At this point, the civilization genre needs an intervention. We could all sit in a circle on folding chairs we borrowed from the local church. Set out a little tray of cheeses and olives. Have plenty of tissues on hand for everyone. Speak in that voice we reserve for serious moments. “Hey,” someone would say, breaking the ice. “I’ve noticed you’ve been in a rut lately.”

Rising Cultures, designed by Aske Christiansen and Francesco Testini, almost begs to be described entirely via comparisons. It’s a lower-fidelity Imperium, a blown-out Ancient Realm. Clash of Cultures in how closely it sticks to an inherited form, as far as possible from Arcs on the personal-to-longue-durée matrix. Not as good as any of the bests, but neither so bad that it’s worth observing for its missteps.

No sooner is its lid cracked than Rising Cultures reveals a few inborn limitations. There are four civilizations to helm, three of which are Egypt, Rome, and Persia, those old standbys that aren’t exactly going to blow anybody’s hair back. The experience is two-player-only. No solitaire, although what follows will be mostly solitary in nature, nor welcoming of a third or fourth player, although it feels like the designers could have pushed it to those heights had they really wanted to.

Also, there are heaps of icons. So many icons, in fact, that each civilization comes with its own fold-out crib sheet that translates every single line of the boards and every single card. Oh, and sometimes explains concepts in eight-point font that must be scraped from the surrounding info-spatter. Transcribing these details calls to mind City of Six Moons, another civilization game Rising Cultures is very much unlike.

From there, the gameplay grumbles into action. And it’s good action. Each round sees players figuring the best use for the four cards they’ve drawn from their hand. Scratch that; three of them will be used, the fourth will return to the top of the deck to reappear on the next go. The action economy is thus strictly limited. Three cards per round. Seven rounds per game. Nominally, that’s twenty-one actions in total.

Of course, there are plenty of ways to break this rubric, although Rising Cultures isn’t quite as combo-tastic as some of its peers. At any given time, there are four main uses for each card. First — and flimsiest — you can discard it to pick up two coins. This always feels like a defeat. Second, you can slot it into your empire as resources, the bricks and stone and so forth necessary to, third, build cards into your tableau. This is the most durable option, permanently earning access to that card’s best benefits, whether scoring abilities or ongoing perks. Fourth, any card can enter your military. More on that in a moment.

As processes go, this is good stuff. Interesting stuff. Compelling stuff. Cards aren’t quite multi-use, in the sense that they might tempt players to wander distinct avenues. If possible, you’d probably want all of them in your main tableau. But that isn’t possible, and anyway there’s a clever tradeoff whenever you build a card. Basically, you’re given the option of flipping the bottommost resource onto your civilization board, unlocking further abilities but decreasing your overall wealth. It’s a smart move, one that goes a long way toward preventing players from falling into a formula where they spend their first few cards on resources and then keep building everything afterward.

Little by little, your civilization takes shape. That shape, naturally, is largely predetermined by whichever faction you’re playing at the moment. The Romans go to war a lot. The Egyptians must manage the ebb and flow of the Nile. The whole thing feels a lot like Imperium, except you’re going through a deck once rather than cycling through and improving it over multiple stages.

At points, players are invited to glance at one another across the table. Usually this happens when gearing up for the fight that caps each round, when some province will be awarded to only one side depending on whichever civilization has assembled the most suitable army. In rare cases — okay, one case — a civilization offers bonus actions to its rival. Beyond that, this is a heads-down affair.

Which is fine. I’m not slamming multiplayer solitaire. But I am left wondering where Rising Cultures’ identity might be found. Its four civilizations each play like their own puzzle. With their cards jumbled together, all those natural synergies out of order, can you assemble them into a points engine that outpaces your opponent’s? Maybe. It depends. On the shuffle, sure, but also on whichever faction sits before you. Some are more complicated than others. Egypt has that shared Nile row going both for and against it. The Abbasid Caliphate requires some strict sequencing in order to usher in its era of science, which is notably tougher than the slapdash approaches available to Rome and Persia.

What it never manages, unfortunately, is to stand apart. At its best, it feels like a microgame that got too big for 18 cards, or like a less generous and less flexible version of Imperium with half as many civilizations and a stricter play count. It isn’t weird or experimental, but neither is it especially standard, in the sense that it might appeal to someone who’s looking for an unvarnished civgame. The result is a middle-of-the-road title that says and accomplishes little. I don’t expect it to survive the test of time.

 

A complimentary copy of Rising Cultures 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 the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)

Cephalofair expands Buttons & Bugs, and Allplay teases a trio of new releases

Continue reading on Board Game Beat LLC | W. Eric Martin

In the 9 years since we launched the submission form on our website, we have received nearly 3,000 game submissions, many of which were eligible based on our guidelines.

Alan reviews all submissions and shares some with me, and if I’m intrigued, we request a prototype and interact a little with the designer to see how they communicate. Finally, if we both think the game could be a Stonemaier game, we share it with the rest of the team (conceptually and on the table) to make sure we’re not overlooking anything.

Of those games, how exactly do we decide which games to publish?

It boils down to a series of questions we ask ourselves:

• Will this game bring joy to tabletops worldwide? This is our mission statement. It’s a broad question, but it helps us try to picture the game on different types of tables worldwide.
• Do we love the game? We spend a lot of time, energy, and resources on every game we publish, so there’s a high bar for how we feel about it from the start.
• Does it feel like a Stonemaier game? There’s a certain vibe captured by our games, largely described in the 12 tenets. Just because we love a game doesn’t mean that it feels like a Stonemaier game.
• Do we already publish a similar game (mechanically or thematically)? If someone submitted a winemaking game to us, even if we really liked it, it would be incredibly difficult for us to decide to publish it since we already make Viticulture.
• Has another publisher already made a close facsimile to this game? Or, asked another way: If this game shares a core mechanism with another game (but with a twist), would we choose this game over the existing game?
• Does it have the potential of being a big hit with evergreen potential? This is, in some ways, an unfair question. There are many games I love that have only sold a few thousand copies. But given that we average less than 2 game releases per year and that we invest heavily in every game we make, we want it to have the potential of being a big hit. This question includes the value proposition (the game’s estimated price versus what price it would need to have to be successful).
• Are we excited to teach and share this game over and over? Something I learned in the early days of Stonemaier Games is that I don’t actually get to play the published versions of our games all that much. Instead, most of my involvement with our games is teaching them and talking about them. So even from the start, we try to envision ourselves doing that over and over to ensure this is a game for which we can maintain a high level of excitement.

Importantly, these questions also apply to games I try to design. There are multiple checkpoints throughout my design process when I share the status of a design (through video and playtests) with my team, and if we don’t answer the above questions affirmatively, the game does not get published.

Keep in mind that these questions are in addition to all the guidelines and tenets listed on our submission page. Many games check the submission boxes, but in the end it’s a very subjective decision. We’ve passed on games that went on to be successful with other publishers, and I’m always happy to see that they found the right home.

Also, in full transparency, I think we’ve been “wrong” about some games we’ve published in that at least one of the answers to these questions wasn’t as much of a full “yes” as we originally thought. I don’t regret publishing them, but those misses are a good opportunity for me to evaluate the process and the questions asked along the way.

What do you think of these questions? If you’re a publisher, how exactly do you decide which games to publish?

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Also read: How to Pitch (and Not Pitch) Your Game to Stonemaier Games

If you gain value from the 100 articles Jamey publishes on this blog each year, please consider championing this content! You can also listen to posts like this in the audio version of the blog.

by Scott Brady

I think this is the first time I will have two major releases of my games occur at the same convention. June marks my annual trek to Columbus for Origins Game Fair. Two years ago my co-design with Danielle Reynolds, Caution Signs, premiered there. Hues and Cues would have in 2020 hadn’t it been for the shutdown. Everything else I’ve made typically debuted in the fall or was silently released into retail whenever they were ready.

I talked about boop. Shuffle previously and am anxious to see how it is accepted by the typical abstract-loving public. It was technically released in May, but this will be the first convention it will be available for sale.

The other title is being flown in from China and will be available at Origins in limited quantities – I’m told only around 100 will be for sale. Size Wise from GameHead has been in development for some time and is proof of how game design can lead from one idea to another organically.

Concept

For quite some time I had been tossing around the idea of a game about measurements. We’ve all seen plenty of trivia games where you guess how tall something is or how much it weighs. I’m not a fan of this type of game because replayability could be an issue. Over time people will memorize the answers.

I’m much more a proponent of groupthink, like Hues and Cues, where the correct answer doesn’t matter. Scoring points is about how well you match up with what other players think. This means that even if you have the same challenge in a different game, the answers might be very different depending upon the other players’ perspective.

First Crack

I began working on a game I tentatively called “Size Matters”. That progressed to “On the Scale of…” and then the final prototype name, “Banana for Scale”. It featured a board with a grid going from one to one hundred. Cards featured questions in different measurement categories with questions like “In millimeters, how long is a centipede?” and “What are the odds of aliens landing on Earth by 2050?”.

Questions could have actual answers, like the average length of a centipede, or be opinion-based like the alien one. In both cases, points are scored if you matched the answer within a range of the active player. It didn’t matter about the size of the insect or whether aliens arrived or not!

It was while doing a little dev work on this game, trying to decide what the interface would be for the consumer that I thought of the situation where a fisherman is trying to describe the size of the fish they caught using their hands as measurement tools. I knew this type of description wouldn’t work for “Banana for Scale” as it was only about size and not predictions or any of the other categories. I still felt like there was something cool about those fish tales and how it could be used in a game.

Prototypes

The game itself turned out to be rather simple, which I was fine with. I’ve learned that simple sells. Mass-market consumers don’t want long rulebooks or teach. They just want to play. Using your hands to describe the size of something is natural and familiar. How would I control the game though if I allowed the players to hold their hands up and tried to compare them?

Plus, why would they even need to buy the game if we didn’t supply a unique experience with custom components!

The first, obvious answer to me was a measuring tape. I envisioned each player having a player-color measuring tape with no markings. I figured players would extend their tapes for the lengths they were estimating and hold them next to each other to compare. I purchased a lot from Amazon to play around with. It was then I discovered something important.

Cheap measuring tapes only click and hold in certain increments. The ones I bought extended in 1.5” segments. Traditional measuring tapes like what you might have in your garage are much more accurate…and expensive.

Second Attempt

I was struggling to figure out a way to implement the ideas of this game inexpensively yet still being unique and appealing. My mind went back to the fish analogy. That’s when I thought of a bobber on a fishing line.

A ball on a string – that would work! The clasps on a bobber would allow it to slide up and down the line and become a pseudo measuring device! Off to Amazon again to shop for bobbers.

What became difficult was that bobbers are designed for thin fishing lines. At best I could use color nylon string, but that is very thin and doesn’t come in easily differentiated colors. Neither do bobbers. They’re mostly neon yellow, neon orange or white. Not nearly enough for player colors.

Third Attempt

Bobbers were out. So were tape measures. My next idea was utilizing those little spring-loading things you see on backpacks or sweatshirts (see photo above). I’m sure they have an official name, but I have no idea what it is (editor's note - spring cord locks). I managed to find a batch on Amazon to test. They didn’t hang consistently due to their odd shape and lack of weight, so comparing lengths was a bit of a chore. There was also the issue of the weight of string I was using.

Solution

Eventually, I somehow landed on shoestrings as they came in a broad range of colorful hues (see what I did there?!) and were very inexpensive. Because of the Amazon searches I had made for bobbers and balls, it magically recommended I look at beads. I found a set of ¾” diameter color beads that conveniently matched many of the shoestring colors! My hypothesis was that I could put the shoestring through the tiny bead hole and friction alone would hold it in place.

OSHA Violation

My theory was correct. Except the holes weren’t quite large enough. Using the bead holes as a pilot hole, I hand-drilled them to be larger, to the dismay of my wife who had already dialed “91” on the phone so she could complete the call to Emergency Dispatch quicker. Looking back, I admit it probably wasn’t the safest way I could have made them.

This is a case of the risk being worth the reward. They performed perfectly! I tied one end of the shoestring to a keyring and threaded the ball onto the other end. A tied knot would keep the ball from falling off and now I had player-colored measuring devices for each player!

Testing

I went through many scoring options, eventually landing on a player just not wanting to be in the extremes. Shortest and longest receive strikes. Everyone else is safe. Person with the fewest strikes wins!

Luckily, I had several design retreats, Protospiels and conventions on my schedule. “OutSized” (what I was calling it) was tested by dozens and dozens of players over the next few months. I was also able to curate a number of fun clue challenges thanks to playtester contributions. They are all mentioned in the rulebook!

Pitching

I was carrying both OutSized and Banana for Scale in my pitch bag at Pax Unplugged, mostly focused on the latter. I did show OutSized to a couple people once I got a better feel of the market and price point they were trying to hit. Paul Salomon from GameHead was one of those people. He didn’t jump right away but was obviously still thinking about it later as he followed up and told me about the company and what they were doing.

They are a newer publisher, but not new to the industry. GameHead is the publishing arm of GamerMats and they hired Paul (Honey Buzz) to act as inventor relations and developer. To his credit, the dev experience working with him has been one of the best I’ve experienced to date.

They were about to release their first six games (2025) and he was building out a slate of six potential 2026 titles. He saw the same simplicity and elegance in what I had made and committed to the game. It was now his job to turn my shoestrings and beads into something worth buying!

Done!

As you can see from the final product, he incorporated Schoolhouse Rocks styled artwork and one of the best laid out rulebooks I’ve ever been associated with! After testing a few different possible names for the game, we agreed on Size Wise.

I mentioned earlier that Size Wise will make its retail debut at Origins this month. While preparing for the show, GameHead was able to have the manufacturer make a giant-sized version to show off during demos! If the giant version is as popular as I think it will be, maybe you’ll see it available for purchase via crowdfunding! 😉It's double the size with six foot strings! How big is a donkey?!

I’ll be at both Origins and Gen Con and would love to teach it to you myself! Come by booth #1908 at Origins to grab one of the first 100 advance copies! Expect a general release at Gen Con booth #1629! See you there!

Scott Brady

NOTE TO ANY PUBLISHERS READING THIS! Banana for Scale is still available for licensing! 😉

I picked up a review copy of the medium-weight, engine-building title Tundra, designed by Luc Rémond and David Simiand. Rémond is best known for one of the most popular two-player-only designs of the last 10 years, Sky Team. That, alone, made Tundra an instant “yes” when I had the chance to grab a copy during my visit with the Hobby World team at SPIEL Essen last year.

Tundra gives it to you straight. Over the course of four rounds, players take on the roles of estate managers in the fantasy world of Tundra, using workers and towers to gather resources to score the most points. Tundra, the game, begins every round with each player using the same set of die results across four dice—rolled by that round’s first player—before players use one die per turn to activate a space on one of their four action boards, known as “Order” boards.

These Order boards are not unique across the player pool, so each board does the same thing for each individual player…at least, when play begins. The tasks are very vanilla—gather one or more of the game’s three resources (firewood, peat, and rock), build towers and workers, move around a grid-based map of tiles that offer more chances for more resource gathering, or upgrade the Order boards to…

The post Tundra Game Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.

Crowdfunded board games are a saturated market space. In other breaking news, the sky is blue. That saturation means there are much-hyped games that don’t even merit being printed. It also means that there are criminally underrated games that sneak through unnoticed. To call Mysthea unnoticed is a bit of an overstatement, as it was […]

Source

Also, co-operative game publisher Family Pastimes prepares to close

Continue reading on Board Game Beat LLC | W. Eric Martin

In 1539, a small Spanish garrison of troops numbering 3,500 men held the Albanian village of Castelnuovo for 22 days against the massive Ottoman army consisting of over 54,000 Turk soldiers. This siege took place as a part of the Ottoman-Habsburg struggle for control of the Mediterranean Sea in July 1539 at the walled town of Castelnuovo, which is the location of present-day Herceg Novi, Montenegro. After days of open trench warfare and more than a month of smaller combats, skirmishes, assaults and bombardments from the Turkish navy, the last Spanish defenders fell ending the siege. Castelnuovo 1539 is a wargame that focuses on this siege designed by Francisco Ronco. The defenders are safe behind sturdy walls and battlements but time and continual shelling from the Ottomans will lead to assaults over the walls. The battle is hopeless for the defenders but they can win the game by doing enough damage to the Ottomans to end their campaign and stop them from invading further into the Albania and then onto Spain and the rest of Europe. The game is very well produced using wooden blocks for soldiers, stylized walls, siege trenches and cannon along with ships and the board is also beautifully illustrated. The game is a block wargame where the strength of units are hidden from the opponent and plays pretty quickly in less than 90 minutes and really is a great representation of the battle and its history.

In this series of Action Points, we will first take a look at the beautiful Game Board and its area movement scheme, examine the units available to both sides and compare their relative strengths and weaknesses, take a look at the 5 different types of Command Cards and discuss how they are used, look at the 2 different types of rounds including a Siege Round and an Assault Round and how they differ, take a look at an example of combat and bombardment and finally examine the victory conditions for both sides and how casualties effect this outcome.

Game Board

The Game Board represents the fortified city of Castelnuovo and its surrounding areas, including the Mediterranean Sea to the south and the rolling countryside to the north. The Game Board is divided up into areas which are used to regulate the movement and positioning of the block units. The Game Board is pretty large really measuring in at 29″ x 21″ and is a fully mounted map board and is very nicely illustrated by Paco Arenas and absolutely was a joy to play on.

As you look at the Game Board in the picture above you will notice a few things. The areas of the city of Castelnuovo are outlined in red with a dotted line representing the city walls around its perimeter. There are also 4 inner areas of the city itself outlined in purple. Sometimes the game rules make reference to the “Fortress”, which means the 4 areas of the city and the walls surrounding them.

Here is a closeup of the Fortress where you can see the colored lines a bit better. You will also notice that there are rectangular boxes on top of the walls in the Fortress outlined with white dotted lines. These are spaces where the wooden wall segments are placed to represent the Resistance Level of the walls. You will see that in each area of the city that has walls, there is a number found in a white star that represents this Resistance Level. There are areas with both Resistance 1, 2 and 3 inside the Fortress. As the walls are attacked with bombardments from artillery, their Resistance Level will be degraded represented by placing wooden cubes in each area marking the current Resistance Level with 1, 2 or 3 cubes. If an area has 3 Resistance Level and takes a hit, the player will remove one wooden piece indicating that the Resistance points have dropped. Once the Resistance Level reaches 0, the walls are destroyed and the wooden wall pieces are removed from the board. The Ottoman player may then storm the walls and attack the defending units in the city.

There are 2 types of terrain found in the countryside of the Game Board with clear terrain being shown by a solid white outline and rough terrain outlined by a white dotted line. Each area of the map has a Height Level value printed in its location, which indicates the height of the area. The heights are 0 being the lowest, or basically the sea level with a 4 being the highest which represents a mountain level. The height effects the shooting of firearms. In addition, other terrain features are printed on the Game Board including the coastline, which separates the sea areas from the land areas, and also is a landing point for a majority of the Ottoman player’s reinforcement troops. Also, the 3 areas with Resistance Levels of 2 and 3, marked with the white star, are the areas that the Ottoman army must occupy at the end of any round to win the game.

Movement is specifically tied to the type of lines found in the areas of terrain. Units and Leaders can move by playing Action Cards, which allow a group of 1 to 3 units that are in the same area to one or more areas. Activated Infantry units will have 2 movement points and Cavalry have 4 movement points. Moving into a clear terrain area costs 1 movement point while moving into a rough terrain area, which is marked with white dotted
lines will cost 2.

The countryside areas have various depictions of buildings including shacks, storage sheds, houses as well as farm fields. These buildings do not affect combat or movement and are simply illustrative of the surroundings of the city. They are also many trees and bushes drawn on the Game Board with connecting roads also shown.

There are a few pieces that the players will place on the Game Board at the outset of playing including the wall blocks already mentioned as well as the Bastions. These Bastions are used by the Spanish player and are placed at the beginning of the game in any terrain areas outside of the city proper. These Bastions function similarly to the walls of Castelnuovo’s fortifications. Once these are placed, they cannot be moved and will remain on
the board even if their Resistance drops to 0 and they are destroyed. The Ottoman player can destroy them with artillery Bombardments or by spending Trench Points from Command Cards when entering them. These Bastions do not provide defense to the Ottoman player.

The Casualty Track is printed in the bottom left hand corner of the Game Board and is used to keep track of the number of blocks lost by the Ottoman player. In addition, also tracked will be Leaders and the number of Assault Rounds used by the Ottoman player.

The game really is a nicely made production with the Game Board being one of the best parts of the package. It is clear, well laid out and takes little to no time to understand its locations and areas. I think that one of the strengths of this game is that it is not only nicely produced but the rules are very clear and the strategy of what each side should be doing, by taking advantage of their defenses and the terrain.

In Action Point 2, we will examine the units available to both sides and compare their relative strengths and weaknesses.

-Grant

This is a game about preparing your team of anime characters for a tournament. Everyone has a team of three characters. During the game you get to train them, modifying their stats. You can mess with your opponents by modifying the stats of their characters too. When the game starts, you don't know yet what the tournament is going to be about. It will only be known by the mid point of the