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  Designer Diary: The Glorious Guilds of Buttonville

  by pastej on June 27, 2026

  by Erik Anderson Sundén This designer diary will tell the story on how The Glorious Guilds of Buttonville came to be.We, Christian Kudahl and Erik Andersson Sundén, started to explore joint designs less than four years ago. Erik had played Mindbug and loved it. Christian had heard of Erik from his adventures at Fastaval and Whirling Witchcraft and was curious. So we started to talk. Relatively soon we both agreed to try to make a game together. We seem to thrive when we work intensely! So we tried a few ideas and shot them down after a few iterations. Especially Christian pushed the idea of abandoning things quickly if they didn’t show great promise already in the first test (as he can really be quite lazy). This can feel quite tough as you still may think “but I can fix it”, but exploring new ideas is just a lot more fun. We wanted a game that was immediately really fun, so that our job polishing the last few edges would be super easy.And so one day we stumbled over the concept of Buttonville. We agreed to create the simplest of systems so the game rules were something like this:1. Draw cards.2. Play as many cards as you want from a set and trigger the ability of that set.Each set has a cool ability which sometimes even gets more powerful the more cards you play. This was the core of the game and already from the first test, we saw something showing a ton of promise. We knew we had to continue down this rabbit hole to see what the game had to offer. It’s fun when you make games, you can yourself be surprised at the experiences they throw back at you. It is a bit like having a kid.We saw that the system was simple enough to not get in the way, so the heart of the game was really the cards. Depending on what you put on those, the game could be a breezy experience playable with families or a brainburning puzzly hellhole that would make even heavy eurogamers quit in frustration. We aimed for a happy medium.We made the game modular, so each game you select some number of stacks that are used in that game. (A stack consists of multiple copies of the same card). This gives a lot of variety between games and leaves new combinations to be discovered each play. This idea is certainly not new, and Dominionprovided some inspiration here. Not for the gameplay, as Glorious Guilds of Buttonville is not a deck builder, but for having a big box with stacks of cards, only some of which are used in every game. Other inspirations include Guildhall and Ethnos having abilities increasing in power based on the number of cards played.And all of a sudden things exploded. We went into hyperspeed mode and more than 50 cards were created in less than a day. Erik loves to brainstorm ideas and just throw them out there, no thoughts of consequences and no sorting of good or bad effects. Page up and page down. Christian is great at finding the gold nuggets among those ideas and polishing them to crispy unique (and well-worded) effects. Christian even suggested that our rapid work pace made him think of us as he listened to MacGyver by They Might Be Giants.Playtest at the lunch break of the division of applied nuclear physics at Uppsala UniversityAfter working on the game for what feels like only about a month, Erik proposed sending it to Thorsten Gimmler at Ravensburger. Usually it is a good idea to make your idea really refined before showing it to a publisher - if they don’t like it, they might not want to see a more polished version again later. On the other hand, we are both quite impatient (especially Erik), so we decided to send it away. And then we waited. What did we learn from the waiting? Erik is WAY less relaxed in a waiting state. He probably checked his mail every 5th minute. Christian was much more Zen.Thorsten: ”From the very first test game, I was captivated by the game. Many games have extensive rules that ensure complexity and replayability. Buttonville, however, has such simple and few rules, yet the combinations of cards ensure that the game remains exciting. Since the games don't take long, I played three games in a row during my first test. Further tests quickly followed, especially since it was easy to find test players for the game, as everyone wanted to test it again and again. So it quickly became clear to us that we definitely wanted to make the game.”An early playtest of the prototype at Ravensburger in June 2024Thorsten came back to us and started by saying. “This game sure has a LOT of cards in it! I can’t believe that I spent so much time crafting this first prototype, but I’m glad I did! Because I REALLY like the game!” and a few months later a contract was signed. We had a great development process with Ravensburger. Thorsten proposed that instead of picking the card sets completely random, we could group them into sets of similar effects, for example drawing, getting currency, spending currency etc. This was a great call and allowed us some freedom in designing cards. If a card for example rewards you for spending coins, you really need there to be another card giving you coins or that first card will just be a dead draw.Erik and Christian (especially Erik) created well over 100 more card stacks. Some were super simple and some more advanced (Christian even used the expression “crazy mess” now and then). We playtested the cards and sorted them back and forth in good and bad, simple and hard. Together with our editorial team at Ravensburger, we decided to mostly focus on the simple and easy to understand card effects, and only one or two of the crazy messes snuck their way into the final game (You know who you are, Slimebob!).Photo Credit: [user=W Eric Martin][/user]Thorsten: “Working with Christian and Erik was really great and a lot of fun. We coordinated with each other regularly and discussed our test results in video calls. It was great that we always had the same vision for the game. It just worked really well. We made small improvements again and again, replacing some cards with new ones or simply improving and adjusting others slightly. We also made a big leap forward by designing the entire system to be modular. This allows everyone to freely assemble their own set. Of course, this also had the practical benefit of not having to test each set multiple times. 😉 But this means you are not limited to previously tested sets. You can keep putting together new sets and be sure that they will work! The signing event at SPIEL 2025.The game premiered at SPIEL Essen 2025. We were happy to be assigned a signing slot at the booth of Ravensburger. We had a decent number of visitors who wanted a signed copy, a fair amount were happy designer friends who congratulated us. We had a great time! And then! As the time was getting close to the end, something started to happen. A huge queue started to build up and we started to get excited. Did the hype spread to the entire convention already? Christian, the more observant of the two of us, noticed that every single one in the queue was also carrying a green box… hmm.. As we turn around Stefan Feld is standing behind us: “I will take over from here.” (Just kidding, Stefan was super friendly and congratulated us on our game.)Almost a year has passed, and now it is time for the game to be presented at Gen Con! We look forward to its American reception!From the left: Erik Andersson Sundén, Thorsten Gimmler, and Christian Kudahl

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  The Ants spent the Night at the Zoo and claimed Papyria as "All Mine!"

  by boardgamersteph on June 24, 2026

  by Steph Hodge Capstone Games recently announced their Gen Con lineup of games! Here are the details![imageid=9526276 medium rep]▪️ It gives me great pleasure to talk about All Mine! because it reimplements Scharfe Schoten, a game I hold on to tightly in my collection because it never made its way to the US market. I am very pleased to learn of this new release from Capstone Games. It does seem to be a new age of trick-taking games, so it doesn't surprise me to see All Mine show up and essentially resurface. This game is played by 3-4 players in about 30 minutes.From the BGG Page:All Mine is a mining claim (trick-taking) game in which players predict their hauls of each of the four treasures (gold, gems, mushrooms, and dragon eggs). However, instead of predicting the number of hauls they'll take, they must state the treasures they think they'll receive the most and least of. Since all cards display their treasure type on the back, players have more information than usual.During each claim (hand), you must play the same treasure type if possible, even with the special trump cards. This requirement makes it difficult to predict which hauls you will bring in. In the end, the player who comes closest to their predictions wins.Don’t get too greedy as you playfully place your bets in this game guaranteed to please card game enthusiasts and families alike.▪️ Ants was originally released from Cranio Creations at Spiel 2025, but now will be available in the US market from Capstone. It is a heavier strategy game for 2-4 players and plays in about 90 minutes. From BGG:Ants is a deep strategy game that focuses on worker management and territorial expansion. Each player begins with one of multiple unique Queen tiles, which will heavily influence your strategy and interaction with the game's interconnected systems. Throughout the game, you will guide your ant colony through cycles of growth, exploration, and conquest to establish dominance over the garden ecosystem....The heart of the game revolves around your colony's life cycle management. Your incubation board tracks three vital phases (eggs, larvae, and ants), each containing three specializations: diggers, explorers, and gatherers. Wild ants serve as valuable wildcards that can fulfill any specialization need. When you incubate, you complete enterprises, trigger production effects, feed your larvae with food cubes, and advance the life cycle.▪️ Night at the Zoo is a new tile-placement game for 1-4 players that will play in about 30 minutes. The catch is that you need to program your movement and understand the patterns to do that. From BGG:“Just a little further, a bit higher, bro…” The cheetah gives the penguin a boost over the gate, while a confused wolf dashes past. “Look out, someone’s coming!” Everyone freezes. After a moment of silence, a sloth calls from a tree: “All clear, move out!” The animals have secretly snuck out of the zoo at night—and now they’re trying to find their way back. Help them return before the keepers notice!The goal of the game is to help the animals and guide them safely back into their home. Players explore parts of the darkened zoo to discover the best routes home. Each round, players draft tiles and place them on their boards, triggering special actions and building a path back for their animals. Every animal has its own unique way of moving and scoring points, making each game a new adventure!▪️ Along with the base game, you can acquire the expansion Night at the Zoo: Latecomers. Now with more animals and added variety!From BGG:The Zoo has opened four new enclosures, welcoming more animals into the park. Under the cover of darkness, these curious beings joined their friends and escaped! Help them return to the Zoo safely, but be careful – some of those new arrivals have more complicated ways of moving!This expansion doesn’t alter any of the base game rules; it adds four new animals to choose from.▪️ Finally, another big game called Papyria. This game is originally from Irongames, but will now be available in the US from Capstone. It has a Rondel mechanic, which is very intriguing. The game plays 1-4 players and takes 90-120 minutes.From BGG:Mesopotamia, around 1500 BC: The Mesopotamian region on the Euphrates and Tigris is home to a melting pot of different cultures. Achievements such as writing and the wheel led to the construction of the first large cities and lively trade. In the mountains, the coveted lapis lazuli is mined, and papyrus is made from reed grass.In Papyria, you explore the region to create an extensive network of canals; discover inventions; develop mines; and build temples, sanctuaries and cities.During your turn, you move your wanderer or ship. On the target space, you choose two of the three possible actions, which can mean taking a new tile for your display or a multiplier for later scoring; building a city, a temple, or a mine; or producing lapis or papyrus, which you need for building, special actions, or special scorings.The game ends as soon as the last good has been taken from several spaces and a certain number of "end-of-game" tiles have been revealed and fulfilled. After several final scorings, whoever has the most points wins.

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  Jackpot: Set the Reel Designer Diary

  by djur on June 23, 2026

  by Kristian Karlberg The Birth of JackpotVersion 0 - 2020 The earliest version of Jackpot: Set the Reel was born at KalCon, a small Swedish board game convention where Kristian was demoing and recruiting backers for Goetia: Nine Kings of Solomon. During the event, inspiration struck and this childhood memory of us playing slot machines on the ferry between Finland and Sweden made us tinker with the idea of making a deck builder slot machine. Even back then, we were fascinated by slot machines as a physical and emotional experience. There’s something universally recognizable about the rhythm of spinning symbols lining up. Part of the original vision was simply recreating that feeling in tabletop form: revealing three cards at a time like the reels of a slot machine and letting players chase combinations.Kristian likes to take picture of the very first versions of a game. This is the very first hotel-room-prototype of Jackpot. Breaking the Bank Early in the development, players were trying to hit three-of-a-kind as often as possible in order to gain coins - just the way the old slot machines worked. The coins in the bank eventually became the timer of the game thus making the working title “Jackpot: Break the Bank”. ArtworkPeople say that you should not spend money on artwork for prototypes, but Kristian stumbled upon some beautiful cherries somewhere and decided to track down the artist, who was surprised that Kristian had found some of his old artworks. He agreed to sell us the art pieces to use, since Kristian was convinced that he would make this into another Kickstarter, so he might as well get the rights to use his artwork straight away. The artwork would end up being used to draw looks and raise interest, but these art pieces never ended up in the final version.Early Artwork used in PrototypeDesigning Variants That “breaking the bank” concept stayed at the heart of the game for a long time. Every decision players made brought the table collectively closer to the end. Early versions experimented with all kinds of mechanics. There was a hold mechanic inspired directly by video poker, where players could lock certain symbols while rerolling others. At one point the game drifted surprisingly close to being a memory game, asking players to track information across turns. We also introduced income mechanics tied to clover symbols, giving players more long-term strategic engines to build around. One early mechanic that Kristian thought was interesting was the fact that you gave your cards to your opponents, and if they used those cards when they won some coins, you gained some coins because your cards were used. This caused the players to get an influx of coins out of turn. The coins could then be used to purchase new cards to improve your hand. Early on, the game used achievements with decrementing values, so the first player to hit a three-of-a-kind would get the highest victory point token. Variants of this remained in the game and eventually ended up becoming simply cards that were awarded to the players. Decreasingly valued VP cards awarded when hitting 3 of a kindLater iterations used a game board where players were moving between casinos and trying to break each and every one of the banks. A version had players move between casinos and collect poker chipsThe hold mechanic showed promise, but caused the timing of the game to become strange. Players needed to be finished with their turn at the same time to create order.The Pitch ProjectThe game eventually took shape into something representable. During the peak of Covid, Jay Cormier and Sen-Foong Lim realized the lack of opportunities for designers to pitch games to publishers, so they organized an event called the Pitch Project. The workshops during this event built the foundation and taught us how to properly pitch games to publishers. Sell SheetsThe requirement to enter the competition was to make a Sell Sheet and use that to qualify for the online pitch where dozens of publishers would look at your game. The sell sheets went through many iterations. Initial versions had too much text, then later versions were too rules-heavy, and slowly the feedback shaped them into something more refined. Evolution of the sell sheetFirst ContractJackpot qualified for the Top 50 out of roughly 750 submitted sell sheets and was set to hold a two minute video pitch for publishers. Shortly after the Pitch Project, the game was evaluated by multiple publishers and was eventually signed by an American publisher and entered a longer development process.DevelopmentSeeing another team engage deeply with the design was exciting and slowly but surely made improvements to the game. The development team aimed to improve Jackpot’s pacing and deck-building feel by reducing or removing the coins while keeping and refining popular features like wild cards, and allowing longer gameplay for better progression. Some of the ideas explored during that period still echo in the current version of the game. Hold was scrapped, coins were cut, and eventually clovers were introduced as currency, shifting the focus towards pacing, accessibility, and making every turn feel active for all players.Game Is Put On Hold Unfortunately, the publisher later ran into internal difficulties and had to let the project go. After a couple of years, the rights reverted back to Kristian, along with a huge amount of valuable feedback gathered during development. Jackpot was put on ice whilst other designs were made. Two years went by.Enter Kenny ZetterbergFor the next couple of years, Kristian and Kenny Zetterberg started to make multiple designs together. At some point, they revisited Jackpot and began tweaking it further, while also exploring what else could be done with the jackpot mechanic. Jackpot itself remained on ice while other designs explored what we now call the “jackpot mechanic”. This was added as an action selection system in other projects, eventually leading to a eurogame using that core idea. Prototype of the eurogame Kalix using the Jackpot mechanicExploring the jackpot mechanic in other designs proved valuable. We realized that, contrary to traditional slot machines, partial matches needed to be rewarded. Matching one or two symbols still gave players something. The game became more generous, more energetic, and far less swingy, keeping players emotionally engaged even when narrowly missing the perfect result. A crucial discovery during this period was the income phase. At the end of each round, players received income that could be used to purchase more cards, whereas earlier versions only rewarded wins directly. Clover indicating income at the end of a roundJackpot was occasionally revisited, and bonus actions were introduced when players achieved two-of-a-kind, which felt like the missing piece. The game timer was changed to “first to 33 VP wins,” and the game was ready to be pitched again.Reddit During the sell sheet design, Kristian posted in the r/tabletopgamedesign subreddit for feedback. Dranda Games had seen Jackpot during the Pitch Project and noticed that several years had passed without release. An old sell sheet post caught their attention, and they reached out to test the game. Conversations started, prototypes were sent, and before long Jackpot had found a new home.Dranda GamesThe development team at Dranda Games loved the game but felt there was more design space to explore, particularly inspired by mini-games found in modern slot machines. We began experimenting with very small mini-games integrated into the core gameplay. Designing these was an interesting challenge, as players would only experience them for a few turns. They added variety and created playful breaks in the flow of the game. Some experiments proved too complex and were cut, including Roulette and Minotaurs Maze, which required too many components and slowed the experience. Mini-game development explorationSeven Seas mini game PrototypeKickstarter - Jackpot: Set the Reel What started as a simple idea in a hotel room opened up many doors and possibilities, and six years later found a home with Dranda Games. Jackpot reached its funding goal on September 5th and has its official release at UKGE 2026. As a bonus, Jackpot: Set the Reel is now in the beta stage of development on BoardGameArena. Kenny Zetterberg & Kristian Karlberg at Essen Spiel 2025We couldn’t be happier with the game and we truly hope you will enjoy playing it!Thank you for taking the time to read about our journey.

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  The Body Clock is Set

  by whenindoubteatout on June 22, 2026

  by Justin Bell Ray Charles and I agree: night time really IS the right time, particularly when it comes to my energy level.Some of that is tied to the fact that I have children (ages 12 and 9) and I have a wife, all of whom typically go to bed by 9 or 10 PM every night. That means Dedicated Justin Time starts around 10, and I try to squeeze a lot in between 10 PM and maybe 1 AM every day.In some ways, nights for me start as soon as my typical weekend afternoon siesta ends around 4 or 4:30 PM, because I try to take a nap each day on the weekends and select days during the week, especially if I can find or create a gap somewhere each afternoon when “that 2:30 PM feeling” kicks in.So even though I love mornings, I find that my body’s peak energy sweet spot typically runs from about 5 PM until 1 AM. I have a passion for things like happy hour, dinner parties, evening networking events, and the Chicago nightlife. I also have a passion for playing board games at night, typically starting after 7 PM and running late, if I can find the right people to hang with me.For me, the body clock is set. Board games exist in my world as an evening activity, and that activity is not limited to playing lighter fare at night either. In fact, some of my best memories of the last 10+ years are playing heavy games that ran late, that went past midnight, that featured people squawking at each other into the wee hours of the morning.Conventions are sometimes worse for me because I will always find a way to start a game late when “free play” halls are open 24 hours a day. I have many memories of doing what I consider the absolute worst thing one can do at a show: opening a new treasure at like 10 PM, then ripping off the shrink and trying to table a new game by learning that game from the rulebook (“Justin…NOT FROM THE RULEBOOK!!”) when I have no business trying something like that.You know the situation. “Yeah, I just picked up a copy of [insert new strategy title here]…we should DEFINITELY play it tonight. No, there are no teach or learn-while-playing videos out there because the game is so new. Yes, this is the right time to punch the cardboard chits, set it up then learn it by reading the 24-page rulebook tonight.”“Is there any chance we finish this by 1 or 2 in the morning?” a brave soul, doubling as your group’s voice of reason, will offer.“Absolutely. All we have to do is get through the rulebook; I’ll bet we are up and running in 20, maybe 30 minutes.”Then you try to play the game…and find that you’ve just finished the first of four rounds, and it is already 1 AM.But thanks to Ray Charles’ voice in the back of my head, my body is always telling me that night time is the right time to do just about anything. So, I’m the joker who tries this or just agrees with your plan—learning a new game from the rulebook is absolutely the right idea late at night during a show, so we should go ahead and commit to learning it. Strike while the iron is hot, even when it looks like everyone else is essentially asleep.I still remember when a friend tried to get a game of 1861: Railways of the Russian Empire rolling, a first play we started at like 10 PM. (No, we didn’t finish.) A first play of Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory that went from a teach to a final turn that ended just after 1 AM on a Monday night? No sweat; those five hours just flew by.Rebel Princess: Deluxe Edition at a convention free play space that started after midnight? Home, sweet home. A five-player game of Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy that started at 9 PM and required a teach? Count me in, even as one player hid in the corner of the map to earn a victory while the other players space-battled their way into a four-hour slugfest at the center of the playspace. (Naturally, that was the second game of a very long night of chucking dice.)I’ve got dozens of stories like this, and I’m thankful that I’ve found other players who love playing games late at night as much as I do. That’s because I struggle carving out the time to play games during the day.I certainly like the idea of playing board games starting at, say, 11 AM or noon on a Saturday. But the reality is that being a dad also means trying to avoid tough conversations at home.“Honey, listen…my friend Beth is doing a game day from 12-6 PM. I’m thinking that, well, maybe I just bail on the family all day long, and you can run the kids to soccer, then band practice, then that third-grader birthday party downtown. We’re cool, right?”Talk about a recipe for divorce! Instead, I try to carve out one day each month when I actually do bail on my family and tackle daytime gaming. Lately, that means starting around 4 PM with friends in the suburbs on a Sunday here and there. But getting out of parental responsibilities is tough and it never feels great, so I try to balance the day gaming option where I can.Even if I wasn’t a dad, my body still loves afternoon down time. That makes my already-legendary lack of patience a bigger issue, so I try to avoid these trouble spots by not making critical board game decisions at 2 or 3 PM on a Saturday. Plus, no one I know plays games early, and I’m not a part of a 6 AM commuter game day where I can do card games with folks at a coffee shop downtown or something. (Maybe I need older gamers to join my network, since the people I know who love early mornings the most are also seniors. Some of those folks have already retired, so I’ll have to start making a list of potential gaming buds out of local retirees.)Maybe it’s different in other parts of the world. There have to be people playing Grand Austria Hotel in an actual hotel lobby somewhere at 8 AM, right? Wargamers who kick off new campaigns at the crack of dawn? Post-yoga trick-taking game mornings with folks from a local gym?I’ll keep an eye out; maybe mornings give me a chance to shake up the night owl formula that has worked wonders over the years.In the meantime, nights will do. Thankfully, my body prefers late nights anyway.

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  Designer Diary: Perfectly Imperfect

  by TokenGaymer13 on June 20, 2026

  by Danielle Reynolds “Love” for many can be a roller coaster of ups and downs. I had a six-year relationship with a woman I almost married and after that break up my friends were pushing me to go on apps because they wanted to play “swipe” (and probably have me find love). Most of them were in monogamous relationships and never got to experience Tinder, Hinge, Bumble or whatever the flavor-of-the-week app was. No offense to my friends but I didn’t trust them to just take my phone and pick what girls I should date so I’d watch to make sure they knew what I liked before I let them play “swipe”. This concept is what inspired the design of Perfectly Imperfect. I wanted players to learn from dating profiles what each other’s red and green flags were in the form of a conversation party game. This design spent years changing names and directions before it found its way to becoming Perfectly Imperfect. The cousin of this game was a design I attempted based on the concept of getting ghosted but I ditched the concept in 2019. In 2021, a yearish after my breakup, the first form of Perfectly Imperfect began as Date or Hate. Profiles were written to resemble public domain characters like Robin Hood. Each card was double-sided with a girl profile on one side and a boy on the other. That way you could turn the deck depending on a player’s preference. It was cute but people knew these characters. They had many pre-existing opinions and didn’t learn as much about each other as I had wanted. So I took a second stab at the content with the help of my uncle Terry. We wrote historically bad people/fictional characters into the game. You’re now dating the worst of the worst. The problem is, not only was that not fun, people didn’t want to think about dating a tyrant even if it was written comedically. So I tried again on my own. This time I wrote them all as gender neutral, researching names that could work for all the profiles. By this point it was 2023 and I was playtesting the game with David Gordon and TAM in New York City. We did some brainstorming and TAM suggested a new take for the look of the game. With the new gender neutral profiles I needed a name that better fit and he suggested Abstract Love. I loved the idea of leaning into something I’m very passionate about, gender identity and sexuality. As a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, I love seeing games with gender neutral writing and characters. I updated the prototype and made fun abstract art for the 60ish profiles I had made for pitching the game. The new look also got printed in a much nicer box thanks to a short sponsorship from Launch Tabletop. The mechanics up until this point had one player as the Dater and the others as the Friends each round. Three profiles got read and players placed a yes, no or maybe token facedown under each profile. Then the Dater would place theirs and flip to see what matched. You’d score one point per match and rotate Daters each round until you played 1-3 rounds depending on player count. The only additional element was a suggestion offered by David to add a confidence token that gained you an extra point when you matched up. Funny enough, the future publisher Randolph would later relate this mechanic in what was in their successful Oh, Really? game insisting they would have added it had it not been there. The content hadn’t changed but the facelift gave it a new fresh look that caught publishers' eyes. In 2025, at the Gathering of Friends Joël Gagnon, who I'd met two years before, sat down for a pitch between me and Randolph. When pitching, I explained the journey of the game but it was the fact that most of the content was based on reality and that I had actually done most of the playtesting of the game on actual dates that made them ask to play. I pulled out my prototype and we played. They saw the parallels between Abstract Love and Oh, Really? knowing it would perform well in Montreal at their cafes. They especially loved this game played great at two-players as well as eight-players, giving a slightly different experience but still causing laughter, conversation, and tales that left the gaming table. Joël took a prototype and a few months later we had a contract signed with a fast turnaround for me to write the content. As most party game designers know, the written content can make or break a game so I did a lot of playtesting to get the game up to the 200 profile cards you see in the final version. Randolph had also loved the gender neutral profiles but suggested switching from real names to user names which gave me a fun way to add plenty of cheeky jokes in. They also wanted to go back to each profile having three interests and there being no images like the Date or Hate version had. We worked to balance these interests with the profile text to make the people seem interesting and allow players to focus on different details. We also added a scoring mechanism for the Dater to receive the same amount of points as the highest scoring Friend.A challenge that came when writing the profiles was receiving a head injury when returning from Gen Con in August 2025. The passenger next to me dropped their suitcase from the overhead bin onto my head before deboarding the plane. This led to an ER visit and my fifth diagnosed concussion with a new barrier of limited to no screen time as I recovered. So I channeled my inner middle schooler and journaled my thoughts creating all the original profile drafts in my design journal then using the talk to text feature added them into a spreadsheet to share with my publisher. My friend Amanda Rivera was incredibly helpful in reviewing the profiles to fix the talk to text typos, playtesting and helping me brainstorm funny profile names. The journey of this game really showed me how important my friendships were. Due to my head injury I was restricted in how much screen time I was allowed for months so whenever I got stuck on what to write in the next profile I’d read, call a friend or work on an art project to help with inspiration. One project included two paintings based on the art of my Abstract Love prototype that still hangs above my bedroom.A huge hurdle came in what to call this version of the game. Abstract Love no longer made sense with the illustrations being removed and didn’t scream dating game. We spent most of September going through different name suggestions until they landed on Perfectly Imperfect which had been one of the profile user names based on the popular saying. It was short, simple, elegant and would end up being quoted many times in casual conversation still to this day by me and my friends. The timeline for this game had been sped up due to Hachette taking the game and deciding to distribute it in English before Randolph put it out in Canada. Their goal was a Spring 2026 release so I spent August and September 2025 playtesting non-stop in my freetime and tweaking the profiles along with Randolph’s translator Matthew Legault reviewing changed content. The English edition of the game would have me as the writer while the French would be a combination of translations and original profiles that related to French Canadian locations/sayings - so no more Trader Joe’s jokes! In October 2025 while I was traveling through France after SPIEL I was receiving proofs of the cards and box to review. The illustrator for the game was the same as Oh, Really?. MC Marquis was an incredibly talented artist that made the box look like a piece of art that should stay out indefinitely on people’s coffee tables. I e-mailed feedback from trains and pulled my friends Elizabeth Hargrave, Mattand Donna Leacock to give their thoughts while doing the final playtests in Europe. I appreciated the amount of collaboration that the Randolph team had with me to get this game to the finish line. Not all publishers let the designer be this involved but this game was years in the making and I wanted to see it through to the end.Fast forward to New York Toy Fair 2026 I got to hold a mass production copy of the game in my hands and make a few videos about the inspiration behind this game. It’s wild to think how many bad dates went into this game between the content and the playtests. A few years ago I had made playtesting at breweries my go to first date idea. Figuring if the date didn’t go well I’d at least have a good story and some more playtesting data. I learned that the game could be just as fun with people you didn’t know as the ones you did. It also helped me learn if a second date would happen or not (there was never a second date back then). I even used the published version of the game to play with my now girlfriend to see how well we matched each other. I always hated dating apps and the pressure people put on me to use them to find love but hey, I eventually found my perfectly imperfect partner and I couldn’t be happier where that relationship or this game is going. I hope people enjoy the game as much as I do now that it’s out!

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  Designer Diary: Size Wise

  by ia2ca on June 18, 2026

  by Scott Brady I think this is the first time I will have two major releases of my games occur at the same convention. June marks my annual trek to Columbus for Origins Game Fair. Two years ago my co-design with Danielle Reynolds, Caution Signs, premiered there. Hues and Cues would have in 2020 hadn’t it been for the shutdown. Everything else I’ve made typically debuted in the fall or was silently released into retail whenever they were ready.I talked about boop. Shuffle previously and am anxious to see how it is accepted by the typical abstract-loving public. It was technically released in May, but this will be the first convention it will be available for sale.The other title is being flown in from China and will be available at Origins in limited quantities – I’m told only around 100 will be for sale. Size Wise from GameHead has been in development for some time and is proof of how game design can lead from one idea to another organically.ConceptFor quite some time I had been tossing around the idea of a game about measurements. We’ve all seen plenty of trivia games where you guess how tall something is or how much it weighs. I’m not a fan of this type of game because replayability could be an issue. Over time people will memorize the answers. I’m much more a proponent of groupthink, like Hues and Cues, where the correct answer doesn’t matter. Scoring points is about how well you match up with what other players think. This means that even if you have the same challenge in a different game, the answers might be very different depending upon the other players’ perspective.First CrackI began working on a game I tentatively called “Size Matters”. That progressed to “On the Scale of…” and then the final prototype name, “Banana for Scale”. It featured a board with a grid going from one to one hundred. Cards featured questions in different measurement categories with questions like “In millimeters, how long is a centipede?” and “What are the odds of aliens landing on Earth by 2050?”.Questions could have actual answers, like the average length of a centipede, or be opinion-based like the alien one. In both cases, points are scored if you matched the answer within a range of the active player. It didn’t matter about the size of the insect or whether aliens arrived or not!It was while doing a little dev work on this game, trying to decide what the interface would be for the consumer that I thought of the situation where a fisherman is trying to describe the size of the fish they caught using their hands as measurement tools. I knew this type of description wouldn’t work for “Banana for Scale” as it was only about size and not predictions or any of the other categories. I still felt like there was something cool about those fish tales and how it could be used in a game.PrototypesThe game itself turned out to be rather simple, which I was fine with. I’ve learned that simple sells. Mass-market consumers don’t want long rulebooks or teach. They just want to play. Using your hands to describe the size of something is natural and familiar. How would I control the game though if I allowed the players to hold their hands up and tried to compare them? Plus, why would they even need to buy the game if we didn’t supply a unique experience with custom components!The first, obvious answer to me was a measuring tape. I envisioned each player having a player-color measuring tape with no markings. I figured players would extend their tapes for the lengths they were estimating and hold them next to each other to compare. I purchased a lot from Amazon to play around with. It was then I discovered something important. Cheap measuring tapes only click and hold in certain increments. The ones I bought extended in 1.5” segments. Traditional measuring tapes like what you might have in your garage are much more accurate…and expensive. Second AttemptI was struggling to figure out a way to implement the ideas of this game inexpensively yet still being unique and appealing. My mind went back to the fish analogy. That’s when I thought of a bobber on a fishing line. A ball on a string – that would work! The clasps on a bobber would allow it to slide up and down the line and become a pseudo measuring device! Off to Amazon again to shop for bobbers.What became difficult was that bobbers are designed for thin fishing lines. At best I could use color nylon string, but that is very thin and doesn’t come in easily differentiated colors. Neither do bobbers. They’re mostly neon yellow, neon orange or white. Not nearly enough for player colors.Third AttemptBobbers were out. So were tape measures. My next idea was utilizing those little spring-loading things you see on backpacks or sweatshirts (see photo above). I’m sure they have an official name, but I have no idea what it is (editor's note - spring cord locks). I managed to find a batch on Amazon to test. They didn’t hang consistently due to their odd shape and lack of weight, so comparing lengths was a bit of a chore. There was also the issue of the weight of string I was using.SolutionEventually, I somehow landed on shoestrings as they came in a broad range of colorful hues (see what I did there?!) and were very inexpensive. Because of the Amazon searches I had made for bobbers and balls, it magically recommended I look at beads. I found a set of ¾” diameter color beads that conveniently matched many of the shoestring colors! My hypothesis was that I could put the shoestring through the tiny bead hole and friction alone would hold it in place.OSHA ViolationMy theory was correct. Except the holes weren’t quite large enough. Using the bead holes as a pilot hole, I hand-drilled them to be larger, to the dismay of my wife who had already dialed “91” on the phone so she could complete the call to Emergency Dispatch quicker. Looking back, I admit it probably wasn’t the safest way I could have made them.This is a case of the risk being worth the reward. They performed perfectly! I tied one end of the shoestring to a keyring and threaded the ball onto the other end. A tied knot would keep the ball from falling off and now I had player-colored measuring devices for each player!TestingI went through many scoring options, eventually landing on a player just not wanting to be in the extremes. Shortest and longest receive strikes. Everyone else is safe. Person with the fewest strikes wins!Luckily, I had several design retreats, Protospiels and conventions on my schedule. “OutSized” (what I was calling it) was tested by dozens and dozens of players over the next few months. I was also able to curate a number of fun clue challenges thanks to playtester contributions. They are all mentioned in the rulebook!PitchingI was carrying both OutSized and Banana for Scale in my pitch bag at Pax Unplugged, mostly focused on the latter. I did show OutSized to a couple people once I got a better feel of the market and price point they were trying to hit. Paul Salomon from GameHead was one of those people. He didn’t jump right away but was obviously still thinking about it later as he followed up and told me about the company and what they were doing.They are a newer publisher, but not new to the industry. GameHead is the publishing arm of GamerMats and they hired Paul (Honey Buzz) to act as inventor relations and developer. To his credit, the dev experience working with him has been one of the best I’ve experienced to date. They were about to release their first six games (2025) and he was building out a slate of six potential 2026 titles. He saw the same simplicity and elegance in what I had made and committed to the game. It was now his job to turn my shoestrings and beads into something worth buying!Done!As you can see from the final product, he incorporated Schoolhouse Rocks styled artwork and one of the best laid out rulebooks I’ve ever been associated with! After testing a few different possible names for the game, we agreed on Size Wise.I mentioned earlier that Size Wise will make its retail debut at Origins this month. While preparing for the show, GameHead was able to have the manufacturer make a giant-sized version to show off during demos! If the giant version is as popular as I think it will be, maybe you’ll see it available for purchase via crowdfunding! 😉It's double the size with six foot strings! How big is a donkey?!I’ll be at both Origins and Gen Con and would love to teach it to you myself! Come by booth #1908 at Origins to grab one of the first 100 advance copies! Expect a general release at Gen Con booth #1629! See you there!Scott BradyNOTE TO ANY PUBLISHERS READING THIS! Banana for Scale is still available for licensing! 😉

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  Party Crashers? No Worry! These New Games Handle 6+ Players!

  by boardgamersteph on June 17, 2026

  by Steph Hodge How about some games that will play with a higher player count? Here are a whole bunch of releases coming soon that will handle 6 or more players![imageid=9389228 medium rep]▪️ Synapses Games announced Medium: The Hand of Fate to be released Q3 2026. This will be able to combine with any previous Medium game you currently have. This game handles 2-8 players and is designed by Danielle Deley (Medium, That Old Wallpaper) and Nathan Thornton (Green Team Wins, Medium, That Old Wallpaper). This is a new standalone title. From the announcement: In Medium: The Hand of Fate, players team up in rotating pairs, each playing a word card and then attempting to say the exact same connecting word out loud, together, at the same time. Two optional modules — ESP cards and the new Prediction system — add layers of strategy, while a dedicated 2-player cooperative mode pits players against the mysterious Madame Fortuna. The game is also fully compatible with all other Medium titles.▪️ Pandasaurus Games just announced Moustache. Originally published by Lumberjacks Studio in 2025. Now Pandasaurus is bringing us this team-based trick-taking game for 3-6 players. Look for this game at the end of August 2026.From the newsletter:In Moustache, you and your fellow players are a cast of gloriously mustachioed animals competing across four chaotic rounds of shifting alliances and evolving rules. Each round, fate assigns your teammates and introduces a new twist to the game. The result is a game that's equal parts charming and cutthroat, with enough chaos to keep everyone at the table guessing.Moustache is a team-based trick-taking game for 3–6 players that plays in about 20 minutes. Players follow suit to win tricks, with card strength determined first by color (green → pink → orange → blue) and then by value. But nothing stays simple for long! Each round, a new rule card is revealed and stacks onto the previous ones, reshaping how tricks are won and scored. Cards valued at 2 automatically win their trick. Joker cards (the unicorn, monkey, and pigeon) let smaller teams punch above their weight. After 4 rounds, the player with the most points on their trophy tokens wins! And since those tokens are drawn randomly and kept face down, the final score is a surprise right up to the end.▪️ Gigamic announced a new edition of Panic Lab is set to be released at the end of June 2026. This game was originally released in 2012 and has seen many iterations over the years. It's real-time chaos is back and will host 2-10 players in about a 30-minute playtime!From the newsletter:The amoebas have escaped, and it's up to you to catch them! Track them down by rolling the four dice to determine which amoeba you are looking for, and which lab they escaped from. That sounds easy, but they might change their patterns or colors if they pass through a mutation device. Amoebas can also escape through the air vents as they run away, popping up through the next air vent in the circle!The first player to lay their hand on the correct amoeba card collects a token, and the first player to collect five tokens wins! Can you match the correct amoeba before your opponents? Panic Lab is a must-have for people with cool heads, sharp eyes, and fast hands!▪️ Shapely is a new party game from R&R Games for 3-6 players! Your goal is to arrange your shapes so that other players can guess your word. You can play in just 30 minutes. I believe it is already available. From the newsletter:In SHAPELY, players use abstract shapes to create fun images.To Play: Each player begins with 4 random abstract shapes. The goal is to arrange them as a clue to your secret item.Then everyone tries to guess the items from the images. (Don't fret... Players do not guess items out of thin air. They only need to pick items from a line-up)▪️ Finally, we have Who's Next? from Don't Panic Games. A new musical party game for 3-7 players. This is a hand management card game.From the newsletter:in Who's Next, everyone takes on the role of a musician in a band trying to hold it together through a concert. Players pass the spotlight around the table by playing Musician cards in the right order, at the right time — while an oral countdown ticks down. Miss your cue, play out of turn, or freeze under pressure, and you earn a Wrong Note. The player with the fewest wrong notes when the music stops wins. What makes Who's Next? stand out is its progressive level system: the base game is learnable in minutes, but six escalating rule layers keep the challenge growing as players get comfortable. It works equally well with kids on a Friday night or with competitive adults who think they have great reflexes. Spoiler: they don't.

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  Designer Diary: boop. Shuffle

  by ia2ca on June 17, 2026

  by Scott Brady Three years later and I am no better at keeping ongoing notes about my design journey than I was when I penned the Designer Diary for boop. I usually become so focused on my projects that I’ve never found space to step back and write down what works and what doesn’t. Sadly, many of those processes will never be known and I know I’m the one to blame.I am immensely proud of what we (Smirk & Dagger and I) have accomplished with the release of boop.and its subsequent releases, Boooop. and boop the Halls! With each new edition I wanted to make sure to give the consumers something more than just a cool skin. Each game needed to offer something new and different. Making changes to the tight, elegant gameplay of the original proved much harder than I anticipated. In the end, the right solution for both versions was to introduce unique rule-changing characters and items that supplemented gameplay and didn’t change the core.Progression of the BrandWe have been discussing the future of the boop. line for some time, wondering if it should ever expand beyond being a true combinatorial abstract game. So far, we had followed the same pattern and still have one more unannounced entry coming in 2027! Don’t worry, it’s not another holiday-themed version. And the gameplay is my personal favorite of the series! I cannot wait to tell the world more!ConceptionIn the meantime, I began thinking about how the boop. experience might be utilized in other game types, either by theme or mechanic. I’ve often heard stories about how people made bags for their copies of boop. to make it more portable. I began playing around with the idea of playing cards and what I would need to do to make an official travel version.It would have been easy enough to just make a 1:1 conversion of boop. into cards with no rule changes. Basically, just a component twist. This would have been the exact opposite of my philosophy above where I wanted it to be more than just a reskin. The game needed to stand on its own with something unique. That’s when the idea hit me – you could play each other’s felines!How the Game GrewThe cool thing about using cards is you get to shuffle a deck. No longer do you have a choice of what to play, you must play the card drawn. Not only did this mean you didn’t know if you were going to play a cat or kitten, because all the cards are shuffled into one deck (instead of player decks), it meant you could end up playing a cat or kitten of your opponent’s!Hence the final name – boop. Shuffle!Talk about an instant strategy change! The mechanics remained the same, but the thought of leaving behind one of your opponent’s cards instead of your own changed the game quite a bit. I also envisioned the bed to be virtual, allowing for play on any surface. The edges of the bed would shift as the play area filled with cats. I felt this simple change with the deck of cards and virtual bed was the right thing to show to Smirk & Dagger for consideration.They liked it…kinda…Rejection?They agreed it was a great interpretation of the original game, but they wanted more. Their vision of a card game version was less focused towards a classic abstract, but one that had more surprises and thematic elements. I admitted I could see that too. As any great partner, they came up with several ideas which we ended up working together on implementing. There are wild cards that can be used by either player. Actions on certain kittens and cats you might recognize from boop the Halls! And then there was the blankie…In what I will call the cutest mechanic to ever be in a board game, boop. Shuffle includes a blanket card. When drawn, you place it on top of any kitten or cat on the bed. While napping under the blankie, they don’t exist in the playfield. In order to count them towards a 3-in-a-row they must be uncovered! The blanket can be booped like any other item. When they are booped onto another cat, they now nap! If they are booped into an open space, the blankie is removed from the board and put into the discard pile.CutbacksAll of a sudden we have a lot more chaos happening with the blanket, action cards, wild cats and a virtual bed. Maybe a little too much overhead for the market we’re targeting, so we elected to remove the virtual bed, relegating those rules to an “advanced version” in the back of the rulebook. Instead, we include neoprene bed skirts to define the board edges. These also roll up nice and tight to remain portable without adding too much cost to the product. In the end we were able to offer this new boop. experience for half of the retail price of the original game!Releaseboop. Shuffle had an official release date in the US of May 1 and you can already find it on the shelves at your favorite local game store and Barnes & Noble. Smirk & Dagger offers it directly on their website and will have copies available at Origins Game Fair, Gen Con and PAX Unplugged. I’ll be in attendance as well if you would like me to teach it to you myself!Scott Brady

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  Making Games Shine on BoardGameArena (BGA)

  by jgrisenthwaite on June 16, 2026

  by Jeff Grisenthwaite I’ve been playing games on BGA since 2014, but it wasn’t until this past year that I made the leap to developing games on BGA.My goal is to start a discussion about what I’ve learned about making gameplay feel just right within the unique environment of BGA, using examples from a couple of my games, Soothsayers and Positano. Simulating that Board Game FeelingBGA is weird.It’s a huge collection of online games that bear little resemblance to the experience of console, PC, or mobile games. Instead, BGA strives to replicate the feeling of playing board games together in real life for all those times when we can’t actually be gaming together.And they connect players with the whole world. One of the tenets of BGA development is to stick to pretty basic, vanilla code, in order to make the games widely accessible, regardless of players’ hardware or browsers.For Positano, the big challenge was to capture the 3D look and feel that people love about the game but to do so in the 2D non-dynamic world of BGA.Side-by-side images of Positano in real life and Positano on BGAThe solution was to simulate the 3D hillside and buildings simply by layering images at a fixed angle. It retains the beauty of the physical game, while keeping the technical approach as basic and widely accessible as possible.Teach Through PlayI don’t know about you, but I try to use BGA as a shortcut to avoid reading rulebooks. The tutorials are great (shoutout to Nekonyancer!), but what can be even better is when the BGA adaptation teaches players as they play. Here are a few techniques that help to teach the game to new players:Tooltips: When players hover over a card or other component, showing a zoomed-in display of that component, along with explanatory text, helps players to access additional information when needed.In Soothsayers, players can hover over any card to view detailed information about it.Title Bar Text & Buttons: BGA’s standard convention is to present the choices available to a player on a given turn as buttons in the title bar. To help players learn the game, dynamically update the text in the title bar and the text and icons on the buttons to best inform players of their options.In Soothsayers, buttons explain the costs and effects of each action.Player Panels: Summarizing key information within player panels, particularly scoring, reinforces for players the important metrics to pay attention to.In Positano, the player panels help players to understand how each building they construct affects not just their overall scores, but provides detailed scoring for sea views, gelato, and three different public goals.Animation: Using animation in key places can help players understand the effects of their actions and notice changes in the game state. For example, in Soothsayers, when you use the Judgement tarot to steal a Fate token, the Fate token flies from the rival’s card to yours.How To Play Rules: Because BGA automates the setup and administrative steps between turns and enforces the rules during play, the text of the How to Play tab below the game can likely be 90% shorter than the full rulebook.UndoBefore I started development, I asked game communities within Discord and on Bluesky what are their biggest points of frustration with games on BGA. The most common complaint was when games don’t provide the ability to undo your last action or reset your turn.There are two main reasons for providing the ability to undo at key points:1. New players are learning the game. After seeing the consequences of their actions, they may need to retry a few turns.2. Errant clicks. BGA is trying to simulate the tabletop game feeling with as high of fidelity as possible, which is why it feels so bad to have your turn ruined by accidentally clicking or tapping on something and having no recourse.Not every single action needs an undo, though. Providing too many can slow down games, and players should never be able to undo an action after hidden information is revealed.In Soothsayers, after completing your turn, a Confirm button displays with a 5 second countdown before it auto-confirms. If you’re not satisfied with your turn, you can choose to reset.Layout ConsiderationsThe second biggest player complaint is when BGA games require too much vertical scrolling to understand the game state, so here are a few techniques to reduce the need to scroll:Robust Player Panels: By displaying all the key information within player panels, players often can bypass needing to view opponents’ tableaus or auxiliary boards.In Soothsayers, the player panels display the levels of all 8 cards in each player’s tableau, who holds the Fate tokens, coins, and the number of cards in each player’s hand.Floating Hands: Many games demand that you play a card or tile from a hand to a tableau or place on the board. By anchoring the hands to the bottom of the screen and allowing them to float over everything else, players can always view the cards in hand when making the decision for where to play them.Responsive Design: To accommodate players on tiny mobile screens, on ultra-wide monitors, and everywhere in between, responsive design techniques should be employed to make the best use of every screen size.In Positano, the goal cards are displayed below the beach board on mobile, but when on a larger monitor, they're displayed to the left of the hillside.Player Preferences: We’re all different people. BGA games should reflect that by providing ample player preferences to tailor the game experience to your needs.Soothsayers player preferences include options to change the card size, remove pulsing animations, and more.Turn-Based PlaySome games work really well in BGA’s turn-based (asynchronous) play mode. These tend to be games with chunky turns, in which you’re making big moves each turn, as opposed to micro-decisions interrupted by other players. Turn-based play on BGA lets you luxuriate in over-analyzing your strategy without worrying about holding up the game.A few techniques for making turn-based play go a bit smoother include:Automate Non-Choices: By identifying the spots in the game in which players don’t have an actual choice to make, you can save everyone a lot of time by automating those decisions.Provide a Robust Log: Sometimes days pass between turns, and other times players are playing multiple turn-based instances of the same game at once, so it’s important to provide a detailed, easy-to-scan log that players can use to catch up on the most recent turns.In Soothsayers, the log provides small renditions of the cards drafted or played to make it easier to scan.Simultaneous Decisions: BGA offers a mode in which players can all take their turns at the same time, which can massively reduce the amount of time it takes to complete a turn-based game.Developing on BGAProgramming games on BGA is not easy. It takes a long time, and the documentation could be more robust. The upside is that BGA connects your game with a global audience who can compete at the highest levels.My hope with this article is to share what I’ve learned as I strive to provide an ideal BGA experience for my own games.I’m also hoping to start a conversation! What else can developers do to provide better BGA experiences?Jeff Grisenthwaite is the designer of Positano and Soothsayers, both available in stores and on BoardGameArena.

• 
  Read the Player Aid!

  by whenindoubteatout on June 15, 2026

  by Justin Bell One morning this past February, I was standing on a scale in my bathroom, doing my normal routine of knocking out the weigh-in before getting the kids ready for school. The number that came back wasn’t to my liking, the third or fourth or tenth week in a row where it was not to my liking. After I helped get the kids on their way, I dropped about $100 on a 12-month subscription to the Weight Watchers app to start tracking my meals and committed to a goal of losing at least 20, and ideally 30, pounds by the end of the summer.As of this posting, I’ve lost 25 pounds, and assuming I stay on track with continuing to build better eating habits, I should cross the weight-loss finish line soon. But I think a lot about that day in February; I just hit a breaking point, and I got so angry when I saw the scale that fateful morning that it pushed for immediate action.A similar thing happened this week, across three consecutive nights of gaming where players sent me to the breaking point. This article is both a love letter to some of the recent changes I’ve observed from publishers, and some interesting opportunities for players.Last Monday, my review crew and I had the chance to play our first game of Entropy, the new Board&Dice release designed by Tommaso Battista, Simone Luciani, and Nestore Mangone. The game doesn’t have much video content on the interwebs yet, so I taught the game live to a group for this four-player game.Teaching a game on site and in person to any group of players is typically a minefield, a minefield that gets progressively more dangerous as a game’s complexity rises.I’m still scarred by the experience I had watching a person try to teach me Feudum almost six years ago. I see in my Logged Play notes that the teach took 80 minutes, for a game that ultimately took only a little longer than that to actually play. When you see a game’s Complexity Rating land in the 4.5-and-above range, it usually means you are in for quite a sit as you try to learn a game.Entropy is certainly not that—I think the game’s complexity rating here on BGG will land in the 3.5-ish range once you, the people, begin to share your thoughts in volume—and it took only about 25 minutes to explain the game’s core concepts, main actions, and end-game scoring conditions.But one thing was key during my Entropy teach, a hallmark of how far we have come as a community: I taught the entire game from the included player aid cards, and asked players to follow along from the aid, in part because everyone had their own. (My only gripe with publishers for this article: please, please, please include one player aid for each player! Competitive gamers don’t have a “share” gene! This is why they like competitive games! One player aid per box is not going to cut it, people!!)With our teach complete and our snack bowls filled—it was a Kit Kat “Bunnies” night, alongside zero-calorie sodas, a selection of bottom-shelf bourbons, and the Kirkland Signature Kettle Brand Krinkle Cut “Pink Salt” potato chip night, because Costco recently decided that the words “Himalayan Salt” were simply too difficult for a standard American consumer to comprehend—we got to work playing the game. But something interesting happened as we began play:Everything I had just taught, from the basic movement of a player’s worker pawn, to how actions worked, to scoring conditions, to limitations of components that can be placed on a player’s planets, quietly left the brains of these usually reliable players, almost as if I had taught the game in Dutch, but everyone at the table pretended they spoke fluent Dutch as they nodded along during the teach.“Hey, sorry about this, but before I move…I know you said that I can move up to three spaces, but in which direction?”“If you look at the ‘On Your Turn’ portion of the player aid,” I began, “that’s where it shows the rules for movement.” (There are also chevrons on the board that point in a clockwise direction near each space, and we will come back to this.) The text on the player aid: “Movement: move 1-3 spaces clockwise. Finish on either outer or inner space.”“When I take the Create Life action, I see the icon that means I have to drop the matching action marker there to take the action, so I’m good there. But how many cards can I discard to take the place of icons I am missing from my planet-star combo to play a card?”“If you look at the ‘Actions’ area of the player aid, on the side that has the major actions—yep, that side—you’ll see that you can discard one other card with one of the four icons you are missing to play the card you want. And don’t forget about the part you see in that same section of the aid: each planet can only accommodate three life cards.”Although my basement gaming lair is pretty chilly during the summer when the air conditioning kicks in, I could feel my temperature rising a beat. Oh, another question:“I’m trying to understand the icons for my Focus cards.” (In Entropy, each player gets their own asymmetric, lettered set (A, B, C, or D) of bonuses, which power each of the game’s three major actions. Think of this like the Experiment boards in Nucleum, where players can upgrade some of the standard actions they take to earn additional bonuses.) “What does this first symbol mean?”“I don’t know, but I also can’t see your Focus cards from where I’m sitting,” I commented. “What does your player aid say for the set of Focus cards you have?”“Oh, right, thanks, I forgot that was on the back of the ‘On Your Turn’ player aid card. Looks like I get…”This continued for the majority of our experience, although like all games, the rules began to settle in for everyone—myself included—by the end of our first game. And, I can’t fault human nature: it’s simply easier to ask the rules guru at the table a thousand questions, since they know the game better than everyone else does. You’ve done it, I’ve done it, we’ve all done it…although, I take listening to a teach very seriously, because I teach so often myself.The problem with this is the play experience for the rules explainer. I have been a vocal supporter of not only thanking your tabletop teacher for spending the time to both learn a game and be willing to teach it thoroughly to new players, but also acknowledging that it is so difficult to both teach a game and enjoy playing that same game.That’s not because the game is new to the teacher, assuming this is their first time playing it. That’s because the learners at the table don’t take the time to consider all the tools available to them while playing, and being able to answer 75-100% of the questions that can be answered. That starts with the player aid.Some of you know that I write an article each year on Meeple Mountain summarizing not only the best and worst games I played in a year, but also summarizes my thoughts on the stuff we really care about: the best rules for deciding a first player, the best individual components, the best dice. One of the categories is best player aid, and I love how far player aids have come over the last 3-4 years as highly complex games get summarized on a sheet or double-sided cards.Recent titles such as SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Galactic Cruise, Covenant, Arcs, Salton Sea, the Perseverance games, and La Pâtisserie Rococo provide excellent player aids, sometimes with little cues such as specific rulebook page numbers where a player can get more info even when the aid isn’t enough. (The aid for SETI is the gold standard in this category.)Some of my favorite games of the last few years didn’t have a player aid, such as Clinic: Deluxe Edition and Railway Boom, but I can get over that if there are strong visual cues and a sort of board-based player aid on the main play area. Clinic has one of the best in the business, and Railway Boom does a great job with the information loaded into the auction area on the bottom third of the board. Sometimes, even a game’s player boards have enough turn action and clean-up/maintenance information to get by.All of this provided information is great…but only if players bother to read the aid or look for other visual cues around the play area.I’m certainly biased because I teach a lot of games, and I know how hard it can be for a person to spend a lot of time on the front end to get to know the game well enough to be comfortable teaching that game to others. It’s a lot! But players need to own their share of the investment. I’ve just spent 10, 30, 80 minutes teaching you the game…could you do me a favor, and simply listen??? Could you first look at the player aid before asking me another question, a question that may have just been answered because another player asked the exact same question two turns ago???Over the next two days, I did another play of Nippon: Zaibatsu (with the upcoming Genro expansion) and a second multiplayer game of Entropy with two new players at a game night with a strategy gaming group in downtown Chicago. Many of the same things popped up, with questions about some of the game basics that could have been answered by the player aid, had a player acknowledged its existence first. (Kudos, as well, to the makers of the excellent “Player Handbook” included in Nippon: Zaibatsu, another game that can be taught from the player aid.)By the end of that third straight day of beginning multiple responses with the prompt “if you look at the player aid...”, I snapped. (OK, you’re right: “snapped” for me is pretty light in the scheme of things. I happily went about my evening and watched the wild ending of the fourth game of the NBA Finals later that night…then immediately began to write this column.)I’ve been thinking about ways to solve my own problems. Do I need to be more forceful with players as they consider their questions? Like my buddy John, should I start mining the Files area on BGG for every game in my collection that doesn’t have a player aid, so that I can start printing my own? (Thanks, BGG community; some of you have made great aids from scratch, particularly for older titles.) Where possible, should I send out PDFs of the player aid files in advance, so that players can have those handy on their phones while they study up on a new game?Publishers have begun to do their part. And the drum I beat is not just tied to these medium or heavy-weight strategy games…because I say it every week: every single game needs a player aid. UNO needs a player aid just like SETI does. That’s because new players forget rules all the time. Heck, I forget a rule or two all the time with games I’ve been playing for years. Now that most games have player aids, we as a gaming community need to level up…and review those player aids when we have questions about a rule.That’s the least we can do, right?

• 
  Under the Surface: The Design Journey of Drillers

  by BoltKey on June 13, 2026

  by BoltKey Part 1 – Finding the Right Pace & DepthThose who follow CGE for a while know that a lot of design happens in close cooperation between the designer and CGE after the game is accepted by the company. I was in a bit of a special spot in this project: I have worked as a full-time employee at CGE, and I have worked on Drillers since late 2023.The process of CGE deciding to publish the game was quite gradual. I was bringing various prototypes to CGE events, some people that liked the game pitched in with their skills to make the next prototype just a little bit better, and this eventually evolved into the crunch of a real project with real deadlines and stakes. Říman, a CGE in-house 3D artist, was a great partner in the initial phase and contributed many ideas that made it to the final game. We spent many evenings brainstorming and discussing the game, and that’s the reason he is titled co-designer on this project.There was not a singular moment, contract, email or meeting where we decided “let’s do this”. It was almost like a natural progression.Development and design of the game were a lot of fun and great adventure, as with any game design endeavor I get involved in. I am writing this diary from my perspective (Adam Španěl) as the lead designer and author of the initial concept, but I’ll occasionally use “we”. That means “the development team”, which mostly consists of me, Říman, Tomáš, Elwen and Mín.The Story of DrillersBack in 2005–2010, I spent a lot of time playing flash games. It was a golden era of browser gaming. That’s when I discovered Motherload, and I absolutely loved it. The sense of wonder every time you discover a new type of mineral. The satisfaction of selling your haul, finally refilling your fuel at the last second and upgrading your machine. The courage it took to just go deeper, and keep discovering more.The series that culminated in Super Motherload in 2013 helped define a genre of "mining games" like Dome Keeper, SteamWorld Dig, and many others. They all share the core loop: dig, gather resources, sell, upgrade, repeat. No board game I have played quite captured the feeling I got from the video games: you know you should probably head back up as your fuel is running low, but there is that really valuable gem just within reach that would be just enough to buy that upgrade you really need. And the next time you get there might be too late. On top of that, your curiosity of what is hiding in the depths is sometimes stronger than your rational decision to just play it safe and return to camp.Designing for MyselfI know I should probably focus more on who the target audience is when designing a game. However, I am one of those designers who make games primarily for themselves. The games I want to play, and the games I feel are missing on the market. And if other people end up enjoying them too, that's a great bonus. I knew an exact feeling I wanted the game to create, and the only way to play it was to make it myself.So, I got to work. The very first iteration contained just the core elements: cards that generated moves and drills for fuel, tiles that created cubes that you could collect in your cargo, and when you reached the surface again, you could buy better cards. I am really glad that these core mechanics "survived" in pretty much unchanged form from the first iteration to release.Of course some of the mechanics evolved: how the shaft tiles worked exactly, and how the card offer worked, how the card management worked, and gradually mechanics like drones, repair, unique effects, floor cards or permanent cards grew around the game, but the core loop was tight and solid.Abstracting the MineOne core mechanic of the mining video games is that as you play you’re constantly reshaping the world as you play. You are creating a maze that you have to later navigate, so it has this kind of "build your own puzzle" element to it, and if you are not careful, you might get lost and perish.At one point I considered playing around with this idea in Drillers. It turned out to be just too bloated in combination with other mechanics, and it added too much unnecessary complexity that was not so fun. So I decided not to explore this direction any further.Drillers – Mainboard progressGame DurationDrillers is a game with variable and player-driven game length. This creates a sense of urgency and a bit of race. This however poses several design challenges.Balancing the GameDrillers is all about optimizing your turns and pushing every card to its limit. There is a big difference between what a beginner can do in a turn, and an advanced player. Since the game is timed by what players have accomplished in the game (how much they’ve mined), this creates huge discrepancy between length of different games. While advanced players usually hit the "sweet spot" of 10–12 turns, beginners' games often stretched to 17 or 18 turns. Combined with the natural learning curve of new players, this initially resulted in pacing friction that lacked momentum. During development, we noticed that many players played it safe and stayed near the surface, working with the minerals that they could reach easily. While that approach worked, it often led to slower and less engaging moments.We wanted to bring forward the feeling that we love about Drillers. The need to go a little bit deeper, take a risk and get something more valuable. So we started to shape the game to naturally encourage players to dive deeper:The Market: Encouraging Diving DeeperInitially, the prices for selling minerals were flat, but we decided we need to make them variable somehow, to make the new shiny minerals more attractive. We considered a shared market, but that was too complicated. Instead, we created the system where the more you sell of the same mineral, the less valuable it becomes. Eventually, we made the silver and gold prices drop to zero credits if they are oversold. It’s basically a way of pushing the players towards diving deeper for more profitable minerals.The Floor Cards: What Lies BeneathThere was the idea of floor cards adding special rules floating around, but I was scared of it: I didn’t want to add too much rules overhead. But I think they turned out great. The main principle is that the floor cards only trigger when you actively interact with the floor, rather than just passing through. But the main reason was, again, to motivate new players to dig deeper. The curiosity of what is on the next floor really helped this.It was a challenge to hit that sweet spot with the floor cards so they are significant enough so you want to care about them, but not game-changing in a way that gives unfair advantage to certain playstyles. Let’s look at the Hot Tub. The first version gave a discount of 1 drill but also 1 damage. This was just bad most of the game, and usually you wanted to avoid it. The intention was to make that floor a bit more dynamic, with easier access to tiles, but the drawback was too much, so the opposite happened, with many players skipping that floor entirely.In another version we added 1 extra fuel for each tile on top of the damage. This solved the initial problem of skipping the floor, but created a new one: players could suddenly make very unpredictable moves, grabbing 3 or 4 tiles at once and sometimes ending the game prematurely. To restrict it, we limited the effect to once per turn.. But this was still a bit too weak.In the final version we gave it a major buff, where for the first tile, you get a discount along with the damage to your hand. Now that’s definitely beneficial, but still can bite you if you are not careful.Another interesting example that highlights the back-and-forth with the illustrations is Lobby.The original idea was simple: a safe space where you can prepare for your next big turn. At first, it only had the ability of keeping 3 cards for free. That worked quite well, but in practice, the timing often felt off. When the card was revealed, you usually didn’t get to take full advantage of it.We brainstormed the theme a bit: first, it was just a “safe ledge”, which felt a bit bland. From there, the idea evolved into something more playful–a rest spot for a picnic table next to a vending machine.When we were thinking about how the floor should work, we leaned into the theme of the vending machine, adding abilities involving money and getting snacks. Adding these effects ate up the space for illustration, so we dropped the picnic table, which evolved into the garden chair.This quite wild iteration led to a really sweet floor card. It is a perfect example of the “game design informs art, art informs game design” principle that CGE prides itself in following.Drillers – Lobby Event card progressionGame End Trigger: Making Progress VisibleFinding the right way to end the game took several iterations.Initially, the end of the game was connected to the total number of minerals sold by all players. That worked reasonably well, but it was a real pain to track during play.Then we moved on to a system where all the ground tiles had a number of dots, and if you collected 12 dots, you triggered the end of the game. The same issue, you had to keep recounting dots of other players to see if they were close to ending the game.Then Říman had the great idea of connecting it to the physical size of the tile, making deeper tiles bigger, and slotting them above the player board. It was intuitive and satisfying, but this led to another problem: when players collected too many minerals and kept building their deck instead of getting the fat points on the lower floor tiles, it made the games exceedingly dragged out.So finally we connected the dots, and made the end trigger by combination of tiles and minerals filling the track from each side. With that, we have a system that is quite intuitive, takes into account both minerals and ground tiles, but more importantly, you see at a glance how far along everybody is.I am really glad how that one turned out.Drillers – Progress of the player boardEnding TurnsAnother mechanic we iterated quite a bit was the final turns after the game end trigger.The first option, that is quite common, is giving every player the same number of turns. I usually don’t like use of this mechanic in games for two reasons. First, you must somehow mark or remember who was the starting player. And second, in my opinion, it adds more asymmetry to the player order than with variable number of turns: the last player approaches the end of the game differently than the first–they know exactly how many turns they have left, which can shape their entire strategy.Instead I prefer giving players later in turn order extra resources to compensate for potentially less turns than others. Some players reported that having less turns than their opponents felt unfair. We tried quite a few solutions until we found something that felt right. First, we simply gave an extra turn to the player who triggered the game end. This, however, led to the extra turn feeling a bit useless and uneventful, and in some ways boring: the final turn should feel like an all-out finish, but the player triggering the end of the game expended most of their resources to trigger the game end, and didn’t have much of anything left for the extra turn. But we still wanted to give that all-out final turn to the opponents.So, finally, we settled on the big 18-VP bonus for the closing player, that should compensate for the opponent’s extra turn (along with that extra card we gave just to make the final turn feel even bigger) The solution finally felt quite good for all parties involved.Thank you for reading our Part 1 and coming under the surface with us.Next time, we’ll dig into the core mechanics of Drillers–deck-building, decisions and how we shaped the way the game actually plays. If you want to get a head start, you can dive into how the game works by reading the rulebook: Drillers Rulebook.If you want to be notified when the Part 2 drops next week, subscribe to Drillers here on BGG.Looking forward to reading what you think so far.

• 
  Dive Right In The Water's Fine...

  by boardgamersteph on June 10, 2026

  by Steph Hodge Time to get our feet a little wet with these new game announcements. [imageid=9531435 medium rep]▪️ Stonemaier Games sent out a May update with new expansions available for several titles, including Finspan. The expansion to Finspan is called Finspan: Sharks & Reefs and it adds 75 new cards, which include new shark cards and coral habitats. Lots of new strategies to pursue.From the BGG Page:Finspan: Sharks & Reefs adds to the variety of the core game with a focus on sharks and fish that live among coral reefs. This expansion introduces new coral reef habitats to your ocean mat and more incredible sharks—with fearsome new abilities!Players can now nurture colorful coral reefs in each of their oceans' three dive sites. Healthy reefs enable you to play powerful reef fish, unlock fish abilities, and score bonuses at the end of the game. Meanwhile, sharks scatter schools of young (to form even more schools elsewhere) and leave behind food scraps that any fish in your ocean can consume.To play this expansion, you need the Finspan core game.▪️ Mythic Baths was just announced from Good Games Publishing with a release happening soon. Hopefully available at GenCon 2026. A cute game for 2-5 players that will play in about 30-60 minutes. Your objective is to treat the guests and collect as much aber as possible to win.From BGG:As our newest employees, it is your job to take care of our mythic guests; gathering ingredients for their baths, completing treatments, giving nourishment, and cleaning the baths to welcome new and potentially troublesome guests.Players compete to earn the most amber tokens (victory points) by treating the mythic guests that visit the baths. Guests arrive with a set of ingredient requirements that must be met to complete their treatment. Over the course of the game, players will gather ingredients needed to treat guests, nourish them to earn their favour, and clean dirty baths left after their treatment.Treating guests and cleaning baths earn players amber. More complicated treatments will earn you more, but if you complete any treatment exactly, you will be rewarded with valuable tips from our guests!▪️ Six-Sided Seas Was just announced for GenCon 2026 release from publisher Solis Game Studio. This is a 2-pirate game, but you can add a set to allow it to play up to 4-pirates. Gain glorious victory in 15-20 minutes!From BGG:The dicey waters of the Six-Sided Seas have tempted many pirates with the promise of riches and glory. Legends tell of several powerful treasures lurking amongst the isles...powerful enough to control everyone and everything on these waters when combined together. There are many paths to becoming the most ruthless pirate in the sea, and the choice is in your hands. But be warned, you’ll face rivals at sea who also wish to claim the title, so prepare for a cutthroat battle or go down with the ship! It’s win or die on the Six-Sided Seas!Six-Sided Seas is a push-your-luck, worker placement game. On your turn, you will roll dice from your supply to generate crew members for your ship that can be assigned to stations. After each roll, you can choose to roll again or stop. Be careful, though, because if you go over your limit, you will bust! If you choose to stop rolling and don’t bust, you will then assign crew members to stations on the ship. The stations on the ship allow you to deal damage to the opposing pirate ship, explore islands, or search for gold. The first player to sink their opponent’s ship, reach the maximum gold coin limit, or control the majority of the explorable islands wins!