by Justin Bell

I spent most of the last few years turning down opportunities to review legacy and campaign games. However, I turned that idea on its head at this year’s edition of Gen Con by picking up not one, not two, but SEVEN games that fit the description of a sizable tabletop investment.

So, I added the following games to the “bag of hauling” in Indy: Regicide Legacy from the team at Badgers from Mars, Mountain Goats: Legacy and Enchanted Ivy (both from Allplay), Forbidden Legacy (Gamewright), Encyclopedia of Monsters (Scorpion Masqué), Codenames: Critical Roll Adventures (CGE), and Mini Rogue: The Council (a roguelike from Nuts! Publishing that features a campaign).

Part of why I jumped back into these types of games is that magical moment when you first open the box. Is there anything better than that first moment, when you start a new campaign game, and you are greeted by the large red “STOP!” sign warning you to not open the presents inside too early?

“Oh, man, that’s heavy,” someone said when they picked up the box for Regicide: Legacy. “What’s inside that thing?”

Campaign games offer such a thrill of discovery. Even I had to admit that opening the Regicide Legacy box was quite a surprise; for the uninitiated, the base game of Regicide is a simple deck of cards. Yes, the deck is a very cool, well-illustrated set of cards…still, it’s a deck of cards, in both simplicity and weight. (The simplicity melts away when you lose for the 20th time in a row.)

Picking up the Regicide Legacy box—just lifting it up!—got my mind rolling on what sorts of secrets were inside. The box cover features characters in silhouette; are there minis in there? Poker chips? 12 separate decks of cards for the 12 “challenging missions” described in the BGG listing?

Over the course of the next few weeks, I’m excited to see what treasures are inside. Additional games that have campaign and legacy elements have arrived after Gen Con, such as Buried Memories, which features one-off plays augmented by unlockables hidden in sealed envelopes.

Hmm…am I suddenly back into campaign games?



I like the idea of campaign/legacy games quite a bit. In fact, during COVID, I spent a lot of time seeking out campaign experiences while I was locked down and looking for something to build on during quieter gaming times at home.

But even before COVID, the only consistent struggle I have faced during my 40+ year tabletop career appears when I try to line up a new campaign. That’s because of the people.

Locking in a group to play the exact same game a few times can be a disaster. Playing the same game 10-12 times? From a logistics perspective, this is a nightmare. Aligning the stars using a Doodle poll to confirm availability? Frightening.

But when I have been able to marry the bodies to a consistent schedule, some of these play experiences have been incredible.

My plays of Pandemic: Legacy Season 1 became my definitive campaign experience. The highs, the lows, the thrills of discovering something new in the next chapter of that game became requirement viewing. For years, we had one of the character cards on our refrigerator, a reminder of memories past. Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated came very close to taking the top of the mountain for me, and somehow we had a group of four players who completed the entire game across just a few gaming sessions. The surprises were great, but the extension of the core game across a funny story became a model I consistently sought out.

Charterstone also fit the bill, as a game that lived on my kitchen table for a few nights while we worked through all the fun unlocks that box provided. Freelancers: A Crossroads Game was so funny my kids quoted some of the app’s dialogue from time to time. More recently, we did the first five chapters of Little Alchemists, and I was thrilled to find the kids so engaged across the total experience. Even though we didn’t see everything in the box, seeing the majority was still a nice surprise.

Like many others, I did a three-game arc of…Arcs: The Blighted Reach, another exceptional campaign experience that took note of how hard it is to get people to play the same game a bunch of times. So, the design of that campaign includes just three sessions, so across two game nights I joined two members of my review crew to take it down. Like those other successful campaign experiences, The Blighted Reach created real memories at the table, things that I still laugh about today.

Beyond these seminal moments, the last few years of playing campaign games have often ended badly. In fact, I find nothing less satisfying than getting a commitment from a group, then learning the (initial) rules for the game and setting up the scheduling for the next few weeks of a new campaign game.

You get the first play session in, maybe a second…then, “it” happens.

“Justin, listen…I just got staffed on a new project in Tuscaloosa,” they’ll say, with texts peppered with sad face emoji. (I’m not an emoji guy.) “Go ahead and swap me out for ____: Legacy, cause I don’t wanna hold you guys back.”

A second of your four-person group suddenly gets flaky, less reliable than she’s always been. “My friend Sally’s in town this Tuesday; I can’t make it for ____: Legacy this week. But I know the game is a ‘swap in, swap out’ situation, so you guys will be fine without me. I’ll be back next week, promise!” One week turns into four, and you now remember that Sally’s the one who bails on you for other activities all the time, making you quietly question Sally’s place in your life.

Earlier this year, the team at Horrible Guild offered me a review copy of The Queen’s Dilemma, a campaign game I badly wanted to try. But I knew it would be a challenge to get a group together in Chicago around the time that I wanted to table it: late spring even, right around the time that gamers start ghosting me for more pleasurable activities, like…summer, nice weather, beach vacations, and the annual summer gaming snooze before things pick back up after Gen Con.

There weren’t tears in my eyes, but I knew it was the right move to pass the offer to another reviewer. “I’m sure someone else has a group,” I said, and I’m still interested in seeing the game for myself. But that takes a lot of planning, and human beings are tricky.



Here’s why I love campaign and legacy games again now: I have at least one standing group in place. That group is my family.

At Gen Con, I picked up those games above with abandon. “Are you sure you’ve got a group for this?” the publishers would say.

“Yep,” I said. “My son will play anything, and now all these games fit for him and the other folks at home. I’m good.”

We did nine of the 15 chapters of Encyclopedia of Monsters in about a week. Mountain Goats: Legacy was originally a three-chapter plan…the day before this article was posted, we finished the sixth of ten chapters. Regicide Legacy is kicking up plays this week. Enchanted Ivy hit the table as soon as I got back from Gen Con; a solo-only campaign is an easy win for me, and I did the first three plays in about 80 minutes. Forbidden Legacy’s first play was completed the day before this article went up. Mini Rogue’s campaign attempt already took place. Codenames: Critical Role Adventures will hit the table in October, along with Buried Memories.

Even though it is not technically a campaign game, I’ve already gotten a handshake agreement with a partner for this fall’s plays of Kingdom Come: Deliverance. (I’m even brushing up on the video game to get ready.) I’m told Cozy Stickerville is something I would enjoy. I’ll try to convince the publishers of Stonesaga that I’m the right man for the job.

I’m aggressively hunting campaign and legacy games that will fit both at home and with hobbyists in my play groups. At home, we are always looking for ways to keep kids off of tablets. If a game is both fun AND gives us a chance to keep them coming back to a good story, we are in. My wife picked up a copy of Mindware’s Ziggurat last year, and across a six-chapter campaign, we dove headfirst into another adventure.

Experiences like this are why I love coming back to this game format again and again. Publishers: keep ‘em coming!

by David Ausloos

The First Spark (No Meeples Were Harmed)

When I started developing Rival Seas, I revived a peculiar little ritual from the making of Dreamscape, one that had somehow become part superstition, part creative compass, and, if I’m honest, part excuse to avoid getting down to "serious" work. One that has helped me kickstart every project since. It's a simple but effective method: build a rough improvised cardboard playground. A small imaginary arena to put pieces on, move them around, and discover what the game wants to become. I've found that this kind of tinkering sparks ideas far more naturally than staring at a notebook. It's a bit like a child playing with toys on the kitchen floor. It creates an intuitive thinking space where mechanics emerge through play rather than analysis. And so, on a bright summer morning I found myself sitting at the table with a board-shape that would later prove to be spectacularly wrong. One thing however was clear from the very beginning: this had to be a maritime game. I've always loved bustling coastal towns, little rural harbors, and the romantic notion of setting sail toward the unknown. Apparently, I also love cutting cardboard at a kitchen table and pretending these unevenly cut pieces represent a functioning economy. That first prototype was rough. So rough it probably needed its own sea-based rescue operation. But somehow it already contained the core DNA of what would later become Rival Seas.

Twinstar Valley, my SPIEL Essen release of the previous year, revealed something I wanted to explore further with Rival Seas. What fascinated me most about Twinstar Valley were its opening turns. You begin with very limited capital, and every coin matters as you struggle to get your company off the ground. Eventually, though, the economy opens up and money starts flowing much more freely. With Rival Seas, I wanted to preserve that specific tension of those early turns until the very end. I wanted every investment to matter, every opportunity to come with a trade-off, and every decision to carry just enough sting to make players hesitate...but never enough to make the game intimidating. By this point, one thing was becoming increasingly clear: Rival Seas was shaping up to be an expert-level game.

The Fine Art of Knowing What You're Building

To keep the economy of the game tight, I wanted players to invest in order to grow, ensuring the cash flow of the player to be challenging to manage. That idea found its way into the design very early through a stockholding system. Buying shares in a container company means committing to it for several turns. You wanted that company to thrive, but just as interestingly, you sometimes wanted it to struggle once your rivals started investing in it as well. Especially when they manage to become CEO of the given company. In many games I've played, stockholding is a source of powerful emotions: the fear of losing control of a company you helped build, or alternatively the fear that other players won't use the company enough to make your investment worthwhile. The stockholding system itself was surprisingly streamlined from the start. Balancing it, however, was another story. In early prototypes, buying shares was too profitable. It created joy-filled moments, ruthless power plays, and enough drama to keep therapists fully booked, but it also overshadowed the game's other pillar: earning money by shipping containers across the sea. The solution turned out to be remarkably simple: reduce the opportunities to buy shares. Suddenly, every share purchase became a weighty commitment rather than an obvious move. The stock market remained exciting, but no longer dominated the game. It transformed into a constant source of tension that lived alongside, rather than above, the shipping economy.

The biggest design challenge, however, was finding a unique action-selection system that felt so organic that players barely noticed how much machinery was ticking beneath the surface. In the end, it took three complete redesigns before it became what I had envisioned. The first version used a rondel. Players moved their markers around it to produce containers and carefully timed their actions, trying to be in the right place when the next opportunity presented itself. It worked but it felt a little scripted. The second iteration replaced the rondel with an action-slot system. Players selected actions from different slots, with less powerful actions offering small bonuses and better intitiative to act, compensating for their lower impact. It was a more flexible design and created interesting trade-offs. But once again, I felt something was missing. I wanted players to have genuine freedom: an open playground where they could adapt, improvise, and outsmart opponents. A place where the game doesn't hand you a script, but throws you into a constantly shifting situation and asks: "So... what are you going to do now?" For that to be possible, the system needed a more organic core. A system not unlike that first cardboad playground I build in the early stages of development to play around with.

The Prototype Finally Stopped Fighting Back

The breakthrough came during a playtest at a local game club, with two critical testers sitting across the table from me, sharpening their feedback like they got paid per emotional scar. We call them "Bruno" and "Jean-Pierre" out of self-preservation. They're the kind of playtesters who will sigh dramatically halfway through a session, get up in dead silence, walk into the crowded hallway, and explain their existential crisis with your game to complete strangers. If your prototype survives them, it can probably survive publication. Your ego, on the other hand, may require a few more playtests. After yet another revised version, Bruno finally uttered the words a designer wants to hear: "It plays well." A brief unsettling silence followed. "...but..." There are few words in game design more terrifying than a compliment followed by "but you could also make it..." Fortunately, I'd had one of those rare flashes of foresight and started recording the conversation that followed on my iPhone. Two hours later, I had a complete philosophical dissection of Rival Seas safely stored in a single massive audio recording. Looking back, it was the most valuable two-hour therapy session I never knew I needed.

Night after night, before going to bed, I replayed Bruno and Jean-Pierre's conversation, hoping my subconscious would do some heavy lifting while I slept. Apparently, my brain was happy to take over the design work, as long as I stopped bothering it during office hours. One morning at the breakfast table, it finally delivered: I noted down a timetrack system that would change Rival Seas forever. The old system worked, but it felt procedural, like the game was quietly filling in paperwork. The timetrack opened up everything. Turns suddenly flowed naturally, downtime nearly vanished, and players finally had the freedom to perform well-timed actions as a reaction to others. Because every action now came with a specific cost. Moving further on the track might offer you the perfect opportunity to act, but it also means handing the initiative to your rivals for the next operations in the shared playfield. Buying another share might be tempting, but if it pushes you too far ahead, your opponents might get several actions before you can react. The timetrack became the backbone of Rival Seas: a living puzzle where every action reshapes the next.

Another key mechanic that slowly revealed its true purpose during development was the Demand system, a deceptively simple idea that would become one of Rival Seas’ defining features. I wanted the market to feel alive: a constantly shifting network of needs driven by what coastal towns actually received. Once a demanded good was delivered, that town's demand should change. This evolved into a rotating queue system of demand markers. After a delivery, the matching demand marker is removed from the town and placed at the back of a queue of demand markers, while the entire line shifts forward. The first marker in the queue then replaces the old demand at the coastal town. The result is a dynamic system that keeps these coastal towns in constant motion. It also adds another layer of importance to initiative on the time track. Getting to act first can mean placing a valuable demand in exactly the right location...turning a small timing advantage into a major opportunity. Sometimes, in Rival Seas, the difference between a good move and a great move comes down to reading the currents of the market. Positioning yourself for future demand is not about luck...it is about making the right decisions before the opportunity even exists.
Shares and dares...

Also crucial in the gameplay is the connection between shares and route building. Once you own shares in a container company, you can use an action to place "Navigation Points" on sea spaces, creating shipping routes for vessels to travel between harbors. When points connect two harbors, ships can sail the route. But, naturally, there is a catch. Every time you use a Navigation Point, you pay a credit from your personal capital directly into the treasury of the company that owns that point. And here comes the delicious twist: for every share you own in that company, you can use one of its Navigation Points for free. This creates a tricky balancing act. Investing in companies gives you access to valuable infrastructure, but using your rivals' networks too often is basically handing them money and politely asking them to become richer. Meanwhile, using routes owned by companies you invested in makes those companies more profitable, allowing you to reclaim part of that wealth through dividends payed out to you at the end of each round. In other words: sometimes you're building your own shipping empire. Sometimes you're accidentally funding your opponent's yacht collection. Finding that perfect balance between cooperation, exploitation, and "wait... why am I making my rival richer?" became one of the core tensions of Rival Seas. Holding the majority of shares in a company makes you the CEO, giving you a small but powerful amount of control. Most importantly, during the payout phase: you decide how many dividends are paid to shareholders from the treasury. But be careful...if the treasury can't cover at least 1 credit per share, the company's stock value drops. And trust me, these treasuries are often painfully tight. Keeping your investments healthy requires careful planning, perfect timing, and constantly watching what your opponents are trying to pull off. Because nothing hurts quite like seeing your carefully nurtured company run out of money thanks to someone else's "perfectly reasonable" decision.

This layered approach to money management is, for me, what makes Rival Seas such a challenging economic system. Every dollar has a purpose, but knowing where to put it, and when, is where the real game begins. You are not just trying to keep your own shipping company afloat by delivering containers that are currently in demand, chasing the highest values on the ever-changing market, and planning profitable routes. You also need the container companies you've invested in to succeed, because their treasuries are what fuel your dividend income. And your rivals know this. They will happily disrupt your plans by timing their actions perfectly, making that crucial delivery just before you are ready to cash in. Since everything in the game is open information, you can't rely on surprises...You have to plan ahead, read your opponents, and leave a little room for someone else’s carefully planned sabotage. It would be rude to assume they haven’t planned anything. In Rival Seas, your biggest threat might not be a collapsing market. It might be that innocent looking player sitting across the table, smiling politely while silently dismantling parts of your unprepared business plan.

Writing this, I realise I have only scratched the surface of what Rival Seas has to offer. It is a game that creates new dramatic situations with every play, because a single decision made by a player changes the landscape for everyone else. I have played it more than 100 times across all its mutations, and even now I still discover new approaches to play. But more than anything, Rival Seas feels alive. It is not just a collection of gears clicking together. Those systems are there, of course, but they exist to amplify the choices players make. Every playthrough spins a new story, complete with different challenges, different opportunities, and at least one decision you'll defend long after it has obviously ruined everything.

The Gentle Art of Calling It Done
Looking back, the journey of Rival Seas stands out as one of the most formative chapters of my humble life as a game designer. And, judging by the number of times I rebuilt the game, possibly one of the most expensive forms of therapy too. I learned the importance of stubornly returning to a core idea again and again, even when that means tearing everything down and starting over from scratch. A game is not finished simply because it works well. That is only the beginning. For a game to truly blossom, it needs to feel alive. I discovered how much I value player interaction, and how it keeps a game from devolving into an exercise in mathematical optimalization. The systems you create are only the stage. It is the players, and the way they interact within that shared space, that create the tension, emotions and unexpected moments, that shape a session.

And now, the final stretch towards SPIEL Essen has begun...that wonderfully chaotic beast where more than 1,700 new games fight for attention, shelf space, and the last remaining scraps of human concentration. Among all that marketing noise, Rival Seas will have to find its place. The words "battle" and "uphill" immediately come to mind, not necessarily in that order. Still, despite our modest booth, one thought keeps me calm: Rival Seas is the game I wanted to make: a compact playing time, a short ruleset, yet filled with difficult choices and intense interaction. So, if you’re at SPIEL Essen this year, come and say hi at Booth 2D130. I’d love to see you, show you Rival Seas, and perhaps convince you that container shipping is far more exciting than it has any right to be. If you take the time to sit down at the gaming table, you will discover an intense experience packed into a surprisingly compact box. A box that looks completely innocent...until two hours later careful planning has turned into cold panic, small-time endaveours have developed into grand shipping empires, and someone realizes the absurdly daring move they laughed at earlier was apparently genius. And honestly? That thought makes me disproportionately happy.

by Marco Canetta

A long time ago in a galaxy on a beach far, far away....

Actually, the beach was in Tuscany, not that far from our home, at least. It was 2010 - long enough ago that many details have faded from memory.

Stefania(Niccolini) and I had recently published African Park; we were working on The Doge Ship and Rhein River Trade; and, above all, we were brimming with enthusiasm, which had spread to the whole family. It all started when our son, during that year’s summer vacation, said to me, “Papino (more or less “Daddy” in English), why don’t you make a game about your job?”

At the time, I was working as a consultant for major mobile phone operators: base radio stations, antennas transmission patterns and gains, dBi and dBd, and electromagnetic fields were my daily bread. The idea of creating a network, with constraints on power, antenna orientation, and interference with other networks, was quite appealing. That day, instead of building sandcastles, Stefania, our son, and I started drawing hexagons on the beach (hexagons were used at that time for representing mobile phone network over maps – perfectly fitting also for a game).

It didn't take long to come up with some initial drafts: a map on which to create the network and various radiation patterns. The patterns consisted of 1, 2, or 3 cubes placed on hexagons, representing the signal intensity, which, when moving away from the antenna, naturally decreased.

The first draft was purely economic: I spend money to build the network, and I earn money based on the locations reached by my signal. An interesting optimization, but not an easy one.

Between 2010 and 2012, while we were completing our other ongoing projects, we continued to develop these ideas. To create a variety of strategies, cards like these have been introduced.

And the map looked like this.

Some “workers” were moving around on the map, identifying the locations (i.e., the hexagons) where the base radio station would be installed and from which it would then spread the signal.

It's Not Time To Make a Change…

Putting aside a prototype for a while might help you see it in a new light and spot its flaws and its potential areas for improvement. The long break due to the development of ZhanGuo allowed us to return to the game later with fresh ideas.

To offer more variety, the map became modular, with modules like this one.

(Personal note: the modularity is always great. However, cutting hexagons is somehow annoying).
In addition to the cards, which still were driving the actions in the game, patents had also been introduced, providing permanent improvements to actions.

In short, all the elements were in place, but another long break was looming on the horizon…

Video Railroad Killed the Radio Star (?)

Working on Railroad Revolution - a game that had something to do with building a network - brought the project to a halt once again. The subsequent expansion of Railroad Revolution, Railroad Evolution and other projects that had taken shape in the meantime left the Wireless prototype gathering dust on a shelf.

There was a bit of a scare with the release of Smartphone Inc., a great game that - fortunately - had a different game flow and, in some ways, a different theme. All in all, that game was not “interfering” with our project. The real interfering factor was the time. We were aware that the rapid evolution of the board gaming world would render the prototype outdated and that, if ever revived after years, the project would require complete rework.

A New Hope

Winter 2023. A quiet period. COVID has been left behind, the development of Zhanguo: The First Empire was at the end, the prototype of Kingdom Crossing was already satisfying: a good time for new ideas. Personally, I’ve always been fascinated by the colorful cards of Ticket to Ride, and I was wondering what a game might be like that used colorful cards for more complex actions (sorry, we often tend toward complexity…).

Ok, but what should I do in this game? Certainly not a railroad network, I thought.

Why not revisit some concepts from Wireless, in a totally new form and with a totally new gameplay? And in a short time, here come some dual-purpose cards…

...and a fairly detailed playerboard with a summary of the available actions.

The basic idea was: if I play several cards, I have access to stronger actions.

(Fun fact: The playerboard in the example belongs to the yellow player and features an image of Nikola Tesla. By pure coincidence, since this version of the game never left our house, the final version designed by Harald Lieske also features the same combination Tesla + yellow).

The “network” would be created by placing tokens on a modular map like this one. The number on the hexagon represented the difficulties in installing a base station there.

Rather than introducing different types of resources (both abstract and concrete, such as knowledge and experience, physicals antennas, supports and infrastructures for antennas, electrical and electronic equipment, energy, technicians, and collaborators…), we decided to condense everything into simple cards, which could eventually be combined with money.

As far as I recall, we played only a very few turns of that prototype. The generic map wasn’t helpful (too generic) and didn’t provide any direction.
We soon put together a map focused primarily on the locations (i.e. Europe and U.S.) where Marconi, Tesla, and other scientists began their research and experiments.

(I admit, we created the map by borrowing map fragments from a game I like a lot).

And the cards evolved accordingly…


I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For

However, there was something about the card mechanics that didn’t quite convince us. Or, at the very least, that didn’t quite satisfy us.

The idea came to us while playing around with some $ tiles from Railroad Revolution.

What would happen if the coloured cards became simple coloured tiles, maybe in the same size of the banknote above, and if having more or fewer of them affected the cost of the action? And what if I compensated for the missing tiles with $? And, to prevent the game engine from “exploding,” how would it feel if every action taken weakened the next one? And finally, what would the game be like if I could use money as a wild card or as a filler to make up for any shortcomings?

The answers ended up on an oversized game board like this one.

Finally, the game was heading in the direction we wanted. In short, in addition to the action tiles (which temporarily had flags on the back)…

… other tiles were added that simply “filled” the spaces - the Tycoons.

The development of the playerboard and the map was quite complex and went through numerous versions, released between 2023 and 2024, again with (albeit useful) breaks related to the completion of Kingdom Crossing.

The signal tokens had also found their place and their role on the playerboard.

Finally, the Personal targets had arrived as well - especially useful in the early games (when in doubt, I’ll just grab the flags…).

All the pieces were now in place…

SPIEL Essen 2024

A game with this complexity and these dimensions certainly isn’t right for every publisher. And time at the trade show is limited. So, we had to choose our meetings carefully. By chance, Bier Pioniere caught our attention and therefore we wrote to Spielefaible. We had a cordial meeting, during which we found many points on which we were in complete agreement. And a few months later, our journey together began.

And with Spielefaible came the final major revolution: turning hexagons into rectangles meant redesigning almost the entire game. Transmission patterns, patents, objectives… A lot of game parts were affected by this change. But this change was a bold finishing touch.
We went from this:

… to this:

SPIEL Essen 2026

SPIEL Essen 2026 will be the final destination of this long journey I tried to resume here. And, even if I often used the term “I” throughout this diary, this has been a journey we took together, not only with Stefania, but also with our daughter and our son, who are not only our main playtesters but also precious help. For example, in contrast with our prototypes, rather essential, we had a nice cover image made by our daughter.

Now, all we have to do is wait a little longer to finally see the game on a (XL) table. Our son and our daughter, who are grown up now, will obviously be in Essen too.

“Papino, why don't you make a game about your job?”
Done!

by Steph Hodge

[imageid=9277257 medium rep]▪️ WizKids (I) announced the release of Marvel: Remix the Cosmos. From designer Bruce Glassco (Betrayal at House on the Hill). If you love Fantasy Realms you have to check out Marvel: Remix and now the Cosmos Standalone expansion. This perfect filler plays in 20 minutes for 2-6 players.

From the newsletter:





▪️ Paverson Games announced the release of the new expansion Distilled: Cocktails to arrive this September. From designers Dave Beck and Richard Woods, this is a new big-box expansion for the hit Distilled. This game is for 1-5 players and plays in 45-150 minutes. If you are like me, you are ready to roll the dice!

From the newsletter:



▪️ STYX from Don't Panic Games and by designer Pierre Lahmi. A gorgeous new auction game for 2-6 players that plays in 45 minutes.

From BGG:




▪️ Flip 7: Liquid Death from The Op Games is out now. From designer Eric Olsen, this is a new edition of the very popular Flip 7. It is The Op, so we get to have all of these amazing IP editions of small card games like this. Choose your favorite flavor and enjoy, or if you are like me, collect the series as they might all just be a little different! Liquid Death has some deadly twists!

From BGG:

by Bonghwan Ju

A Presidential Election... in South Korea??

President Maker is an election game in which you become a candidate for president of South Korea and compete to win the office.
If you live in a country where democracy actually works, you've probably taken part — as a voter — in that peculiar ritual we call an election.
(Don't worry. I'm not here to start a political argument.)

My point is simply this: elections — and politics in general — sit very close to our everyday lives, which makes them wonderful material for a game that people can connect with and get absorbed in.

The heart of an election is the same everywhere, after all.
Get as many votes as you possibly can from the voters.

And the lineup of political forces that fills out an election isn't so different from country to country either.
Conservatives and progressives face off, some players hold the middle ground, and a few strike out on their own, independent of everyone else.
For that reason, I believed this game could resonate with board gamers well beyond its Korean setting — anywhere democracy is genuinely at work.

Where the Idea Started: A Bag-Building Voting System

South Korea's presidential election is beautifully simple.
Any adult may vote, the votes are tallied nationwide as one big sum, and whoever finishes with even a single vote more becomes president.
That means campaigning in a region where you're politically at a disadvantage is never a completely pointless exercise.
Squeezing out one more vote — anywhere, by any means — can decide the whole race.

When election season comes around, Korean politicians visit traditional markets and eat cheap street food, almost as if they'd all agreed on it beforehand.
Presumably to project an image of being a man or woman of the people.

One day, watching exactly that scene on TV, a question popped into my head:

"How many more votes did they ACTUALLY gain by eating street food at that market?"

Nobody could guarantee that a single visit to a market translates into extra votes.
But for a politician who needs to make themselves known, it's surely better than doing nothing at all.

And that's when I decided I wanted to take the subtle, undeniable gap between "eating street food at the market" and "doing nothing" — and turn it into a game mechanism.

I came to define that gap like this: even if no single move converts directly into votes, repeatedly showing yourself to voters gradually raises the probability that someone out there might cast a vote for you.

Let's dissect how an election works, mathematically.
In the end, it's an equation produced by just two variables: approval rating and turnout.

In a region where my approval rating is high, the higher the turnout, the more votes I'm likely to collect.
By the same logic, in a region where my opponent's rating is high, the lower the turnout, the better for me.

That felt like an excellent starting point. And turning it into a game mechanism wasn't so difficult. Put tokens into a cloth bag equal to each candidate's approval rating, then draw tokens equal to the turnout — that alone looked like a convincing election game.

I set that as the core mechanism and began designing, layering the many other elements of an election on top of it.

Winning the Hearts of Five Regions

President Maker features five regions, including Seoul (the capital area).
They're based on South Korea's real geographic and administrative divisions, the do(도) — provinces.

Map of South Korean administrative divisions

Political leanings in Korea often differ sharply along these provincial lines.
So depending on a candidate's Political Orientation, some regions are a home turf while others are hostile ground where you'll receive no welcome at all.

In this game, each of the five regions takes one Political Orientation — Progressive, Center-Progressive, Conservative, Center-Conservative, or Neutral (the capital area) — while the four candidates players can choose from are Progressive, Conservative, Centrist, and Independent.

Political Orientation has a big effect on the game's initial setup.

- A Progressive candidate, for instance, starts at rock bottom in a Conservative region — and vice versa.

- The Centrist candidate leads nowhere, but begins with a middling Support level everywhere.

- The Independent candidate has the lowest name recognition in every region (much as in the real world).
But — unlike in the real world — they carry the underdog's power to flip the whole board.

Deciding which Political Orientation went to which region took a fair bit of thought. Political sensitivity in Korea has been climbing for years now, and it's no longer something you can treat lightly. Declaring outright that this region is progressive and that one conservative carried real risk, even when it happened to be true. Such a setup could poke at regional resentments, or lead players who'd gotten a little too invested in the game to genuinely offend one another. So I chose to randomize each region's Political Orientation instead — accompanied by the slightly absurd premise of "South Korea in a parallel world."

The result was that a region known in reality as staunchly conservative might come up as progressive, producing situations you can simply laugh off together.

Who Actually Shows Up to Vote?

The other thing I wrestled with while setting up the five regions was population — that is, the number of voters. As I mentioned, this is an election where a single extra vote wins, so naturally the more populous a region is, the more it matters. Seoul, the capital, was set as the most populous region, just as it is in reality. It therefore becomes, quite naturally, the key battleground where every candidate fights over support.

The other four regions hold equal status as provinces, but when I looked up the real numbers, their populations turned out to differ quite a bit. Reflecting that faithfully, though, would have assigned each region a fixed absolute value based on population — and that didn't look desirable from a balance standpoint. So every region outside Seoul was given an identical population.

Someone might think:
"All four regions with the same population? Won't the game feel flat?"

That's half right and half wrong. The population here represents the maximum possible number of voters in a region. And just like in the real world, not everyone in a region actually turns out to vote. Some regions are keenly interested in politics, others much less so. That ratio of actual voters to potential voters is what we call turnout — the Engagement Level in this game.

At the start of the game, every region sits at the lowest point of its Engagement Level. As play unfolds, various interactions raise interest in the election in some regions while leaving others relatively cold. In other words, turnout starts to diverge from region to region.

Each region's importance as a source of votes therefore emerges organically during play. A region whose Engagement has climbed sky-high becomes a genuine battleground. (So sometimes a region climbs higher in Engagement than Seoul itself!)

The Dilemma Between Popularity and Attention

Think about what politicians do when election season arrives. I've already mentioned the traditional market visits, but fundamentally, the thing they care about most is making themselves known to people. One of this game's core actions is the Campaign Rally — putting your face in front of voters.
During the Campaign Rally, each candidate may visit only two of the five regions. (You have one body, and time is finite.)

Every candidate picks their two regions and reveals them simultaneously. Then, some regions may overlap with other candidates' choices, while others may be visited by one candidate alone. And here an interesting dilemma appears.

In a region you visit alone, your Support level rises by 2. You had all the attention to yourself.

In a region several candidates visit together, attention is split. Each of you gains only 1 Support level. But a region that politicians swarm to is also, by definition, a politically important region. Voters there feel "our region matters," and more of them turn out to vote. That region's Engagement level ALSO rises by 1.

However high your Support climbs, if people don't make it to the ballot box, it never converts into votes. Conversely, even in a high-Engagement region, votes are hardly guaranteed when you're locked in a fierce fight with the other candidates. For these reasons, each of the game's three Campaign Rallies produces a genuinely interesting decision.

Be Bad — But Only Just Enough

We don't have to think badly of politicians.
But when building a game on a political theme, scheming, slander, and dirty tricks were the first things that came to mind, and there was no helping it.

So yes: the action you'll take most often in this game is running political risk to smear and tear down your opponents. Actions are performed mainly through Political Cards, and they fall roughly into "fairly decent," "bad," and "very bad."

A "fairly decent" action means cooperating across the aisle, or honestly appealing to your supporters for their votes. No danger — and negligible effect.

"Bad" actions offer far more powerful, far more tempting effects. Spread a rumor to slash a rival's Support level, or push a region's Engagement up and down to suit your needs. But every time you take one of those powerful actions, you receive a Risk Card — the embodiment of political risk. The back of a Risk Card shows a risk value between 1 and 3, but players can't check it.

And here I introduced another enjoyable dilemma: something close to a game of chicken.

At the end of a round, all players reveal every Risk Card they've collected and total their risk values. The candidate with the highest total is branded a corrupt politician and watches their core supporters walk away. The candidates with the second- and third-highest totals suffer nothing at all — because the press only ever chases the biggest story.

So throughout the game you're constantly monitoring how many Risk Cards everyone else is taking. All so you can commit your "bad" actions in just the right amount. You only need to avoid being the worst person in the room.

"Watching" Election Night

The highlight of this game is the Vote Count. Every single thing a player does is ultimately in service of squeezing out one more vote right here.

What's unusual is that although the Vote Count is the phase that decides the whole game, players have no way whatsoever to influence the outcome during it.
All you can do is watch the count unfold. Exactly as if you were watching election night coverage on TV. (But of course, the Vote Count is nothing but the result of everything you've already done.)

The Vote Count proceeds one region at a time, through all five in order. In each region, Vote Tokens equal to each candidate's Support level go into the cloth bag, and tokens equal to that region's Engagement level are drawn out. The tokens in the bag are the voters; the tokens drawn are the supporters who actually showed up and cast a ballot. With every token drawn, the candidates' markers advance along the Vote Count Track in real time. When the final region finishes counting, whoever leads the track is elected president.

The Vote Count always produces cheers and groans at the same time.

"My Support is that high and this is all I get? Where did my supporters go instead of voting?"
"Thank God — both of my two supporters turned out!"

A drama unfolds, just like watching the real broadcast. Designing the Vote Count as a spectator experience was both the most daring choice and my personal favorite as a designer. Technically speaking, it is an ordinary scoring phase stretched out horizontally into a long sequence. All the potential points a candidate has accumulated by working the 5 regions meet the probabilistic factor of Engagement and are converted into actual points, one at a time. I couldn't imagine a better way to express the moment an election is decided. And it really did work!

One Last Thing

There's plenty more I agonized over in capturing the many faces of an election, but this diary is running long, so I'll stop here. I hope you'll experience the finer details for yourself at the table.

A couple of tips for enjoying the game more: try substituting Korea's five regions with regions from your own country. The immersion goes much deeper. Also, when you play a Political Card, say its title out loud. Rather than "I'll move Region A's Engagement track back by 1," it's far more entertaining to declare: "I Expose Corruption in Region A — and so Engagement there drops!"

Elections are undeniably fun material for a board game. Someday I'd love the chance to design a game around a different electoral system.

Thank you for reading all the way to the end!

by Justin Bell

After a recent business trip, I returned home and made a few updates in my home office before shutting down the laptops. I walked out of my office and took a peek to my right, into the game closet.

My closet is a small nook with an actual door (I don’t want visitors to necessarily see the depths of my obsession) that includes the hookups for a washing machine, tile floors, and just enough shelf space to hold my collection. It’s also the room where I keep the two halves of my Game Topper game table and the Costco folding table it lives on top of when I host game nights.

Between a smaller shelf facing the entryway and a larger set of shelves to the right, I’ve got space for a mix of about 200 games, depending on box size. But space is getting tight. If you ask my wife, space is already pretty tight. I only keep about 10% of the review copies I get each year and I already have a sizable personal collection, so we are almost completely in “one in, one out” territory.

It is time to make hard decisions. Only the cream of the crop is going to stick around when I’m done with the current purge.



I have visited friends who own game collections that number in the hundreds. I have a couple friends with collections that exceed a thousand titles. I have an industry connection who has north of two thousand games. I’m sure someone will respond to this article with thoughts on why they will never part with a single member of their three or four THOUSAND game collection.

Many of you are collectors, an impressive hobby in and of itself. I know many people buy games with the express goal of never playing most of their games, adding boxes purely to have them live on their shelves. Sadly, they never hear the voices coming from the boxes.

“Please, play me!” the box seems to be saying. “I thought you bought me to love me.”

“In a way, I did,” you say. “I bought you to love you, but only to look at you, to admire you from afar. No one will ever shuffle your cards, or manipulate your components, or unfurl your board. No, handsome $82 board game product, you will remain here, on shelf 134 of my room-wide Kallax, for eternity.”

“But, I was made for play! I was produced in a factory far from here to be appreciated by the players, on a table! This shelf will not do!”

“Quiet down, handsome $82 board game product,” you reply. “The decision is final. My shelves are a museum, and I look forward to seeing your smiling side box art staring back at me when I walk past you on the way to the kitchen.”

At my house, I only possess games for the purposes of semi-regular play. When those games are not getting enough play, I move them out. It’s strictly business. Some people have a library of hundreds of books that collect dust; others, a liquor cabinet full of spirits that never get consumed. To each their own.

My collection is reaching a breaking point. I used to believe that I needed to own no more than 52 games, because I play games often enough to get at least one of my own games tabled every week. Reviewing games has changed that calculus, because now most of my game nights are either review game nights, family game days, play con events, or instances where I enjoy the collections of others. Thankfully, there is a lot of crossover for the latter, so when someone wants to table a game that I also own, I nod in approval…I’d love to play your copy of Orléans, because I haven’t played my copy all year.

This has helped me focus on the current exercise. I want to winnow these 200 games (technically, 205 games, per the BGG link to my collection) down to about a hundred this year. That mix will mean about 50 family/party games and about 50 hobby games. That means the games in the Maybe Pile are going to go soon, and I’ll be a little pushier to ensure those get played quickly.

The games that I think I love enough to keep, but don’t ever suggest tabling, have to go, too. If it’s a game that is out of this world, truly the cream of the crop, best in class for its respective category, it stays.

If I love the game, and anyone else I know also loves it and plans to keep their copy, my copy is a goner. If a game is not on the personal Mount Rushmore of a category, that game is gonna hit the streets. For example, I count on five specific titles to keep me happy on the nights I vote for party games: Wavelength, Just One, Codenames, Caution Signs, and Decrypto. Those games are more than enough. But what about Belratti? OK, alright, fine…I can make room for six.

The auction game section is full up: Stockpile: Epic Edition, Amun-Re, The Princes of Florence, Container, and Railway Boom. For Sale will stay because I want to have a quick auction game option. Auction/bidding mechanics are all over the place at my house, in many forms, including in titles like Coimbra and all of the train games.

The Lacerda collection previously held as many as ten slots in the collection, and now it is down to seven. No purging needed there; the current selection is tight. Sitting in the same zip code as the Lacerda games lies Carnegie, my #2 game of 2022. I think Carnegie is genius, but even writing this paragraph gives me pause: I haven’t put Carnegie on a table in more than two years.

I’ve played Carnegie a few times on Board Game Arena, a place where I KNOW I will play it more than I will play my physical copy at home. That means Carnegie and its expansion are getting moved to the donation pile. This hurts my soul, but I know it’s the right move. While I love the beauty of that board and the satisfying nature of play, it doesn’t come out enough to justify its space in my collection even a moment longer.



Maybe that’s it, then. It’s not only the fact that a game has to be the cream of the crop. It has to draw enough attention that I NEED to play a physical version of it at least once or twice a year.

That made the purge exercise even easier.

Valeria: Card Kingdoms? Exceptional, and my favorite of the “roll dice, get stuff” genre. And, a goner, because I haven’t felt the emotional connection to table it in a couple years now. Ayar: Children of the Sun? A personal top-10 pick from 2025…and, a game that I have not played since I wrapped up my review plays, so it is getting moved into the donation pile. Illiterati? Love it. But word games don’t surface as often in my house any more, so 1973’s Montage will be the only title I need to fit the word game/association bill for the time being. That means it is time to find a new home for Illiterati.

The exercise continued deep into the night I began drafting this article.

Huge fan of The Red Cathedral. But its expansion, Contractors? It was a mixed bag in my play groups, and I haven’t integrated the expansion content in the plays it has gotten since. So, the expansion has to go. The Mombasa redux, Skymines? A blast. The card system is something I still admire. I just haven’t admired it enough to put Skymines back on the table, and every time I go back to re-read the rules, I find myself more enamored with something else that I want to table instead. Love the game, love those storage tuckboxes, love that the game got a retheme. But Skymines is moving out.

For years, I screamed to the masses that designer Martin Wallace’s most underrated design was the skirmish game Wildlands. I still think the game is badly underrated. Those feelings haven’t helped me push the game to the table more, so it’s a goner too.

Magnate: The First City? Love it. It’s hard to find a legitimately fun city builder that plays in about an hour, even at the full player count. But the box is a behemoth, and more importantly, a friend in my local playgroups is never getting rid of his copy. If I can play his, I don’t need mine. The third shelf actually thanked me when I moved the Magnate box off the shelf.

“Thanks,” Shelf Three said. (I think I heard its voice, but that may have been the cocktail I had earlier that evening.) “I wouldn’t mind some card games living on top of me for the next few months. My back is killing me.”

All in, I pulled 33 games off the shelves. I took a moment to stare at the now-former members of my collection because I wanted to be sure. Am I really going to move these games out? It felt like the right decision, but I wanted to give the games one last chance to tell me that I am wrong.

Sometimes, there’s the pull of sunk cost. A couple of these games cost a pretty penny at the time, and maybe I don’t want to see them go just yet. In other cases, a portion of a game is something I love even if the complete package is an up-and-down affair. For example, maybe one game mechanic really sings to me, such as the rondels of Sabika, the real-time play of Wildstyle, and the engine-building magic of Raising Robots. But in each of these cases, I haven’t really made eye contact with these boxes in at least a year.

After piling all the purged games back in my office, I walked back into my game closet to stare at the remaining games one more time. Is each one a game I can really see myself trying to push the table if I get to pick something for an upcoming game night?

One by one, I revalidated my feelings. I still have some work to do, to clear some more space. But for now, the collection is all cream. Now I just have to clear more time to play my favorites.

by Kristian Amundsen Østby

Creating Memories
Two years ago, I stood on the show floor at SPIEL Essen with my daughter Maria, watching strangers play a game we'd made together. That game was Gardlings, and it was hers as much as mine. It was her first design, my however-many-th. And seeing strangers enthusiastically play her game wasn’t just a proud memory for her. Anyone who’s been a shy teenager knows it can be a period full of insecurities, and an experience like this can be a valuable source of confidence.

This October, it's my son's turn. Aleksander is twelve, and this is his first game. He's genuinely excited about it, and hopefully the experience can be as meaningful and create just as fond memories for him as it did for Maria.

So, here's the story of how Buried Memories came to be.

It Started With a Mess of Tiles

I’ve been interested in game design for many years, and I’ve always been fascinated about games that are truly analogue. And I don't just mean "non-digital." I mean games that aren't tied down to a fixed play area, a board, or a grid. Games that are looser and more organic, and in a way break the fourth wall of games. Many dexterity games do this (like Jenga, Bausack, and Soccer). But it is not that common in regular board games, because it can be difficult to define clear rules for chaos and to convert analogue measures into discreet points.

One evening I found myself staring at a box of tiles I'd tossed in there at random, and thinking: could this mess be the framework for a game? You could only take tiles from the top of the pile, tiles that weren't covered. Sometimes you'd spot the corner of something interesting further down, and you could dig toward it, without knowing what you'd actually find along the way.

That felt like digging. And I've wanted to make a game about digging since I first played Dig Dug on my computer in the 80s.

The First Attempt (Which Didn't Work)
The early version had players start with basic digging equipment. You could take two tiles per turn, upgradeable to three or four. I loved the idea of unearthing a big, boring stone tile only to find treasure hiding underneath it.

Except the game didn't do much of that. It felt clinical. Predictable. There were no real surprises, no roller-coaster moments. Just a steady, repeated process. I wanted delightful drama, this was just dull disappointment.

So, the prototype went into my drawer of shame, which is where prototypes go to think about what they've done.

Enter Minecraft and My Son
Some time later, my son Aleksander and I were playing a Minecraft-themed board game (If you don't know Minecraft, it's just Dig Dug for Generation Z).

Partway through, he said something like: "It'd be cool if you could actually dig, like, dig through tiles or something."

It didn’t take long to retrieve the prototype from my drawer. We started tinkering with different equipment, different soil types. But the big emotional moments were still missing. The fixed draw just didn’t create drama.

One mechanism that is famous for creating drama is push-your-luck. I wasn't thrilled about making this into a push-your-luck-game. I've already done push-your-luck-games, and I don't like doing the same things twice. Also, the genre can feel very random. But we had an idea for making it feel different.

The Trick: Push-Your-Luck With No Required Luck
Tiles have two sides. Throw a pile of them into a box, and roughly half will land face-up, half face-down. This is an awesome and underrated feature of tiles (I actually explored this feature in my 2011 game Mammut).

Now, on one side of each tile, we put one of six “creepers” (like spiders, snakes and so on). On your turn, you can keep drawing tiles as long as you don't draw two matching creepers. Since half the tiles are already face-up, you're not gambling blind. You can see a lot of what you're risking. Play it safe and only take what's visible. Play it wild and go after the good stuff regardless of what's face-down. Or play it smart, and only take a risk when the reward is big.

It's push-your-luck where the luck is optional and you actually have a lot of control. That distinction turned out to contribute with exactly what I was aiming for.

We also decided the tiles themselves shouldn't be plain squares with symbols. They're have custom shapes, vases, statues, artifacts. Because digging up a chunk of a vase should feel like digging up a chunk of a vase, not like picking up a tile that says "vase."

The Missing Ingredient: Care
At this point the game worked, but something felt flat: it was a set-collection game, and early test players didn’t seem to care much about what anyone else was doing. Even though the game was interactive (how and where you dig certainly affects the other players), players didn’t pay attention to what the others collected. If you didn’t care what the others collected, the game didn’t feel very interactive. Everyone was mostly collecting their own stuff in their own corner of the table.

The fix was quite simple: put a scoring track on the table and make it a race to 50 points. Same underlying scoring, very different feeling. The moment test players could see each other advancing towards the finish line, they started paying attention to what they were collecting. This improved the level of experienced interaction. What tiles you picked up and left behind suddenly felt much more crucial.

The Envelopes
We had several cool ideas for different tile effects, but I wanted to keep the rules simple to make sure this was a low-entry game. However, the added variation from the new tiles was also very good.

We decided to divide the contents between five sealed envelopes. You unlock them one at a time as you play, each one introducing a new twist or tile type. We deliberately kept this short: You should feel real progress early on, and be able to unlock the full game within about 8-10 games.

The Art
Somewhere in the middle of all this, French illustrator and cartoon author Nathan Lemonnier agreed to do the art, and this leveled up the game. His art is distinctive and playful, in a style you don’t often see on board game boxes. And he didn't just illustrate what we'd built, he came up with its own universe, and gave the artifacts their own half-explained mythology. You're not just digging up "a vase" or an ancient artifact. You're now digging up strange memories. It also matched perfectly with the concept of the envelopes, as he could add theme and meaning to them, and the envelopes would tell a little story.

The Return to SPIEL/Essen
So, that's the game, built from a box of loose tiles, a Minecraft-related boardgame night with my son, and a lot of trial and error.

In October, we'll be at SPIEL Essen together, setting up the table, teaching strangers the art of combined archaeology and paleontology (contrary to common academic belief, these disciplines can absolutely be combined).

I did this with Maria two years ago for Gardlings, and it remains one of my favorite memories as a dad. Now I get to experience this with my son. Aleksander has already asked if he can explain the rules to people, and if he ends up explaining the game to you, even though he might seem a little shy, you should know that he is quite good at hiding his pride.

by Vladimir Suchy

DESIGNER'S DIARY - TRISTAN

BEGINNINGS

Hello everyone, I am Tristan Geeraert, and I’m happy to share that my first board game Chronocritters is being published by Delicious Gamesand will be released later this year at SPIEL. The design of Chronocritters started eight years ago (somewhere in 2018), more or less one year after I started to get really engrossed in the board gaming hobby. By that time, I had already developed a preference for euro games and especially those that use worker placement (with a twist) and dice manipulation as mechanics. To me, the main advantage of worker placement (beside liking the mechanic itself) is that games incorporating this mechanic are, for a large part, self-explanatory, because turns are straightforward (placing a figure on the board) and the effect of the different action spots can often simply be read from the board. I think that such a rigid core leaves room to go a little deeper into the intricacies between different actions and certain sec-ondary effects, without ending up with an overly complex ruleset.

Initially the idea to create a game of my own was purely a passion project, something I wanted to create for myself as a personal challenge and which I could share with family and friends when finished. However, while getting more and more caught up into the hobby, the desire grew to make my game into an official product that could be published and brought into the market. During the first two years of working on the game, I created laser cut MDF game boards and player boards which felt advanced (at least for a prototype) and which led to very tangible playtests. While the game looked cool and beautiful, it was not very practical from a design point of view. Whenever certain things changed, I often had to redesign components which was much more of a hassle than if I had just worked with print and play prototypes. However, I enjoyed the creation process, so I didn’t mind it back then. After all, there was no publisher in the picture with whom I had to share a prototype yet. But the desire to approach a publisher started to grow.

CONTACTING THE PUBLISHER

Fast-forward to autumn 2021: I still hadn’t approached any publishers, but I had done some research on which publishers nearby (in Belgium or the Netherlands) would be possibly interested in the heavy euro game that I had created. At that time, the game was still called "Test of Time" instead of Chronocritters. Without any specific reason, I suddenly decided that it was time, so on that same day – two weeks before SPIEL 2021 would start – I contacted the owner of the Belgian publishing company, Game Brewer, through a DM. I introduced myself, asked if I could show them my prototype during the fair and send them some photos of my latest MDF game board. Looking back at it and acknowledging that my way of communication might not have been the most professional, it was very extraordinary that my request was accepted nonetheless and that I indeed had a chance to present my game. After a playtest by the Game Brewer team, they expressed their interest but indicated that the game was still too complex and contained too many items. Back then the game consisted of eight rounds with five workers per player (not counting two additional unlockable workers) and almost 100 dice. Streamlining and cutting out certain mechanics was of the essence. There were simply too many components to make it feasible to produce the game and too many rules for the game’s own good. Luckily, the Game Brewer team had fun, and they indicated that they were open to revisit the game once I did make sufficient changes.

So, I went back to the drawing board and intensively worked on the game for an additional four months before asking for a second chance. A new playtest followed and a couple of days later I signed my first contract. What a great feeling that was! It was clear that a lot of things still had to change, but I looked forward to the development process and improving the game even further. It is not a secret that Game Brewer ceased operation two years later. Test of Time had been pushed back a couple of times and after it ultimately went through a development process in the winter of 2023, I got the news that the game – which was renamed Chronocritters in the meantime – would no longer be crowdfunded due to the cessation of Game Brewer.

The rights of the game reverted back to me and I wanted to get back to work on it as soon as possible. However, I realized that to reach different publishers it would be helpful to have an online playable version of my game. Luckily, my brother helped me out and created a Tabletop Simulator version of Chronocritters in no time. At this time, I had again revised the game slightly. During the Game Brewer development, the game was reshaped into a very tight 16 action game (four rounds instead of eight with four workers) and I preferred to make it a little more loose again. Yet, some ideas that originated during the Game Brewer development lived on in the latest iteration of the game. To me, this was the best of both world: a collection of ideas and mechanics that I liked the most combined with some clever streamlining thanks to Game Brewer.

I contacted some of the publishers that I valued very highly based on games from them that I had played. One of them was Delicious Games as I was very impressed by Vladimir’s games I had played up until that point. In the summer of 2024, I got a reply stating that usually Delicious Games only publishes Vladimir’s own designs (or sometimes a co-design) but that they were nonetheless interested in the game after reading the rules. They asked me to send the files so that they could assemble a prototype for themselves and test the game. They preferred to test the game in a physical manner instead of through Tabletop Simulator, and while the latter option would certainly have been faster to get a first impression, it can sometimes be hard to get a good grasp of a game’s real potential. So of course I send the files to the Delicious Games team.

A couple months went by and in the weeks leading up to SPIEL, I was happy to learn that Delicious Games was still interested in the game after undertaking some tests. They had certain remarks about the current state of the game and pointed out things that needed to change. One of the bigger changes they requested was removing one of the initial four starting workers that each player had. Knowing that the initial prototype in 2018 had six different workers per player which was brought back to four already before the Game Brewer collaboration, the idea to now – two years later – cut out another worker felt almost impossible. Especially since my entire game was built around the fact that each of the four workers had a special passive ability that was an essential factor in deciding where to place it on the board. At this time, each player started the game with a hare, fox, beaver and eagle. The (fast) hare performed a double action when placed, the (cunning) fox could flip a die to its opposite side, the (craftsman) beaver could perform a special Dam build-ing action among other things and the (flying) eagle could reach parts of the board inaccessible to other non-flying workers. The exercise to cut out one of these abilities was not an easy thing to do.

Nonetheless, I got back to work and tried to incorporate Vladimir’s feedback. I removed a worker (the eagle) and made other changes based on his suggestions and quickly became aware that the game had improved significantly. Not for the first time I was confronted with the fact that as a designer you can sometimes end up having tunnel vision regarding certain game ideas, making it very helpful to let an external person shine their light on the overall game. The latest feedback I received was very positive and with a feeling of hope I met with Delicious Games at SPIEL 2024, presenting the new revision. It was then discussed that Delicious Games wanted to do some more test before taking a decision. And then something unexpected happened…

Out of the blue I received a contract to sign the game from Final Frontier Games (who was one of the other publishers to whom I had sent an email back in the summer). I had once shown them the game through Tabletop Simulator, but didn’t hear back from them until now. They were very enthusiastic about the game I had submitted and wanted to fast forward with developing and producing it without any significant changes. However, there was one “problem”. The prototype as reviewed by Final Frontier Games (FFG) was the previous one (with four workers) and in the mean-time I was convinced that the prototype with the changes based on Vladimir’s suggestions was superior. While it was very nice to hear of their interest, I asked for some time to think about this turn of events as I didn’t want to rush into a decision which I would later regret. I wanted to allow Delicious Games to perform their additional tests, and I was also slightly conflicted about the fact that FFG indicated no changes were necessary. Because even though it can be hard for a designer to change or cut out some things from your own game, it is often worthwhile to remove superfluous parts. Ultimately, Delicious Games sent word that they wanted to publish the game, but that it would require further changes. While the enthusiasm of the FFG team was undeniable, I think Vladimir had already convinced me of my preference for Delicious Games due to his recent suggestions.

One thing was clear when comparing feedback from Delicious Games, FFG, Game Brewer, and a couple of other publishers who reviewed the game: the time travel mechanic and the dice grid were considered the standouts of the game and the varying worker abilities were often praised. Once the contract was signed, Delicious Games started to work on the game and introduced changes to intertwine both the time travel mechanic and the dice grid mechanic even further. A long development period followed where many revisions were made and many mails were sent with suggestions, feedback and updates. It was great to know that the game was being continuously polished. What followed were many great improvements, streamlining exercises and clever ideas. Ultimately, it also led to a very hard decision to cut out the different passive animal abilities. These abilities had formed the core of the worker placement decision pattern since the con-ception of the game, but they were removed in an attempt to enhance the focus on the time travel and dice grid mechanics. The game was also further reshaped in order to align more with the tastes of Delicious Games’ audience. This meant removing random factors like dice rolls and card draws wherever possible. While I personally like games to feature some randomness (in the form of widely varying card abilities and – albeit modifiable – dice rolls) this was less the case for the growing testing audience who preferred the game to be more strategic with fewer luck inducing factors. Luckily, Delicious Games know their audience and acted accordingly. In the end, Vladimir and his team were able to make Chronocritters into a beautiful product that retains the time travel and dice grid mechanics which I created all these years ago and I am very excited to see the release draw closer. I am looking forward to seeing players discover the many strategies woven into the game.

DEVELOPER'S DIARY - VLADIMIR SUCHÝ

In July 2024, Delicious Games received a game proposal from Tristan Geeraert. We do not actively seek out new games, so we usually reply immediately stating that we do not accept game submissions as we have a full publishing plan, or sometimes, the proposal just doesn’t fit into our portfolio of games. However, this particular prototype intrigued us for two reasons: the story behind the game's release (it had originally been slated for publication but the project was abandoned when the publisher ceased operations) and the mechanics and theme, which appeared innovative.

We therefore decided to test the prototype, with the understanding that the decision on whether to publish it would be made after testing. While online testing platforms can have their merits at times, we still consider them to provide limited insight, especially when deciding whether to publish a game or not. Consequently, we requested the physical files so that we could build a prototype to playtest.

Our initial impression from testing was positive; we saw great potential in the game. We were particularly impressed by the time-travel system - where certain action spaces were inaccessible in time but could be opened up by creating time portals (which also involved a crucial "decay" factor) - and by the dice grid used to complete quests, which created an original puzzle-like mechanic for dice manipulation. The dice in this grid could be used as a resource for other actions, yet they also needed to be collected to fulfill objectives.

These two core mechanisms remained the backbone of the game throughout its subsequent development, right up until the point at which development concluded. From the very beginning, we identified several areas where we wanted to steer the game's development. After our initial contact, we requested some modifications specifically to shorten the game (by reducing the number of animals/actions) prior to further testing. However, to make a final decision on the future of the game, we needed to gather insights from play-ers and testers.

Further playtesting took place, during which Tristan informed us of a new contract offer for the game. We asked for some additional time, and after further testing, we recognized the game's strong potential and decided to offer the author a publishing contract with Delicious Games.

The game after the first graphic and gameplay adjustments at Delicious Games
Initially, we had envisioned this game being developed alongside another title that I would author or co-author. However, we subsequently decided to capitalize on the fact that we had a prototype ready in the autumn of 2024 and so a game that could be released in 2026. This allowed us to adjust our release schedule and workflow at Delicious Games.

Previously, the process typically involved me finishing a prototype (either solo or in collaboration) during the summer of one year, followed by intensive playtesting, with the game’s release scheduled for the following year, specifically in time for the SPIEL Essen fair. This tight schedule created significant time pressure, particularly regarding the rules, which often had to be finalized shortly before the game's release.

Incorporating a game by an external author (Chronocritters) into our schedule allowed us to extend the entire process; we are now aiming to finalize the prototype two to three months earlier in the spring, while also gaining about a year and a half for playtesting and graphic design. This provides more room to work on the game and reduces stress. We have postponed the release of the game we are currently developing with Ross Arnold, who is the same designer behind Woodcraft, from the original 2026 release date to 2027.

After taking over the game for testing, I identified the following key areas requiring change:

• Managing, or potentially shortening, the game's duration. This was resolved by removing one round, a change that fit well with the game's structure, logic, and action sequencing.

• Introducing elements that fostered engine-building. This involved adjusting how mines operate, adding animal development mechanics, and modifying ability cards.

• Eliminating elements with a high degree of randomness specifically dice rolling, event draws (which were ultimately removed entirely), and the luck factor involved in drawing scoring cards.

• Removing elements that relied on negative incentives (mechanisms that punished players for failing to meet a requirement) and replacing them with positive incentives. During further development, for instance, the game eliminated penalties for insufficient participation in specific areas (such as the dam) and the requirement to "charge up" workers before they could perform any actions. These negative mechanics were replaced with positive ones: players can now gain turn order advantages and various bonuses at the dam, while critter development provides both extra actions and enhanced capabilities and bonuses when deploy-ing upgraded critters.

The final area targeted for improvement was the integration of the game's various components. Previously, the different parts were largely isolated, allowing players to focus on just one are - an approach that tended to make gameplay repetitive. The integration of the various components was achieved primarily by introducing colors for the hard disc quests (tasks arranged in a grid) and implementing a scoring system based on color matching. This feature now effectively motivates players to engage with all parts of the game.

I endeavored to implement these elements into the game gradually. This process involved frequent consultations with Tristan, particularly during the initial phase. Once the core components were finalized and the game was nearing its definitive state, we conducted numerous additional playtests, primarily to fine-tune the balance. During this stage, I incorporated insights gained from testing sessions with Katka and other testers, as well as a series of observations provided by our external tester, Štěpán Peterka, based on his own playthroughs and analysis.

Theme

One key insight from the testing phase concerned the game's theme. The original concept featured a rather broad fantasy narrative starring animal workers. However, due to gameplay adjustments, this premise largely lost its justification, and the scenario lacked intuitiveness. Acting on the testing feedback, Štěpán proposed shifting the game to a post-apocalyptic setting while retaining the animal characters. We decided to adopt this theme. Following this decision, we selected artistVlad Ricean to create the game's illustrations and cover art; his work, which was complemented by the contributions of illustrator and graphic designer Anna Zvocová, elevated the game's visual style exactly as we had envisioned.

Individual characters beautifully crafted by Vlad Ricean
Solo Mode

Once the mechanics were solidified, I implemented a solo mode. As always, the goal was to minimize the administrative overhead required to manage the "automa". Given the game's complexity, the rules and setup are somewhat more extensive than usual, yet the actual gameplay management remains, in my view, just as straightforward as in other DG titles; the objective, as with our other games, is to beat your own high score.

Finally, as with other projects, we had to establish the rules. This is usually a rather tedious process, though this time we (Vladimír and Katka) are creating them ourselves.

plan without graphic additions
Changing Actions in Seasons

After the game’s balance had been refined, the final adjustment involved introducing a system for the random drafting of season actions over time. As previously mentioned, one of the game's key innovations is the time-limited availability of actions and re-sources - a constraint that applies primarily to "engine-building" actions. Randomly drawing these tiles ensures a unique experience in every session, requiring players to adapt their strategies and thereby enhancing the game's replayability.

I believe we have succeeded in creating another Euro-style game that, while offering fresh, intriguing concepts from a new designer, stands proudly alongside the best titles from Delicious Games. It excels not only through its original elements but also through its sheer fun factor, offering a vast array of strategies, action combinations, objective fulfillment, and diverse development options that blend into a highly entertaining and innovative mix.

Final version of the game - Chronocritters

by Steph Hodge

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

From BGG:





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

From the newsletter:



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

From the newsletter:




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

From BGG:

by Chus Rivel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First Contact

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

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

A shot of the first prototype
Setting a New Starting Point

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

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

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

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

The Engine of the Game

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

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

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

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

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

And then, finally, everything started to click.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The prototyping process
The Asymmetric Factions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Team

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

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

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

But this game wouldn't exist without you either.

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

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

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

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

That's in your hands now.

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

Evolution of the box cover

by Justin Bell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until they are not.



Last week, I got in line early.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by David Bernal

Introduction

(written by designer David Bernal)

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

The Inspiration That Got the Design Going

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

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

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

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

Fitting Into a Design Pattern

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The First Problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Andalusian Theme

Written by publisher Chus Fuentes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meeting David

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

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

The Transformation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New Action Selection Matrix

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

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

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

Card Selection

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

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

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

The Customers and the Market

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

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

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

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

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

The Scoring Cards

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

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

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

The Product

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

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

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

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

by Kristian Amundsen Østby

Kristian’s Origin Story

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

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

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

Kenneth’s Origin Story

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

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

Kristian & Kenneth: Time to Megazord!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What if?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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


Best wishes from Norway,
Kenneth and Kristian


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

by Beth Heile

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

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

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

Group Pictures

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

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

Individual Pictures by Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ticket to Ride

Wavelength

Wingspan

Catan

Bohnanza

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

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

by Steph Hodge

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

From BGG:






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

From the newsletter:



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

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

From BGG:

by Katerina Xerovasila

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ability Cards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Justin Bell

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

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

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

When you’re hot, you’re hot!

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Which brings us back to Hell of a Deal.

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

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

Count me in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Michi Die

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope you found this interesting.

Best regards,
Michael

by Daniel Zhang

By Daniel Zhang, CEO and Lead Designer of Tumor Tactics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Best Science Became the Decisions, Not the Card Text

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most of Our Good Mechanics Started as Problems

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

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

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

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

Kids Are Ruthless Playtesters

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

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

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

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

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

What Survived

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Steph Hodge

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