▪️ 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.
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.
Alliance Open House, the tabletop publisher and retailer networking event launched more than 25 years ago by Alliance Game Distributors, has rebranded to Universal Summit US in the wake of Alliance’s takeover by Canada’s Universal Distribution.
Universal said it is waiving all registration fees to celebrate the inaugural US Universal Summit, which will continue its predecessor’s slate of game demos, panels and workshops, vendor exhibit hall and networking opportunities.
This year’s event will be held at the Grand Wayne Convention Center in Fort Wayne, Indiana between August 27 and 29, with registration required by May 15.
Universal Distribution CEO Angelo Exarhakos told ICv2 last July that the company intended to invest “a fair bit” in expanding the event and “making it more welcoming to both retailers, and especially the vendors”.
He added, “We generally, at the Universal level, don’t charge vendors to attend these shows. We think this is a very good marketing expense for us and a good investment, to be able to bring our vendors close to our retail partners, so you’re going to see us invest and expand that show.”
Alliance Game Distributors was a perennial heavyweight of US board game distribution since it was created through the merger of Chessex and The Armory in 1998, with both companies already major players in the sector before the deal was signed.
The company had maintained its strong position since being bought by Diamond in 2000, despite the woes of its parent business in recent years.
Universal will also be holding its regular Canadian summit on September 13 and 14 this year, at the Sheraton Laval in Montreal, Quebec. Registration for that event is also due by May 15.
This is the first part of a three-part series on getting back into board gaming after an extended absence. (If you want to skip ahead, you can go to Part Two to read about rebuilding your gaming groups, and Part Three to see the games that brought me back to gaming.) Today we're looking at ways to re-build your gaming muscles (thinking strategically and logically, understanding mechanisms and how they interact, puzzle solving, etc.) that may have atrophied during a long hiatus from gaming.
My long hiatus began with Covid cancelling all in-person gaming and then swan-dived into three years of caregiving for my parents. When the storm abated, I looked around and realized that I had barely touched a board game in five years. Between having no time or mental bandwidth for games, my game shelf was covered in dust and, even more worrying, my gaming skills had atrophied.
I first tried to play Trollhalla, one of my favorite games. I felt stupid and slow. The game isn't difficult, but my ability to remember the rules and work through a strategy was shot. Five years of too much doomscrolling, constant stress, and lack of sleep did a number on my ability to think clearly. I tried other games with much the same results. It was depressing and…
At Gen Con 2024, I had a chance to demo REM Racers and thought it was a fun mix of Mario Kart and X-Wing, using templates to move cars along a track while also trying to blow your friends’ little remote-controlled cars up with various weapons. The game had a fun art style, but I […]
Recently, while attending Buckeye Game Fest in Columbus, Ohio, we were able to coordinate a 6-player game of Imperial Elegy: The Road to the Great War 1850-1920 from VUCA Simulations. Imperial Elegy is a card driven game that blends diplomacy, warfare, and statecraft and feels a bit akin to games like Here I Stand and Virgin Queen from GMT Games. Grand scale sweeping epics that play multiplayers and take a day to play. Players play as 1 of 6 unique major powers in the game including Germany/Prussia, the United Kingdom, France, Austria-Hungary, Russia and the Ottoman Empire. In this First Impressions post, I want to share a very brief overview of the game and the experience that we had with it.
Imperial Elegy is a fantastically themed game that takes place over 7 turns, with each of the turns representing approximately a decade. If the Great War breaks out due to the World Tension Track reaching a certain level, the game can be extended by an additional 6 shorter turns. A turn in the game consists of player impulses that is driven by the play of action cards for their Command Points or for the printed events. Players will use CP and events to take actions like colonize, conduct diplomacy with minor nations, fight wars, as well as hinder their opponents by playing events that take away their actions or resources. A turn will end once all players have consecutively passed or when all players run out of cards.
The game is somewhat of a sandbox style game as you have so many options and choices about what to do during the course of the game. Obviously, your faction has some direction about what you should be doing but really it is up the player to spend their resources how they will to accomplish their ultimate goals and score Victory Points. I truly love that aspect about this game and as we played we saw that sandbox and the asymmetry between the various factions. Particularly at the start, each country has some specific goals that they have drawn from the National Goals Deck that are a source of Victory Points, in fact a major source of Victory Points, and players will need to prioritize these cards and decide which ones to attempt to go after from the start. With only 7 turns, they will have to make progress on these National Goals if they have any hope of actually achieving them.
I actually thought that the National Goals was a really great part of the design and really sets it apart from the other games that have been used for inspiration such as Here I Stand and Virgin Queen. I partly feel this because of the options for replayability but also it forces players to change and adjust their strategy throughout the game keeping things fresh and interesting. It also causes players to have to think outside of the box and sometimes do things that their nation might not have prioritized but has been given an opportunity that they must capitalize on in order to earn their victory. Every 2 turns the players will draw 3 of these secret National Goal Cards and decide to keep just 1 of them, so their strategy must change and evolve with the board state and conditions found in the game at that time. This very key element of the design seems truly simple but it really has the benefit of rewarding those players who are extremely flexible and who can adjust on the fly, take some chances, change the course of their general overall strategy and adapt. I say this because I do feel that sometimes in games like Here I Stand or Virgin Queen, the same strategies and series of actions will generally be taken by each of the factions with just a modicum of variation. As you can see in the picture below, these National Goals are pretty variable and include things like preventing the outbreak of The Great War, gaining colonies in various parts or regions of the board and a focus on various alliances and diplomatic conditions.
The other aspect that I very much enjoyed was the Flashpoints, which represent key regions of competition amongst the great powers of the period including Italy, the Suez Canal, the Balkans, Qing China and more. Dominating flashpoints is sometimes one of the conditions to achieve and complete some of the National Goals but also provide players with certain benefits, including gaining additional cards each turn or even DRM’s. The specific Flashpoint that I thought was very interesting was the Power Projection Flashpoint which is a projection of the total naval supremacy across the globe through control of ports and naval bases in the various seas and oceans. The only downside here though is that this is an added part of record keeping that players will need to keep a handle on. Not overly burdensome but something that maybe should have been better represented on the player boards or the board itself.
Each of the represented nations in the game have their own special player board that contains various tracks that keep various information readily available to the players. Here is a look at the German player board. I very much enjoyed that they have gone to a great deal of effort to make these player boards and also that they gave each of the nation’s Stability, which decides whether various actions like war can be taken or if there are various positive or negative modifiers, the available Manpower that will determine how many armies can be built, Industry that tells how many action pointed you will have to spend during war to maneuver units, attack and replace losses. The focus of the game is about the control of territories both in Europe as well as colonies abroad and there is an automatic victory if a certain target number is met, in the case of Germany 15.
Here is a quick look at the Russia player board for comparison’s sake as each faction is unique and has various starting levels and abilities. These are very well laid out and assist tremendously in playing the game.
As we played, I started to realize that the key focus of the overall world stability and things like the Domestic Stability Tracks, which are focused of both the internal and external pressures faced by the powers. I really very much liked this thematic inclusion as no one wants to start a major global conflagration and there are steps that players have to take to skirt the inevitable troubles that result in their own actions and how they are seen by the other players in the game. But in our limited play, I never really felt threatened by this concept. Either our group was super skilled at avoiding the inevitable increase in tension or due to our short play we didn’t really experience some of the events that would have tipped this over the edge. I think that we say small increases in our full turn play but nothing that seemed unmanageable and we actually had an event that lowered it so it never became an issue. The game is about spending your resources wisely, in the form of your cards and your aspects like Stability, and to use your cards to do the events that could increase tension didn’t seem to be in our best interest, at least not in the 1st decade of the game. But maybe that will come later.
Keep in mind here that we only played the first full turn and it took us about 90 minutes including an hour of setup and rules overview and discussion as only one of us at the table had player previously (John Lapham). But we very much enjoyed the experience and found lots to like. We have scheduled a full count play of the game in mid June and I will have more to report on at that time but suffice it to stay everyone at the table was impressed with the design and everyone had a good time with it.
Thank you so much for following along and I hope that I was able to show off Imperial Elegy a bit and give it the justice it deserves because it really is something and I look forward to playing more in the future.
Treat, Please! Designer: Courtney Shernan Publisher: Solis Players: 2-4 Age: 10+ Time: 30-60 minutes Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4cbRgAX Played with review copy provided by publisher You live a cozy life with your fellow dogs and loving human. Each … Continue reading →
I would describe my feelings toward Regicide as “appreciation,” despite it finding dedicated fans all around me. For years it was in regular rotation on my wife’s phone; my sister-in-law bought the fancy custom deck rather than just using a generic deck of playing cards. My own interest had more to do with the game as an act of repurposement: the clever casting of face cards as mad royals who needed to be put down, the suits transformed into character classes for blocking attacks or repairing injuries.
Regicide Legacy, designed by the same trio as the original — Paul Abrahams, Luke Badger, and Andy Richdale — is very nearly the exact opposite of the original game, at least in terms of form factor. Where the previous Regicide could be played with any old deck scrounged from a vacation bag, this edition is something of a throwback. It’s a genuine legacy title, for one thing: torn cards, stickers, micro-expansions, all of it. Its cooperative/solitaire campaign is generous. Moreover, it’s hard, significantly harder than is the norm in our current obliging hobby. It isn’t uncommon for a chapter to take two, three, half a dozen tries before your band of mercenaries is permitted to move on to their next target.
Now that I’ve wrapped it up, I can squarely say that the ordeal was thrilling, brilliant, and exhausting.
Hey there. We spotted you from across the bar and liked your vibes.
If you haven’t played the original Regicide… first, maybe give it a try. The rules are freely available, and as noted earlier you can play with a deck of cards that costs five bucks at the supermarket. That’s if you don’t have one handy already.
Regicide Legacy begins with Regicide. As in, its first chapter is the base game with only the slightest of modifications. Your crew, a band of adventurers, comprises the forty non-face cards of an ordinary playing deck, plus perhaps one or two goblins depending on player count. Their strength ranges from one (for an ace) to ten, across four classes that have been given their own iconography rather than repeating the regular French suits.
The face cards, meanwhile, become a deck of targets. First you’ll face the jacks, then the queens, then the kings, ideally lining them up for the guillotine. This is no easy feat. Each royal has a sturdy pool of health points, and punches back after each attack, requiring you to spend cards from your hand to absorb the blow.
The cardplay is impressive. Depending on your chosen attacker, your crew avails themselves of an ability. Warriors deal double damage to your target. Paladins block return damage. Clerics cycle discards back into your deck, which Bards then use to refill everybody’s hands. There’s a life cycle to this process. Some cards can be paired, such as aces, here styled as animal companions, or duplicate ranks whose strength would sum to ten or less. Success demands a delicate balance, between offense and defense, between healing and aggression, between risk and caution.
It’s pretty much inevitable that you will lose.
In contrast to the original Regicide, Regicide Legacy is all premium.
That inaugural failure, though, demonstrates the ways that Regicide Legacy intends to depart from its predecessor. Rather than shuffling the cards and giving it another try, you’re invited to open the first of the set’s many boxes. Within, you discover mercenaries: multi-rank cards that can be readily paired with more of their peers than usual, heavy hitters, maybe an extra goblin or two. Each merc has a cost in its corner. One loss means you have one gold to spend.
So you buy a card, add it to your deck, and take another stab at toppling the divine right of kings.
Again, failure is largely inevitable. It’s just a little less inevitable than before. Second loss, two gold. You grab a couple new fighters. Shuffle. Again.
Another loss. That’s three more gold. Now your company is becoming noticeably tougher. Maybe you were struggling with damage output; some extra Warriors will make up the difference. Or perhaps you found it difficult to manage your hand; that’s where Clerics and Bards come in. Whatever your particular weakness, there’s a patch for it.
At some point, the odds turn in your favor. Inside the first chapter box there is a sealed booster pack with its own instructions. Your mercenaries depart. New cards are introduced. Another chapter presents a new set of bosses, each tougher than the last.
Opening the post-game expansion pack.
Along the way, a few things become apparent.
First, Regicide Legacy wants you to succeed. Even if only belatedly, after spending heaps of gold on up-powered mercenaries who round out your company’s deficiencies. Where the original game bordered on the misanthropic, booting you back to the beginning at even the slightest trip, the ability to pad your deck with repeat failures is a wonderful tool. Some make it easier to pair cards, or add wild aces, or, eventually, strip even the toughest bosses of their natural immunities to your character abilities.
Next, Regicide Legacy earns that second ligature. This is a legacy game through and through. In its earlier stages, this means variable card sleeves. To offer only the lightest of spoilers, the members of your company can become corrupted, adorning themselves in the thorn-framed sleeves usually reserved for royals, and incurring a penalty when played. Not long after that, you’ll encounter more transformative effects. Stickers that dual-class cards, minigames for randomly determining which character succumbs to a story beat, and, yes, eventually the dreaded moment that was so transgressive back in Risk Legacy, the command to rid yourself a card for good.
Go ahead. Tear it up. Don’t let your squeamishness show. Don’t let your fingers tremble. Don’t check how much the reset box costs. Uh oh. You looked. That’s as much as, like, fifteen decks of playing cards. But who would buy that many playing cards? You’re here for the drama, baby, and there’s no drama quite like drama that inflicts lasting damage.
Each boss presents its own conundrums.
The main highlight is the procession of new character classes that are added to your ever-expanding band. To the original four — the original six if you count animal companions and goblin jesters — there’s enough to more than double the roster. I won’t spoil the surprise, but the way your deck morphs from one thing into something else entirely is quite the sight to behold. There’s wild magic to be uncovered, risky operators who might help or hinder your goals, heroes who always seem to show up in the nick of time, and complicated figures who require constant reminders.
Because Regicide Legacy, already a tangled, difficult game, only grows more tangled and more difficult as additional chapters are unlocked. More complicated, too. Sequencing matters. The subtle distinctions between two defensive classes matter. Whether cards are discarded or banished, which abilities a boss blocks, how cards are shifted across the board in this particular scenario — everything matters.
In our case, we played nearly the entire campaign four-handed. There was me, of course, plus my wife and sister-in-law. I doubt I would have survived by excluding the fanatics. We were also joined by my mother-in-law, a veteran of countless trick-takers. Her inclusion highlighted both the game’s strengths and its weaknesses.
Strengths first. Across the duration of the campaign, Regicide Legacy held our interest. Even my mother-in-law’s interest. Even when we were tired from battering ourselves against a particularly difficult chapter. (The worst offender, we discovered, had been nerfed post-release.) At our weekly dinner, the group was eager to see what came next. Not so much in the story, which is the usual fantasy muddle of proper nouns. But in the interplay of cards and abilities. In the composition of our deck. In which sticker would be appended to which character. In the developing shape of the thing.
But these strengths are attended by problems. Foremost, that Regicide Legacy soon gets too big for its britches. My mother-in-law spent the back half of the campaign showing her hand to whichever daughter was seated beside her, effectively requiring someone to play two hands simultaneously. She recalled the starting classes well enough, and even remembered a few of the later outliers. But as for the distinction between a Mage and a Reaver or between a Druid and a Chanter, no player aid was sufficient to fill every gap.
That’s one packed box.
Perhaps this sounds like an issue of age. To some degree, it was, as my mother-in-law would freely admit. But even those of us inured to modern hobby games and RPG classes and this particular brand of cardplay sometimes found our minds snowed in by the game’s avalanche of intersecting triggers. It isn’t only the character classes; there are also the bosses to consider, plus the special rules that govern this chapter, plus, often, the lingering rules from last week’s session, finally cemented in time to be discarded with the previous tuckbox. Most of the time, I had to run the turn-by-turn action, and even then it wasn’t uncommon for someone to stab back that my reminder necessitated a counter-reminder because of such-and-such character or some lingering effect from the scenario instructions.
Is it too much? We finished the campaign. We survived. We succeeded. But we also stumbled along the way. Sometimes we realized two rounds later that we’d flubbed a rule earlier. More than once, we restarted a session altogether, the rules suddenly clear where previously they had been opaque.
Personally, this process was many things. Frustrating at times; exhausting at others.
But it was exciting, too, and exciting in a way that very few games have been before. We developed favorites — dual-classed Elashor, Vegarian the Vegetarian, my crush Lierin — and groaned at the appearance of others — Dinky, may you be damned to the underworld for eternity for how often you have betrayed us. We laughed a lot, especially when a new boss crushed us to powder, or when somebody stared at the problem before them, eyes glazed over, only for someone to recall the exact rule that would save us from a doomed situation.
The remaining question is whether we’ll return. Some of us already have; my sister-in-law has launched her second campaign with another group, spreading the good word to unwitting converts. There’s an entire post-game to tackle, justification for the potential waste of a discarded core box, and I can confirm that it’s a smart system, randomly doling out enemies and modifiers and boons that will test the hardy company that was forged over the previous thirty battles.
Lierin is my Canadian girlfriend you’ve never met.
So. Will we? Return, that is?
I don’t know. Maybe someday. I plan to keep the box, despite my doubts that we’ll remember the class abilities if we go more than a month without a session. Even if we don’t, I can’t help but regard Regicide Legacy with fondness. I can’t remember a single story beat from the narrative. But the stories it told above the table — the way our deck transformed along with our aptitude as players, the inside jokes we developed, the characters whose named we pronounced five different ways — those are worth keeping around. That’s the real legacy here. That’s what makes me consider Regicide Legacy such an unlikely success. Torn cards? Stickers? Psh. I’m only interested in the stickers of the soul. The torn cards of our feelings.
And with those strained metaphors, I think that’s enough Regicide Legacy for one sitting.
A complimentary copy of Regicide Legacy was provided by the publisher.
(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read my first-quarter update of 2026: the best board games, movies, books, and more!)
Questline Designers: Marc-Andre Lavoie and Martin Lavoie Publisher: Thunderworks Players: 1-6 Age: 14+ Time: 15 minutes Preorder link – https://thunderworksgames.com/products/questline-card-game Played with review copy provided by publisher In Questline, players compete to earn the most reputation stars by … Continue reading →
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 Conception
In 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 1
The 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 Artist
These 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 Graveyard
For 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 Down
After 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 Stop
When 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-publishing
I 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.
Thanks
Colossi 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.
If there's one thing all boardgamers can agree on, it's this: boardgames and their accoutrement take up a lot of room. Space is at a premium. And, if you're like me and you live in tight quarters to begin with, the idea of ever owning a nice boardgame table such as the Bandpass Firefly Board Game Table is nothing more than fantasy. In my home, we have three surfaces on which we can game: the dining room table which measures roughly 40 inches in width and 80 inches in length, a folding 4' x 4' card table, or a folding 6' x 4' picnic table which takes up the entire living room once it's been deployed. None of these are designed with modern boardgaming in mind. The largest of the three, the picnic table, struggles to contain large, sprawling megaliths such as Frosthaven or any Vital Lacerda game.
This is why I got excited when I saw the Relic Gaming Tabletop Table pop up in my social media feeds one day not too long ago. On paper, it seemed to be the answer to all my prayers, utilizing the airspace above the game table to relieve the pressure on the game table. But, how functional is it in…
A little over a year ago, I took a dive into the entry-level skirmish game Heroscape. Long considered a “grail game”, Renegade Games Studios brought Heroscape back to the masses with brand new content (fully compatible with the original). Not to be content there, they have since released a number of expansions to keep the […]
With this My Favorite Wargame Cards Series, I hope to take a look at a specific card from the various wargames that I have played and share how it is used in the game. I am not a strategist and frankly I am not that good at games but I do understand how things should work and be used in games. With that being said, here is the next entry in this series.
#76: Military Uprising from The Republic’s Struggle: Battle for the Republic, Spain 1931-1939 from NAC Wargames
The Republic’s Struggle is a thematic Card Driven Game that tells the story of the historical events that took place in Spain after the resignation to the throne of King Alfonso XIII, and the proclamation of the II Spanish Republic in 1931. With the creation of the new regime, the struggle for power between the different social, political and ideological sectors increased, which gave rise to continuous changes of political power, alterations of public order, armed uprisings and violent acts, carried out by the numerous ideological factions of the moment; which culminated in 1936, in a failed military uprising. The failure of this coup d’état was the origin for the Spanish Civil War.
The Republic’s Struggle is based on Twilight Struggle from GMT Games and uses the same concepts of area control while adding in some actual combat with units represented on the board. During the game, the Republican player and the National player, will be able to recreate events of the period to increase their popularity in the localities by carrying out political propaganda, recruiting troops or militias, generating revolts or assaults, establishing diplomatic relations or carrying out bombardments. All this will be done by playing their hand of cards in an alternative way, either by using the events or by playing the action points or icons to perform any of the other actions available to the players.
One of the interesting parts of the design is that each player has what is referred to as a Special Card that is included in their hand from the start of the game and can be played during their turn. These cards don’t count towards the maximum number of cards that each player can have in their hand at the beginning of each turn. The 2 cards are Military Uprising, which is given to Nationalist player and Proletarian Revolution, which is given to the Republican player. These cards are single-use event cards and can only be used during the first 4 turns of the game, or in other words during the period referred to as Phase 1 – The Republic. If, after this phase, these cards have not been played, they must be discarded and removed from the game. Both players can choose to use their Special Card in an Action round, instead of using one of the cards from their hand. These cards are played like the rest of the Operation Cards either using their Operations Value or applying the effects of the printed Event. Once played, the card will be removed from the game so it is use it or lose it.
Both cards are very powerful but have some fairly difficult criteria that must be met to fully realize the value of the printed Event. In the case of our featured card Military Uprising, the top part of the card first gives the player the chance to downgrade the European Status Quo Track by 2 levels. The European Status Quo Track allows players to appeal to and in some ways manipulate the stance of the other European Nations regarding their view on the Spanish Civil War. It also the determining factor in how Victory Points are awarded for the crucial Armed Actions aspect of the game. At the end of each turn, if the number of Armed Actions carried out by a player equals or exceeds the current level of the European Status Quo, that player will score 3 Victory Points. Also, as long as the European Status Quo Track is set on level 2, players cannot carryout any action using the Operations Points of cards played to advance in the Diplomatic Relations Track. So this is another tied result to the card as if the level is 1, no cards can be played to advance the Diplomatic Relations Track.
But, remember I said that to fully realize the effects of the card, the Nationalist player would need to control Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia and every Naval Base Location or every Air Base Location. If this is the case when the card is played, then the Nationalist player will earn an automatic victory. Frankly, this is next to impossible, but has a sliver of possibility depending on how diligent and attentive the Republican player is as well as the hand of cards that are drawn by the Nationalist player. If they draw certain other events, as well as have a hand full of higher Operations Point value cards, they can make a run at this but it is not necessarily recommended. The card also has a very useful secondary use as if the condition isn’t met, they will get to place out on the board 1 combatant cube, representing one of their combat units, and also remove all of the influence of the Republican player in Morocco and Galicia and gain 2VP. In order for the card to be used in this manner though the Nationalist player will have had to previously play the El Director card.
Either way this is a very good card and a shrewd Nationalist player can make some significant headway in their efforts to push the Republican out of power in Africa and northwest Spain as well as add combat strength to areas that they wish to conduct future Armed Operations.
In 1934 there was widespread labor conflict and a bloody uprising by miners in Asturias that was suppressed by troops led by General Francisco Franco. A succession of governmental crises culminated in the elections of February 16, 1936, which brought to power a Popular Front government supported by most of the parties of the left and opposed by the parties of the right and what remained of the center.
Spanish Civil War Republican troops manning a machine gun during the Spanish Civil War, 1937.
A well-planned military uprising began on July 17, 1936, in garrison towns throughout Spain. By July 21st, the rebels had achieved control in Spanish Morocco, the Canary Islands, and the Balearic Islands (except Minorca) and in the part of Spain north of the Guadarrama Mountains and the Ebro River, except for Asturias, Santander, and the Basque provinces along the north coast and the region of Catalonia in the northeast. The Republican forces had put down the uprising in other areas, except for some of the larger Andalusian cities, including Seville), Granada and Córdoba. The Nationalists and Republicans proceeded to organize their respective territories and to repress opposition or suspected opposition. Republican violence occurred primarily during the early stages of the war before the rule of law was restored, but the Nationalist violence was part of a conscious policy of terror. The matter of how many were killed remains highly contentious; however, it is generally believed that the toll of Nationalist violence was higher. In any event, the proliferation of executions, murders, and assassinations on both sides reflects the great passions that the Spanish Civil War unleashed.
Here is a link to our full video review of the game:
A recent episode of the Game Design Deep Dive, featuring the podcast host, Dan Bullock, in conversation with prolific board game designer of many historical and storytelling games, Cole Wehrle, got me thinking about something I had never really questioned before: who we actually are when we play board games. Player roles are often afterthoughts, taken for granted as part of the theme or setting. However, the more I thought about it, the more it became clear that they shape how we understand a game, how we make decisions, and even how they influence our emotions as we engage with what is happening on the table.
UK-based Gutter Games, which was launced in 2017, is best known for dexterity challenge party game Beat That!, and has also published adult-themed party titles including Gutterhead and Trunk of Drunk.
Beat That! by Gutter Games
Gutter was bought by US Amazon aggregator Perch in 2021, which was itself acquired by private equity-backed Amazon FBA businesses operator Razor Group three years later.
Savana founder and president Romain Chemière de Carné told Mojo Nation, “Gutter Games built something genuinely special – irreverent, high-energy games that travel across cultures and languages.
“Our intention is clear: restore the brand to the prominence it deserves, develop extensions and new entries in the Gutter Games universe, and further strengthen a portfolio that is already one of the most dynamic in the global board game industry.
“This is our first M&A operation, and our first acquisition overseas – it demonstrates SAVANA’s capability to execute complex international transactions, and it opens a new chapter in how we grow the business.”
Savana also sells markers and crayons, nail stickers and temporary tattoos in addition to its line of board games.
The company’s game releases this year are set to include a One Piece version of its pirates-themed social deduction game Traitors Aboard, according to a listing on BoardGameGeek.
Popular game publisher CMON has been having a rough time of it post-tariff-idiocy period, forced to sell of their most profitable IPs and stop new campaigns, but to their credit they really did seem to hunker down and concentrate on getting promised crowdfunded games out to backers while slowly rebuilding the company. I think I’m even getting my Dune: Arrakis expansions soon, finally.
Metal Gear Solid: The Board Game is one of their underrated gems. I played the original computer game way, way back when, but these stealth and action mechanics are so solid, and feel so good, they could have been attached to any similar theme. The bonus for Metal Gear Solid fans is that the scenarios follow the first game’s beats so closely, which supplies a fun nostalgia hit. And like a video game, the scenarios introduce rules and new situations as you go, so you’re not overloaded from the start.
This game is nicely produced, plays smoothly (despite a long-winded and badly organised rulebook), and just works. Stealth mechanics are hard to get right sometimes, especially when you add patrolling guards and security cameras into the mix, but MGS nails it. In between there are some fun boss battling segments that use a deck of custom behaviours to give the antagonists personality. Apparently the crowd-funded version came with a comic book which fleshed out the scenarios, and it is missed here, but you can easily live without the bonus big walker miniature.
In the end, I’d trade one really solid, fun, well-designed game like this for shed-load of useless Zombicide and Marvel-themed plastic crack, but that’s just me. Definitely recommended!
Limit covers a serious topic. It is a simulation of modern human civilisation. It is based on the Meadows Report "The Limits to Growth", which says that because our planet and its resources are finite, constant growth is impossible. We will sooner or later hit a saturation point. Yet humans behave as if there is not such limit. Every corporate CEO is expected to achieve ever higher results.
Anmelden
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https://boardgamewire.com/
The Players' Aid
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