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▪️ On Dec. 8, 2025, McSweeney’s published Robert Rooney’s story “The Mastermind Box Cover: What the Hell Were They Thinking?” An excerpt:
GARY LARKIN (Design Lead): Right. Here it is. Black void. Two adults. No board. No pegs.
PAM REYNOLDS (Product Development): Where are the children?
LARKIN: Exactly. Also, who cares?
▪️ The Toy Foundation has announced its finalists for Game of the Year, and as usual they are all mass-market titles aimed at casual gamers. Cast your vote to help choose the People’s Choice Award for this category (and others) in its Toy of the Year (TOTY) awards.
▪️ On Dec. 9, 2025, Leder Games announced that Take designer Ted Caya, who was a staff employee with the publisher, had decided to leave the company and take Take with him. Leder Games had started teasing this heist game in mid-2025, with more than 8,000 followers on the Kickstarter landing page that was scheduled to launch in early 2026, but has now been removed.
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▪️ On Dec. 10, 2025, BoardGameWire‘s Mike Didymus-True summarized the dire history of Mythic Games, which raised more than US$12 million in six crowdfunding campaigns from 2020 to 2022, but has left many of those campaigns unfulfilled and now no longer exists as a company. An anonymous spokesperson for Mythic Games told BoardGameWire:
At the same time, we were confronted with several unforeseen financial issues that severely impacted our cash flow: the increase in refund requests, including unexpected direct withdrawals initiated by Stripe, banks or PayPal (withdrawals that came in addition to the monthly refunds we were already issuing); and a VAT adjustment following a tax audit.
The full story runs much longer…
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▪️ For nearly forty years, U.S. publisher Looney Labs has been closing out each year by publishing “holiday gifts”, sometimes as a downloadable game and sometimes as a physical product shipped to those who purchased games directly.
Many of the games have been new designs that make use of the Looney Pyramids game system, and 2025 offers another such title: Looney Dejarik, this being Andy Looney‘s take on the holographic chess game that appeared in Star Wars for less than sixty seconds, yet became a thing just like everything else in Star Wars became a thing.
▪️ With the end of the year approaching, game buying guides have started to appear, with The Guardian‘s list being compiled by Senet co-founder Dan Jolin, Tim Clare, Alexandra Sonechkina, Dan Thurot, Matt Thrower, and Meeple Lady.
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