are hand-drawn, its design is iterative, and its central spark is the same promethean fire that is our human capability to organize and imagine. I love its squiggles and crotchety alien kidnapper. I love even more what it reveals about our human capacity to index a shelf of shame.
A complimentary copy of the new version of Out of Sorts was provided by the designer/publisher.
(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)
Ares Games is considering bolstering its website protection after suffering its first ever DDoS attack, which it says left its site inaccessible for about 10 hours across three days of difficulties.
The Italy-based War of the Ring publisher said thousands of fake requests repeatedly saturated its server bandwidth and CPU earlier this week, temporarily preventing some customers from reaching its main website and e-commerce site, which is also used for preorders and crowdfunding pledge management.
Ares director of production Roberto di Meglio told BoardGameWire no customer data was compromised during the cyber attack, adding that he was inclined to believe the company was targeted randomly rather than specifically.
He said, “It’s difficult to assess the exact monetary loss in terms of missed orders. We can assume most of the potential customers affected by the issue will probably come back at a later moment, so the revenue should be delayed but not lost – especially if the customer was visiting for something specific, like a pre-order or pledge manager.”
Ares’ e-commerce infrastructure supports ordinary direct sales alongside preorders and crowdfunding activity. The publisher has continued to use crowdfunding extensively, with its 16th Kickstarter project, Mega Empires: The Far East, completing its campaign earlier this year.
Di Meglio told BoardGameWire at the time that the company planned a combination of reduced inventories, increased prices and product selection alongside “developing our direct sales to make up for the loss of profit through the traditional distribution tiers”.
While Ares has experienced other hacking attempts previously, Di Meglio said this was the publisher’s first DDoS attack. Its server administrators introduced additional security rules in response, and Ares is now considering whether to add further protection such as a DNS proxy service like Cloudflare.
But he added, “The main concern is that every rule or system you implement to stop this type of ‘swarm’ attack potentially might stop or slow down a regular visitor, so you have to find the best compromise between keeping danger out and allowing customers in.”
Anmelden
