Bgg News

BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek BoardGameGeek features information related to the board gaming hobby

A Newcomer’s Guide to Tokyo Game Market
by DomerHoo on November 20, 2025
by Derek Yeung I had the honor of attending Game Market Spring 25 in Japan on May 17-18, 2025, receiving a press pass for the event on behalf of BGG. (I'm a Team Geek volunteer at BGG events and picked up games from this event for the BGG Library.) Here's an overview of the Game Market experience: 1. What is Game Market? Game Market is a gaming exhibition hosted twice a year by Arclight Games, usually in May and November. In 2025, Game Market is hosted at Makuhari Messe in Chiba, about forty kilometers east of Tokyo, with the event often still being referred to as "Tokyo Game Market". Exhibitors will have their titles — board games, card games, tabletop RPGs, and more — on display and for sale, and beyond the games themselves, you will find a plethora of game accessories such as meeples, dice, and more available for purchase. 2. Who are the exhibitors? Most of the exhibitors are from Japan, ranging from first-time designers to regular attendees such as Engames and Korokorodou to big publishers like Arclight and Oink Games. A few exhibitors come from outside Japan, such as Taiwan Boardgame Design, Broadway Toys (Hong Kong), and Allplay (U.S.). 3. How do you buy a ticket to Game Market? You can get a ticket in two ways: Preordering through a website (which requires a Japanese phone number, making it difficult for a visitor) or buying the ticket on the day of the exhibition. On Saturday, an early ticket is available that lets you in an hour before the show officially opens, but (again) you need to have a Japanese phone number for text confirmation, which is difficult to obtain. On Sunday, all tickets enter at noon. If you want to be the first ones into the show, you want to be waiting at least an hour prior to the opening. You will be waiting in the outdoor area, so be sure to dress for the weather. When I was there, it was raining and humid. 4. How do you buy the games? Most vendors will take only cash for game sales, although some larger vendors will take credit cards. To reduce the foreign exchange fees, my recommendation is to use a debit card with no foreign transaction fees at any 7-Eleven ATM. Be sure to withdraw using Japanese yen and let the bank automatically calculate the exchange rate rather than selecting the equivalent in your local currency. 7-Eleven ATMs allow you to withdraw up to 200,000 yen (approx/ US$1,300) per transaction. Many vendors have reservations for games. They will post the RSVP link either on their Twitter account or on the Game Market website. This will reserve a copy for you until a certain time. Once the RSVP time passes, the game is available for public sale. (I lost a game during my visit in the spring because of this.) Other vendors do not do reservations; they are first come, first serve. Quoth Games, the original publisher of Nokosu Dice, sold out of Final Binary immediately on Saturday. As there was popular demand, they later reprinted Final Binary with English rules. 5. What's the difference between Saturday and Sunday? Since most vendors are hobby enthusiasts and not businesses, some come on Saturday only or Sunday only, while others are present for both days. The Game Market website shows where each vendor is and whether they will be present only on Saturday (土), only on Sunday (日), or on both days (両). To get the games you want, you may need to show up both days. In general, Saturday is geared more for board games and Sunday is geared for RPGs. 6. Does Game Market have food and drinks available? Yes, food trucks and vending machines are in the outside hall areas for dining and keeping yourself hydrated. Be sure to bring at least two additional bottles of water for the spring Game Market as it was extremely hot and humid when I went there. Should you want more food, a food court can be found in a five-minute walk from the Messe that features Yoshinoya (a Japanese rice bowl chain), Taco Bell, and other options. 7. How do you get to Makuhari Messe? From Tokyo Station downtown, take the Keiyo Line (marked with Red JE sign) to Kaihin-Makuhari station. Once there, leave via the South Exit (buses should be buses present) and keep walking south. Take the escalator up to the sky pedestrian walkway and follow the directions to Makuhari Messe. It's about a 10-15 minute walk from the subway station. 8. Are there any gaming areas around Messe? Since most of the game market goers are local, a few hotels nearby have gaming space: • APA Hotel Tokyo Bay • New Hotel Otani • Hotel Francs • Hotel Green Tower Makuhari There is also gaming available in the food court between the Messe and the train station. 9. What about game stores in Tokyo? The best stores are Suragaya and Yellow Submarine in Akihabara. You'll need to take the Keiyo train to Tokyo Station, then transfer to either the Keihin-Tohoku or Yamanote Line to Akihabara. Suragaya has a used game shop that is reasonably priced. You may find some older games that are gems. For transiting throughout Tokyo, I would recommend getting a Suica card. This is like a prepaid subway card that you just tap to get through the gates. 10. Oh no! I missed the Game Market! How can I get the popular games recommended by various bloggers or YouTubers? Most publishers will sell their unsold games in one of three ways: • Booth • Korokorodou • Bodoge All three will ship only within Japan, so if you are not also in Japan, you will need to use a Japanese freight forwarder to consolidate your packages and ship them all at once. (It's not fun to pay $30 to ship a small card game every time.) Most forwarders hold a package for one month. If you are located in the U.S., you may face an additional 15% tariff (current as of published date) and possible delivery charges. Okay, enough about the Game Market basics. Here is my sneak peek for five games that will be featured at Game Market Fall 2025, which takes place November 22-23: 1. Dodicitr3, by Taiki Shinzawa, designer of American Bookshop, Inflation!, and Shut the Books — Dodicitr3 is a shedding game in which you want to be the first one to empty your hand of cards. What's interesting about this game is that cards range only from 3-12,, but the 11s can be used as two 1s and the 12s as a 1-2 run. You can add cards to your tableau to create a longer run or set. (¥2500) 2. Chrono Trick — You need a regular deck of playing cards for this co-operative trick-taking game with no trump. During set-up, three players are assigned a card that determines how many tricks (0-6) they must take, but this card faces away from them, so it's seen only by other players; the fourth player must take what remains of the thirteen tricks. Four chrono cards lie in the middle of the table, and a player can select one to choose the starting player for the next trick. (¥500) 3. ウロボロストリック ("Ouroboros Trick") — In this trick-taking game, when you run out of cards in your hand, you reshuffle the cards that you've won and use them as your new hand, but first you discard one or more cards based on the smallest card that you won. When someone needs to refill their hand but can't, the game ends and that person loses. (¥2500) 4. Tricktakers Guide to the Galaxy — This design combines No Thanks! with trick-taking. Rules are revealed one at a time, and if you don't the rule to be passed to you, place a coin from your starting reserve on the card. If you accept the rules, take all of the coins on that card, with coins being worth points at game's end. The game features a decent amount of Japanese text, so I'll have to translate that before I can explain more. (¥2200) 5. Catte, from LEO, designer of VIVO — Catte is a must-follow trick-taking game with three suits: black, white, and brown, which represent black coffee, milk, and a milky coffee. A player can combine a black and white card to create a brown one, and sometimes you'll be forced to do so. The card in the center of the table shows the trump suit, and whoever wins the trick scores this card, with the lowest-played card becoming the next card in the middle. If your score goes over a certain total, you bust and score 0 points, with the round ending immediately. After 3-4 rounds, the player with the highest score wins.
Renegade Revives Lords of Waterdeep, Invites New Diplomacy, and Doesn't Stop Dungeon Crawler Carl
by W Eric Martin on November 19, 2025
by W. Eric Martin ▪️ Announcing yet another new edition of a game in the Hasbro catalog, U.S. publisher Renegade Game Studios will re-release Peter Lee and Rodney Thompson's Lords of Waterdeep in April 2026, along with the Scoundrels of Skullport expansion. Lords of Waterdeep debuted from Wizards of the Coast in 2012, and in the years since, it's become one of the prime examples of a worker-placement game due to its ease of play. Here's an overview of the game: Waterdeep, the City of Splendors – the most resplendent jewel in the Forgotten Realms, and a den of political intrigue and shady back-alley dealings. In Lords of Waterdeep, a strategy board game for 2-5 players, you take on the role of one of the masked Lords of Waterdeep, secret rulers of the city. Through your agents, you recruit adventurers to go on quests on your behalf, earning rewards and increasing your influence over the city. Expand the city by purchasing new buildings that open up new actions on the board, and hinder – or help – the other lords by playing intrigue cards to enact your carefully laid plans. During the course of play, you may gain points or resources by completing quests, constructing buildings, playing intrigue cards, or having other players use the buildings you have constructed. After eight rounds, the player with the most points wins. ▪️ At Gen Con 2025, Renegade teased a G.I. JOE crossover with its Heroscape game line, bringing together two other Hasbro-originated product lines. Now Renegade has revealed that the standalone base game for this product line will be G.I. JOE Heroscape: Rumble at the Rift Battle Box, which is due out in March 2026 along with three expansions — Strike Forces, Greenshirts & Battle Copter, and COBRA Troopers & COBRA Flight Pod — and a Serpentor pre-order freebie. What IP will be found in the Heroscape sets of the 2060s? Heroscape: Jake Paul? Heroscape: Labubu?! I can't even imagine what folks will be nostalgic for forty years from now... ▪️ Yet another Renegade title emerging from the Hasbroverse is Diplomacy: The Golden Blade, a 2-7 player card game from newcomer Rosco Schock that's due out in May 2026. Here's an overview: In the prelude to World War I, the seven great European powers contend for supremacy, both with their military might and political maneuvering. In this game, players must choose and negotiate alliances carefully, knowing when to expand...and when to stab. Only the most cunning leader will emerge victorious as "The Golden Blade". Diplomacy: The Golden Blade is a standalone card game for new or experienced Diplomacy players that features no player elimination. ▪️ To follow up another Gen Con 2025 revelation, Renegade has announced that in addition to the promised Dungeon Crawler Carl Roleplaying Game, the second title using that license will be Dungeon Crawler Carl: Unstoppable, a one- or two-player game based on John D. Clair's 2025 title Unstoppable. The short description: Dungeon Crawler Carl: Unstoppable is a co-operative card-crafting deck-builder set in the World Dungeon. You'll battle against neighborhood, borough, and city bosses while gearing up and leveling your chosen hero to survive and reach the next floor. Play solo or bring along your own Princess Donut for a co-op run! A crowdfunding campaign for these two titles, which will both be illustrated by Dungeon Crawler Carl artist Luciano Fleitas, will launch in April 2026.
Ask Ms. Meeple: Is It Game Over...?
by jschlickbernd on November 19, 2025
by Greyfax Hey, folks, it's a short column this time as I am hosting an event this weekend and have a ton to do. Here is the question: Can we kick out a player who is in cognitive decline? We've touched on this before, and I'm going to do a disability column sometime soon, but here is my answer for this question. I'm not answering the specific question as any group can kick anyone out for any reason at any time; instead I'm answering what I think they are concerned about. There is no kind way to explain to someone with a disability that's not under their control that they are no longer wanted. There simply isn't. What I would want to do is arrange for perhaps one-on-one sessions with this person to play games with them that they can handle. I realize that solution can't work for everyone, but this could be presented as an alternative to you telling the person that because of their cognitive decline, they no longer can attend — and closing the door on them completely. I totally understand that not everyone will agree with this solution. If others have a solution that meets their group's needs, please present it. Best, Ms. Meeple (Jennifer Schlickbernd) P.S. If there's a situation in your board game group or at a meetup that you would like advice on, please send me a Geekmail with "Ms. Meeple" in the title.
Teasers for Indie Games Night Market at PAX Unplugged 2025
by W Eric Martin on November 18, 2025
by W. Eric Martin PAX Unplugged 2025 takes place on Nov. 21-23 in Philadelphia, and among the 400+ listings on BGG's PAXU 2025 Preview are multiple listings for independent productions that will be available solely at Indie Games Night Market, which takes place at 19:00 on Saturday, Nov. 22. As organizer Daniel Newman writes on the IGNM page of his New Mill Industries website: The event will feature 30 designers with small tables (listed below), selling games that would otherwise have had no channel for purchase. The intention was to feature games that have not been signed by publishers, had no intention to go on Kickstarter, and may otherwise not be available. This is meant to be an outlet for interesting ideas that may not have wide appeal. ▪️ Let's sample a few of these titles, starting with Mac McAnally's This Is Not a Game About a Pipe, a trick-taking game inspired by René Magritte's painting, "The Treachery of Images". The deck has four suits — pipe, card, trick, and winning — with cards valued 1-12. More importantly, each card has a partial sentence such as "This ______ a pipe" or "This ______ winning" near the bottom of its face and either "is" or "is not" near the top. When you lead to a trick, you use two cards, with the top card indicating the suit and the bottom card completing the sentence. If you lead with a card in the "winning" suit, for example, you must flip around the second card (which can be any suit) underneath the winning card so that the sentence will read "This is winning". After all, you're leading to the trick, so your card is currently winning that trick. The value of your play is the sum of the two cards played. Players must follow suit, if possible, and someone playing a lower-valued card in the winning suit must make their sentence read "This is not winning". The other suits have their own quirks: Card must always have "This is a card" for its sentence since indeed the item played is a card. Pipe, as you might expect, must have "This is not a pipe". Trick is "This is not a trick" unless it's the final card in the trick, in which case "This is a trick". I'm a fan of surrealism, so I've purchased a copy of the game, but have yet to play since I haven't had the right group at the table yet. Gameplay seems like it might be tedious thanks to the card flipping and the need to choose two cards for each trick, but as I said, I'm a fan of surrealism, so I'm game to give it a try. ("Un Chien Andalou" is a mesmerizing film, but one viewing was enough.) ▪️ Marceline Leiman participated in the initial IGNM in 2024 with High Tide, and she's back with a new title from her Roly Poly Games line: Heavenly Bodies. Here's an overview of this two-player card game: Inspired by classic card games like Gin Rummy and Koi-Koi, in Heavenly Bodies players meld three or more cards in sets and runs, aiming to pass thresholds for each suit in order to score points. Each turn, players may either draw two cards from a shared deck, then discard a card to either of two discard piles OR draw all the cards of either discard pile, melding any that they can into sets, then taking the remaining as penalty cards. Once players have melded cards, with the number of cards depending on the suit, they score points. Each suit in the game — planet, moon, comet, and star — has a different composition of ranks based on a pyramid, and card thresholds worth different amounts of points. Each hand is a race to 5 points. Once a player reaches 5 points, they can stop the current hand and collect one star fragment OR "Nova" and push their luck to reach 10 points before their opponent reaches 5. If they Nova successfully, they collect two star fragments; if not, their opponent collect one star fragment instead. Whoever collects four star fragments first wins. ▪️ Taylor Shuss debuted in 2022 with Stonewall Uprising, and like Leiman he'll release his second title at IGNM, with Fold & Fly! being "a short family-style game for 2-50 players." Here's how Shuss describes the game: "Each round, players fold lines on their airplane templates, then throw towards the finish line! Will your airplane make it past the finish line first? Or will a rival craft an even more aerodynamic machine? Or will planes collide — dashing hopes in the process!" ▪️ Jamie Sabriel and Triple Rainbow Games will have the two-player game Fight Sequence, which features a fun concept: Fight Sequence is a tactical reverse action-programming dueling game about psychics THINKING about fighting! Players build sequences of attacks and responses that resolve in reverse order, representing the ebb and flow of a theoretical fantasy fight scene two psychics are projecting into each other's minds. Planning your own moves isn't the only key to victory; you'll also use your psychic and magical abilities to manipulate when — or IF — actions resolve! Players select one of the four characters in a diverse cast of psychic combatants, using their unique skill sets to emerge victorious. Every character deck has its own strengths and weaknesses, with a depth of tactical play that ensures no two fights are the same. ▪️ Justin at YouTube channel Board Game Animal has previewed more than a dozen of the IGNM titles that will be available at PAXU 2025: Youtube Video
Designer Diary: The Evolution of Nature
by domcrap on November 18, 2025
by Dominic Crapuchettes How a decade on the Magic Pro Tour and a decade designing the Evolution series led to my grail game. Hello, friends, Dominic here — designer of Nature, Evolution, Oceans, and Wits & Wagers. I want to share why Nature is my most ambitious project yet. It's more than a redesign of Evolution; it's the realization of a design dream I've chased for over a decade. My Design Philosophy A game needs two things to become an established brand that lasts for generations: It must be inviting to new players, and it must have enough depth that experienced players regularly bring it back to the table. In short, it needs a community of fans that grows faster than it shrinks. I’ve been redesigning Evolution over the past six years with two corresponding goals: 1) Make the core game easy to teach. 2) Create a modular system that's easily expandable. The result is Nature, a gateway into a limitless world of ecosystems. My Eternal Quest Nature is my grail game. It's the game I've been trying to design for over a decade, though for most of that time I wasn't aware of what I was trying to accomplish. In 1995, I played in the first professional Magic: the Gathering tournament, followed by nearly every one afterwards for the next five years (except in summers when I was captaining an Alaskan fishing boat). Wizards of the Coast used my image on a promotional poster when I was the Virginia State Champion in 1996. That's me a decade later standing on the poster. Magic changed everything. I'd grown up playing board games with my family three times a week, but Magic offered something new: a limitless world to explore with a vibrant community, and the thrill of discovering powerful synergies no one knew about, not even the game designer! I wanted to share that experience with the people I loved most — to hook them into playing with me — but I failed on every occasion. My family, childhood friends, college friends, even my dad (who taught me chess when I was four). No one was interested. The experience Magic offers can be transformational, but the barrier to entry is high. For the past decade of my life, I've been trying to bring that experience to a wider audience so that others could share it with their closest friends. With Nature, I finally feel like I've arrived. It accomplishes everything I originally intended for Evolution. Why I Redesigned Evolution Nature began as notes scribbled in the margins of an Evolution sketchbook — ideas for expansions and ways to improve the core experience. For years I watched players at conventions, stores, and online, listening closely to what they loved and where they stumbled. When I released the second expansion, Evolution: Climate, I realized it took twenty minutes just to switch between expansions. That's what killed Evolution for me. Fans wanted more content, but I couldn't stand another lengthy set-up. It's not something I'd tolerate from a game in my own collection. I planned to solve the issue before releasing the next Evolution expansion, but after years of trying, I realized the problem couldn't be solved within Evolution's architecture. I tried to move on, but something kept bringing me back. That dream of a sharable, limitless world remained unfulfilled. It tugged at me. And then came the issue that hit me hardest. Brought to Tears One night I read a Reddit post from someone who'd played Evolution for the first time. The experience was so brutal they went home and cried. Days later, they posted a warning to others. This post was painful to read, but it carried an important message. Despite its success and awards, Evolution could deliver a terrible experience to new players. They'd make innocent mistakes and end up helpless — easy prey for others. What bothered me most was that Evolution was many people's first modern board game, often played in a classroom. In 2015, Professor Stuart West published an article in Nature magazine reviewing evolution-themed board games. Evolution was his clear favorite, and Professor West began using it in Oxford's evolutionary biology department. The game was later featured in Science magazine and the International Journal of Organic Evolution, which looked at ten games before concluding: "Evolution: Climate is our top-rated evolution themed strategy board game for use as an educational resource." —International Journal of Organic Evolution Those articles sparked an explosion of Evolution in classrooms worldwide. I was even invited — expenses paid — to speak at a conference for evolutionary scientists in Croatia. Seeing my game adopted as an educational tool was a dream come true, but it was also profoundly unsettling. Evolution was too complicated for most people outside of the hobby, and the idea that it could bring someone to tears in a classroom was deeply troubling. I knew I could make the game easier to teach, equally scientific, and far less punishing. A Gateway to an Endless World From 2019 to 2021, I rebuilt the foundation of this game as Nature to make it 1) more accessible, 2) less punishing, 3) easily expandable, and 4) scientifically grounded. To start, I played Nature more than fifty times with my son and hundreds more against myself. I rarely used the same rules twice. To make Nature simpler and deeper, I had to find rules that were both elegant and provided layers of strategy. Playtesting with Elizabeth Hargrave and Matthew O'Malley in early 2021.The prototype used Evolution art and components. The Perfect Catch-up Mechanism Much of those three years was spent chasing the perfect catch-up mechanism. I tested over fifteen systems to soften the blow of being attacked without removing the need for defense. Nothing worked until I realized the real issue: snowballing. Engine building and snowballing are two sides of the same coin. A game engine snowballs when the resources produced by an engine can make the engine better. It's exciting when your engine grows exponentially, but demoralizing when an opponent's engine is clearly uncatchable. Snowballing is worse in an interactive game in which your engine can be attacked because once you're behind, you stay behind. Many engine builders avoid this by becoming multiplayer solitaire, but Nature couldn't becuase real ecosystems are full of dynamic interactions. A 2021 prototype using new concept art and new components Evolution Versus Nature Evolution is an engine-building game that snowballs. When you make a mistake, you pay for it immediately with fewer points that round, and you pay for that mistake again in every future round by competing with fewer resources. At the same time, players that get off to a good start draw extra cards in the next round, allowing them to increase their lead. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. Nature breaks that cycle by removing the snowballing elements. When you make a mistake, you score fewer points that round just like in Evolution, but you will start the next round with the same amount of resources as everyone else. This gives you a chance to outplay your opponents in each subsequent round to make up for an early mistake. After three years of searching, I finally discovered the perfect catch-up mechanism...is not to have one. Playtesting the Flight module in 2021 Fulfilling the Dream Once the core gateway experience was solid, I turned to modules — the key to making Nature a limitless world of endless discovery. There are three distinct stages on the path: Stage 1: Play the core game. Although meticulously crafted to be as accessible as possible, Nature still has a learning curve for casual gamers. That's the price of a thematic experience with layers of depth. Stage 2: Play with one module. My niece played six or seven times before asking to try the Flight module. I was nervous because the new traits generated questions, but when I asked afterward whether she wanted to play Flight again or return to the base game, she paused, thought deeply, and slowly asked, "What are some of the other modules?" I smiled. It was clear she was hooked. I often describe stage 2 as going from high school to college. The structure is familiar, but everything feels fresh and exciting again. Each module provides a unique experience: Flight: Find Safety in the Skies! This module allows players to avoid conflict. Jurassic: Size is Power! This module brings out giant predators, making you feel invincible when others can't hurt you. Natural Disasters: Adapt to the Chaos of Mother Nature! This module creates memorable stories for those who like to think on their feet. Arctic Tundra: Survive at the Edge of the Livable World! This module is for players who enjoy a bitter challenge. Amazon Rainforest: The Amazon has Secrets! This module conceals animals in the dense canopy for surprising reveals and unexpected bluffing. Every module has been carefully curated and tested thousands of times by our playtesting community to evoke a specific feeling. Stage 3: Combine several modules This is where the frontier begins, where you step out of my carefully curated world into unchartered territory. I've explored only a small fraction of the 96 combinations that currently exist (soon to be 736). This world is wild, untamed, and yours to explore. I'll be there with you, discovering new strategies and finding powerful synergies. When you reach Stage 3, I hope you join the NorthStar Discord community to share your discoveries and teach me about this limitless world I've helped create. Dominic Crapuchettes NorthStar Game Studio
Game Review: Don't Botch the Broccoli, or A Seven-Minute Steam Sale
by W Eric Martin on November 17, 2025
by W. Eric Martin Given how much I liked designer Mark McGee's first release through his company How to Steam Broccoli — Tether, which I had backed during crowdfunding — when McGee offered a review copy of his second title ahead of its debut at PAX Unplugged 2025, I said, sure, let's give it a go. On the surface, Don't Botch the Broccoli has nothing in common with Tether aside from both being card games, but in practice both designs encourage you to bait opponents, then hope they'll make the move you want them to make. Don't Botch the Broccoli falls into that love/hate genre of simultaneous-play card games, that is, everyone selects a card in hand, then reveals them at the same time: "I think that you think that I'm going to play this card, so you'll play that card in anticipation, so I'll instead play this other thing." You know the drill. Alex Randolph's Raj is the Platonic ideal in this genre, with everyone having the same set of cards in hand and trying to out-think others by not playing the same card as anyone else because then your play is negated. You all start on the same footing due to identical hands, but with each turn that passes, everyone loses a card. By tracking who has played what, you'll possibly have an edge in future turns, although your success often comes down to good guesses and luck. Image: Mark McGeeDon't Botch the Broccoli also gives players an identical hand of cards — two copies each of broccoli valued -1, 1, 2, 3, and 4 — but now you want to match other players...at least some of the time. When you reveal the same card as someone else, each of you places your broccoli in your "steamer". Essentially, you're thinking along the lines of another chef while prepping your dish and are like, yes, we're doing this correctly. After all matches head to their respective steamers, the chef with the lowest card on the table scores that card, along with all cards in their steamer. Anyone else with a card on the table returns that card to their hand, along with all cards in their steamer. One chef has jumped to move their broccoli onto plates headed to patrons, while the others have waited too long, botching their broccoli and needing to start again. Thus, you want to think like opponents just enough to load up your steamer, then you want to scoop them on the plating so that customers pay your checks instead of theirs. Once a chef has scored seven cards or has no cards in hand, the game ends, then everyone scores their served broccoli to see who has done the best. With only ten cards in hand, your game will run 5-10 minutes, and as in Raj, your success often comes down to good guesses and luck. Maybe you'll match with someone else and each load your steamer with a 4, then you switch to -1 to try to score it — but they did the same! Do you -1 again, now scoring only 2 points, or do you go higher and hope to match someone else so that you can -1 later? I've played Don't Botch the Broccoli five times, three times with three players and twice with four, and you can't plan much about your play — but I don't think this design is intended to be a "planning" game. Race for the Galaxy has players reveal their action choices simultaneously, but your tableau of cards gives opponents more information about why you'd choose one card over another, and you choose from five actions that are more consequential than choosing a number. Like Raj, 6 nimmt!, Diamant, and other games with simultaneous play, Don't Botch the Broccoli mimics a lottery in that you make a choice, then see how things play out. You can't control what others do; only guess what they'll do based on who they are and how they've played in the past. Like those other designs, Don't Botch the Broccoli isn't about a single play but about subsequent plays, ideally with the same people one after another. You're hoping to bluff someone not only with this one choice, but with the history of other choices they've seen you make. You're not rewarded for making a smart play, but for making the ideal play — even if you didn't know it was ideal when you made it. Some players don't like this style of game, and others love it, including one person in my four-player games, who wanted a copy immediately. Luckily, McGee had a spare copy on him I could buy as a gift before that person moved out of the area. Ideally she'll introduce the game to others and spread the love for how to steam broccoli. For more examples of gameplay and thoughts on the design, watch this video: Youtube Video
Designer Diary: Khlor
by Tembo on November 16, 2025
by Alvaro G. Echave The Origin of the Idea For a long time, I wanted to design a game in which instead of assembling the game, it would gradually disappear. I had several notes, but the spark came when Ricardo, a friend, shared his inner world with me: seven colored dragons in the mountains surrounding a legendary dragon in a valley, and seven tribes protecting it. He asked me to design a game without luck. My analytical side reduced that world to numbers: a valley composed of seven rows and seven columns of colored demon tiles, with polyominoes around the edges to remove demons from the valley — and in the center lies the legendary dragon's egg. Each player aims to dominate as many colors as possible, collecting demon tiles matching the polyominoes with the demon tokens while enhancing those colors with dragon eggs. Sounds like a tongue twister? It's the rebirth of the dragon empire! Early Playtests The first games at home and with friends quickly revealed what worked and what didn't. Seven colors was too many, and player interaction was minimal. Additionally, assigning colors to the polyominoes felt forced. After several deep adjustments, the mechanisms were consolidated, and randomness was reduced to a minimum. Colors were reduced to five, and the final scoring system was set. Initially, I designed this as a two-player game, but after these adjustments, it worked perfectly with three players. The only weak point — that I saw at that moment — was the final turn, but even so, I felt the game was ready to be shown at board game fairs. Jugamos Tod@s in Córdoba, Spain — October 2023 During this festival, I spent four days at a table, teaching people to play and playing over forty games of Khlor myself. This allowed me to test additional scoring methods and adjust the number of turns per player. The major breakthrough was reducing the number of demons drawn per turn from four to three and aiming to expand the game to four players. More importantly, this added an interaction component: polyominoes could now include a symbol to remove eggs of colors that didn't interest you. At the product level, a recurring problem emerged: the set-up without a board was messy and became the weakest aspect of the prototype. I began working on a solution. It was a real gaming marathon, but I left motivated by how the design was evolving. Interocio in Madrid, Spain — March 2024 For this fair in March, I already had a base board and the table presence improved a lot. During Interocio, I didn't play any game; I just watched how everything flowed. Feedback remained positive in the games, but I felt the games mechanisms still didn't work as smoothly as they should, so one of the moves after the fair was to add a sixth color so that four-player games would have more colors to fight for. SPIEL in Essen, Germany — October 2024 In Essen, I realized the sixth color wasn't necessary; allowing the second player in each color to score as well solved the previous issue and doubled the scoring opportunities. The additional challenge was adjusting the resolution of ties in each color to ensure fairness. Essen also brought the definitive revelation regarding the final product. A player told me, "The game works, but if you can make the pieces stay in place, it will greatly improve the players' experience." He was right. Nobody wants to be frustrated because a tile falls and disrupts the board, forcing the game to pause. The solution was clear — stackable tiles — but I didn't know of an existing way for how to stack them, so finally I created my own design: This feature increased the production cost but was necessary — and since the game was already taking on a deluxe edition feel, I took the opportunity to improve the other components: 3D wooden eggs and a wooden board joined the game. When I received the prototype, I realized this would be the final version of Khlor. Dados Colgados in Cuenca, Spain — November 2024 With a pre-production copy ready and the Kickstarter campaign about to launch, I attended this fair, taking advantage of being nearby to record videos for the campaign. There, I realized I could simplify the game even further. I removed a rule that had been in place since the beginning: the obligation to always place a polyomino next to an egg. Once I removed this rule, something magical happened: Players started playing on their own after the initial explanation, with no need for corrections from me. The central egg was no longer necessary, but I decided to keep it in the game, more for romance and personality than function, and it still adds a small placement challenge. That same event revealed another issue: I noticed some players made mistakes when flipping polyominoes during the selection phase. Those mistakes carried too much weight in the game. All players should have access to every tile at some point, so the previous mechanism was flawed for several reasons. The solution, inspired by Patchwork, was to simplify: Players would now choose between only two polyominoes each turn. This was more than enough to preserve strategic depth while minimizing mistakes. With these changes, the games began to run smoothly on their own. I left Cuenca very satisfied because I had solved design issues that had been there since the beginning, issues that I hadn't been able to see until then. Final Refinement In December 2024, I worked on the solo mode. The white demons, which were previously just wild cards, became automatons with a system of arrows and orientations full of potential. I liked it so much that I decided to include an advanced mode in the rules as well. Conclusion After this entire journey, Khlor has become a game with many possibilities, but always guided by a clear design principle: simplify as much as possible to leave only the essential. This philosophy also helped me solve the final turn issue. I tried making the game last a fixed number of rounds, but it was messy; players put more effort into counting than playing, and depending on the number of players, the game ended too early or too late. The solution was, again, simple: Play until you can't play anymore, until no turns are possible. If the round didn't align perfectly with the initial player, I added a simple extra turn to bring the game to its final resolution. Khlor has undergone many adjustments, always maintaining its original essence. I believe this was the key to designing my most mature game to date, and I am very happy for the support everybody showed during the process and during the crowdfunding campaign. After three years of development, SPIEL Essen 25 was a celebration of all the work behind Khlor. If you were there, thanks for stopping by! If not — but you're attending PAX Unplugged — you can take a look at the game in the PAXU First Look Area. Thanks for reading! Alvaro G. Echave
Game Preview: TEMBO: Survival on the Savanna
by W Eric Martin on November 15, 2025
by W. Eric Martin While at SPIEL Essen 25, I got a preview of TEMBO: Survival on the Savanna, the next release from Danish design studio Sidekick Games, with this 1-4 player game coming from Mads Floe and Sidekick co-founders Dan Halstad, Asger Harding Granerud, and Daniel Skjold Pedersen. TEMBO concludes Sidekick's "nature" trilogy that started in 2024 with AQUA: Biodiversity in the Oceans and continued in 2025 with HUTAN: Life in the Rainforest. The original design came from Floe and Halstad, with Granerud and Pedersen doing development work that eventually became co-design credit. Here's an overview of the design: TEMBO is the Swahili word for elephant. In this co-operative game, you lead a herd of elephants on a thrilling journey of survival across the savanna. Reaching your destination is the only way to win, yet the path is full of challenges. You will need to search out food and water, navigate shifting terrain, and avoid the fierce lions that roam the land. On your turn, play a card to either expand the savanna or move the herd forward across it. Each card has dual uses, and your position at the table determines how you can play it, creating a multi-layered puzzle for you and your team to solve. Play continues until the herd reaches its destination — or until you lose by going hungry, running out of time in the deck, or being caught by the lions. No two journeys are ever the same. Each game offers new challenges, demanding careful planning and constant communication to guide your herd safely to victory. In the image below, you can see one of several scenario layouts, and our goal here is to move the herd — which is represented on the game board by the large matriarch figure — from the upper left corner to the lush grass in the lower right. Each player has elephant tokens, with an El Grande-style system of managing elephants ready to be played and elephants in reserve. Daniel Skjold Pedersen wants me to take my turn From a hand of three cards, you play one card per turn, then refill to three from a deck that's stacked in three levels: day, sunset, and night. You can play a card to place elephants from your ready area onto the board adjacent to other elephants in play. In the image above, for example, Daniel has most recently played a card with two horizontal symbols to place two pink elephants in that pattern on the board. The spaces he covered showed one of four types of tree, and since all spaces of that tree are now covered, our herd "ate" that tree — symbolized by knocking over that tree to the left of the image — to improve our current status. As the description suggests, you play a card with its bottom toward you, so you might be able to fill a diagonal path with elephants while your fellow player sitting 90º away would find that card unplayable because the path goes the wrong way. Alternatively, you can play a card on an empty space on the board. By doing this, you create the landscape that you must later travel, with the only spaces you're able to move on being the circular spaces. (Game boards come with one pre-printed space.) By playing cards, you'll add watering holes, trees, and rough terrain that must be traversed with two elephants in the same space to the terrain. In addition, you'll cover a space that affects your elephant supply and those of your fellow players. Maybe everyone moves two elephants to their ready area, maybe you get four and no one else gets any, or maybe you get five, while another player must return two. By playing a matriarch card, you somewhat reset the board, with the matriarch elephant moving to the far edge of the herd, all played elephants being returned to the reserve, and fallen trees placed upright to symbolize you moving to fresh lands with new food. You want to hold off playing matriarchs since the herd shrinks to one space, making it harder to reach food and water, but if you draw a matriarch card while already having one in hand, the herd is punished. You can also use a matriarch card to stay ahead of the lions as the deck contains lion cards that must be played when drawn, with those lions moving on the board toward the herd. If a lion catches player elephants on the board, those figures are removed from the game — and if you lose enough elephants, the herd can't spread out as widely as you'd like. As with AQUA and HUTAN, Sidekick Games plans to license TEMBO to multiple publishers for release in various languages, with the 2026 English-language edition from The Op Games being the only one announced to date.
Designer Diaries: Tropicalia and Sinister Institute, or Two Games Nineteen Years in the Making!
by Phil81 on November 14, 2025
by Phil Walker-Harding I was fortunate to have two new games launch at SPIEL Essen 25: Tropicalia and Sinister Institute. Both of these games have long development histories — eleven and eight years respectively! — and I learned a lot from designing both. I hope you enjoy the stories of how they came to be! The story of designing Tropicalia begins over ten years ago. It was 2014, and I was thinking a lot about worker placement. The initial flurry of worker placement games had died down a bit (oh, the heady days of 2007-2011!), and then Lords of Waterdeep felt like a distilling of what everyone loved about the mechanism, or maybe a summation of the first five years of this exciting trend. I was wondering whether there was anything new I could do with worker placement, and if so, whether it might have a place in one of my designs. One day, something extremely rare happened: I had a design idea that arrived fully formed in my head — and also worked well from the first test! This almost never happens to me, and I am super envious when I hear other designers talk about such epiphanies. Here's the idea: There's a grid of worker-placement action spaces. The players take turns placing all their workers around the edges of the grid, one at a time at the end of a row or a column. Then the players take turns moving one of their workers along its row or column to claim the space they wish to activate. In short, the worker placement has two phases: first claim rows and columns, then claim spaces in those rows and columns. This system created an exciting little puzzle of tactical timing, and I was surprised how well it worked from the start. However, after such an easy beginning, it would take me almost another decade for the rest of the game to be completed. Such is the process of game design! A diagram explaining the two-stage worker placement from the Tropicalia rules The grid-based worker-placement system felt like a solid central mechanism for a game...but my next step was to figure out what the actual aim of the game was, or in other words, what sort of actions the spaces would grant to the players. I tried a few ideas and discovered that collecting resources in some spaces, then selling them in others created interesting timing decisions for the players. You had to order and prioritize when you collected and when you sold. Some nice tense questions began to arise: Which column should I claim before someone else does? How urgent is it that I claim that space in my row before an opponent claims it from their column? Should I rush to sell these for $3 each now, or should I collect a few more but maybe sell them for only $2 each later? I worked on the game for a few months and decided on a 1920s gangster theme. The grid of spaces became city blocks, and the workers were gangsters picking up different types of booze to sell at speakeasies. When I was happy with the design, I decided to submit it to game design competitions. Earlier in my design career, these competitions were a fantastic way for my designs to get exposure, and for me to get feedback from people in the industry. I was really glad to be one of the four games recognized in the 2015 Boulogne-Billancourt Concours International de Créateurs de Jeux de Société. This even led to publisher interest! So I thought "Chicago" was on its way to release. The prototype of the first version, named "Chicago" A little while later the publisher decided to pass on the game and returned it to me, so I decided to put the project aside. The design felt resolved and complete, but I think I also knew it was missing that extra spark which makes a good game special. Over the next while, I considered reworking the design to be even simpler. Perhaps my worker-placement system could be employed in a more stripped-down game, maybe even a simple card game. After all, one of my main design interests is taking one mechanism and trying to build a simple game around it. Unfortunately, the results weren't great, and I felt that the extra elements in the original game needed to be there to hold the player's interest. Still, the feeling that the game could be improved persisted. I later tried the opposite approach — making the game more complex. For most designers, I think it can be quite a natural move to add a new system or layer of decisions onto an existing game, but this is something I so rarely do that I found it a real challenge! My usual instinct is to take elements away to showcase one simple system, not to bolt systems together. And I kept thinking to myself that the grid-based worker-placement system was really solid, so why clutter it with other things? Around 2017, I began working on the design again and re-themed it to a tropical island, which felt brighter and more inviting. Now you were landing your workers on the beach around the island in the first phase, then moving them onto the island in the second. My first attempt at adding something to the core system was to bring in a sort of connections mini-game. Now when you made money from selling goods, there was an extra step to convert money into points. You had to spend money to build statues at intersection points on the island grid. You would score points for having clusters of statues connected along grid lines, racing your opponents to build in the best spots. This worked okay, but I could tell it was not engaging enough to be the answer. However, working on this version slowly convinced me that my worker-placement mechanism wasn't fully satisfying all by itself. Using it to "power" another system was feeling more and more like the right direction to head in. The first version of Tropicalia that included the statue-placement mechanism I soon decided to go all-in and try bringing a substantial new system into the game. I love tile-laying games, but hadn't done something with old-fashioned square tiles since Cacao, so on a whim I decided to try a new system in which players build their own village with different tiles they have purchased. The main shared island is where you make money, but building on your personal island is how you score points. Village tiles are purchased from a sliding market, and these tiles do different things when placed: some just give points, some require set collection, some have to do with adjacencies in your village, and others play into the worker-placement system by providing you with new ways to gain goods. In a sense, I was mashing two games together: my worker-placement game, and this tile-placement village-building game. For a little while, I felt uncomfortable about this, almost like I was breaking one of my own game design maxims or doing something really "inelegant" to make the game work — but looking back, I was just accepting that while some simple systems may be able to carry an entire game, others cannot. Some systems are best employed as one challenge intertwined with other interesting gameplay elements. Again, this is nothing out of the ordinary for most designers, but for me it was a real adjustment! Does this make Tropicalia my most complex game? Not really. Gizmos still has many more unique elements to consider and combine, and Llamaland is more of a brain burn, yet Tropicalia does stand out to me among my own designs because of its design story and how it features two quite distinct systems. Once I began showing the prototype again, Mojito Studios showed an interest in the game, and I was so glad about their decision to bring Naïade on board to illustrate it! He is one of my favorite board game artists and the sunny and friendly final art is more or less exactly what I was hoping for when I made my prototype! For fans of family-weight worker-placement and tile-laying games, I hope you will enjoy your visit to Tropicalia! ••• For a long time I've kept a list of game ideas that one day I'd like to take a crack at. The ideas on this list are usually pretty vague, concepts that excite me but I'm not sure how I'd tackle them. Sinister Institute began when in 2017 I started work on an idea from this list that I simply called "Adventure". Like Tropicalia, this game took a long time to come to fruition and spent time with different publishers, but I think what is most interesting about its story is its beginning. What was "Adventure"? It was a game with exploration, questing, monsters, mazes, and magic items — not a full-on RPG, but something that evoked playing Adventure on the Atari 2600 or The Legend of Zelda on the NES. Another project that has allowed me to step into this genre is the Adventure Games series I created with Mathew Dunstan and KOSMOS. Especially in the first box, The Dungeon, I got to explore the narrative side of an adventure game as this series is story-focused with lots of text to read as you make your way through the scenario — but this game would focus on an adventure not so much as a narrative, but as a puzzle to be solved. Adventure on the Atari 2600 Usually when I begin a design project, I think a lot about the end product. I give myself some sort of design brief and try to lock in initial ideas about the audience, components, game length, and so on. In this case, though, I wasn't sure where the game would land in most of these areas. All I had was a genre — even less, the "vibe" of a Zelda-like adventure game — so I proceeded by letting some of the tropes of the genre guide me and act as starting points. The first element I was sure would be in the game was map tiles. I knew the game needed a feeling of exploration and that players should be revealing the world tile by tile and finding various paths to follow, so I started drawing all sorts of possible map tiles in a notebook, experimenting with how different pathways would work, turning and intersecting with each other across tiles. Some early notes where I was experimenting with map tile design. One inspiration here was Tsuro as I have always loved how this game's tiles are almost a design lesson in how four different paths on a square tile can behave. Although I have never played Magic Realm, the map tiles in it have always fascinated me. Their intricate design means that every different layout creates unique maps. The map tiles in Magic Realm (Image: @jardeon) As I was prototyping cardboard tiles, I realized that it was kind of interesting to lay them out in a grid, then rotate one of them. New pathways would open up, and others would close off in dead ends. This seemed like a good central idea for the map traversal in the game; the players move around on the tiles, but can also rotate them to forge new paths ahead. This meant I could keep the world physically reasonably small, but still create the feeling of a puzzly labyrinth. Next, I knew the game should have quests in it. Not being sure what they would be mechanically yet, I started brainstorming descriptions of different things that could be exciting challenges in this simple fantasy world: returning a lost crown to the king, helping out an old hermit who needs medicine, finding a long lost treasure, and so on. A pattern I saw with most of these ideas is that they usually required finding something, then taking it somewhere — and this suggested some sort of "pick up and deliver" system. I already knew that as the players explored the world they would find item tiles around the map that would give them special actions, so I decided to introduce a bunch of treasures into the item tile deck, objects that don't give you an action, but have a role to play in the possible quests that come up. For me, pick up and deliver can sometimes feel a bit repetitive as a central mechanism in a game, but I wondered whether the game being co-operative might add some interest. The players could pick up items for each other, take them somewhere on another's behalf, exchange them, and so on. This would also create a lot of opportunity for planning and discussion as a team around the table. Now I had the central structure of the game, and a goal for the players — work together to complete quests before...before what? How the map tiles looked in later prototypes The next step was to figure out what was bad about this world: What was getting in the way of the players completing quests? The first most obvious answer was time. As in many co-op games, I thought that the players working against a game timer would create good tension, but surely in an adventure game we also need an enemy, a big boss to fight. And of course in homage to Adventure on the Atari 2600, it had to be a dragon! A dragon could fly around the map and attack the players. It could also set fire to certain tiles, forcing the players to either deal with the flames or find a new way to get where they needed to go. To make all this work together, I created the event deck. Every turn, an event card is flipped and it determines how the dragon behaves — and when the deck is exhausted, you have run out of time. This made sense, but now I had this whole deck of cards just to move a dragon around, so what else could this deck do? I had another brainstorm about interesting little stories that might occur in this world, various happenings that could be expressed on these cards: a wandering healer offers you help, a magical rain comes to put out fires, or a friendly dove transports one of your items to another player elsewhere on the map. I renamed this deck "story cards", and now the heart of design was starting to come together. Early examples of story cards If all of this is sounding pretty "generic fantasy", that's because it was! Not being too sure exactly which way I would go with the theming, I purposely kept everything as vanilla as possible for most of the design process. The name of the prototype progressed from "Adventure" to the only slightly more specific "Story Quest"! It wasn't until Mojito Studios took an interest in the game that I started to think more seriously about the actual theme, but in the end it was the team at Mojito who came up with the world of Sinister Institute. Instead of the setting being a castle and a forest, we are now students at a magical college deep in a haunted swampland. The dragon is now a top-hatted evil sorcerer, and the fire has become his ghostly minions. Instead of quests being side stories that give you victory points, they are now rituals performed with certain ingredients that are direct attacks on the sorcerer. This theme may sound pretty Potter-esque, but to me when I look at the finished product it feels more like Tim Burton making a Jonathan Strange spin-off for teenagers...if you can imagine that! So much of this flavor comes through in Edu Valls' amazing illustrations, which are filled with great spooky little details. A closer look at a swamp and school tile So where my "Adventure" project ended up is a family-weight co-op adventure game with a cool creepy setting. What I enjoy most about Sinister Institute is its balance between individual player agency and working together as a team. Often the players will be spread out across the swamp working on their own thing, but there are still ways to help each other, discuss future plans, then set them in motion. We also managed to get a whole lot of variability into the game, with many elements changing each play: the map layout, where the items turn up, the story cards that are in the deck, and the eight characters who each have a special ability that they can level up. For young-at-heart game groups who want to go on a spooky adventure together, I really hope you will enjoy exploring the world of Sinister Institute! Thanks so much for reading! Phil Walker-Harding
The Story Behind Francis Tresham's The Judge in Circuit
by keiththomasson on November 13, 2025
by Keith Thomasson Image: Tony BoydellWhen Francis Tresham passed away in October 2019, he left a fair number of unfinished games behind. When you realize that he tended to work on projects over a number of years and had multiple projects running side-by-side, that's not so surprising. One project that he started work on in 1985 was getting close to being published, but the final steps had not been taken. After discussion with his family in 2024, I agreed to see if I could get it over the finishing line. That game was The Judge in Circuit. The game is quite unlike anything he has ever done before. That is also not surprising as he was always coming up with new ideas and seeing whether they would fit into one of his projects — or indeed, whether he could create a project to go round the idea. The Judge in Circuit is based on the concept that in the UK, some court judges move from one court to another, moving around that circuit and dealing with the crooks that need judgement at each court. In the game, you play the part of the crooks. When you are up before the judge, he may sentence you to some time behind bars and send you to one of five prisons. The aim of the game is to get into those prisons, then get out and be sent to another prison. The game is won by being the first crook to get into the required number of different prisons. Image: Tony BoydellFrancis said himself that winning this game is morally disgraceful and don't blame him if your teenage daughter or maiden aunt cotton on to the essential facts of a successful career quicker than you, but if you lose, it can still be fun, and winning will give a sense of achievement. The first thing I had to do was to find out how much work I was taking on. When returning from a driving holiday in Scotland, I stopped off at his daughter's house in Durham to pick up the pieces. My big surprise was finding that this involved filling my car to the roof with boxes of stuff, because the majority of the components had already been printed — in 2011. The key component that was missing was the rulebook. There were a few physical copies, but no error-free print-ready electronic version. After trying to reformat that, I decided that the easiest option was to simply recreate it. There was a separate prison board, which contained the tables you consulted to first find out what the judge you were facing would do; if he sentenced you to prison, you consulted the second to see where you ended up. It annoyed me that the first table you consulted was table 2, and the second was table 1, so I made a new version, swapping the table numbers over while retaining all of the information, but making it more logical. The key thing for me was not to mess with the game in any way. It may be a little old-school, but that reflects its origin in 1985. With the components and the rulebook sorted, the next job was to put some games together. The component set included boxes on flat sheets, game boards, luck cards, and various tokens and markers. Image: Tony Boydell Assembly involved folding up and gluing the box lids and bases, then filling each box with the right components. One thing I wanted to preserve was that Francis always gave each box a unique serial number. The space for this was on the box, and as I had inherited his number stamps, I could surely get that sorted. Unfortunately, whenever I stamped a number on a box, the ink refused to dry and still smudged over a day later. My solution was transparent laser labels, so while the style might vary, the principle remained the same. The final step was to apply shrinkwrap. Francis never did this, but I had the means, so it helped me to be sure which games were ready to go. As for the game itself, well, it is a game more rooted in 1985 than today. It is a roll-and-move, but you don't go round the outside of the board, you choose your route through the streets. You can move your own piece, or you can move one of the police pawns, or you can move judges round the circuit, so that when you meet one, he's more likely to send you to a prison you haven't visited before. You can mitigate the die rolls for movement a little. If you don't like the result, just choose to move three spaces instead. The luck cards add some uncertainty. Will you get one that lets you get into a new prison, or one that stops someone else from doing the same? The game difficulty, or length, can be adjusted by playing to a different number of prisons to be entered. It is a light game that is aimed at all ages and intended for family fun. Someone commented that it would be a good Christmas game, but that may depend on how you like to spend your Christmas time. Whatever you do, don't take the game too seriously! Anyone interested in obtaining a copy can find more information on my website, which includes a link to the rulebook (PDF). Without shipping, the game is £35, with the majority of that going to the Tresham estate.
Indie Games Spotlight: Game Market West (Fall 2025)
by gamemarketwest on November 12, 2025
by Johnny Chin In September 2025, Game Market West, a tabletop game market where independent designers showcase and sell their newest games, returned to Guildhouse in San Jose, California. The venue received a lot of compliments this time around from both attendees and designers. Throughout the event was the usual steady stream of attendees, chatting with designers and playing their games. We had quite the line-up of games from a fan-made expansion to a social deduction and area control crossover. There was also a new drawing game, a genre we're a big fan of, along with trick-takers and climbers. The aforementioned drawing game is Paper Pencil Stencil by Jestin Brooks and Jeremy Schichtel. You use stencils to draw the word you've been randomly assigned. It's always nice to have a handicap, especially for terrible artists like myself. Usually it's time or difficulty in word choice that evens the playing field, but the predefined shapes are a cool twist. Next up, we have Okay, Duckies, Now Let's Get In Formation by Ted Schaller — a cute rubber ducky game that had a giant edition on display for all to play. Don't let the cuteness fool you, though, as the game is actually quite the crunchy spatial puzzle for two players. You're arranging your duckies on an ever-changing board to win. I was lucky enough to playtest it when the game was in development, so I had to grab a copy. Lastly, we have Side Quest by Sean Nakada, a classic feeling RPG board game with the customization of trading card games. This first version starts with a more level playing field in terms of the cards and scenarios for a better onboarding experience. There's a ton of different classes with thematic abilities and stat tradeoffs that have already been developed. For more pics of presenters, head to the Fall 2025 recap on the GMW website. Thank you for supporting this indie movement. We always love to hear how we've inspired others to turn their idea into a game. In fact, a few designers were present who mentioned that, and even some attendees asked how they could be a designer for a future game market. We'll see you at the next Game Market West on March 22, 2026! You can sign up for updates or as a designer.
Enlarge The Gang, Take a Happy Holiday in Europe, and Engineer Wild Growth
by W Eric Martin on November 11, 2025
by W. Eric Martin With SPIEL Essen 25 barely two weeks behind us, German publisher KOSMOS has started teasing new games coming in early 2026, starting with The Gang: More Players, an expansion for John Cooper and Kory Heath's co-operative poker game The Gang that allows for games with...more players, specifically up to ten players. We've had trouble doing well in The Gang with six players, but perhaps we're mediocre compared to everyone else. KOSMOS notes: New chips and additional rules bring even more excitement to the table: the new "Exit Chips" also simplify the game for five or six players while maintaining the excitement. Ah, okay, exit chips for those who find the game challenging enough already and additional chips for those who want more crooks at their table. You know who you are. KOSMOS lists Thames & Kosmos and KOSMOS UK for the English-language edition of the game. I've reached out to Thames & Kosmos to ask about a release date for this item. ▪️ Another headliner on the KOSMOS line-up is Fantasy Ink, a two-player game from Luc Rémond, designer of Sky Team, which landed KOSMOS the Spiel des Jahres award in 2024. Here's the publisher's overview for this game aimed at players aged 10 and up: A unicorn or a pirate – who will write the best fantasy story? In this captivating game for two, you'll compete to create the best fantasy characters for your book. Skillfully use dice to bring your heroes and heroines to life and fill your book chapter by chapter. Every decision brings you closer to victory. Whether you finish your work first or assemble a special group of heroes – only the most creative pen wins! ▪️ Happy Holidays is a 1-4 player game from frequent design duo Matthew Dunstan and Brett J. Gilbert that KOSMOS describes as a "tactical family game". Here's a teaser: Barcelona, Paris — and then a side trip to Amsterdam? Three weeks of vacation in Europe invite careful planning. Where are you going? What sightseeing are you planning? What's the best way to get to your next destination? Longer visits earn you more points, while the clever choice of transportation determines the smooth running of travel between cities. Find out who has the skill for perfect vacation planning: Choose city tiles, organize your stays, and collect the most points with clever travel planning. Definitely a game geared more toward the German game-buying audience than the one in the United States. ▪️ Travel takes a different form in Der Wanderzirkus, which is German for "The Traveling Circus". This 1-6 player card game is from first-time designer Max Ostrander and is pitched as follows: The stage is set – the traveling circus is in town! Step into the magical world of artists: Who will put on the best circus show? In Der Wanderzirkus, you combine clever deck building with the domino principle to create spectacular card chains and make every performance a highlight. Round after round, you hire new talent, choose the next city, and plan your grand entrance. Who will make the cleverest combinations and score the most points before the curtain falls? I think it will be me. ▪️ In addition to these new items, KOSMOS will release German-language editions of: • Koi, by Rosaria Battiato, Massimo Borzì, and Martino Chiacchiera (designer diary) • Castle Combo: Out of the Oubliette!, by Grégory Grard and Mathieu Roussel • Faraway: Sous un ciel d'étoiles, by Johannes Goupy and Corentin Lebrat ▪️ Speaking of Thames & Kosmos, I met a representative at SPIEL Essen 25, and the only German title coming to the U.S. that the company has confirmed is Kasper Lapp's combo-driven Wildwuchs, which will absolutely (not) maintain that name in the English-language edition. In Wildwuchs, German for "wild growth", players want to bloom as many flowers as possible in their plot. You each start with a random flower, which come in five colors, and 5-7 seeds, one of which starts at the bottom of the track on your flower. On a turn, draft a new flower from one of the five fields and place a seed on bottom of its track, then all players "grow" flowers in the color of the field from which that flower was taken by moving the seeds on these flowers up one space on their track. (In the image below, all orange flowers would grow, including the one you just took if it's orange.) Each track has two effects on it shaped like a dumbbell, with the effect in the upper dumbbell. After growth, in the "arrow" phase, if a seed is on the bottom part of the dumbbell, you can move it to the upper part automatically. Whether after growth or the "arrow", if a seed is on an effect, you can carry it out, with you determining the order in which multiple effects happen. If you move onto a color, then all of your flowers of this color grow one space (instead of everyone's flowers); if onto a butterfly, then all of your highest seeds grow one space; if onto a caterpillar, all of your lowest seeds; if onto a bee, you can place a bee token on one space of a flower's track, with the seed "jumping" the bee during growth. A ladybug gets you a free flower from the deck, and a grasshopper jumps all seeds on your other flowers to the grasshopper space on those tracks. All movement and effects are optional, so you can hold off on grasshoppering down a track or moving a seed onto a blue space when you have no blue flowers. When the seed moves off the top of the track, you place the grown flower in your meadow, and when the flower deck runs out, whoever has the most grown flowers wins.