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• 
  He Loved Being at the Table

  by whenindoubteatout on May 11, 2026

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

• 
  Designer Diary: Beastro

  by MatteoUguzzoni on May 10, 2026

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

• 
  Designer Diary: VNTYPL8S

  by casimps1 on May 9, 2026

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

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  Be the Gulo of the Sandcastle Kingdom

  by boardgamersteph on May 6, 2026

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

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  Designer Diary: Colossi

  by johnrudolph on May 5, 2026

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

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  Patience is a Virtue

  by whenindoubteatout on May 4, 2026

  by Justin Bell A few months ago, I joined two friends for a play of The Gallerist, one of my favorite titles from designer Vital Lacerda. (Also, Vital: thanks for the intel on hot spots in Lisbon. The pastéis de Belém were absolutely magnificent!)A friend was celebrating his birthday weekend, so he was hosting an all-day gaming session where folks like me would show up in waves to play the birthday boy’s favorite titles. It had been maybe a year since I last played The Gallerist, so I watched a teach video to warm my brain up to the rules and reminded myself of some of the things I’ve seen work when I’ve won, and (more often) watched others do to win.The host, who we’ll call “Schmeven”, had built a schedule for the day that was pretty tight. We’re talking two-hour blocks, with some games that were already going to push on the soft borders of that Google Sheet’s time window. The Gallerist was set for 11:30 AM, the first game on the slate. For this particular day, I was intent on arriving a couple minutes early, to help Schmeven keep the events on schedule.I rolled up at 11:28 AM and buzzed Schmeven’s apartment. Walked in, sat down, and readied myself for the play. Schmeven, who, like me, ensures that the first game of the day is locked and loaded when guests arrive, had done his part and the game was set up and ready to go.Then Schmeven got a text. Our third player, who we’ll call “Slim”, was running late. Slim had taken the wrong bus line to Schmeven’s house, so he was going to be delayed for another 20-30 minutes.Foolishly, I had made other plans with the family to start about a half-hour after the originally scheduled end time of 1:30 PM. That part is on me; two hours for The Gallerist with players I don’t know is potentially a gamble. But, hope springs eternal. My thinking: if Slim moves at the velocity of Schmeven and I, we’ll be fine to wrap up The Gallerist in 90 minutes or so.Schmeven’s quick turn-taking is well established; Schmeven and I have done a two-player game of The Gallerist in just over an hour, and we’ve done two games of Speakeasy in a single sitting in under three hours. He has earned the Justin Bell Gold Speed of Approval and is always welcome at my table; he, like me, takes snappy turns. Even though Slim was the wildcard on this particular day, he just had to play at roughly the speeds Schmeven and I normally play at, and we would be in great shape.Well...not exactly.***Slim arrived, exchanged pleasantries, apologized for the delay, and sat down at his station near me at the table. Slim is a seasoned strategy gamer who entered our gaming circles with a wealth of street cred. I was excited to see what he would bring to The Gallerist during our play.After everyone was seated, I turned to Slim. “When’s the last time you played this one?”“Gosh, maybe six, seven years ago? It’s been a while, so I’m a little rusty…I didn’t have time to do a full rules refresh, but I think I remember how most of this works…the player aid IS really good, so I can always fall back on that.”My heart sank. My soul—what little soul I had left—sank lower, if that was possible. We were definitely going to have to sorta play and sorta teach this game to Slim while taking our own turns. There was no way we were getting through this one in 90 minutes.Separately, in my review crew, everyone knows that I have a hard and fast rule when it comes to tabling games: if there is a teach video anywhere on the interwebs in English, players have to watch those videos before they come to game night. It saves SO MUCH TIME, and it ensures everyone has skin in the game when it comes to the investment part of knocking out multiple plays of different games in a single night.I am more lax about this with other groups, and for this play of The Gallerist, I think there was an unspoken expectation that everyone knew the rules, but we never called that out when setting up the birthday schedule. After this experience with Schmeven’s birthday play of The Gallerist, I’m thinking about changing my tune.***As I expected, Slim tested every bit of my patience during our play. I’m told patience is a virtue, but I’m beginning to question that.I’ve only joined Slim for a couple of game nights, but I have found that Slim is a player who verbally talks out his options before taking a turn. I do this from time to time, especially late in a game with friends where I can talk through one or two options on a turn that might swing the game. But certainly not on every single turn.Slim’s turns looked a lot like what some friends call “min-maxing”: exploring many, if not every, possible outcome before making a selection most beneficial to the current game state. Again, no problem late in a game, and I am on record as telling other players that on the final turn of any game, you can take as much time as you want…no one wants to see a player lose a game because they made a major blunder on their final action.But, Slim’s min-maxing happened on almost every turn for the first nine, maybe ten turns.The Gallerist is an action selection game where players have a choice of four major locations. Each major location—the International Market, the Sales Office, the Media Center, and the Artists Colony—offers two unique actions. When a player moves their pawn to a new location, they pick one of the two actions there, and execute it. On successive turns, the active player must move their pawn to a new location to take a different action.I never mind when a player is thinking through which of the three locations they want to move to next, nor how they will best execute the action at their chosen location. But a player needs to fully understand what’s possible at each location, and Slim’s rust showed during those moments. Often, that meant Schmeven and I were explaining what actions were possible at each of the three locations available to Slim on that turn, which meant talking through the possible outcomes of SIX different actions.Every turn.When I do a full teach of any serious strategy game for new players—this exact scenario happened just two weeks ago, when I got to play Chicago 1875: City of the Big Shoulders with a couple new players—I just turn my brain off completely when it comes to building my own in-game strategy. That’s because I find it difficult to manage both what I want to do, and what others need to understand in order to enjoy their play of the game. Just when you begin to think through your own turn, a question comes in that breaks your concentration.For a learning game, totally fine. For this play of The Gallerist, I was pretty excited to get into “the art of strategy,” the game’s tagline.I quickly became the surly, impatient curmudgeon who rushed through his own turns so that we could simply wrap up the game. By turn four, my main focus became trying to mask my anger, in service of Schmeven, the birthday boy who (I hope) was having a great time just getting a game off the shelf that doesn’t see the table nearly as often as it should.Maybe two-thirds of the way through our play, Slim was in great shape on the rules and finished off a victory, navigating his own turns with ease. And, to Slim’s credit, he acknowledged the help that was provided by his tablemates during the game. Our play took just over two hours, which in some ways was a miracle.My only regret? Not doing a full teach of The Gallerist for Slim the moment he acknowledged that he hadn’t played the game in years. Teaching The Gallerist to a new player only takes about 20 minutes—the player aid really is great as a teaching tool—and for a seasoned player with even distant plays under their belt, getting a quick re-teach is usually enough.It’s also fun to see how I change as I get older. I don’t mind losing, and I’m certainly less competitive than I was ten years ago. But, I do mind waiting. (Yeah, it’s your turn!) If patience really is a virtue, then I guess all I can say for now is that I am working on it!!

• 
  Adaptation Diary: Making Witchcraft! Digital

  by mantita on May 3, 2026

  by Mantita Games We'd been kicking around the idea of a digital card game for a while, and when we landed on Witchcraft! it all clicked. It's a fantastic game, with a really powerful card mechanic, and on top of that it has the kind of complex, demanding strategy that hooks us. We love hard games — the ones that make you think — and Witchcraft! was a perfect fit.So we got to work.[heading]The challenge we thought would be the big one: the interface[/heading]The first thing that worried us was how to translate the reveal/hide card mechanic to a screen. It's the game's most distinctive feature, and on the table it's completely intuitive — the card is split in two and you can see both sides clearly. In digital… well, that was another story. How was the player going to keep track of which side they were playing? How would they choose?Our first instinct was drag-and-drop. We went all in and built a system where, when you picked up a card, two distinct zones appeared and you dropped it into one or the other depending on the side you wanted to play. On paper it looked great. We tried it on mobile and it fell apart: clunky, unclear, artificial.Our second idea was to put two little buttons, one on each side of the card. Our designer really went for it here — he came up with some lovely buttons, full of personality — and with that solution we reached our first testing phase feeling pretty good.And then the first two people who tried it told us the same thing, with almost the same look on their faces: why can't I just tap the side of the card I want to play? We looked at each other. We felt a bit silly. And right then it hit us — the solution had been right under our noses the whole time. No dragging, no buttons, no inventions. Just tap the card. Sometimes the road to the obvious is longer than it should be.[heading]Meanwhile, on the visual side[/heading]While we were tangled up with the interaction question, there was another thing on our plate: how all this was going to look. And here we had a huge head start — Albert Monteys's illustrations. Honestly, just dropping them into the mobile layout already did half the work. I mean, wow. With illustrations at that level, the question wasn't whether they'd hold up — it was how we were going to make the design around them live up to them.Luckily, the original game's graphic design was done by Meeple Foundry, so we weren't starting from scratch — not even close. Everything was very well prepared to edit and tweak, and there was a clear design language that helped us enormously in figuring out where to take things.From there, we put together some pretty scrappy wireframes — really scrappy — and handed them to our designer, Lorenzo Berzosa, who helped us pull it all together in a consistent, coherent way. We knew what we wanted on each screen; he turned those sketches into something that actually holds up visually.Ugly wireframesActual designer work[heading]The challenge we didn't see coming: the tutorial[/heading]In our heads, teaching people to play Witchcraft! wasn't going to be complicated. The rulebook is short. The mechanic didn't seem convoluted to us. We had it figured out.Our first tutorial was a disaster. Most of our early testers got lost in the tutorial. Yes, lost. They understood the individual actions, but not how they connected to each other or why they mattered. That's when we remembered one of the harshest lessons in development: just because you understand something after months up to your neck in it doesn't mean it's easy to explain. If anything, it usually means the opposite.We went back at it. We rethought the pacing, changed the order of the concepts, cut things, swapped explanations for playable examples, cut again… and bit by bit the tutorial started to work. There was no single magic change — it was pure iteration: try it, see where people get lost, adjust, try again. Even now there's still room to grow, especially because the game has so many strategic layers and it's hard to cover all of that in five steps.[heading]And then came the fun part: the campaign[/heading]I'll admit, the campaign was by far what I enjoyed programming the most. It was exciting and challenging in equal measure. On the architecture side, we were able to put together something pretty solid that let us configure each tale almost automatically, and from there it was test, test, and test.I got pretty obsessed with the final tale. In fact, I started to believe it was impossible. I remember anxiously asking Salt & Pepper: but has anyone actually beaten the game? Is it even possible? Until one night, at three in the morning… I did it. The achievement system popped up right on cue telling me I'd completed the campaign, and I almost teared up. An epic moment I keep with a lot of fondness.[heading]Magical challenge unlocked[/heading]It's been a long road. A lot of design revisions, a lot of hours in front of the code, and the involvement of a bunch of testers who got really invested and contributed ideas and suggestions that ended up shaping the game you can play today. This digital Witchcraft! is, in large part, theirs too.On April 15th, 2026 we went live in the stores. And with the launch comes another pile of lessons learned… but that's for another day.Thanks for reading.

• 
  Race for the Galaxy: Xeno Counterstrike Designer Preview

  by Tom Lehmann on May 2, 2026

  by Tom Lehmann Race for the Galaxy: Xeno CounterstrikeRio Grande GamesDesigner Preview by Tom LehmannXeno Counterstrke is the second and final expansion in Race for the Galaxy's Xeno arc. Introduced in the Xeno Invasion expansion, the Xenos are a violent xenophobic alien race that cannot be negotiated with.Taking place after their invasion of galactic space, Xeno Counterstrike portrays the galactic empire's expansion through the frontier zone into Xeno space.Xeno Counterstrike features two play experiences: a frontier game, with powerful new worlds to explore and settle, and a bonus counterstrike game, which continues the invasion game from Xeno Invasion and takes the fight to the Xeno worlds.The Xeno Invasion expansion is recommended but not required for the frontier game, which can be played by 2-4 players with just the RFTG base set. The counterstrike game requires Xeno Invasion, which also adds a 5th player option to both experiences.Frontier Ho!The frontier game adds 46 frontier worlds divided into two separate decks of Near and Far frontier worlds, plus a new Frontier Settle action card.Frontier worlds are located in the starry rift section of space that separates the galactic empires from Xeno space. These worlds are populated by a mix of pioneers, outlaws, and worlds previously conquered by Xenos.Xeno Counterstrike uses several concepts introduced in Xeno Invasion:* mix-with-hand for all Explore actions,* Xeno worlds -- worlds already conquered by the Xenos,* specialized military vs. Xenos (similar to military vs. Rebels), and* the Anti-Xeno "keyword" -- groups opposing the Xenos.Initially, players can choose to settle only Near frontier worlds. Once an empire has grown to 5+ cards in tableau, it can settle either Near or Far frontier worlds.Settling a frontier world is a plunge into the unknown. To do so, a player plays Frontier Settle (triggering a normal Settle phase for the other players) and draws 3 cards from a frontier deck. They can choose to play and pay for or conquer one of them, discarding the other two worlds face down to that deck's discard pile. (Unlike a normal settle, they don't draw a card afterwards, as their card bonus is the card they drew.)If the player is unable or chooses not to settle any of them, they keep one card for a later normal settle or card payment; thereby losing a tableau-building tempo, but gaining a card.However, this risk is balanced by the frontier worlds being cosiderably better than similar cost regular game worlds. Deciding when you are ready to settle frontier worlds and whether they should be Near or Far ones adds new decisions to the game.Some cards have powers that help you settle frontier worlds and some 6-cost developments reward players for settling frontier worlds.Thematically, settling frontier worlds is a resource committment across considerable time and space, so each player can do so only every other round (their used Frontier Settle card is tucked under their start world for one round to mark this). When playing the experienced 2-player variant, players may do a Frontier settle every round.Design ConsiderationsMechanically, having frontier worlds be separate decks, instead of adding them to the game deck, solves two potential expansion issues:First, in an expansion, players want new, fun cards to play. Satisfying this desire often leads to "expansion creep", where expansion cards are just better than the original cards. By placing the better worlds in separate decks with a risk-reward mechanism to obtain them, I can give players access to lots of really great worlds without diminishing the base game worlds (as players still need to build up to afford frontier worlds and also need worlds to settle when other players call Frontier settle).On the development side, the higher military defenses in the Far frontier deck creates a need for more military cards, allowing me to make a few fun but costly military cards:Second, single-deck games (such as Race for the Galaxy) have the "sample variation problem" where, as the deck grows in size, the odds that a player draws a bunch of one type of cards (say, developments) and none of another type (say, worlds) increases with each expansion that adds more cards, increasing the luck of the draw.This issue, along with a desire to tell different stories, led me to create separate expansion arcs.With almost half this expansion's cards in the frontier decks, I could design a lean addition of 6 start worlds and 25 game cards to the main deck, concentrating on interesting variations of existing cards that didn't produce expansion creep:These cards had to provide enough Xeno Worlds, military vs Xenos, and Anti-Xeno keywords so that Xeno Counterstrike could work without Xeno Invasion.Testing revealed an issue: namely, the game was a bit too short for the powers of Far frontier worlds to have an impact, as by the time players had built up and acquired them, it was often over.The solution was to add some VPs to the initial common pool (15, not 12, VPs per player) and to play to 15, not 12, cards in tableau to make the game 1-2 rounds longer. This still keeps the frontier game reasonably short and snappy, but allows those big Far frontier worlds a chance to strut their stuff.The Empires Strike BackBeyond depicting a varied frontier, I wanted Xeno Counterstrike to continue Xeno Invasion's storyline: what happens after the invasion is repulsed? Can the empires then take the fight to the Xeno hive worlds? Could I give this an epic feel?The optional counterstrike game begins as a combined frontier and Xeno Invasion game until the invasion is successfully repulsed (if the Xenos win, the players all lose). Then it shifts into the counterstrike game, replacing the invasion game tiles and cards with the counterstrike versions.To ensure that this game doesn't end prematurely, I greatly enlarged the VP pool (to 30 VPs per player) and eliminated tableau size as an end condition. Players have to either exhaust this larger VP pool, conquer all the Xeno systems (which scale with number of players), or have a combined military vs. Xenos that is equal to or greater than the Xeno conquest value, as shown on this track:After a successful repulse, play resumes, except that now the players are on the attack and the Xenos, if at least one Xeno system isn't attacked each round, carry out retaliatory strikes (similar to the old invasions, but with a new deck).The Xeno systems are a deck of Sattelite and Hive worlds of varying strengths.To attack them, an empire plays their Frontier Settle card, using its conquest portion, provided they have either 16+ cards in tableau or contain at least one Far frontier world. A failed Xeno system conquest increases their retaliation strengths that round.Some Xeno retaliation strengths and all Hive world strengths are equal to the the attacking empire's military + military vs. Xenos + 2-6 more. To defeat them, the empire must have at least 9 military vs. Xenos and additional temporary military equal to the card's extra 2-6 military.Thematically, this represents Xeno swarming tactics, where they bring more than the opposing force to overwhelm them. Only surprise tactics, represented by temporary military, can defeat them.The extra awards for successful defeat of retaliating forces is the reverse of Xeno Invasion, which favored being the smallest military capable of holding them off. Now, the military that defeats the largest attacking force gets the extra awards.Players can win either by military conquest or by churning out massive war production represented by VPs (as all empires are now assumed to be on a fully mobilized war footing).The optional counterstrike game changes Race for the Galaxy considerably, as tableaus of 20-25 cards are not unusual and game time is roughly doubled. This is the version for the players who want a longer, more epic version of Race for the Galaxy against a common foe.Finishing TouchesIn developing Xeno Counterstrike, I was aided by my long-time partner Wei-Hwa Huang, his wife Trisha Huang, and Chris Lopez. They tirelessly playtested both versions and made many useful suggestions. Thanks!With more than 75 different card illustrations, this was a demanding assignment for the illustrators, Martin Hoffmann and Claus Stephan, and the graphic artist, Mirko Suzuki. This product marks more than 20 years we have worked together. I would like to thank them for all their contributions over the years.Jay Tummelson of Rio Grande Games, as always, was very supportive. Bringing games to market during these times is quite difficult and I deeply appreciate his efforts in doing so.It's been a privilege to work on Race for the Galaxy and be able to tell different stories. I'd like to thank all the fans for their interest and support. I hope you enjoy the stories of exploring the frontier and defeating an xenophobic race that Xeno Counterstrike offers. Enjoy!-- Tom Lehmann

• 
  On-The-Go with the New Releases from Hachette Boardgames USA

  by boardgamersteph on April 29, 2026

  by Steph Hodge ▪️ Hachette Boardgames USA has been on it with announcing new games! Today, I will highlight some of the smaller games coming out in the next several months. [imageid=8969959 medium Rep]▪️ Canal Houses just released this April and should already be hitting the stores. From the Gigamic catalog, Canal Houses is a 20-minute game where you build up the beautiful streets of Amsterdam. The colorful houses and charming artwork are used for scoring at the end of the game. From the newsletter:Each round, players pick a card from their hand and build it simultaneously, then pass the remaining cards to the next player. Refresh your hand by drawing a new card type—base, floor, or roof, and keep crafting your architectural masterpiece. To complete a house, you’ll need to build from the ground up: start with a base, stack any number of floors, and top it off with a roof. Simple to learn and quick to play, Canal Houses is the perfect mix of strategy and charm.▪️ Another new release from Gigamic is Pirate King! this June! Pirate King is a push-your-luck card game for 2-5 players and will play in about 15 minutes. Pick your captain and build your deck, but don't be too greedy, or you just might bust out. Every round, players will reveal cards simultaneously, one by one, from their own deck. Revealed swords lets players gain creatures with special powers. Revealing gold allows players to draft treasures into their decks. Be careful though, reveal 3 skulls and you bust! With its wacky effects, unpredictable treasures, and monsters to battle, Pirate King offers a dynamic experience blending tactics, luck, and dirty tricks. Ideal for groups looking for a fast-paced, fun, and slightly chaotic game.▪️ Leaf It! is a new dexterity game from Edition Spielwiese releasing this June. Leaf It plays 2-4 players and takes about 10-20 minutes. There is a mix of memory and dexterity as you have to assemble the canopy and then dismantle it, collecting the most valuable animals as you do. From the newsletter:Leaf It! requires a mix of steady hands, a good memory, and a little bit of luck. When it's your turn, you must place a card onto the growing canopy, making sure it doesn't collapse.The Rule: You must always cover the animal on the previous card.The Strategy: Try to remember exactly where you (and your opponents) placed the cards with the most valuable animals! After all cards have been placed it's time to Dismantle the Tree! Players take turns carefully drawing cards back out of the treetop.Grab the cards you remember having the most points.Be careful: the canopy is highly unstable. If you cause it to collapse, you will be penalized!▪️ HUCH! is a new partner with Hachette, and they just announced 3 mini games releasing this May! All of the games support 2-5 players and can be played in about 15 minutes. In Blue Penguin, each player tries to attract the cutest penguins—the smaller they are, the cuter they are! The problem is that penguins always follow the bigger ones.On their turn, each player places a “penguin” card and draws a new one. The player who plays the card with the highest number collects all the cards played that round and becomes the first player for the next turn. The game ends once all cards have been played, and scores are calculated based on colors, not numbers. In Meteo, players try to pick the best weather conditions for a last-minute vacation. At the start of the game, six visible “weather” cards are randomly paired with hidden “sky” cards of different colors, and each player gets to secretly look at one. The “sky” cards are revealed one by one. At any moment, a player can interrupt the process by saying “I’m going!” to stop the reveals and claim the cards they think will earn them the most points. In Wool Street, players buy and sell cards representing woolen garments in six different types, hoping to collect those that score points while selling off those that bring penalties. On their turn, players draw a card and must place it on a pile of the same garment type (e.g., sweaters with sweaters). Then, they can choose to sell a garment card by placing it in the center of the table or buy one from the center. The first pile to reach 7 cards scores 2 points per card of that type for players who bought them; the second pile scores 1 point, but the fourth and fifth piles result in point losses!If you are on the go or are looking for some quicker games for the collection, these seem like they would fit the bill.

• 
  Designer Diary: President

  by NicoCardonaDenis on April 28, 2026

  by Nicolas Cardona Hi, I’m Nico Cardona, a board game designer and publisher based in Barcelona, where I also run my small label, Too Bad Games. Today I want to share the design journey behind President, which is probably my first larger design outside the filler space, after titles like Rudolph, Mala Suerte and Panots. More than just telling the story of where the idea came from, I want to focus on the design problems behind it, the systems that failed, and the decisions that finally made the game click.The Initial SparkThe first seed of President came from a somewhat unusual place: my master’s degree in organizational engineering.One of the topics that stayed with me the most was game theory. I think it is fascinating for any designer, because at its core it is about incentives, prediction, trust, and decision-making under uncertainty. I was also very interested in graph structures, and at some point those two ideas clicked together in my head.I started imagining a hierarchy represented almost like a graph or an organizational chart, where your position in that structure would determine how much power you had, and therefore how strong or relevant your actions would be. That was the first real idea behind President. I knew very early that I wanted a game with three levels of hierarchy. Everything else was still unclear.What I did know from the beginning was the type of experience I wanted. I wanted a game for many players, one where trust mattered, where people had to negotiate, whisper in each other’s ears, make promises, read intentions, and sometimes betray each other. The political theme came later as the perfect frame for those dynamics, but the real starting point was not theme, it was structure and interaction.The Core Design ProblemThe real design challenge was this: how do you make a game for large groups that feels socially alive and interactive, but still has enough weight to feel like a proper game?I love social games, but many games for large groups tend to fall into one of two extremes. Either they become hidden role games, where the entire experience depends on secret identities, or they become very broad party games, where the interaction is loud and fun but mechanically light. I wanted something in between.I wanted a game that could handle a big player count, but where the interaction came from timing, hierarchy, negotiation, reading people, and managing risk, not just from shouting or acting.That ambition created a lot of problems immediately. Early versions were much bigger, with more systems, more layers, more moving parts. In theory, some of those ideas were interesting. In practice, players got lost. The more I added, the more the game drifted away from the fast, readable, socially sharp experience I was actually trying to build.At some point I had to be honest with myself. If I wanted President to work for a broader audience, and if I wanted the emotions to be immediate, fast, and easy to read at the table, I had to cut aggressively.That became the real design process of the game: not adding the right things, but removing the wrong ones.The Versions That Had to DieOne of the earliest versions looked nothing like the final game. At that stage, I was still exploring hierarchy in a much more literal and structural way.President went through a huge number of prototypes. Some ideas lasted much longer than they should have, simply because I liked them too much.One of the earliest concepts was that there would be two sides, blue and red, and at some point players could switch allegiances. The idea was that you would push for your side in order to earn bonuses, but maybe change camps when it became convenient. On paper, it sounded politically rich and full of tension. In practice, it was too much. It added another strategic layer, but not the kind of layer the game actually needed. It made the system heavier without making the experience sharper.There was also an early version where players did not all have the same card set. Instead, cards were drawn, and your position in the hierarchy influenced whether you got stronger or weaker options. Again, this sounded exciting in theory. Higher status could give access to better tools, and the game could reflect power in a more literal way. But it quickly created too much volatility, too much information to track, and too much friction for a game that needed to stay readable, especially at high player counts.Another difficult thing to abandon was the idea that being President should simply give better rewards than being Vice President or Secretary. At first, that was the direct logic: the higher your office, the bigger your reward. But this created all kinds of problems. It made the hierarchy too obviously dominant, flattened some of the interesting decision-making, and pushed the game toward a more static reward structure.What finally worked was not giving the top position a directly better reward, but creating situations where being higher in the hierarchy became advantageous depending on what everyone else had played. That shift was crucial. The hierarchy stopped being a blunt reward ladder and became something much more interesting: a system of timing, initiative, leverage, and opportunity.I also explored versions with more modules, more accumulation systems, and more phases. Some of them were individually fun. But the more I tested, the more I understood that President did not need more content. It needed more precision.The BreakthroughAt this stage, the game was already much closer to its final identity, but I was still testing which actions deserved to stay and which ones had to disappear.The real turning point came when I found a cleaner hand system.Once I moved toward the idea that everyone should share the same set of cards, the whole game began to make sense. From there, I iterated many times, around twenty or thirty meaningful iterations, just to find the final seven cards. I was looking for a very specific combination: cards that worked mechanically, fit the theme, were easy enough to understand, and most importantly created strong interaction, replayability, tension, and memorable moments.The other big breakthrough was the retrieval structure. Players use cards and lose access to them temporarily, then recover them through specific effects. That gave the system rhythm. It made timing matter. It made players pay attention not only to what others were doing now, but also to what options they might regain later.At that point, I also realized something essential: if I wanted the game to scale to very high player counts, it could not be turn-by-turn in the traditional sense. The game needed simultaneous action selection. That was one of the decisions that truly made large groups possible.But I did not want pure simultaneous chaos either. So the solution was subtle: players choose actions simultaneously, but they do not all resolve simultaneously. Resolution unfolds in order, shaped by the hierarchy. That gave the game speed without losing tension. It also made the hierarchy feel meaningful, because it effectively became a shifting initiative system.That was when the game stopped feeling like a collection of ideas and started feeling like an actual design.Defamation and the Social EngineIf there is one mechanism that made the whole design click, it was Defame.Defame allows you to predict another player’s action, either in the current turn or even the next one. If you are right, you steal a victory point from them.That may sound simple, but in play it changed everything.The moment this mechanic entered the game, negotiation, promises, and public table talk became much more dangerous and much more interesting. Suddenly you could not afford to become too predictable. If you openly signaled your intentions, someone could exploit that. If you lied too often, people would learn to read you differently. Every deal, every bluff, every political speech at the table became part of the real game state.In other words, Defame did not just create a fun effect. It connected the social layer to the scoring layer.That mattered a lot. Many social games have plenty of table talk, but the conversation exists somewhat outside the formal system. Here I wanted the opposite. I wanted the game to reward reading people, misdirecting them, and choosing when to be transparent and when to manipulate. Defame was the mechanism that turned all of that into something tangible.It is probably the hardest card to explain in the game. I know that. But I made a conscious design decision to keep it anyway. Sometimes you remove complexity because it is unnecessary. Sometimes you keep a little complexity because the payoff is worth it. For me, Defame was absolutely worth it.Simplifying Without Hollowing It OutOne of the hardest lessons of President was learning that “simpler” does not automatically mean “better”, but it often means “clearer”, and clarity is essential when you want a socially dense game to work with many people.There were moments when I tried to make the game deeper in a more conventional, gamer-friendly sense. More sub-actions, more differentiation, more layered effects. At one point, even with a smaller set of cards, each card could contain multiple sub-actions depending on hierarchy and context. The result was exactly what you would expect: too much information to retain for a game that was meant to sit somewhere between family game and social strategy game.The issue was not that players could not understand it eventually. The issue was that every extra rule took energy away from the real experience: reading the table, making alliances, lying convincingly, spotting opportunities, and reacting quickly.That became my filter for every design decision: does this rule improve the social engine of the game, or does it merely make the system denser?If it only made the system denser, it had to go.Scaling to Ten PlayersFrom the beginning, I wanted a game that could work in big groups. Part of that came from watching large groups play games like Secret Hitler and thinking: I want that social energy, but I do not want to rely entirely on hidden roles.Getting there was not easy. A game that works at eight, nine, or ten players can easily become too flat at three or four. The reverse is also true. Many systems that feel rich at smaller counts become painfully slow or unreadable at larger counts.What made President viable at ten was not one single trick, but a combination of constraints. Simultaneous action selection reduced downtime. Shared card sets reduced rules overhead. Ordered resolution kept tension and readability. And then the “day cards” added just enough variety to keep the table alive from round to round.Those day cards were another area where I learned the value of cutting. Early on, I had more than twenty. Eventually I realized that I did not need that much variety. What I needed were six or seven that were truly excellent, cards that created conversation, forced commitment, or encouraged bluffing in a clean and memorable way.One of my favorites asks players to declare at the start of the round which action they will play. They may lie, of course, but if they actually do what they said, they recover a card. It is a tiny rule, but it creates exactly the kind of moment I wanted from the beginning: table talk with real consequences.What the Game Taught MeMore than anything else, President taught me how games are really designed.Theory matters. Studying systems matters. Understanding incentives matters. But at some point you are no longer dealing with theory. You are dealing with a living system that resists you. A prototype is not an idea. It is an argument with reality.This game forced me to learn through repetition, through failed versions, through mechanics I loved and had to cut, through moments where I thought I was close and then realized I was still too far away.It also reinforced something I believe very strongly as a designer: interaction is not decoration. It is not just a bonus layer you hope players bring themselves. If you want a game to be socially memorable, you have to build that social energy into the mechanics themselves.For me, the best moments in games often come from looking at another player and thinking: what are you about to do, and can I trust you? That tension is alive. It creates stories. It creates laughter. It creates the kinds of memories that survive long after the rules are forgotten.That is what I was chasing with President.Looking BackAfter all the cuts, failed systems, and repeated testing, this was the final form the game took.People sometimes ask what I would do differently today. The honest answer is complicated.Of course there are always details one could revisit. Every design contains a thousand possible alternative paths. But in a deeper sense, I would not undo the mistakes, because those mistakes are exactly how I learned what this game needed to be.I am the designer of President, but I also handled the art direction and published it myself together with Zacatrus, a well-established publisher in Spain that supported the project. By the time the game was already quite advanced, I also showed it to other publishers and saw strong interest there too. That was reassuring, but more importantly, it confirmed something I had started to feel during testing: the long process of cutting, refining, and insisting on the core idea had paid off.To this day, President is the game of mine I feel strongest about. Not only because of the final product, but because of what it demanded from me as a designer.It taught me that when a game is trying to do something unusual, especially for large groups, you cannot afford to protect every idea you love. You have to protect the experience instead.And sometimes, if you keep doing that for long enough, the game finally starts telling you what it wants to be.

• 
  Two-Handed, Intentionally

  by whenindoubteatout on April 27, 2026

  by Justin Bell Late last summer, I had dinner with an industry contact, and we got to talking about life, love, and the pursuit of tabletop happiness over a handsome buffet of cheap prosecco, garden salads, and chicken fingers. (Extra honey mustard, please.)Eventually, our conversation turned to one of my favorite questions. “What’ve you been playing lately?”The contact answered with a grin; like many, this contact mostly talked about games that they are not involved with professionally, since industry folks are usually playing games in development at their own company most of the time. One of their answers really intrigued me.“I’m actually playing one of these games ‘two-handed’ a lot recently. In fact, sometimes on weekends, I pour a glass of wine and intentionally do that with titles that I can’t get to the table with my game groups.”I paused for a second, making sure I heard this correctly: the contact was intentionally playing multiplayer games as two distinct players, alone?“That’s right,” they replied. “Sometimes, I like to take longer turns thinking about what I would do as the active player, and it’s easy to imagine playing as someone else in a game that I know really well.”We moved on, but the thought stuck with me. I digested it along with those tasty tenders, and let the thought marinate for most of the last few months.As a media member, I “two-hand” review samples all the time, playing as two distinct players to get a feel for how the game plays. I always do this with games I receive that have not been released yet. Designers are often unavailable to teach their upcoming creations directly to peasants like me, so I usually have to grind through a rulebook on my own to learn a pre-production copy (PPC) of a rulebook before a video content creator has been contracted to produce a formal teach video.Two-handing (or, “dummy-handing”, in my personal parlance) is a necessary tool for my efforts. I take teaching new games seriously, so the two-handed or three-handed plays really help me suss out the potential questions I’m going to face from other players. Usually, though, I don’t two-hand an entire playthrough…I might do two or three rounds in a four-round game, especially in a game that has mid-game scoring elements or pre-round steps that evolve over the course of a longer play.But intentionally two-handing a game all the way to the end? Playing a game from my collection, for fun, by myself, pretending to be multiple players? I’ll be honest: I never even considered it. These days, half the games I review have a dedicated solo mode that simulates a two-player game, or—in what is becoming my growing preference—automas, geared by difficulty level, that can be added to multiplayer games to simulate a higher player count.And many of the board games I want to play have a dedicated app or an implementation on Board Game Arena or Yucata, so if I really want to play, say, Race for the Galaxy by myself, I don’t have to two-hand it…I can just pull out my iPad and play against three bots of varying difficulty.But there is something to the idea of putting a board game on the table, handling the fancy components, and playing a game live. I already play a lot of video games and I already play a lot of app-based board games, so maybe that industry contact was onto something.I looked in my game closet and considered a couple of games on the Maybe Pile. It was virgin territory for me, playing some of the games in my collection two-handed. The results surprised me.The current game on the top of the Maybe Pile is Evacuation, the Vladimír Suchý title from a couple years ago. Evacuation is a game I enjoyed when I reviewed it on Meeple Mountain, but it’s a game that has only hit the table once since my review plays in late 2023 when I bought a copy at SPIEL Essen that fall.Evacuation’s play mode bit is divisive in my circles. Some players only want to play Evacuation in Race Mode, the rule set that is the main play variant in the game’s rulebook, while others prefer Points Mode, where a full four rounds have to be played to determine a winner. But I think the game hasn’t come out as often as I expected because it never got an expansion (not that it needed one, since there are 3-4 game variants and mini expansions included in the base game) and Suchý fans I know prefer some of his other titles, such as Pulsar 2849 and Underwater Cities, over Evacuation.I decided to embark on a two-handed game night with Evacuation in tow. I passed on the glass of wine, but bourbon was handy. One refresher of the rulebook and I had the rules down again—a compliment, for a game that I hadn’t played in more than two years—and setup was a breeze. I set up a Race Mode game for two players, and I was up and running in just a few minutes.I went through the motions on my first few turns, in part because I hadn’t played in a while. Evacuation’s big hook is the game’s goal: over a series of rounds, players have to evacuate their population from the “Old World” and settle them on the “New World” on the other side of the main board’s map.As it turns out, what players REALLY have to worry about is the production level of the game’s three main resources (food, energy, and steel) on both worlds, tracked with three small discs on each player’s personal board. You start the game with a fully-functioning economy, but then you have to break that economy and rebuild it through settlement on the other side of the board…and, fast. All the while, players have to manage an action point system that gets very expensive very fast, as players spend energy from one or both sides of their personal board to get everything done.That race in the base game mode ends when a player has bumped their three resource trackers to space eight or higher, at which point some final calculations are done to come up with a winner. And since I was playing by myself, I took my time feeling out what I remember liking about the game.And as I took my turns, trying to build up a profile of what each of the game’s two players should do on their turn, something weird happened…I noticed I was having fun.Not just a little fun, mind you; I really enjoyed puzzling out the best way to optimize each player’s board. These medium-weight Euros, the ones that feature tech tracks or personal milestones, make playing a game two-handed very straightforward. So, I used the two different sets of technology tiles to drive each player’s strategy.If a tech gave me production powers for, say, steel, I leaned hard in building more “prefab” steel factories. When a tech gave me an ongoing power that provided additional rewards when I built stadiums—in a funny nod to all things sports, Evacuation provides “happy faces” to players who build stadiums, and each player has to build three stadiums for the New World by the end of the game—I went even harder on building more stadiums for that player.I tried my best to pretend I was the purple player (purple being my favorite color) and to pretend that the yellow player was my hated rival. Still, I always gave yellow the benefit of the doubt, taking chances to stab the purple player whenever I had the chance. When yellow was the first player at the end of a round (turn order changes only between rounds), I always tried to block purple from getting the best bonuses, the technology upgrades, or the symbols they might need to build new population centers in a future round.It felt weird to snipe myself…but hey, I’m a two-hander now!The game experience just got better and better. Whether it was purple’s turn or yellow’s turn, it was always MY turn, so downtime was…zero. I experienced all the highs of putting together a solid plan. I’m not the kind of player that usually suffers through “analysis paralysis”, or AP, so I took my time on some turns and breezed through others. But since no one was waiting on me to finish turns, I never felt the burden of other players looking over my shoulder.Undoing an action? All good, it’s still my turn, since I’m the only one taking turns! I spent time feeling out how each tech upgrade would benefit future strategy, so it was fun to explore the game in a bunch of different ways, but all during the same game. Having the chance to take so many turns made all the systems click faster, since I had more space to get so much of it wrong.I had so much fun that, when the Race Mode game was over (Justin beat Justin thanks to a slight edge in minimum production levels), I decided to run it back. For my second play, I did Evacuation in Points Mode, using the Advanced Action variant as well as personal goal cards, which made it even easier to focus both purple and yellow on their distinct strategies.After setting up the second game, I switched out the nine tech tiles from each player board and swapped in a new set for each player. The Points Mode game went the full four rounds, with yellow taking home a much deserved victory and a greater appreciation for the system Suchý created here. By essentially playing the game four times—maybe it’s better to say that I got to explore the system from four different perspectives, rather than doing four complete plays—I finished with my highest set of production levels and took much better advantage of the advanced action system than in previous plays.These two plays cemented my belief that Evacuation should stay in my collection. It also left me wondering why I had not tried to two-hand any other games in my collection before now.As it turned out, that industry contact was onto something.The ol’ two-hander might have legs. I consider myself lucky to have 3-4 game nights a week with friends and family, but I think I will complain a little less often that I cannot get some of my favorites to the table. Those plays of Evacuation only took about two hours in total, so time certainly was not an issue. I’ve got some favorites that are getting a little dusty on the shelf; carving out time for a two-hander once a month is very easy to do, especially on a weeknight where I want something to do while watching the NBA playoffs in the background.Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not about to spend entire weekends intentionally trying to play a heavy strategy game by myself as two or three other players. But I’m open to salvaging plans to play with other humans by just playing a game by myself instead. On nights where I set something up and players bail last-minute, I’m now a bit more open to the idea of playing that game on my own instead of angrily putting the game away.A new pile of games is now building, next to the Maybe Pile in the game closet. This pile, the Two-Handed Stack, now serves as an activity to attack solo, especially when the eyes have burned out from staring at a screen for too long.My early-to-bed in-laws recently spent the weekend, and that meant I needed a couple of quieter activities I could mess with after everyone went to bed…enter the Stack. Sometimes, I want to show the kids new-to-them favorites from the adult game collection, but they get a better offer to hang out with their buddies for another round of Fortnite. All good…I’ve got the Stack. My pile of review copies runs out early each summer, and using review nights to tackle the Stack sounds good to me.Old dog, new tricks? Sounds like my two-handed game nights for the next few months!

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  Designer Diary: Inkwell

  by mxjasperbeatrix on April 26, 2026

  by Jasper Beatrix Game design is a journey, and one without a clear path, nor a clear end. Everything you imagine at the beginning is full of passion and hope, but so much in flux. What you will make is an unknown distance in time and space from where you are now: in theme, in mechanics, in style. We sometimes feel that we have changed as much as the game.Inkwell, for example, goes back to a long car ride during the muted holiday season of 2020. Who were you back then? Who were we? And what was this game?2020Julia & I, having previously worked together on Sacred Rites, had a chat during my long ride up from NYC to Syracuse, New York, primarily because I am terrible at long solo drives. The topic was, primarily, a game that was about turning pages.The brainstorm phase is like fishing about for infinite fish. Would it be a game with actual books? Folded boards? Large cards that flip off a deck? We discussed word puzzles, roll-and-writes, worker placement, token placement, dice management, hand management. But there was this focus on the verb of play that helped guide us: Turning the page. But that brought so many questions of its own. Does the page turn permanently? Can it turn back? Does a player know what is coming? Can they travel a book as they would a player board? Or is it a one-way trip? Do they choose future pages? Or choose to stick with what they have?But in the end we called our shots; after three hours I had reached my destination, and in the end, the game was not built from a hundred ideas. It was built from a few, whichever ones we felt like pursuing, even if it led to disaster. It isn’t the right phase to be right; it was the opportunity to be wrong. We were stumbling in the dark, and as usual, enjoying it.2021After the holidays I looked back at our notes and prepared a first shot at what we called ‘CODICES’, which was about old books and rolling dice, and we liked the clever feeling of sneaking the word ‘dice’ into the title.The idea was straightforward, at least at the time: Two sets of dice would be rolled, with one representing the ink color, and the other a numerical value. Each player would be limited to playing their numerical value on a space of the chosen color or filling pre-designated color spaces. There were other mechanics around pleasing patrons with bonus scoring for certain numbers and collecting gold leaf to decorate the pages. And, at each player’s leisure, they could turn pages back and forth to score in different parts of their book.This left us in that most cursed of playtesting situations, once we got others to play: The game was interesting but not fun. This is a drag, to acknowledge that it felt fresh, and unfortunately, not special. We had a string of such designs around this time, grasping at creativity in the wake of so much going on in the world around us.We tried to iterate in large amounts in different directions. This meant trying a version where the board was only a grid and was filled in to build patterns from pattern cards, as if to form illustrations. We tried word puzzles and drawing games. We tried returning to numbers again and moving from collective dice use to dice gathering done privately by turn, with each player gathering dice and exchanging them as if to gather their supplies. We also messed with applying force on the players, either through the action of another player, or through some sort of counter that players could affect, like a flexible game timer.What was disheartening about this, as it often is, is that each attempt felt, somehow, worse. The passion was replaced by a grind of ideas and attempts. Band-aids on band-aids. Its journey almost ended.2022The game languished here, and that is important to acknowledge. We felt like we were done making games, and there was this process of ‘putting it all away’ that was quite sad. Turning the page, as it were. We recycled a lot of boxes, papers, bits. More than we probably should have. Of this project, all that was left, perhaps accidentally, was the bag of ink dice, and a single printed page. Fossilized, like many projects end up.2023The spark that helped us form DVC is for another time, but in that came two lovely things: Restrictions, and passion. We wanted to get back to making things. New designs abounded, but two old cartons of prototypes were dug up and rehomed. In all that was that little fossil, the dice and the page, and it was like a bolt of lightning. Who was that? The person that made this? And there was a surprise: Likely falling from another prototype, we also found a single real metal cube, a gold one, in the box with what was left of the game. Huh. It got repackaged and placed on a shelf.2024With a baby on the way, there was a sense of urgency for our little crew of friends and family. A whirlwind of work. Old designs found in that same process, repackaged the year before, were all the rage. Here Lies. Karnak. Rosetta. And a mess of others that have not surfaced quite yet. I began to make myself a little package of projects to work on later, as a promise. I dug up old files and put them in the cloud.It was about this time we also got a chance to play a prototype by Lewis Graye, who has used paint cubes to represent the gathering and mixing of colors. There was even a touch of the colors 'matching’ the paintings they were paid for, and the cubes were taken from available inkwells to use.2025About two weeks after our little one was born, I was up all night keeping an eye on him and digging through those old files I had set aside, squinting at my phone. I hadn’t really designed anything in months, I was so nervous about being a parent. Game design felt so small, so unimportant.But, in that chair, something clicked. Or really, everything clicked.Lewis was onto something.Inkwell ultimately became a drafting game, but designing it was also a drafting game, as the process of making something is often a game itself.I got together with Lewis, as well as long-time collaborator Joey Palluconi, who had some thoughts about asymmetrical inkwells after discussing the old design. We began writing on cards, and quickly had arrays of cube spaces opposite pages of abilities. Then a central mat of abilities and cubes mixed together. Then a reset timer controlled by player choices. There was a debate of the abilities themselves, and the desire to let them combine and build engines pleased players more than punished. Joey, Lewis, and many of us had recently liked cozy games, ones that let us converse while we ‘did the fun thing’. That, maybe, was the drive in the end. Meditation, reward, beauty, straightforwardness. Younger me would have scoffed. But now, all of us in our struggles, me as a new parent? Inkwell playtests became a safe space of quiet, even as a designer. The three of us held clandestine little meetings at larger game nights, sheltering in the project as the world swirled around us.You see, I am used to some common questions about game design. Where do ideas come from? How long does it take? How do you know what works?Inkwell was built on work by quite a few people, but more specifically, it drafted many of its ideas from itself over the course of years. The segments of this diary in bold show where parts of the final design first surfaced, even if ignored. It took time to realize which fit where, what matched, what did well. Each iteration was like a turn of the page, where we would get a score and try again.This game, as a design, was a comfort to us after a long journey. We hope you can make some tea, play some lo-fi music, place cubes, and hopefully breathe with us and think of how incredible it is for anything to get to its destination: here and now.With love,Jono Naito-TetroDVC co-founder