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  It's Old Skool Nite! Vol. I

  by whenindoubteatout on May 25, 2026

  by Justin Bell Some of you are familiar with The Dusty Euro Series that I craft over at Meeple Mountain: one-off reviews of Euros that are at least 10 years old at the time the article goes up.I’m lucky to know a lot of players who love to dig into the crates to dust off classics from time to time.Every so often, I not only play a single older title for game night, but a few all at the same time. I will write about those nights here and discuss the good times shared at the table. I know some players are obsessed with “the cult of the new”, but there are thousands of “old”, great games out there and I will use this platform to ensure people keep getting all kinds of games to the table.Enjoy!My man Dan recently celebrated a birthday by hosting game night at his place. While the chatter leading up to the night was tied to some of Dan’s favorite games, such as Marco Polo II: In the Service of the Khan, Caylus, and Lost Ruins of Arnak, Dan claimed that he was open to playing almost anything, as long as folks could make the quick trip to his house.After we worked through some pizza, Oreo Double Stuf cookies, Dot’s Pretzels, and something that looked like it was healthy (I am told the word I’m looking for is “carrots”), we broke out the bourbon and got to work. Dan’s birthday turned out to be a party of six, so we decided on Uwe Rosenberg’s 1997 negotiation classic Bohnanza to start the night.Bohnanza is one of those old games that I think a lot of people have heard of, but I don’t think a lot of players—particularly younger players or those who are newer to the hobby—have run out and tried. You can find copies online and I’ve seen copies in stores, particularly hobby stores that have a used game area, but it’s rare that I see Bohnanza used as a “gateway” game for new players like other titles typically used in those circumstances.That’s a shame, because while I’ve only played the game twice, I came away from this recent play thinking the same thing as some of the other people at the table that night: Bohnanza might be the designer’s best work, and it is absolutely the most straightforward Rosenberg design that I have tried.Bohnanza is a negotiation game, where prospective bean planters use cards to plant beans into one of two “fields” (simply two empty spaces in front of a player) to earn coins…most coins wins. On a turn, a player must play one or two cards from the “front” of their hand (right or left, but a player must decide this at the beginning of the game and they can never rearrange the cards in their hand), to either continue a matching set of beans from their fields, or wipe a set to create a new field.Depending on the number of cards in a player’s set—and depending on the number of that bean type in the entire deck, which makes some beans more rare than others—they can wipe a set with enough copies to convert some of those cards into coins, with each converted bean equal to one victory point. After playing cards, a player draws two cards from the top of the deck, flips them for all players to see, then (usually) adds those cards to their own fields if they match before opening negotiation for card trades with their opponents.It is this last point that makes Bohnanza highly group dependent. Dan is a part of my Wednesday gaming group, with a lot of jokers who talk as much or more smack than I do (hard, but possible), and who prefer the yelling and screaming portions of any game night. Spoiler alert: Bohnanza has a lot of those moments, particularly when players are jockeying for one more blue bean, or trying to negotiate black-eyed bean “futures” by making empty promises for favors later in the game (favors that are absolutely not binding), or yelling because someone’s earlier promise for red beans resulted in that player throwing said red beans into the discard pile to make way for a new set on her next turn.(Yes, that last part happened to me. Yes, I’m still angry about it, despite the fact that another player and I shared the victory thanks to a matching number of coins and leftover cards remaining in hand. Grudges run deep!)Bohnanza does run a bit long for my tastes. Our six-player game went for about 70 minutes, mainly because all six of us yelled as much as we could to convince other players that each of us had “the best offer”, every single turn. That’s a LOT of negotiating. But still…“I think this is the best game ever made,” one player said when we were wrapping up. That player, a game designer himself, got a couple nods from others at the table.It also reminded me of something else I think about when I’m writing game reviews: when prospective game designers (or even established ones) play games like Bohnanza and they, themselves, are designing a negotiation game, do they think about the fact that making a game as good, or better, than Bohnanza should be the inspiration to make something great?It’s a fascinating thought.The second game of the night was the second edition of Camel Up, released in 2018, although the original came out in 2014, ensuring that it qualified for inclusion in this article. (In our play group, Camel Up 2E is known as “the version of Camel Up with box cover art that reads Camel Up, not Camel Cup.” Long-time players know what I am talking about!)For a few years after the first edition of the game was released, one of the Wednesday night guys would always start the night with Camel Up, because it can accommodate up to eight players and we always had a couple folks showing up late. This also meant that I came to despise Camel Up for a period of time; good or bad, I just don’t want to play the exact same game every time I come to game night!Camel Up, like Bohnanza, is also a yelling and screaming game. One player, who had played Hot Streak but was seeing Camel Up for the first time, listened to the teach and wondered “did Camel Up rip off Hot Streak?”“No,” someone said, since Camel Up came out first. “But you are going to get some Hot Streak vibes for sure, especially when camels start going in the wrong direction.”That’s because the second edition of Camel Up has the same shenanigans as the first edition—dice, camels, a random assortment of ways camels can move forward by moving on their own versus riding on the backs of other camels, betting on camels to finish first or last in both a round or the entire race—plus two new camels, one black and one white, that are moving BACKWARDS all game long.When a forward-moving camel lands on a backwards-moving camel, that might mean that the pony you thought was certain to win might get carried three spots backwards on multiple turns, throwing an already precarious situation into further disarray. Oh, and did I mention that in the second edition version, there are six dice in the pyramid dice shaker (one for each of the five normal camels, then one die for both the white and black camels) but only five dice are rolled in each leg of the race??The winner of our play of Camel Up guessed on his very first action of the entire game which camel would finish the race first…and he was right, winning by the difference his total gave him by guessing earlier than anyone else, three points. Camel Up is a gambling game through and through, and having NOT played it for years made it all the more enjoyable.At this point, one of the guys in the group desperately wanted to get his copy of the also-old, also-brilliant Reiner Knizia game Samurai to the table, so we broke into two groups of three. It was about 9:30 PM on a school night, so my dreams of Dan picking Marco Polo II were off the table. Still, I wanted to honor the birthday boy with one last play.“I’m good for another hour or so,” I said. “I’ll play whatever you want.”“How about Puerto Rico?” he asked. Two of us raised our hands to join him; I hadn’t played Puerto Rico in a couple years, at least not “IRL.” (I play the Puerto Rico app all the time, plus I’m more of a San Juan guy than a Puerto Rico guy; San Juan plays faster and serves as a solid filler in my home while scratching most of the same itch.)Puerto Rico is no stranger to you, the fine people who read our content, as a former #1 overall slot holder and a member of BGG’s Hall of Fame. (Shameless plug: I’m one of the folks featured in the video.) But I swear I say this every time I play Puerto Rico, even when I play it by myself on the app or online on Board Game Arena:Why doesn’t Puerto Rico hit the table more often?The other guy at our three-person table hadn’t played Puerto Rico in so long that he needed a full teach…eight, maybe nine minutes later, we were good to go. The production of the original game is gloriously basic; I don’t believe in using cardboard money, so it was both a personal insult and a genuine hoot to distribute coins that felt thinner than notepad paper. Setup was done in a flash, especially with three of us, and we were up and running quickly.Puerto Rico, like Race for the Galaxy and other games that feature the hallmarks that made them so innovative “back in the day”, uses the nuances of the active player advantage or “privilege” to such great effect. Just picking a role each turn—especially the ones that had just enough coins piled on from previous-round neglect to make them attractive—was a joy, picking up the physical role tiles to kick off a new set of actions.I went hard on the Settler action and quarry tiles, piling up four quarry tiles in what felt like a blink of an eye, making Builder actions really cheap later once I got enough colonists in place. One player went big on production and market benefits, and was the only player to participate in the coffee and tobacco markets. Another player decided early on that he needed his own boat for shipping, so he bought a Wharf tile then piled up a nice array of corn, sugar, and indigo fields to create a handsome shipping empire.Turns were moving quickly, just the way I like it. I got to socialize my terrible British accent by saying “well ‘allo, Guvna!” every time we passed the Governor tile, dictating the new first player for a fresh round of actions. Taking turns that benefited only me was also a joy, a joy shared each time another player did it to the rest of us. (Curse you, Dan, for taking those three coins on the Trader tile and selling the final item to the Goods Market, closing the rest of us out of making money that turn!)Scores were close at the end: 52, 47, 47. But I was happy to see the birthday boy go out a winner. I blamed myself for tossing a bunch of corn into the ocean—bad craftsman and captain timing, and haven’t we all been there?—but I can fix those problems another day.In the meantime, I got to bask in the glory of enjoying old games with friends. I’m excited to hear about some of the classics all of you got to the table over the holiday weekend!

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  Shakespeare and Blackbeard hang in The Halls of Montezuma on the First Monday

  by boardgamersteph on May 20, 2026

  by Steph Hodge ▪️ Fort Circle Games has been busy at work creating so many games! There are four games scheduled for release this June, followed by three more games later this year in the Fall. Many have heard of their successful game called Votes for Women, which is also being restocked this summer. [imageid=8535024 medium rep]▪️ The first game to catch my attention was Shakespeare's First Folio as I quite enjoy the theme. A game for 1-4 players and plays in about 45-60 minutes. The mechanisms listed on BGG are really what have me intrigued, as they list Set Collection, Trick-Taking, and Worker-Placement. From the BGG Page:Shakespeare’s First Folio has players taking the role of printers in the early Seventeenth Century, competing to print the first folio of Shakespeare’s plays.Players will utilize a combination of trick-taking and worker placement to collect as many plays as possible. The plays are suited - Histories, Comedies, and Tragedies. There are also historical patrons and personages who will help the players out.A game ends immediately when the last Play is taken by a player. The most points wins and will print Shakespeare's First Folio!▪️ Hunt for Blackbeard has just released. This is a game designed by Volko Ruhnke (Fire in the Lake, Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001 – ?). This is a game for 2 players and takes about 30-45 minutes to play.From the BGG Page:The Hunt for Blackbeard is on again. As Blackbeard, you must select your anchorage carefully, as you’ll need all your guile to survive. The hunters are coming — evade them, or prepare defenses and risk luring them in? As the Hunters, how long can you afford to press your stable of informants and arm your expedition? You know Blackbeard: he will not sit idle. His ambitions may expose him, but he is getting stronger day by day. How will you approach — a flushing strategy, or a precision strike? Be careful, as your quarry is apt to bite!Hunt for Blackbeard is a two-player boardgame that portrays the effort in 1718 by the colony of Virginia and the Royal Navy to track down the notorious pirate Blackbeard (Edward Thatch) as he sought refuge in colonial North Carolina. It features the historical events, places, and personages involved in Blackbeard’s demise 300 years ago, and the real-world challenges of “golden-age” piracy and pirate hunting. One player takes the role of Blackbeard and the other the pirate hunters. Blackbeard seeks to commit acts of piracy or to enjoy a pirate’s life while remaining free. The hunters try to discern Blackbeard’s plans to thwart his piracy. The game may end in a battle in which either the hunters capture Blackbeard or the pirate wins by seizing a hunters’ ship as his prize!▪️ Next I noticed First Monday in October designed by my friend Talia Rosen, who loves the heavy thematic games. So, it makes sense to me that this would be a heavy thematic game. A game for 1-4 players and plays in 90-120 minutes. To release this June.From the BGG Page:On the First Monday in October, the all-powerful Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court gather each year in their "marble palace" to decide the fate of a nation. Over the course of two hours, First Monday in October re-creates the history of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1789 to the present day, through three distinct eras: Era I represents the founding of the Court in 1789 through the Civil War in 1865; Era II represents the time period from 1866 until the seminal decision of Brown v. Board in 1954; and Era III represents the modern era from 1955 until 2010.Players compete to score renown points in this card-driven strategy game by advocating for the winning side of cases decided by the Supreme Court and by shaping the judicial philosophy of the Court to align with their objectives. During each round, players can choose to place their clerks on what they hope to be the winning side of cases as they progress along the Docket track. In order to help their litigants win, players can take actions to change the composition of the Court by encouraging Justices throughout history to retire and by supporting judicial candidates. At the end of each round, one case will be scored and awarded to the player with the most clerks on the prevailing side. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins.▪️ The final game Fort Circle Games is releasing this June is The Halls of Montezuma. This is a wargame for 1-2players and plays in 60-90 minutes. From the BGG Page:Following the annexation of Texas by the United States in December 1845, war between the United States and Mexico became inevitable. From 1846-1848, the two countries fought a bloody and bruising war culminating in Mexico surrendering significant territory to the United States.The Halls of Montezuma tasks two players to recreate this pivotal war in American and Mexican history. As the United States, you will be tasked with taking California and invading Mexico while facing mounting political opposition at home. As Mexico, you will be forced to fight a defensive war of attrition against the better-trained and led American troops.The Halls of Montezuma is a low complexity, card-driven game for two players (with solitaire rules). Players relive the decisions and dilemmas of this crucial period in history. Fast setup and a playtime of 60-75 minutes.The other games you should keep an eye out later this Fall are Night Witches, Peace 1905, and A More Perfect Union. Seems like a bunch of games to look forward to coming from Fort Circle Games.

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  Designer Diary: TEDOKU

  by 4docich on May 19, 2026

  by Sandro Blasich It is a rather interesting story of how I came up with the idea for TEDOKU.So, I finished a game for SPIEL Essen pitch and like every year I watched SPIEL Essen preview list and I saw a game that looked almost 90% as mine. It was so similar that I gave up on it and I didn't pitch it. That was a game with Tetris elements. However, since I like both sudoku and Tetris, suddenly an idea crossed my mind that I could actually combine those two elements in one game. As it usually happens, I had that idea in one of those rare quiet moments that you can have when you have kids: when you lock yourself in the bathroom 😊 So, I designed TEDOKU but I had no plans to pitch it at SPIEL Essen. I designed it for fun, just for myself like I said in my previous designer diary. Basically, the first prototype was practically a final product. Everything just clicked from the beginning. It was easy to design it and it was even easier to make it. During one board game night at my house, a friend saw a box with no name on my board games shelf and asked me about that game. I said that it was just a game I designed for myself. He was curious about it so we played it a few times and he really liked it. He told me that he thought the game was complete and ready for SPIEL Essen. I wasn't so sure but in the end I decided to pitch it and I managed to get some meetings at Essen for it. And just like that I signed my first contract. I was very happy. I couldn't believe it but it seemed that I'm finally going to have a published game. As you know, it takes some time from the signing of the contract to the exact publishing date so it took several years for TEDOKU to be published. TEDOKU was my first signed game but in the meantime my other game got published first (Choconnect). TEDOKU is a 'roll, flip and write game“ in which you try to fit special shapes called polyominoes into your own Sudoku-style grid. The result of a die tells you what to draw and a card flip limits where you can draw it. When drawing a shape you can rotate or mirror it in any direction. If you don't have enough space to draw it properly you must skip your turn. The game finishes after 20 rounds (after 20 cards have been drawn). Each player scores points based on the number of completed sectors, columns and rows in their grid. Also the replayabillity is huge because there are 27 cards in the deck and at setup you remove 7 cards at random. There are 6 pencils in the box but if you have more pencils you can play it with any number of players. The game is also great for solo play. TEDOKU is a small, cosy game but it's got a lot of substance due to a number of interesting choices that you can make. TEDOKU is also a perfect travel size game as well. I'm very pleased with how Ares Games developed my game. Thank you Roberto Di Meglio.And of course I must mention Matteo Ceresa, who made a great job with the illustrations and graphic design reminiscent of Japanese art. Thank you Matteo.

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  Uh Oh...It's Getting Warm Outside!

  by whenindoubteatout on May 18, 2026

  by Justin Bell I checked my phone’s weather app for the upcoming week. The forecast showed a steady diet of inbound beauty in Chicago: lots of sunny days in the high 60s and low 70s (Fahrenheit, for my friends abroad), an outlook of blue skies, and a healthy dose of days where temperatures would rise into the 80s.Most people in Chicago love it when the temperatures start to warm up; I still believe Chicago is the best place on Earth from Memorial Day to Labor Day. It’s just a totally different place when you add warm weather to the already solid roster of great people, great restaurants, great sports (well, maybe “good” is more appropriate for our pro teams) and great sightseeing, because we also have a beach ready to go when people don’t want to fly to places like Florida, and the summer street festival season is something else.I, too, love warm weather. Unfortunately, when it gets warm in Chicago, every board gamer I know essentially stops playing games to take advantage of the weather. As a player, and as a game reviewer, it’s the toughest time of the year to find bodies.***One of my former steadies is a strategy gaming group formed during the early months of COVID. For a stretch of time, 6-8 of us would gather a few times a week and mask up to play games all over the city. The group was reliable, in part, because most of us had nothing else going on. We found each other strictly because of availability; the world had shut down, but gamers seem to always find a way to chuck those dice.I’ve never played board games on a nearly daily basis like I did for the first two years post-COVID. I was playing games four, sometimes five days a week for stretches, especially in the dark days of winter when the best thing you could do was survive the trip from your house to a buddy’s place and find parking that wasn’t “dibbed” by some guy’s lawn chair in Avondale.Even in that group, everyone scattered from early June through late August. It was like college let out for summer break, and you could only find your high school friends for drinks and mozzarella cheese stick specials at the local TGI Friday’s / Bennigan’s / Chili’s. (Gosh, I miss a good round of greasy cheese sticks.)Nowadays, it sets in with my review crew right around the first week of May. I always put out the call the weekend before review crew night with the normal request: ”Games this Monday! Who’s free?” Usually, we fill seats within a few hours. But when summer approaches, the rapid response rate turns into a trickle.“I can’t make it this week.”“Yeah, I’m taking a vacation with the family all of next week.”“Friends in town, we’re doing drinks on a patio in the city.”“Out” (not even showing enough respect to end this already abbreviated sentence for formal punctuation!)Now, some of this is the double-edged sword that I have set up for myself: I’m a nerd, but I prefer playing games with nerds who also have a pretty robust life away from the table. Part of this “mistake” is my own; I need more people in my life like me, who have kids, or are getting older, or have nothing going for themselves on Monday nights. (Like, seriously, who has hot plans on a Monday? It’s Monday, for crying out loud!)And that’s usually in early May. By late May, it’s DEFCON 2 at my place. Review nights are so close to summer extinction that I begin refusing some review requests from publishers, because I know it’s going to be a challenge to get players often enough to get 3-4 plays of a new title in before posting a review.***Gaming at home is unaffected by the weather. My wife, or my two kids, or any mix of those three are around often enough on a rainy day or after Saturday morning cartoons or when I’ve tied the night’s dessert to playing a new card game. (“Yeah yeah yeah; we have ice cream coming up. But first…”)Because I do at least one play of each review copy with the family, or we play a lot of the family classics for fun, I’m still playing games 2-3 times a week at home.But for my other groups, those warm outdoor temperatures make it tough.I love the Logged Plays feature on BGG. While I was drafting this article, I was curious about my recent summer activity, so I looked up my summer plays over the last five years. Each year’s lowest monthly count happens not in December for the holidays, or convention months like October where I’m out of pocket for a week or two. For me, it is ALWAYS summer.In 2021, it was May, with 27 logged plays. 2022, it was March, with only 19, but then I went back and checked out why—I was in the final month of a job at another company, and I was out of town for almost the entire month. The second-lowest total was June, with 30 plays. In 2023, it was July, with 19.You get the idea. Since a lot of the year’s big US releases hit at Gen Con, then the global releases hit SPIEL Essen, summer usually ends up being the time that I begin to clear the calendar for the hottest upcoming games and convention hauls. To cleanse the palate, I love to play games in my collection that don’t get enough love during other points of each year, and mix standing favorites with titles that can get a lot more love than usual, especially with the kids.Last year, it was a solid mix. Union Stockyards hit the table, one of those fun, underappreciated one-hour Euros I love to whip out from time to time, in the family of Chicago-themed games that also happens to feature hogs, real-world businesses, and a solid, snipe-y area control battle. Stone Age came out! Rococo: Deluxe Edition was still great, and it was still ridiculously deluxe. My son fell in love with Mastermind and insisted on playing it a bunch in late June.A few review copies got 2025 summer love as well. Since the Tiletum expansion, Prospect for Silver, arrived in July, that meant I had no choice but to get the base game out to refresh my memory. The same was true with Xylotar, an incredible trick-taking game, to prep for the Xylotar: Unhinged plays later in the month.No matter what time of year it is, campaign game groups are really challenging for me. Still, I got in the first few chapters of Clank! Legacy 2: Acquisitions Incorporated—Darkest Magic before summer vacations killed off my campaign group.That means the safest campaigns are with people who already live at the house…which made the first eight missions of Metal Gear Solid: The Board Game with my son a breeze. (“Snake? Snake? SNAAAAAAAAKE!!!!”)Memories from last year are getting me hyped for the summer ahead, despite the lack of players. Fantastic Factories made its way to the table before dinner a few nights ago, after sitting quietly on a shelf for years. I mixed in a play of Brass: Lancashire with an upcoming hidden role game last week. I’m wrapping up reviews of a couple of the Pax titles from Ion Game Design, a family-weight card game called Circadia, and in the process of relearning Nippon on Board Game Arena, I’m also prepping plays of Nippon: Zaibatsu over the next few weeks. And now that Nucleum: Gibraltar has arrived, I’ll line up a few plays of that one soon.So, I’ll still get some gaming in while the temperatures heat up. But, I won’t be sad at all when that cold air kicks up again this fall!

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  Game Design Diary - Light Speed: Arena - A cardboard-first companion app

  by eldavisnar on May 17, 2026

  by Leonardo Alese Hi! I am Leonardo, the a-bit-of-everything at Tablescope, including game design, taxes, app development, booth setup, editing, and community. But never art, I don’t do art.This diary focuses on the decisions we made on how physical components interact with the companion software of Light Speed: Arena, the party game where players strategically aim lasers in real time and snap a picture to let the app unfold the battle. As this is quite a new territory, I hope our development process can spark an interesting conversation.To provide some context, Light Speed: Arena reimplements the 2003 Light Speed by James Ernest and Tom Jolly, published by Cheapass Games. This is a unique card game where everyone slams their ships onto the table and then, using rulers and tokens, traces laser beams printed on the cards to see who hit whom. It was chaotic, clever, and unlike anything else at the time. But also fiddly and slow in the resolution phase.In the Tablescope version, besides the photo-assisted resolution, we introduced new gameplay and customization options, components, and a new theme. This edition was funded and improved through Kickstarter in 2024, started retail at the end of 2025, and was freshly nominated for the Golden Geeks!Let’s now dive into what cardboard does in Light Speed: Arena.Cardboard is your input deviceIn a digital hybrid game, someone or something has to tell the app what to do.We began with classic app menus and toggles for selecting game modes, but we quickly noticed a fundamental problem: there was no visual connection between what the app knew and what was happening on the table. It felt like an extra, detached layer that players had to manage mentally. That disconnect pushed us to rethink the entire setup philosophy. Instead of asking players to select modes in the app, we explored whether the physical components themselves could communicate the game state. Over time, we shifted sponsors, team mode, unleashed factions, and more into purely physical configurations. If something is visible in the final photo, it is active. There are no hidden settings. This approach made the experience more consistent and more intuitive. Players express the game through cardboard, and the app simply reads reality.Cardboard is harmlessA game that works through a photo has to look a bit weird, right? Right, Anakin?In the beginning, we assumed so and decided it was perfectly fine if Light Speed: Arena had to look different. If the tech needed visible markers or unusual layouts to work properly, then so be it. Early prototypes reflected this mindset and showcased the flavor of an augmented reality demo project more than a memory-making board game.As the system became more robust, we started challenging that assumption. We asked ourselves, “What if we removed that? And this?” From there, we began removing every visual crutch and hiding all detection information directly inside the artwork. Right now, the slightly peculiar feature someone might notice is the white border around the tiles. Still, we worked to match it with the comic-style art of the game. After all, even Magic: The Gathering cards used to have white borders…During demos, we usually don’t tell players about the picture part. We carry a rubber band in the pocket and, after they finish placing ships, we pretend to start measuring lasers one by one. The terror on their faces is priceless, only topped by the wonder when the app instantly brings the battle to life.Cardboard is independentBy teasing people and seeing how naturally they played without knowing about the app, we realized we wanted cardboard to not only look harmless but also to be fully independent of any non-game-related setup, avoiding what we feel is one of the most frustrating pitfalls a hybrid game can create: realizing the app doesn’t work with the way you are playing.If a solution required players to prepare the table “for the app,” we would not use it. We avoided anchor tiles, special playmats, fixed orientations, and any requirements of the kind “place this here so the photo can see it.”Only then could the app feel like a moment of magic rather than a requirement. You just need to stick to the game rules. Or not, which brings us to the next section.Cardboard is sandboxThe harsh reality is that players bend rules, skip components, mix expansions, and generally do whatever feels fun in the moment. That means the app will often face a table state that is “wrong.” What should it do in those situations? No base of a color? No asteroids? Inconsistent number of spaceships? At first, we considered warning players or blocking the resolution, which felt like the perfect recipe for frustration at the table.After debating it for a long time, we eventually chose just to run the battle anyway. If players changed something, it is probably intentional. If they forgot something, let them continue. House rules are part of the soul of board gaming, and digital hybrids should embrace that freedom, too.That is why the app never stops you before the battle. You take a picture, confirm it, and the resolution begins. From that moment on, the digital companion gives players a superpower no analog game can offer: it applies every rule perfectly. If anything truly breaks, it is probably a (rare) bug ;)Tech is magicIt took us more than four years to refine, and in the end, we are just glad we can describe it with two simple words: it works. We still sometimes find it hard to believe that we can live-demo it in a crowded fair booth (looking at you, Meta…).ConclusionIs Light Speed: Arena perfect? Of course not. I still lose sleep over questions: How to strengthen the app-to-table communication? How to make it more natural? More concise?What Light Speed: Arena ended up being, we hope, is a unique, accessible board game that attempts a new route for digital-hybrid entertainment, with a step forward in tech and UX.More importantly, we hope the approach sparks ideas for other designers as well. I myself look forward to seeing where we can go from here!Thanks for reading, and see you in the Arena!Bonus. The Telegram quest.Between the very early prototype and Light Speed: Arena, there was one more geeky and extremely useful step. After the original publisher gave us the green light, and before we had any plan to make Light Speed: Arena, we built and released a two-player print-and-play version of the original Light Speed played through a Telegram* bot. You would play the game, take a picture, send it to the chat, and it would reply with a visualization of the battlefield, a fast log, or a full commentary. And yes, the silly/trash commentary idea from Light Speed: Arena was already there back then.With around 1,000 players and a ton of feedback collected, the Light Speed Telegram bot became a critical building block for everything that followed. It still works today, but honestly, you might prefer the free demo print-and-play version of Light Speed: Arena itself available on BGG ;)*A WhatsApp-like messaging app

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  Designer Diary: First Giants

  by happy_squid on May 16, 2026

  by Matthew Dunstan It’s not often that you get a chance to revisit one of your old published games, and reimagine it for a new audience. Elysium, designed with Brett J. Gilbert, and published by Space Cowboys in 2015, is one of the games I am the most proud of in my ludography. There are a lot of fond memories I have about working on the game, developing it with the team at Space Cowboys, and my first trip to Berlin for the SdJ ceremony when it was nominated for the Kennerspiel des Jahres (even if we didn’t win!). The game has a lot of fans even to this day, and is a type of game that I personally really enjoy playing.So back in 2022 when Space Cowboys asked Brett and I whether we would be interested in working on a new streamlined and simplified version of Elysium, we jumped at the chance to work on the game again. Repos had recently released 7 Wonders: Architects in 2021, a more accessible version of 7 Wonders, and it provided a useful signpost for thinking about how to approach our task. The core gameplay of Elysium, while light on rules, is quite taxing for players - they have to manage their four different coloured columns to navigate taking three cards from a display that can start each round with as many as 13 cards, all the while having to keep an eye on what their opponents are doing so they don’t get screwed over by the cards they take. There are many cards with a huge variety of abilities, organised into eight different families, of which five are used in any game. Players also have to manage their cards and gold in order to move cards into their Elysium at the end of each round, where the family and level of a card become important in forming Legends (or sets) or cards which score points at the end of the game. In short, there’s a lot to think about!A lot going on!So the problem was how to distill the magic of Elysium while inevitably stripping out parts of the game to reduce the overall mental gymnastics required of players. I would love to say that we then embarked on a multi-year journey, trialling many many different versions of a new game, before finally reaching the end goal...but in reality we were much more fortunate, in two key ways.The first was that I had a very good idea about how to streamline the game in an elegant way, almost at the start of the process. In the original version of Elysium, players have four turns each round, three turns they take a card from the central display, and one turn they claim a Quest which determines their income, how many cards they can transfer to their Elysium, and turn order for the next round. What if there was a way to remove all this round structure, and simply have a game where players on their turn either take a card, or transfer some cards to their Elysium? Then the game would have a lot less upkeep, have a better flow, and could present new interesting choices for players as to what to do on their turn while keeping the actual number of options manageable. The answer lay in reimagining the columns from the original game. Formerly, you would spend one column after each of your turns, and then regain all four columns at the end of the round. As your turns went on, you had fewer columns available to you, tightening your options. But in this new game, what if you could choose to get back your columns at any time? And if we did this, you could tie that action, to regain your columns, to the action of moving cards to your Elysium.But there is one problem - if we did this then the game loses all the tension from the former version, with players allowed to keep refreshing their columns and never having to experience being down to one or two columns and having few good options. The answer in the end was pretty simple: make the rewards you get - your income and the number of transfers - tied to the number of columns you get back when you refresh. That way, you can either keep refreshing one or two columns, maximizing your options but having minimal income. Or you could do the reverse, taking more turns before you refresh, having worse options as you go along, but in turn you are rewarded with more income and transfers when you do refresh. And thus the rule became when you refreshed your columns you gained one gold or transferred one card for every column you returned.The second piece of good fortune isn’t really about luck, but rather about sheer design brilliance. Even with this new structure in place, there was still a lot of work - hundreds of cards and effects to reimagine, streamline and reorganise. And furthermore, I was in the middle of moving around the world from the Czech Republic to Australia, and didn’t really have much time to work on the project. I leave the project for a few weeks after discussing it with Brett, and when I land in Australia, an email is awaiting for me from Brett - which has a complete prototype with all the cards designed and ready to go! With Brett’s game design blitz the game is ready to be shown to Space Cowboys...and they love it!A small sample of Brett's initial complete prototype of First Giants, still using the theme of ElysiumFrom this point on we continue to work with the team at Space Cowboys, refining the cards and rules. There were several important developments, even at this late stage, that further cemented First Giants as its own ‘beast’ (or dinosaur?), rather than simply an offshoot of Elysium. The central display became four different dig sites with two cards available in each, and players would simply place their marker on a dig site to take a card there. But, they could only go to a Dig Site that didn’t already have one of their markers - this both increased the tension for players, and provided a really clear visual marker of what players were capable of on their turn, a definite upgrade from the columns in Elysium. Exhibits utilized tokens to mark your increasing score, that could then be flipped once you completed your exhibition to both mark a bonus and the fact you had completed it. Small improvements like this greatly aided the ergonomy of the game, helping to achieve that elusive sense of flow in gameplay.This was also the time to think about production and theming. Space Cowboys had an amazing idea for a new setting to place the game in - imagining the cards as Dinosaurs you are researching when you take the cards, and then are displayed in your museum when they are transferred. Jessica Cognard came on board the project to handle the illustrations of the many cards, and Maud Chalmel did an amazing job with the cover, evoking a touch of art deco to the overall museum and dinosaur theme. And Space Cowboys flexed their production prowess in managing to fit in a truly remarkable amount of material - the cards, glass beads for amber (the new currency in place of gold), wooden printed pieces and more - in a box less than half the size of the original game.Finally I am able to hold a copy of First Giants in my hands, and I am as excited and thrilled as I was holding my first copy of Elysium more than a decade ago. I hope you will all get to enjoy the game that Brett and I were just grateful to get to spend a little more time in.The evolution from our initial prototype, to the first iteration of a dinosaur theme, to the final published version of First Giants.

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  Filler Up! It's a Wonder as to why the Spyworld Tower Falls

  by boardgamersteph on May 13, 2026

  by Steph Hodge [imageid=9444567 medium rep]▪️ Repos Production just released their new title Spooky Tower. With the attractive price point of $25 and the quick-playtime of 15 minutes, it seems like a risk worth taking. Here is the game description from the publisher:Spooky Tower: The ghost hunt is on!Ghosts have taken over the city! The only way to trap them is to capture them on camera… or to restore the protective amulet of the clock tower! With Spooky Tower, Repos Production takes a playful dive into pop culture. This new clever family game combines dice rolling, risk-taking, and tactical decision-making in a fast-paced and highly replayable format.Designed by Jonathan Favre-Godal (Who Did It?) and Corentin Lebrat (Draftosaurus, Faraway…), and illustrated byApolline Etienne (Living Forest), Spooky Tower thrives on surprise and suspense. Which location will you explore on your turn? With no unnecessary complexity, Spooky Tower focuses on quick turns, immediate readability, appealing and functional components, and strong indirect interaction through racing mechanics. It's “spooky fun” universe, brought to life by Apolline Etienne, creates an immersive atmosphere — without ever being scary!▪️ For the Flip-and-Write fans out there, Spyworld was just released! From Don't Panic Games, this game plays simultaneously, so really any number of players can play in about 30 minutes. Don't you want to rule the world and build the best spy lair around? From the publisher:Spyworld is a simultaneous-play flip-and-write where players build their spy lair, set traps, recruit sentries, and then send their agent to infiltrate opponents - all on the same turn. The Exploration Phase is unlike anything else in the category right now, and players notice it immediately.▪️ New from The Op Games a small box card game called Frenzy Falls. If you enjoy a bit of frenzy and chaos in your quick card game, then look no further. You and your opponents will attempt to seize control over the different lines in the falls. If you don't win the majority of the row, no worries, you will get to spill down to the next row to try and capture that row instead. You have to look out for those special action cards that will pull and bump you from positions you probably don't want to move from. A great family game for 2-6 players, playing in 30-45 minutes. ▪️ Did someone say Similo? OH, HELLO! Similo: Wonders was just announced from Horrible Guild. My collection of Similo is ever-growing because they keep making new editions. If you aren't familiar with Similo, it is a quick cooperative deduction game. There is one correct card in the display, and the clue-giver needs to provide clues so you don't knock out that correct card. You can mix and match sets, so having just one more set is always a good thing. We can look for this new deck in July. From the publisher:This deck brings together 36 iconic monuments and architectural marvels from around the globe, from ancient wonders to modern landmarks, all illustrated in Naiade’s unmistakable style.

• 
  He Loved Being at the Table

  by whenindoubteatout on May 11, 2026

  by Justin Bell “Call me as soon as you can man.”My brother’s third text of the day chased back-to-back missed phone calls. When I’m not writing tabletop content, I work as a program manager for a consulting company. Thanks to a meeting with our company’s COO and Global People Officer, it had been a busy, stressful morning. My phone was on “do not disturb”, so when I flipped the phone over, my brother's communication thread made it clear that there was a real emergency.Sadly, my fears were confirmed. After a series of alarming health changes over the past few months, our father had collapsed at his home in upstate New York. Even though CPR had been administered relatively quickly, my father’s pre-existing health issues and the morning collapse led to a visit to the emergency room, which quickly became a visit to the intensive care unit.The situation quickly became tragic. Dad never regained consciousness, and he was placed on a ventilator. Suddenly, machines were the only thing keeping him alive. I booked a flight to Rochester and arrived about four hours before Dad was set to be taken off of life support.You always think you will have more time.“Immediate family only,” the signs outside the ICU said. That meant just five of us—stepmom, half-sisters, my brother, me—spent Dad’s final hours in a small hospital room, holding Dad’s hands and shedding plenty of tears. We also did what we loved to do any time the group was together: laugh about the memories that have lasted a lifetime.A few of those memories were about games.***My father was never the person who suggested playing games; in fact, he never seemed to even enjoy playing them.As a kid, we played a lot of the traditional “roll and move” games with Dad, like Monopoly and Parcheesi. From time to time, we tricked Dad into joining something like The Game of Life. UNO? Obviously. The Rummy family was always lurking nearby: Rummy, Rummy 500, Rummikub, Rummoli (the Poker/Rummy variant of Michigan Rummy that I grew up with).It felt like Dad was always working late, so games were usually limited to weekends, and my time with him was further limited thanks to a divorce that changed our family dynamic when I was just a child. For my father, games clearly felt like work, so he was less inclined to playing games and more inclined to other leisure pursuits—long meals, action movies, road trips, televised golf tournaments (which mostly doubled as “dad naps”, a tradition we carry on in my home today).Later in life, Dad could occasionally be tricked into playing games, but there was a limit to how many rules he would bother to learn before throwing up his hands. Like the relatives of many players in my network, Dad seemed to hate just about anything that was “too complicated.” (This is only funnier because my dad loved to play golf—itself a very complicated sport—and he worked in complex management roles throughout his career. I get it: everyone’s brain needs a break. But often, the “too complicated” label felt like lip service.)Occasionally, the sibs and I pushed Dad to try something new. Seven or eight years ago, I brought a bunch of hobby games to a Thanksgiving family weekend, and forced my dad to play Luxor, the Rüdiger Dorn hand management game. (Although I love other Dorn designs, such as Istanbul and Goa, Luxor is still the Dorn title that hits the table the most.)Luxor is a relatively rules-light experience that plays in about an hour. The main hook: players manage a hand of five movement cards and a small pool of adventurer tokens, tokens that must be moved forward on a track that ends with a treasure tomb in the middle of the board.On a turn, players can only play either their left-most, or right-most, card from hand to move one of their tokens toward the tomb. (Cards in a player’s hand are never shuffled or moved, only played when they reach one side of their hand.) At the end of each turn, a player must add a new card to their hand from a draw pile, which must be inserted into the middle of their now-four-card hand to give them a new five-card hand for their next turn.“This is ___ ridiculous!” Dad said, after hearing the hand management rule two minutes into the teach. (I’m leaving the profanity out, for the purposes of a family-friendly website.) “This game has too many rules.”Still, Dad decided to play Luxor with my wife and stepmother…and almost won, coming in just a few points behind the eventual winner. At the end of the game, he begrudgingly admitted that he had fun thinking through the best ways to move his adventurer tokens around the map to pick up treasure tokens and sets of cards from the movement track. The best part? Dad didn’t really listen during the teach, so he only ever played his left-most card all game long, and only ever added new cards to the right side of his hand.My father also hated the idea of cooperative games. “I want to have a chance to win,” he would say, because to Dad, winning meant “beating everyone else at the table.” So, whenever we floated co-op games by Dad (The Crew, anyone?), it was a hard pass.Now, Dad WOULD play games with a team…as long as the goal was to beat the other team. The day we got Dad to play Codenames—a family favorite for everyone else in the household—is still one of the most shocking moments in Bell Family Vacay history. Codenames is always a riot with my family; when a team’s Spymaster goes on a one-word clue run that scores three or four cards on a single turn, that story becomes legend. (Naturally, when someone blows it and gives a clue that reveals the Assassin, that kind of story becomes legend, too!)Most years, Dad would politely pass when given the chance to play Codenames. But when he finally did decide to join the family for a play, it was a moment. He didn’t want to play as a Spymaster that first time—let’s give the man a “try bite” first, right?—but simply being willing to join the whole family for once was such a thrill.***Ultimately, Dad’s favorite thing about games wasn’t playing games at all. It was grabbing a newspaper—or later, his iPad, since even my father had to come to grips with reading the news in the present—and being at the dining room table while others played games.My dad loved being near the action. He was constantly looking up from his newspaper, smiling at his family, watching them enjoy themselves, laughing along with the group when something funny happened during a player’s turn.I recently went to a friend’s game night…not to play, but to simply sit around. I’ve done that a few times over the years, and lately, my work schedule has been rough and I don’t always have the capacity to do much more than sit in the same space as my friends. (I am very good, however, at eating your snacks, drinking your bourbon…or, both.)A friend was running a game of Blood on the Clocktower, and ten adults laughed their way through hours of fun as they ran two sessions back-to-back. The friends asked if I wanted to jump in, to take on a character role in-between rounds.“Nah, I’m good,” I said. “I just love being here.” Watching innocent friends get eliminated by their peers was glorious. Standing in a corner of the room with two others as they plotted their way into the next night’s accusation was a blast, too. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but just being around others as they had fun on a game night made me think about how much Dad must have loved just being in the room with his kids.***The five of us at the hospital were rolling, laughing as we reminisced about so many great times with Dad. As a group, we laugh with and at each other all the time, and we laughed at some of the funny things Dad used to say, some of the bad fashion choices of the last 40 or 50 years we could remember, that time Dad claimed to be on a diet while pounding eight pieces of fried chicken at a local theme park, Dad’s everlasting appreciation for the musician Prince, and took a moment to appreciate the biggest laugh of anyone I have ever met.And, the times when Dad would settle into his spot at the end of a large table, a glass of Cutty Sark and a plate of cheese and crackers nearby, watching everyone else having fun playing games.Eventually, the harsh reality of the hospital situation returned. A nurse walked in; a doctor joined her. We had a few more minutes with Dad before…well, before.I got in one more squeeze of Dad’s hand. Everyone gave him one more kiss on the forehead, then the doctors did what they could to offer him a peaceful passing.I’ll miss you, Dad.

• 
  Designer Diary: Beastro

  by MatteoUguzzoni on May 10, 2026

  by Matteo Uguzzoni Beastro is a team-based, trick-taking game with hidden roles where you have to figure out who is on your team, outsmart the other players, and collect as many tricks as possible for your team. You play as a mythical Beast Chef that is trying to open (or burn to the ground) a new pop-up restaurant.We self-published the game in 2025 and released it during the Indie Games Night Market at Pax Unplugged in November 2025 (shot out to Daniel Newman from Newmill Industries for the great initiative!). In this designer diary we will talk about the ancestry of the game, our design journey, and a little about the self-publishing experience.Enjoy the read!AncestryBeastro is the nephew of an Italian traditional trick-taking game called Briscola Chiamata traditionally called Briscola. In my hometown it’s called Amico del Giaguaro, in English “Jaguar’s Friend”, and I’m sure there are as many names for it as there are bell towers in Italy.Briscola, is the name for the family of card games that “Jaguar’s Friend” belongs to. It is one of the most popular, if not the most popular, may-follow trick-taking game in Italy (must-follow games are more rare, but if you’re interested I suggest you start with Tressette). This person is not playing Briscola, but a solitaire versionThe game is played with a Spanish suit deck, in the regional design variant that you find in your region (we play with the Piacentine design in Emilia Romagna, pictured above), with ten cards for each of the four suits: Coins, Cups, Wands and Spades.Briscola is usually played in two teams of two players that have to score sixty-one (61) points to win. The Ace, the Three and the face cards count toward the scoring (awarding respectively 11, 10, 4, 3 and 2 points), while the trump suit is defined by flipping a card after giving the initial hand of three cards to each player. After you play into a trick, you draw a new card from the deck and refill your hand to three. Therefore, players have a very limited information at the beginning of the game.The only cards that score in BriscolaBriscola Chiamata, the auntie of BeastroBriscola Chiamata, the auntie of Beastro, is a five-player only game (2 vs 3) where the teams are defined by a wager phase. In “Jaguar’s Friend”, the variant we play in my area, every player declares how many points their team will score at the end of the round, starting from 61 and going up until the improbable 120 points, meaning all the points available in the deck. The winner of the wager becomes the Jaguar and they declare a card and a suit that they are looking for (for example the Ace of Wands), the player that has that card in their hand becomes the “Jaguar’s friend”. They are now a team - the Jaguar’s team - and their goal is to reach or pass the wager. The trump is defined by the Jaguar’s call, it’s the suit of the card they are looking for. Players that don’t have the called card are in the opposite team of three and their goal is to collective beat the Jaguar’s bet.Briscola Chiamata is a may-follow through and through so not all tricks feel very meaningful. For example the initial tricks, although not very impactful toward the final score, become ways to gauge who is who. The game is very popular among young people (at least in my town) and while old folks rarely play this variant, I remember entire summers playing it. If I have to pick some reasons why Jaguar's Friend is so successful I will say it is social deduction aspect of it, the shifting alliances, and the wager are all unique features of the variant.This is the way you play Briscola in Italy, shirtless and in the streets!All right, if you read this far, you’re probably a trick-taking appassionat*, so it’s time to move on to our actual design!A deck of cards crosses the Atlantic!Unpub at Pax Unplugged, the best way to test your ideasAfter my brother-in-law visited from Italy in September 2022, I was donated a traditional Briscola deck. I was very excited about it and I brought it to a game night with Jason Corace (designer of Lord and Ladies and Super Truffle Pig and half of Hello Mountain, our little publishing coop). The deck was so familiar to me. I vividly remember learning how to make sums playing games with Grandma, but this was alien to Jason. I was able to explain the Jaguar game to him with a traditional french poker deck and we started brainstorming on how to make a new game inspired by it.We set up our design journey with few goals in mind. The first was a broader player count from five, which is the only number that Briscola Chiamata can allow, to the more traditional three-to-six players. The second goal was to make a must follow trick-taking (we were advised that may-follow are not loved in the US market). The third design goal was to keep the hidden roles without adding the classic social deduction parts. We were worried that adding that part will break the flow of the game and lose the straightforwardness that we like about trick-taking games.We hosted our first playtest at Pax Unplugged that same winter in 2022. The game had a different theme back then, it was called Prestige and players were playing as Magicians setting up their magic show. We got a few so-and-so playtests - if you’re playtesting a trick-taking game and people have never played one, buckle up!. Then a family of five that used to play a lot of card games sat down and they had the best time! When the mom, always quiet, revealed that she was the Secret Assistant (a.k.a. Jaguar’s friend) the table almost exploded! She was able to trick everyone into thinking she was not.Prestige's components ..magic tricks in a trick-taking game how original!After PaxU, we pitched the title to many publishers and every time we got great feedback. The folks at Amigo and Pandasaurus were fantastic and the game improved from their generous feedback. In the end, everyone decided to pass on the design. We heard all the reasons (and if you are a designer you know what we mean): “it’s not different enough”, “it’s too niche”, “we already signed trick takers for the next three years”, “we are not publishing trick takers anymore” etc..Prestige becomes BeastroThe following spring both Jason and I found ourselves surrounded by a lot of talented game designers, and with consistent playtesting we were able to bring the game to a completed state. Thank you Viditya, Marcy, Firex, Zach, Rook, Tori, Logan, Nat, George and everyone at the NYU Game Center, Pratt and Gumbo NYC. The game will not be where is it today if it wasn’t for the great discussions we had together.External influences were important too. In that same period both Jason and I ended up being obsessed with the TV show The Bear, starring Jeremy Allen White and Ayo Edebiri, and so we decided to change the theme from magicians putting on their first show to a kitchen where players were up and coming chefs trying to sabotage the next hot restaurant in town for their own private interest or giant ego.We needed a title for the game and Beastro came along and with it the idea that chefs and line cooks were mythical creatures (Beast) trying to open their own pop-up restaurant (a Beastro!). Everything fell into place when we decided to involve Jen Corace, an amazing illustrator from Providence, RI, that worked with Jason in his previous design Lords and Ladies. Jen happened to also be Jason’s sister so that helped the collaboration a lot and she happened to be incredibly talented and amazing. Even an onion is something that I will put on a poster if it's designed by Jen..look at this!I want this on a t-shirtWhat is unique in Jen’s style is that every illustration has a handpainted nature to it, and the reason is because every illustration is hand painted! So Beastro's deck is the work of a real artist that works with the non-digital medium at a mastery level. Alright, enough of the history, below is a more in depth description of the design (thank you for reading this much!!). If you want to go deeper, here is the link to the ruleset and here’s a video of me pitching/explaining the game (Italian accent included).P.S.: At the end there is also an appendix on how it was to sell the game during Pax Unplugged’ Indie Game Night Market and afterwards, if you are a designer that is just starting and is thinking about a first small self publishing experiment, maybe that part could be interesting for you!BEASTRO the final designThe WagerWe simplified the wager vastly. Players get 13 cards at the beginning of the round and they pick one card from their hand that they sacrifice for the wager. Everyone reveals their card at the same time and whoever plays the highest card is the Head Chef and they immediately take the role deck. Starting from the lowest card, one player after the other flips over a Suit card, denying that suit to be trump for the round (a similar system is used in various designs, most notably Lunar by Masato Uesugi, Allplay, 2024). The suit that is left is the trump for the round. All the cards used in the wager are then discarded.Team FormationThe Head Chef gives out the roles, picking their Secret Chef, and the only public role is the Head Chef.Trick-TakingWe play a total of 12 tricks in a round. The Head Chef opens the round leading the first trick. The winner of the trick leads the next trick. It’s a traditional must-follow, so players are only allowed to play trump if they cannot follow suit, or if the trick was led with trump.Special cards (exception to the must-follow rule)There are two special cards that can be played at any time. The first is Secret Sauce, this card beats all the other cards, even trump. The only card that can beat a Secret Sauce is another Secret Sauce (there are two in the deck, or three in a six player game).The second special card is Sabotage. This card is worth zero, so playing it means that you will not win the trick, but giving away Sabotage cards in other people’s tricks is good because the team with the most Sabotages at the end of the round will score negative points. Be careful not to give Sabotage to someone that will end up being on your team! Also the Sabotage card is the tie breaker in case the teams collect the same number of tricks (6 vs 6). The Sabotage card also does not follow the must-follow rule and can be played at any time.Beast Chef Powers!This is our latest addition to the design and we are very excited about it: every Beast Chef in the game has a special power action that can be used only once during the entire game. These are usually very powerful moves that can allow a last minute trick grabbing, but they are not enough to flip a game in your team’s direction (an inspiration for something similar is TRICKTAKERs Hiroken, Joyple Games, 2021).Chupacabra helloooo?! Amazing illustrations by Jen CoraceRestaurantsEvery round is played at a different pop-up restaurant that has two special scoring conditions that every player can score independently. This was Dan Thurot favorite features, read his review here.Addendum - Self printing and selling Beastro! We hope that this next section could be helpful for you. The reality is that every story of self-publishing is different but we learned a lot from this experience so why not share it?The final product While Beastro’s prototype had components, we decided that if we have to self-publish we should keep it simple. So we turned everything into a card, and our game is now a deck made of 86 cards: 62 playing cards, 12 restaurants cards, 6 Beast Chef cards and a role deck of 6 Cards.The game was selected for the Indie Game Night Market in November 2025, and we got news of the selection in August so we sprinted into work! We started with the illustrations and in this section we were really lucky. We trusted Jen completely with her illustrations. She and Jason came up with the list of ingredients, Beast Chefs, and Restaurants, so she was able to complete her portion of the work in no time - I think it was less than two weeks.After we got the illustrations we were ready to design the game's box. One insight I heard on a podcast from the folks at CMYK is that you should be able to understand how to play in three steps just by looking at the back of the box, so we tried that.The three steps rule applied to BeastroWe decided to print in China, and in 2025, that was not a good idea. I mean, we were really happy with the result, but the tariffs, the rush fee, and the cost per unit turned out to be higher than we expected. Another mistake we made was not to print a demo copy before placing the full order. Even if it’s insanely expensive, it could save you money down the road if, for example, you have to re-print a card because of a typo or you forgot a card.Someone ordered a Secrdt Sauce? After Pax USelling Beastro at PaxU was incredibly rewarding. The evening was just a great experience of sharing our design, receiving compliments, and having a good time. We were sad that we were not able to go to other designers’ tables and learn more about their games, but we were able to connect the following days and on the festival’s discord.Hello Mountain (us), selling Beastro. I'm beaten, Jason is rocking itIn the days afterwards we saw some reviews popping up. Some people shared that they got a copy and it felt very rewarding. With that momentum we decided to setup our website and try to sell copies online. The game was reviewed a couple of times more and with some social media activity we were able to sell a steady number of copies for the weeks preceding Christmas and some more in the new year. Some copies, together with the Italian ruleset, went to my hometown crew of “Jaguar’s friend” players in Italy, and some came with me to Tallahassee, Florida, where I relocated in the meantime.A small selection of Beastro's enthusiasts - check out Courtyard Cafè and Games if you are in TallyTo conclude this designer diary: we would like to thank again everyone that helped us along the route and playtested the game - every playtest was incredibly helpful! To self-publish a design that is only cards is definitely something we will suggest if you trying to self-publish for the first time. It will lower the costs, simplify your work, and you will reach a level of quality that otherwise it will be very hard. We feel blessed to have such an active and open community of indie game designers that we can be part of and we hope to keep designing and bringing to life quirky, easy-to-play games in the next future.Thanks for reading!Matteo and JasonHappy playing, courtesy Arianna Richeldi

• 
  Designer Diary: VNTYPL8S

  by casimps1 on May 9, 2026

  by Clarence Simpson 1NSP1R3DIn a way, VNTYPL8S was born out of necessity.VNTYPL8S exists, in no small part, due to the fact that I committed to playtest a game that didn’t exist yet.The Unpub Festival in Baltimore is a great place to playtest your prototypes. It’s a long-running convention that’s focused exclusively on design and playtesting. Designers pay to reserve one of their dozens of rectangular playtest tables for a 4-hour block of time during the con. But for their 2023 event, they decided to try something different.In October 2022, they opened up table reservations for Unpub 2023. But this time, it wasn’t just for rectangular tables. They offered shorter 2-hour blocks at big round tables that were separated from the main bulk of rectangular tables. They were intended to be used for playtesting shorter party-style games that needed less time but space for more players.At the time, I had only designed one party game, and I was already pitching it around to publishers. So, it didn’t need any playtesting. I didn’t actually have a party game to playtest at Unpub, but I decided to register for a party game table anyway. It was a new way to utilize Unpub, and I wanted to give it a try. I liked the idea of being locked down to a table for a shorter amount of time, and getting large group tests, which are often hard to coordinate otherwise. I thought “Surely I can come up with a party game concept by the time March 2023 rolls around!”Smash cut to mid-February 2023. I still don’t have a new party game, and haven’t even really thought about it at all. Unpub is now weeks away. I’m starting to feel the pressure, and there’s nothing like a good deadline to motivate me.I start browsing back through my giant Google Doc of board game ideas. I’m sure there's a decent party game idea somewhere in there. I just need to find one and throw together something playable. As I scroll through dozens of pages of ideas, I spot a single sentence that says “A game about vanity license plates”.I don’t remember when I wrote that in there. It was obviously just a passing thought since I had written no other details. But it got the gears turning, and I started considering if the idea was worth pursuing. Examples of vanity plates in the USIn the US, at least, vanity plates are ubiquitous. Everyone has seen them on the road. And, at some time or another, everyone has probably spotted a vanity plate that they couldn’t quite decipher, leading to a few moments of brainstorming and guesses, hopefully leading to a moment of perfect clarity, when they finally fully understand what the characters on that plate are supposed to mean.Thinking about that simple experience that happens organically on car rides, it had many of the hallmarks of an interesting game. People were presented with a puzzle, and after some debate, discussion, and often out-of-the-box thinking, you reach a conclusion. It also provided those eureka moments when you feel clever for finally making the connections that the car owner intended.So, I decided to go for it and start my pre-design research phase.R3S34RCHNot everyone is like this, but for me, before I dump a lot of time into a new design idea, I really want to know what else already exists that is similar thematically or mechanically. And I was sure that a vanity plates board game must already exist. So I dove into research mode on BGG.Some vanity plate cards from the 1988 game, Vanity ChaseI found surprisingly little in the way of games themed around vanity plates. I found some very old games that contained examples of vanity plates that were difficult to decipher. But they were only concerned with players deciphering plates, not creating them. That sort of game would have limited replayability once you’ve seen all the plates in the game, though. I wondered if I could create an experience that allowed players to both create plates and then decipher them.Then, I found one fairly modern game about vanity plates that was about both creating and deciphering plates. At first glance, I thought I had missed my chance. Someone had already made the game I thought of. But looking closer, in that game’s plate creation phase, players were given specific random phrases that they then had to communicate in vanity plate form. Accomplishing that generally just meant removing letters until the phrase fit on the plate. Which letters to remove (frequently vowels) often felt so obvious that I was sure many people who had the same prompt would create the same plate. In some ways, it felt like there was a “right” answer to each prompt card. So, although this game had both the creation and deciphering that I wanted to do, the creation seemed very unsatisfying to me, and didn’t really engage the creative part of the brain like I wanted it to.Example of play from Less Is More where you earn points by giving clues with as few letters as possibleI was also curious if there were other party guessing games that might operate on a core system of restricting your clues to a finite number of letters, effectively doing what vanity plates do without the vanity plate thematic dressing. I found several that encouraged you to write clues in as few letters as possible, like Less Is More and Inklings, but none with a fixed character limit.With that, I felt comfortable moving forward with designing the game. But I had to act fast because I also had a chance to do some playtesting at TantrumCon next week!D3S1GNThe first thing that came to mind when I sat down to design the game was that people usually want to remember a license plate when they see someone commit a crime with a vehicle. So, I thought about players seeing a license plate at a crime scene and then trying to catch the criminal later. It was an interesting framing, but it really didn’t sound like it would be about creating or deciphering plates. So, I quickly trashed that idea.Next I thought about communicating secret messages using the 8-character limit of most US vanity license plates. That sounded more like a party game. But I quickly realized that the best conceptual framing would probably be that each plate would be associated with a person with a specific job, sometimes realistic, sometimes wacky, like Author or Tooth Fairy. Players would be given a random job, create a vanity plate associated with that job, and then the other players would have to guess what the job was based on the plate. This was essentially what happens in real car rides every day and would provide players with an immediate hook.Some Job cards from the first playable prototype of VNTYPLTSBut I knew the trick would be how to get players to create plates that were difficult to decipher. A plate like “ILUVCARS” leaves nothing to the imagination and nothing is up for debate. The best plates were the ones you had to work at a little before discovering their intended meaning.So I started to think about what makes certain real world plates more difficult to decipher. Frequently, they had no vowels. Sometimes it was difficult to tell where one word started and another word ended. Some of them like “SP33D” would use substitute letters, presumably because someone else in their state already claimed “SPEED”.These observations, coupled with real-world plate restrictions, led to my initial set of rules for plate creation. These rules remained constant from the very first prototype to the final product: - Max 8 characters- Only uppercase letters and numbers- No vowels (though you could use other letters as substitutes)- No punctuation or spacesNow plate creation was starting to get interesting! But I felt like, even with those restrictions, the plates would still be too easy to guess. For the job Dentist, you could just say “T33TH” and it would be obvious that the plate went with a Dentist. And you could write the same plate every time the same job came up. There might be a “best” plate for each job. It still wasn’t difficult or interesting enough.Just playing by these basic creation rules seemed like it would lead to predictable and boring experiences. But how do you incentivize players to create more difficult or more obscure plates? I often think of Dixit in these situations. The scoring in Dixit is cleverly structured such that it’s optimal for the clue-giver if only one other player can figure out their clue. That scoring naturally makes players want to create difficult clues. But I wasn’t sure if there was enough obvious direction on exactly how a player might make a plate concept more difficult to guess.The original Restriction cards, giving players 1 pt per letter usedIf you look at a lot of guessing party games, many of them ask players to communicate some concept to each other, but force them to do it in some very non-optimal way through various restrictions on their communication. So, I added a second layer of restrictions to VNTYPLTS. In addition to a random job, every player would be given a card with a set of three random characters on it. Players would earn points if they used those 3 characters in their plate and if they avoided using vowels. I structured the three characters on each card to always be a set of one common letter, one less common letter, and one number. I hoped these randomized restrictions would add just the right amount of confusion and chaos to the process.Now I felt like I really had something. So, I cracked open NanDeck to create a small deck of Job cards and a small deck of Restriction cards. I combined that with the dry erase plates and markers from my copy of Just One, and I had myself a first playable prototype!For game structure, I took inspiration from So Clover. Everyone writes simultaneously during the plate creation phase to minimize feelings of down time. Then, players take turns revealing their creation and letting the other players guess their job.The last thing I needed was a name. And with a game about creating 8-letter vanity plates, I thought it would be pretty cool if the name of the game was also a valid 8-letter vanity plate. With that, VNTYPLTS was born. The VNTYPLTS title banner, with taglineIt also struck me that if I overlay the title VNTYPLTS on an image of a blank license plate that the game is relatively self-explanatory just from that cover image. For most people in the US, seeing a cover image like that, they could immediately and instinctively know what kind of game they’re about to play. So, I added a tagline that I thought was pretty catchy - “If you can read the title, you’re already playing the game!” and I was off to TantrumCon for my first playtest!PL4YT3STThe very first playtest went surprisingly well. Sometimes players would guess a plate immediately. Sometimes they would give up and make a wild guess. But the best moments were when players would stare at a plate for about 10 seconds and then go “OHHH!” and guess correctly. I needed to make sure those moments happened as much as possible.Originally, players wrote down their guesses for which Job they thought each plate belonged to. Everyone who guessed correctly scored points. It worked OK, but it was clunky. I also realized that a structure like that prevented players from celebrating their Eureka moment when they finally deciphered a tough plate. They would have to sit there until everyone else finished, and then the excitement would have faded away. So, I pivoted guessing to be a real-time race. Each player only gets one guess and the first player to guess correctly gets a point.I also had people tallying their scores on the back of the Just One plates, and it quickly became obvious that scoring was overly complicated. Party games need just enough scoring to teach players how they’re supposed to have the most fun with your game, but no more. Once you start doing arithmetic or spending a significant portion of your playtime on scoring, you’re doing it wrong.Some player-created plates from the first playtests at TantrumCon 2023Can you guess which plates go with which jobs?The problem was that I was giving people points for too many things. You earned points for not using vowels. You earned points for each of the 3 restriction letters that were used. And you earned points for guessing other people’s plates.But also, when I watched the players who chose not to use the restriction letters, or to use vowels in their plate, I noticed that the plates became too easy again, and the game was much less fun. I needed to not give players the option to have less fun, and just force them to make their plates the hard way.So, “no vowels” just became a rule of the game that you had to remember. If you used vowels you were cheating. Doing this was the secret sauce of the game early on. Making sure that vowels were never in plates instantly made the game better.Forcing players to use the three restriction letters was a little more tricky. There wasn’t always an obvious way to use specific letters. But I tried still presenting it to players as a requirement. I was constantly amazed at the clever ways that players managed to use their three characters in their plate. Occasionally, someone would be paralyzed by the thought of how to use their three characters, but I would always tell them that if they couldn’t think of another way to do it, to just put them anywhere in their plate.More player-created plates from TantrumCon 2023Can you guess which plates go with which jobs?Ideally, I wanted the three characters to have a “purpose” in order to count for scoring. I didn’t love that you could do “DRNKSTM7” as a plate for Bartender. Clearly it’s just “drinks” and then the three extra letters. That wasn’t quite playing in the spirit of the game and I instinctively wanted to stop it, but it was too hard to police through rules. I finally decided it was actually fine, because it does still provide some confusion regardless, which is important. But more importantly, it makes the game more accessible to players if they get really stuck on how to use those required characters.These changes allowed for a new scoring system that was dead simple. Each turn, the first player who guessed correctly takes the Job card as a point. And if the clue was guessed correctly and the clue-giver used their three required characters, they take the Restriction card as a point. That made two points per turn and your score is just a pile of cards that you needed to get out of the way anyway. It was elegant and perfect for a party game.When I ran the game, I was fairly loose about allowing players to draw a new Job or Restriction card if they were having difficulty. That would also often fix problems with feeling paralyzed, and kept the game moving.Other than these tweaks, not much changed after those TantrumCon playtests. When I brought the game to Unpub not long after, it was still largely the same game I started with. And it was creating great moments for playtesters at those round party tables that I had no idea what to do with a few weeks earlier.R34DYJust after Unpub 2023 officially ended, some designers and publishers were sticking around to hang out Sunday night. So, I got the chance to playtest VNTYPLTS with a few more people including Elizabeth Hargrave and a game publisher, IV Studio.[twitter=https://x.com/StoicHamster/status/1638029216108126209]IV Studio said that they don’t publish party games, but if they did, they would definitely publish the game. Elizabeth loved the game so much that she tweeted about how it should be on the shelves of Target. After all the other positive feedback, this final playtest sealed it, and I knew it was ready to pitch to publishers.Soon after Unpub, I picked out some mass market party game publishers to pitch it to. But it ended up being significantly tougher to find a publisher for the game than I initially thought. Even with Codenames being such a juggernaut in the industry, some mass market publishers have a strict policy against doing games that ask players to be “creative” in any way. They said it made some players feel uncomfortable and inadequate, and they couldn’t afford to make anyone uncomfortable when trying to reach a mass audience.I also found that some European publishers didn’t feel like they could connect with their audiences because vanity plates don’t exist in Europe in the same way they do in the US. In many of the most populated European countries, they don’t exist at all. And the few that do have vanity plates generally have strict limits on how much of the plate you can customize, often only a few specific characters. The freedom in plate design that we have in the US is actually fairly rare, across the world.So, even with such a strong concept and the endorsement of an industry heavyweight, I went through 15 pitch rejections before I finally found it a home.PVBL1SHDI had known Chad at 25th Century Games for several years through various conventions, and I had been looking for a chance to work with him on something. So, in July 2023, I pitched VNTYPLTS to him over e-mail. He gave my PnP version a spin, and about a month later, he offered me the most designer-friendly contract I had ever seen. So, I signed the game and we were rolling!One of the first things that came up after signing was the title. Someone asked me why it was VNTYPLTS instead of VNTYPL8S, and I was honestly embarrassed that I’d never thought of that. I loved that it showcased the creative way that numbers are intended to be used in the game. So, we immediately made that subtle, but important, name change.Things started moving quickly after that. Within a week, we were talking about making more Job cards. I only had a small set of 54 Job cards in my original prototype. Chad wanted to get 220 total cards in the game. I had some work to do!Originally, I had focused on professions, but with all the new cards needed, we decided to expand a bit and reframe Job cards as Owner cards. After all, there's lots of reasons people get vanity plates in real life - jobs, hobbies, fandoms, personalities, and other identities. In the end, I came up with a list of different categories that could help inspire new Owners: Normal Professions (like Accountant), Wacky Professions (like Necromancer), Creatures (like Dragon), Hobbies (like Homebrewer), Fandoms (like Horror Fan), Personalities (like Night Owl), and Pop Culture (like Godzilla).Some 0WN3R (Owner) cards from the finished productI had mostly avoided pop culture references in my original prototype, partially because I wasn’t completely sure about the legal implications of using them. But also, I was worried about how those references might shackle a game to a certain time period and make the game look dated in the future. I wanted it to have a shot at being timeless. But the two references I put in my prototype Owner cards, Ghostbuster and Jedi Knight, were also always a lot of fun to play with.I went back and looked at Just One for comparison, and I was shocked at how many pop culture references they used. But I noticed that they were very carefully curated. Some were single words with multiple meanings in addition to the pop culture reference, like Rocky, Dune, and Matrix. And the only other references were so well-known that it would be very unlikely for players to have not heard of them, like “Batman”, “Pikachu”, and “Nintendo”. So, we decided to carefully move forward with adding some pop culture references.A portion of the Google Sheet containing all the 0WN3R card dataAfter making the complete list of Owners, Chad handed all the card content over to Nathan Thornton, of Green Team Wins fame. Nathan came up with all the hilarious descriptions for each Owner card, which really gave the game a nice layer of polish. The descriptions may seem like fluff, but I believe they’re actually a critical part of the game. They allowed us to use obscure jobs like Herpetologist without making players feel stupid for not knowing what it is. The descriptions also serve as sparks of creativity. They contain words associated with the Owner, so they can be used as the starting point for a plate. Nathan also added dates/locations to each Owner card, which are often little Easter Eggs, like the Time Traveler being listed as from Hill Valley, CA, the fictional town in Back to the Future.A dry erase plate board from the finished productWhile all this was going on, Chad had also kicked off graphic design on the game. The game didn’t need a lot of graphic design work and it was knocked out pretty quickly. The last few UI tweaks we made were adding the plate creation rules to the dry erase boards as well as eight blank spaces to write letters into. This helped players play the game more easily without ever referencing the rulebook.By the end of 2023, the game files were effectively finished and we had a factory-printed prototype in hand. But for various reasons, actually printing the game was on hold for an excruciating (to me) amount of time.VNTYPL8S set up for demo at the Diana Jones Award Emerging Designer Program table at Gen Con 2024In July 2024, VNTYPL8S was officially announced. I was able to attend Gen Con 2024 thanks to a generous prize package when I was selected for the 2024 Diana Jones Award Emerging Designer Program. And there I ran the first public demos of VNTYPL8S.At Gen Con 2025, VNTYPL8S had a limited con-exclusive release while waiting on the full print run. And now, finally, after a few more delays due to fixing a printing error, VNTYPL8S is having a proper retail release.The final production version of VNTYPL8SVNTYPL8S has yet to get that placement on the shelves of Target that Elizabeth thought it deserved. But now that we’re finally getting copies out to the gaming public, who knows what will happen!I’m really looking forward to more people getting their hands on the game and seeing the creative plates that people come up with. Thanks for reading about its journey and I can’t wait to see it on your tables!

• 
  Be the Gulo of the Sandcastle Kingdom

  by boardgamersteph on May 6, 2026

  by Steph Hodge ▪️ Pandasaurus Games always has a lot of really cool games in the pipeline, and they recently announced a few titles being released this summer, but don't forget about their other just-released titles as well!▪️ Shackleton Base: Below. Within. Above. is a new expansion just released! This expands the very popular Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon which was released last year. In the box, you can expect to find 3 new corporations to mix with your base game, new scoring milestone tokens, and more content for the solo gamers out there. ▪️Also recently released were the two small expansion packets for Faraway and Castle Combo. Don't underestimate a few cards being added to your games; they add a big punch! Check out Castle Combo: Out of the Oubliette! & Faraway: Under Starry Skies.And now for all of the summer releases! I have three exciting new games that have been announced for release this August![imageid=8660175 medium rep]▪️ Time to check out Kingdom Crossing from designers Marco Canetta, Stefania Niccolini the team that brought you Zhanguo: The First Empire & Railroad Revolution. This game plays 1-4 players in 45-90 minutes. From the newsletter:Welcome to Brightspring!In a faraway land in the midst of a verdant forest crossed by the Crystal River lies the small kingdom of Brightspring, ruled by the wise Queen Beavery, who is facing a problem: Her four regions are separated by seven bridges, and to divide her time evenly between the subjects of these regions, the kingdom would need an eighth bridge... Help the Queen build a new bridge! Scour the kingdom, recruit the best artisans, gather construction resources, and create magnificent decorations. Note, however, that you can never use the same bridge more than once in the same day.▪️ Seems like a perfect time for Sandcastles to be released as we get ready for the warm beach weather. For 2-6 players and plays in 20 minutes. More on the mechanics from the newsletter:Over 15 rounds, players draft a single tile per round and add it to their sandcastle: a personal 5×5 grid anchored by a Starter Tile. The catch? Tiles are revealed one at a time, and once you take one, you're out of that round. Wait too long hoping for something better, and you might be forced to take whatever's left.Tiles score through a mix of mechanisms: adjacency bonuses for matching starfish colors, row-by-row window counts, birds on sky tiles, and flat values for shells, shovels, and buckets.This gives players a satisfying puzzle to optimize across their grid. Designed by Alex Cutler (Critter Kitchen, A Place for All My Books), it's a clean, quick game that's equally at home on a family table or as a warm-up for game night.▪️ Finally, a new release of a classic game from 2003 called Gulo Gulo. This is a family game that will play well with kids and large gatherings, as it plays 2-6 players in 20 minutes. From the newsletter:Re-introducing Gulo Gulo 🥚 Some games never should have gone away. Gulo Gulo is one of them. Originally published in 2003, this Kinderspielexperten Nominee spent years as a sought-after out-of-print gem. Now, with all-new art by Jennifer Meyer and a freshened-up ruleset, it's finally coming back to retail on August 21.The premise is as follows: you're a family of wolverines racing to rescue Gulo Junior from a nest guarded by suspicious swamp vultures. The nest is packed with colorful eggs, but hiding somewhere in the middle is the alarm pole. You need to reach in and steal the right one without knocking anything over. It's harder than it sounds, but also extremely fun to watch.

• 
  Designer Diary: Colossi

  by johnrudolph on May 5, 2026

  by John Drexler This is the story of how I published my first game Colossi. I learned 100 hard lessons along the way. But the most interesting are the bookends: how it started, and how I eventually realized I was done designing.The ConceptionIn 2016, I was trying to design a huge, wildly ambitious superhero RPG with my friend Walter Somerville. Being new designers, we of course picked the hardest possible first project. The game was doomed, but it got our creative wheels turning. One afternoon I was on a walk with my friend Mitch, and I tried to explain a combat system I'd been developing. It was just one piece of this massive, sprawling idea. The explanation came out garbled. Mitch nodded politely, tried to play it back to me, and his version was completely wrong.It was also better than mine.That's where Colossi started. Years later in 2020, humbled by several other failed ambitious projects, I excavated just that one combat mechanism: preparing cards in three environments at once, because you don’t know which hand you’ll play next. And that was a good enough idea to build a much smaller game around.I think a lot about where good game ideas come from. Good game ideas are everywhere, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. A painter sees the world in color, light, and shadow. Game designers see games everywhere: complicated real world systems, war, funny social situations, etc. Our job is just to stay open and pay attention. In this case, a great idea came from a friend's misunderstanding of my bad idea. Sometimes you get lucky.Day 1The picture above is literally day one of Colossi. Pencil, paper, and the simplest possible implementation. I prototype fast and furious: get the idea out of my head and onto the table so I can see whether it has legs. I've written about this at length elsewhere. A game only becomes a game when someone can pick it up and play it. Before that, it’s merely a thought experiment. Colossi came to life because I kept putting it in front of people, starting on day one.From that first sketch, the structural hook was already there. Three Environments. Both players have identical starting decks. And, critically, you don't know which Environment will resolve first. So you're preparing three hands at once across three lanes, hedging across all of them. Because when a fight breaks out, you better have a well constructed hand with synergies and combos in that environment (originally called “Zone”)."How much craziness can this scaffolding hold?"My design process is typically: 1. Build a strong and compelling base scaffolding.2. Pressure test how much wild stuff the scaffolding can hold.I strive for the experience where a player picks up a card and says, “No way. Am I seriously allowed to do that? And if I combo it with this other card… that must be broken…” And then it works. A lot of the cards from my first iteration were simply elemental cards like water, fire, and electric, to build up power to win an environment. But I gradually started layering in crazier card types with big exciting effects. The Colossus cards represent your special abilities as a Colossus. These cards all feel like cheating. Heap lets you tuck any number of your cards under itself and count them all toward its power. This allows you to make use of low power cards, dramatically change your hand size, and negate negative effect cards all at once. It’s a great example of a huge, out of the ordinary moment that makes Colossi feel so exciting. Manifest literally says "play another card from your hand, even if you're not allowed to play that card right now." I kept waiting for Manifest to break the game. But it just worked.Another breakthrough was Abduct. There is a set of Beast type cards, that directly attack your opponent by forcing them to lose cards. Everyone starts Colossi with identical decks, which I was attached to because it puts tactics ahead of luck. But the game really came alive when I introduced a Beast card that lets you steal a card your opponent has played and making it part of your deck. Slowly, over the course of a match, the decks drift apart. By the final Skirmish, the composition of what you're drawing from is meaningfully different from what you started with. In a few games, testers abducted their opponent’s Abduct card! Things got crazy, but the game didn’t break, and it was still pretty fair. That gradual asymmetry was a breakthrough. The identical starting decks give the game its fairness. Abduct (and eventually other cards that warp the decks) gives it an arc.Now that Colossi’s foundation felt solid, I started asking how many crazy cards I could fit into the game. The answer, it turns out, is quite a lot. I developed the player decks quite a bit, and got it to a place where there was a fun and surprising set of synergies and counters. But the game needed more.The first big addition came from a test with Walter. He suggested that every Environment should have its own unique rule, something that rewrites a part of the game. That single observation cracked the project wide open. Sacrifice Mountain makes you discard cards onto an opponent's deck. Magnetic Maar pulls cards from other environments into play. Glass River has you prepare cards face-up, totally inverting the strategy. Suddenly every session played like its own mini-game. Each Environment now had personality, and felt like a real place.This was the right level of complexity for new players. But some of my testers had now played the game dozens of times. I had lots more ideas for things that were too crazy to fit into the base deck. Things that you don’t want to happen four times in a game. So I added Items: single-use cards that are randomly distributed to Environments and let you pull off enormous, game-warping plays. A few of my favorites:Ebenezer: Discard your entire hand. If you discarded at least 4 cards, this card gives you +15 power.Wager: Guess out loud who will win this Skirmish. If you're right, draw 2 cards from your deck and prepare them on the next Environment. If you're wrong, discard all the cards you have prepared on all Environments.Terraformer: Destroy both non-active Environments, and replace them with new ones from the deck.The random combinations of Environments and Items created a genuinely dynamic problem to solve. Matching the synergies and counters in your deck to the environments and items available turned into an addictive game loop. Layer on the dynamic of your opponent bluffing and putting together counters of their own? I had a good game on my hands.Hiring an ArtistThese environments were the centerpiece of the game. They deserved oversized cards and gorgeous art. I found my artist Sean Thurlow (Instagram) right here on a BGG forum! Sean does environment art professionally for video games and animated shows. Handing Sean the brief of "here are twenty ridiculous Environments, go nuts" was a dream. Art sells games. Without Sean, I would not have had a successful Kickstarter. The GraveyardFor everything that made it into the final game, two or three things got cut. My list of cut content is bigger than the game itself.Most of the cut cards fell into the following categories: 1. Too many edge cases: The most instructive cut was a card called Hypnotize: "choose an opponent; for their next turn, they must play three cards in a row." It was a fun deviation from the normal gameplay. It was also an edge-case machine. What if the hypnotized player also has a Hypnotize? What if another card interrupts them mid-turn? What if they only have two cards in hand? Every playtest produced a new ruling, so out it went.2. Redundancy / too same-y: since I’m optimizing for big, crazy, exciting moments, it was critical to not have a lot of cards that do nearly the same thing. I even had a good number of cards like Recreate that let you copy a Divine Gift or Beast effect an opponent had just played, and it was fine, but it just repeated an effect you just saw, and it fell flat.3. Mechanically sound, but a vibe killer: I like games where you can really mess with your opponent. But I ran into some ideas that just felt awful. Some cards felt like you were a big brother bullying your little brother, and at the table it just felt bad.Putting It DownAfter 18 months of grinding on this game, I burned out. Colossi was close to done, but I couldn't tell what "done" meant anymore. It felt like there was no end to testing and idea generation. I got overwhelmed and tired, and went to work on other games. I made a web based social game. I developed new board game ideas. I set Colossi aside for nearly a year.The revival happened at a work retreat. A coworker had heard I made games and asked me to bring one along. I was down on Colossi at the time and brought it reluctantly. They loved it. They pushed me to finish it. It had problems, but I had fresh eyes and more design experience. This was the test where I really honed in on Items, and refined how you use them. I was ready for the final stretch.Testing and development are arduous. Progress stalls. You lose perspective. You need kind people around who will remind you that the thing you made is worth finishing.Knowing When To StopWhen I came back to Colossi, I was energized and started piling on new ideas again. Now that I had the right form factor for Items, the ideas were flowing. I played it dozens more times, mostly with my friend Chris Thornton. Chris is a star playtester and a brilliant designer in his own right. He'd been brainstorming alongside me for years. After one test he said, “Every new idea either breaks the game, is redundant, or would turn Colossi into a fundamentally different game." The graveyard was bigger than the game. It was extremely difficult to come up with new crazy things that made the game better. And that was the sign that I was done.This is a great heuristic to know when something is done. There’s no stone left unturned. You’ve tried everything. And every new idea hurts the game instead of enhancing it.It was a weight off my shoulders. Because he was right. The foundation was holding absurd amounts of crazy: players stealing each other's cards, cycling half a deck in a turn, manifesting Beast cards out of nowhere, forcing mass discards, and the game still played fair, fast, and exciting. The cup was full of water, and it wouldn't take any more water.Time to print.Self-publishingI ran Colossi as a Kickstarter through my own publisher, Catacombian. Many backers took a chance on the game, got it into production, and carried it across the finish line.Self-publishing means you learn every part of the pipeline whether you want to or not: manufacturing overseas, freight and customs, CE testing, warehousing, fulfillment (domestic and international), distribution, retail outreach, reviews, advertising, and the long, slow work of getting the game onto shelves. Each of those is its own game, with its own rules, and most of them do not come with a rulebook. I would not have done any of it without the playtesters, the backers, and the wave of designers and publishers I pestered for advice along the way. The board game community is weirdly, disproportionately generous. If you're working on something, keep asking people for help. They will help. It is noteworthy that the story of Colossi mentions so many other people. Game designers have nothing without friends, testers, and collaborators. ThanksColossi is available now on our website and in select retail stores. If you'd like to go deeper on the design process, including a longer conversation about where good ideas come from, I talk extensively about this process in my blog / podcast / YouTube / Instagram / Bluesky.