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Published yesterday — 10. August 2026 ⏭ BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek

Beach Week? Party Games!

✇BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek
Von: whenindoubteatout
10. August 2026 um 08:00

by Justin Bell



Whenever someone tells me they are bringing hobby games home to play with their family for the holidays, I always laugh; disappointment equals pain. Ain’t no way you are getting Wingspan in front of your grandparents; even if you are lucky enough to get Harmonies in front of your two distant cousins and that aunt who you love catching up with, working through even a moderate hobby game rule set can be a drag. (Why does it take 90 minutes to teach your uncle Catan? Because he’s never played a modern board game, that’s why.)

I’ll post another article about this as we approach the holidays, in part because, like many of you, I love making this mistake every year. “Justin, you write about board games; why don’t you bring some of those really interesting games to Thanksgiving this year?” someone will say. Even though I know there is no way we are getting Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon, or even something lighter like Rebel Princess: Deluxe Edition, to the table, I relent and throw a half-dozen games into the bag in the hopes that, finally, this is the year I come up aces and somehow trick adults into a game of Recall after putting three pounds of turkey and two pounds of apple pie (with the ice cream!) into my gut.

For the traditional holiday season, I am silly enough every year to give it a try. But for a summertime beach week, tabling games from my collection is much more reliable. That’s because beaches equal party games, and all of us have something worth a shot even with the family members who supposedly never play games. The mood is right, eventually everyone needs a break from the hot summer sunshine, and someone has to take on the role of Chief Keep the Kids Off the Tablets Officer.

Usually, that someone is me.



Every year, I tell my wife’s family that my worst week of the year to do a beach trip is the week right after Gen Con. I’ve just taken 3-4 days of vacation from my day job, and the thing I am most excited to do is to table a dozen of the treasures I just picked up in Indy. And, like clockwork, my wife’s family elects the annual beach vacation week to start the Saturday of Gen Con weekend, a week full of early mornings, screaming children, and humidity out the wazoo.

I’m not a beach guy. (I AM an Ibiza guy and a South Beach guy, but I don’t go to those places for the beaches.) I do love kids, but as I get older, I’m finding that I love older children much more than younger ones; see “screaming”, above. But these kids offer opportunity, and the general vibes associated with beach vacations work in my favor when I can bring a bucket of hot-off-the-press party games to the beach.

My wife’s family is great about slinging party games to the beach as well, so we had 20 or so party games lying around, waiting to be tapped. Cranium? A game I haven’t seen in years, but I’m more than happy to sit through. Connect Four? Not a party game, but it IS a family game, so my son and I took a double dip into the Connect Four pool one afternoon. Werewords? Sure! At the beach, I’m a surprisingly open-minded individual, and I’ll play any version of 20 Questions if it helps to keep the kids engaged.

This year, I threw four Gen Con pickups into the bag: Size Wise, the new GameHead release designed by Scott Brady; Dino Racer, an Underdog release designed by Marceline Leiman; Trickarus, a design by Bajir Cannon now available through Smirk & Dagger; and, Jibber Jabble, an Allplay release designed by Cassie Sikes.

To ensure the Gen Con batch was visible, I situated the games near the pile of other party games hauled to the beach by the in-laws, but on a shelf just above and off to the left of where the other family games were displayed. Curiosity didn’t kill any cats, but it did lead to questions almost as soon as I put the Gen Con batch out on the table.

“What are those?” said an inquisitive 11-year-old.

“Some new games I brought back from a show last week. I haven’t tried most of these yet, but we’ll see if there’s time to break some out.”

“I’ll play any of them,” she said. I took her up on that offer with a play of Size Wise, a play that featured seven willing family members on the afternoon of my departure.

Size Wise offers an interesting premise. A deck featuring cards with six items per card is placed, face down, in the middle of the table. The card backs have numbers ranging from 1-6, so when a card is flipped face-up, the face-down card just revealed from the top of the deck is the number that “selects” which item is in play for the current round.

Each player has a string, with a ring at the end that can be slid up and down to adjust for size. When a word is selected, each player must secretly decide the length of the item and measure out that distance on their personal string. Once everyone is happy with their choice, strings are revealed then the rings are hung from a wooden stick, and the players who stray farthest from the group average—so, the shortest section of string, and the longest—lose a wisdom token from their personal pool of 5-8 tokens distributed before play begins, based on player count.

When one player runs out of wisdom tokens, the player(s) with the most leftover tokens wins.

On paper, this sounded pretty vanilla, but I like Scott’s other designs and I love the font on the Size Wise cover. That was enough for me to swing by the GameHead booth to grab a review copy. But the magic of the game surfaced almost immediately during this play, as children ranging from my nine-year-old to this 51-year-old howled at the ridiculous things I was suddenly having to size up.

How big is a plate? If you can imagine the size of a normal dinner plate, it's not too rough, maybe 8-10 inches, right? But everyone has a different image in their mind of what a plate looks like. Later, we had to guesstimate the size of a hubcap. Easy for someone who drives a car everyday. But what if you are a kid, and you don’t know what a hubcap is?

The “pièce de résistance” in our play of Size Wise came when the autoselector forced us to guess the size of an alligator’s mouth. I’m still laughing at the range of guesses we threw out for the mouth. How big is the alligator? Is the alligator’s mouth closed? How wide is the alligator opening its mouth? The range of string length from that example was enough for the group to decide that they loved the game.

As a player, nothing beats the moment when someone finishes a game then immediately reaches for their cell phone to take a picture of the proceedings or search the online shopping sites to buy themselves a copy. I’m pretty sure at least one person at the table already has a copy of Size Wise en route to their home address.



I pushed to get Dino Racer to the table—after a successful demo in Indy then a play with my review group the next day, I thought Dino Racer was a perfect fit for the beach—but while we were waiting to start dinner one night, Jibber Jabble got the call instead.

Jibber Jabble is a word game. Yes, Jibber Jabble is a word game in a sea of comparable choices; for my money, the hobby word game space is so crowded that it is the almost literal definition of “a dime a dozen.” But, Allplay (a company that has come a long way from just making board game tables and accessories) has been on a tear, and each time I walked by the Allplay booth during Gen Con, Cassie’s demo table was usually packed with people keen on learning the game from the designer herself.

My demo of Jibber Jabble on the show’s last day was only so-so, and a three-player game of it with my review crew was similarly lukewarm. But those two plays featured lower player counts, so I did a run with six folks from the family while standing outside the kitchen at the beach rental.

Talk about turning that frown upside down.

Jibber Jabble takes place over six rounds. Word cards are broken into three sections, with six words in total appearing on each card. The words scale in difficulty from top to bottom. The active player, in a manner used in games such as Just One, flips a word card face-up so that only their teammates can see the words. The team selects one of the six answer words for this turn, then the player to the left of the active player starts spelling a clue that the team hopes to use as one of three clue words the active player can use to guess the answer word on the card.

The trick is that players have to find a way to get themselves onto the same wavelength when it comes to the clue word. The person who starts spelling a word has a good sense of the direction they want to go in…but then, the first clue giver has to hope others pick up what they are putting down, if you catch my drift.

Let’s say the answer word for this turn is “statue.” A group of Americans might start by saying the letter L. That’s what I did when it was my chance to start off a new clue; it helped that we were playing in America. Luckily, the other players in the circle picked up the scent right away, and when we finished spelling the clue word “liberty”, someone said STOP after saying the letter Y, giving the active player a handsome clue that would hopefully point them towards “statue.”

But one player went in a different direction for the next clue. With an air of confidence that broke almost as soon as he began spelling, he said the letter B. The player to the left of the confident one looked at them, confused. B? What word that starts with B might be related to statue?

Jibber Jabble makes things fun at this point, because a player could say “Jibber” and continue to offer a letter that, they hope, still keeps things on track as the team tries to spell an appropriate clue word. The player could just pivot instead; maybe they don’t know what B word the first player wanted to use, but they could come up with something else that fits instead, related to “statue” but maybe not what the original clue giver had in mind. Or, they could just say “jabble”, a tell that they have no idea where the initial clue giver was trying to go, followed by a STOP command to just throw the active clue into the dumpster.

And “jabble” is exactly what we did. On the strength of “liberty”, the active player did suss out the answer word of “statue” in the end. But then we went back to the scene of the crime. Hey, confident guy, what were you thinking when you said B?

“I can’t believe you guys didn’t pick up what I was trying to do there,” he said. “The Statue of Liberty is made of bronze, so I was going for ‘bronze.’”

“The Statue of Liberty is made of copper!” one person shouted. “COPPER!!!”

Those of us who had cell phones immediately went in for the fact check…and, according to the interwebs, copper is indeed the correct answer, at least in relation to the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. But this exchange, and my entire play of Jibber Jabble, was the reason why I recommend giving the game a look. At higher player counts, groups are bound to get some of these words wrong or have some sequences blow up in the team’s face…and it was moments like these that made me happy I got to see the game in its best light.

Party games need party-sized audiences to work well, and Jibber Jabble fits the bill.

Other party games hit the table during the week, and of the 20-game pile, we probably hit a dozen of them over the course of seven days. When we wrapped up the play of Size Wise, some family members called out the fact that we need to have more beach days where we break out party games old and new.

It’s always fun to contribute when the family is looking for ways to steer kids away from screens a few times each day. Gen Con always provides. Now I just have to figure out how I will convince myself to NOT bring some of the games on the SPIEL Essen 2026 Preview to turkey dinner this fall. Don’t worry…I’m sure I will blow it again this year!
Published — 03. August 2026 ⏭ BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek

It's Not the Games, It's the People

✇BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek
Von: whenindoubteatout
03. August 2026 um 08:00

by Justin Bell



I learned a lot by watching Rodney Smith this weekend.

Like many of you, I know Rodney from his YouTube channel Watch It Played. Prior to Gen Con 2026, I hadn’t met Rodney in person at any of the other shows I’ve attended as a member of the media. At Gen Con, I had the chance to join Rodney and fellow tabletop media writer Dale Yu of Opinionated Gamers for a demo of Mercenaries Wanted, an upcoming game from Cephalofair (Gloomhaven, Frosthaven, Founders of Gloomhaven).

Mercenaries Wanted was a lot of fun, as one might expect given the brand pedigree. But that’s not what I will remember from the experience, even with some of the best smack talk and commentary of the weekend.

What I’ll remember is what happened after we finished the demo. Rodney, Dale and I exchanged pleasantries and parted ways; as we stood up from the table, a group of maybe five or six attendees stopped Rodney to say thanks for the work he does on Watch It Played. Our demo finished late on the first day of the convention; everyone was tired, and with maybe an hour or two before the expo hall day wrapped up, I’m sure Rodney had other meetings to attend, and I was running off to a meeting as well.

However, watching Rodney’s reaction to these attendees was something special. Rodney treated them like a consummate professional. Made small talk for a few minutes. Was overwhelmingly kind, even for a Canadian known for his excessive kindness. (No one does nice like Canadians, right?) For a guy who I’m certain was stopped like this a hundred times over the course of the weekend, Rodney treated these individuals like it was the first time someone had ever complimented him for his work, almost like they were family.

This theme resonated throughout my time in Indianapolis over the weekend. In the board game industry, it’s hard to beat the quality of the people.



The people who work in the board game industry are collectively the nicest people on the planet.

I know that now, because I’ve been a member of the tabletop media space for about five years. The Rodney Smiths of the world are great, and I spent time with many other content creators at the show, from channels I both know and love, as well as newer channels, podcasts, and blogs that feature people I’m excited to get to know soon.

Whether you agree with their opinions or whether you enjoy their content is secondary, at least to me; their intention is in the right place. I am always impressed with the passion of these folks for other people, both their followers and fans as well as their peers. I ran into so many creators this weekend I lost count: David from Man vs. Meeple, Professor Meg, Keith Law, Zazu, Tim Chuon, Ryan Guerra, Stella from Meeple University, The Dice Tower, Chris from The Nerdy Sole, Banzainator, Paula Deming, Ezeekat, Alison and Daniel from Play the Game HQ, a bunch of the folks from Tantrum House.

All of them are wonderful. Many of them treat every convention like it is a college reunion, with big hugs available for both long-time friends and brand-new acquaintances. These folks fraternize with gamers just like Rodney does, and when I have been at shows ranging from PAX Unplugged to SPIEL Essen to BGG Con to Dice Tower West, it’s always fun to soak in their appreciation for their corner of the hobby.



Publishers are great, too. I spent 20 minutes catching up with Dave Campbell from Taco Cat Games (formerly Dolphin Hat Games) about sneakers, and card games, and of course goats and cheese and a little pizza. I ran into my former media contact from Gamewright and we talked about why she is considering a return to the tabletop industry after spending a couple years away. I talked to the current contacts at Gamewright about Buffalo, New York and my time growing up in Rochester. I had dinner with a friend from Trick or Treat Studios, breakfast with folks from Eagle-Gryphon, drinks with Mighty Boards and eggs with Luma Imports, and during those meetups, we essentially didn’t talk about games at all.

I love spending time with random segments of the gaming community. I spent some time with members of the Tabletop Gaymers Association. I did a fly-by with the speed puzzlers near the Ravensburger booth. (Doing a 500-piece puzzle, unseen and from scratch, in 22 minutes is absolutely not my thing.) The Northern Virginia Gamers community was running a table featuring Ares Zombies (Always Ready!) and I kept dropping by each day to see the progression of chalk outlines, dead bodies, destruction and scenery changes across the city map built up by the players.

I don’t live in Northern Virginia and I don’t even know what Ares Zombies is, but it didn’t matter; just chatting with some of the people playing to learn more about why they love the game is why I love the people…it’s not about the game, it’s about bringing people together who share a passion for anything, games or otherwise.



Sometimes, I get the chance to chill with game designers. On the second day of the show, I spent about an hour with Kevin Delger and Jacob Schacht, the men behind Asterisk Games and the co-designers of one of my favorite games of 2024, Railways of the Lost Atlas. We made a point to meet in person at Gen Con this year, even though we didn’t technically have anything to talk about beyond a swap of the duo’s new expansion, Landmarks of the Lost Atlas.

But like every other meetup at the show, the conversation flowed easily and we didn’t talk that much about games. Naturally, we did, at least eventually; Asterisk is working on something new, and I talked about my impressions about the show so far. But then, we really didn’t talk about games, instead flying all over the place about topics ranging from hotels to Minneapolis to other conventions to weight loss to great food and having the right groups for game night.

The Asterisk guys claimed that they are not in the same category of social butterfly that I occupy, but I saw none of that. Instead, I saw what I see every time I hang out with gamers: people who love spending time with other people, with games or without.



On one of the first nights with my Wednesday gaming crew in Chicago post-COVID, I remember a few of us trying to figure out what we were going to play that night. As usual, everyone had opinions.

“Honestly, I don’t really care what we play tonight,” I said.

“You must have something you want to play though,” someone responded.

“Sure, maybe; but I don’t actually come to game night for the games. I come for the people…and for the treats.” (One of the folks in that Wednesday group is a world-class baker.)

Naturally, everyone made fun of this statement, and it still took us another 20 minutes to pick a game. But the sentiment remained: I can find groups to play the games I want, but finding the right people to join on nights to play the right games takes some people a lifetime. Lucky for me, I’ve already struck gold.

This has carried me into my time as a member of the tabletop media and content creation space. I’ve worked in food and beverage, I’ve worked in professional services, I’ve worked in the sports industry, and I’ve worked in retail. Now that I’ve spent so much time in tabletop, it has become easy to see why I think the people in the board game industry are so unique.

These people get the chance to make games and bring people joy for a living. As a job, they’ve taken on work that allows them to create chances for fun experiences with a targeted audience. Creating art is fun, and finding people willing to join that adventure is such a thrill. I see it in the eyes of everyone I meet when I go to shows.

That includes the players.



I talked to dozens of players across my four-day run at Gen Con 2026, and the sentiment I came away with was pure joy. Folks were going out of their way to spend cash. Players called out shirts, hats, costumes, and shoes worn by others: “I love your tattoos!!” Some people waited patiently, sometimes for hours, to buy a single card or a single set of new dice or a copy of a hot game or game-themed swag, from t-shirts to underwear to swords to $10,000 gaming tables.

If we are being honest, Gen Con didn’t have a great show. Sure, things operated smoothly on site and people found their way to the booths that had their games. Events appeared to run mostly without a hitch. Cosplay was solid throughout the show and activities scattered between the Indiana Convention Center, hotel lobbies and Lucas Oil Stadium sounded like they gave fans what they wanted.

But from a logistics perspective, Gen Con was at times a bumpy ride this year. Downtown Indianapolis was essentially a big, orange traffic cone, with construction, hazard signs and closed streets littering every part of the city within a mile of the ICC. Traffic was so bad on Thursday and Friday that a few EXHIBITORS were late to the show if they had to drive in from hotels around the area. I stayed near the Indianapolis International Airport this year, and my ride into town on Thursday–normally a drive that should take about 25 minutes–took 70 minutes thanks to a comedy of traffic issues, closed highway exits, and morning rush hour volume.

And maybe you heard: a tornado warning turned into a roof leak at the ICC that damaged or destroyed some vendor inventory and served up a decent amount of water issues at nearby hotels. Rumors of a future vendor hall expansion only added to the worry that Gen Con might be trying to write checks its collective body can’t cash, to paraphrase a quote from the 40-year-old classic flick, Top Gun.

Despite these troubles, I rarely heard players complain about the extra baggage. The players came to play games, but more importantly, they came to experience something special with their partners, their kids, their gaming groups, and total strangers.

That’s because it was never really about the games, the traffic, or the high costs to make a huge trip to Indy. The players would do it all over again for the people, and I would too. Whether it is players, publishers, creators or anyone else tied to this space, nothing beats hang time with people who love the hobby!
Published — 27. Juli 2026 ⏭ BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek

Try Before You Buy

✇BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek
Von: whenindoubteatout
27. Juli 2026 um 08:00

by Justin Bell



Every time my family joins me at an ice cream shop, the same thing happens: one or both of the kids want to sample a bunch of flavors before they have to commit, especially if we are at a new-to-us spot.

Is espresso-flavored ice cream going to work? Let’s find out. I had never seen the ice cream flavor “Superman” before moving to the Midwest, so even I had to find out what the heck Superman-flavored ice cream was all about before making a firm commitment. (The verdict: not for me.) There’s a local chain in Chicagoland called Rainbow Cone, and the signature cone includes five flavors, one of which is “Palmer House.” What flavor does the term Palmer House evoke? No idea…so, yes, please give me a sample.

The kids and I need to know what we are signing up for before I hand over some crazy amount of cash for a single scoop of ice cream. Buying new board games is the exact same experience for me…I much prefer to try a game before plopping down the cash.

This is why I am so excited for Gen Con.



“The Best Four Days in Gaming” is the trademarked tagline for Gen Con, the long-running annual tabletop gaming extravaganza descending upon Indianapolis starting this Thursday.

There are many reasons why I love heading down to Indy for this show. It’s only about three hours’ drive from my house. I get to spend time with extended family who live in the greater Indianapolis area. I eat as badly as my body allows for four days, between the hotel breakfast buffet (yes, I DO need one more hot waffle), the visits to Steak ‘n Shake (not “and”, not ampersand…just ‘n, like pork ‘n beans), and “dinners” featuring bowls of pretzels and Cheez-Its at media events scattered throughout the weekend.

I love the cosplay, I love seeing so many familiar faces from the industry, I love the open gaming, I love watching the 10 AM “gold rush” on Thursday when people make their way into the expo hall (from above, of course, because I like to observe the fray from a safe space).

The main reason I love Gen Con is the games…specifically for the chances to demo games in order to make a buying decision. I use my time at conventions to chat with a lot of publishers and attend meetings and sit through presentations with other creators; that is certainly important, particularly to understand what’s coming to future shows. But in-between the business of the show, I carve out a couple hours each day and a few hours on the final day of Gen Con to demo as many games as possible, all in the hopes of discovering a new title that will bring me joy for years.

My favorite Gen Con demo experience took place at the Renegade Game Studios booth about ten years ago. That year, I made a beeline to the booth in the hopes of trying and/or buying a certain game, only to find that demo table completely full when I arrived.

There was an empty demo table off to the side of the main retail area in Renegade’s booth, and on a whim decided to sit down there as a consolation. That table featured the game Covert, designed by Kane Klenko. As it happened, the person leading the demo’s teach was Kane himself, and he and I played a round of Covert together. Date night with the game’s designer!

Kane wrapped up the teach then we played a round, and I found that I liked the game’s mechanics enough to be interested in a purchase. Covert is a dice placement game with a spy theme, with some recipe fulfillment tied to completing missions with things like guns, forged passports, binoculars, and recording machines.

I stood up after the demo and thanked Kane for the time. “You know,” he offered, “Covert works well at all player counts, but I actually like it most at exactly two players. If you think that fits for you and your wife, I would give this a look!” I was intrigued, because I did enjoy that single round and I thought my wife would like it as well, so I picked up a copy and paid that familiar slightly-over-retail convention price to ensure I left the show with the game.

And as it turned out, Kane was right. I brought Covert to a game weekend with some of my high school friends the week after returning from Gen Con, and we played Covert four times back-to-back; everyone loved it. To this day, Covert has been the game my wife and I have played at the two-player count more than any other game in our “hobby” collection. The wear and tear on our copy is significant, but the game still lands and always ends up being a blast…and most importantly, she never turns down a chance to play it, so game date night remains a thing at Casa de Bell.



I always take the same approach when I get to the expo hall at the Indiana Convention Center: walk every aisle, browse every booth (not just the big ones, but the small and medium-sized booths as well), and if there’s a demo table with open seats, I will try a few games I hadn’t heard about before. Sure, I will definitely try to grab a seat at demo tables for some of the “hot” releases at Gen Con 2026, and my hit list certainly includes a few of those big titles.

But from our Gen Con preview list of more than 600 titles, I’m excited to try a few that have many fewer thumbs than Entropy, the top vote-getter on the preview page so far.

Look, if you call your game Use Up All Your Sick Days, I’m gonna try it, so that’s certainly on the list, because I’m the weird American corporate soldier who really does use all of my paid time off. The publisher Playte creates the kind of intrigue that has me excited to get my hands on titles like Big Shot and Stereo Mind, especially with the latter title featuring a box that looks like my waterproof yellow Walkman from a thousand years ago (give or take). I’m doing a scheduled look at Horrible Guild’s new title The Amazing Journey, as well as a scheduled demo of Whisperwood and at least one other title that I am very keen to learn more about this weekend.

Happy Camper’s new game Bring Your Own Book had a blurb that was absolutely enough to hook me: “use any book to find funny out-of-context text to match the current prompt.” That blurb made me wonder if my kid book collection could turn Bring Your Own Book into comic gold. I don’t really know what Size Wise is about, but the cover art and the designer (Scott Brady) were enough to convince me that I need to find out how Size Wise plays.

The list goes on and on. dnup is a title I need to try. CGE always has massive amounts of demo table space so getting a shot at Drillers is high on my list. Allplay has so many titles on the “hot” list (seven of the top 10!) that I’m going to have to spend an hour or two during the show demoing the new-to-me games on display at their booth.

But it’s the empty demo tables that intrigue me most. Any chance to try a game for a round or two, spending 20 or 30 minutes hearing the pitch about a game that is not on my radar, is a chance worth taking. In an industry where new game releases are a sea of options that have become impossible to navigate, I’m always looking for the next Covert…and going hands-on is the only way to know for sure.

One year, a demo play turned into my ongoing love affair of City of the Big Shoulders. Another year, there was a discovery of the game Photograph. Some years, it’s the games that I think I will love, then do a demo and realize the game is not for me after all, which might be even more useful as I consider which games I want to buy and which games I need to skip.

I’m looking forward to the adventure once again. If you are going to Indy, enjoy the show!
Published — 20. Juli 2026 ⏭ BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek

Small Cards, Big Hands

✇BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek
Von: whenindoubteatout
20. Juli 2026 um 08:00

by Justin Bell



Like many others this weekend, I stopped by my local theater to catch The Odyssey, the latest big-budget blockbuster film from writer/director Christopher Nolan. I’m not a scholar of the original works by Homer…no, I just like to see big event movies, and after getting pounded with ads during both the NBA Finals and the FIFA World Cup over the last few weeks, it is clear that The Odyssey is being marketed as the big movie of the summer.

Two hours and 55 minutes were sunk into this endeavor; even now, a few days later, I’m still not sure where I land on feelings about the movie. (I DO know where I land on one thing about the experience: if I hand over $21 for a movie ticket, I better get trailers for other movies, and not four commercials telling me to buy more Coca-Cola or a Kia or to waste more of my time on TikTok.)

Combined with some of my thoughts about recent game nights, the movie did make me think a lot about Odysseus’ hands, strangely. Odysseus has hands strong enough to string a massive bow even at an advanced age. For Odysseus, building a raft seemed like a walk in the park. But if I had to guess, whenever Odysseus had to make the trek over to his local gaming cafe in downtown Ithaca, I doubt he could shuffle a deck of small cards.



Occasionally, I table a game that features cards sized outside of whatever you call the norm, based on your country of origin and your physical hand size. Although I wonder how large a man Homer imagined Odysseus to be (Matt Damon will have to do, for now), I think it is safe to assume the hands of Odysseus were powerful, weathered, and larger than the average Ithacan soldier.

I’m 6’1”, and I get the sense that I have larger-than-average hands for my size. When a game arrives and the cards are poker-sized (2.5” x 3.5”), my hands breathe a sense of relief…cards that size will be easy to shuffle, because my hands have been shuffling cards that size my entire life. I can feel my paws getting a little more excited when the cards are the size of a normal deck of tarot cards (2.75” x 4.75”)...big hands love a big deck, and a hefty set of tarot cards always fits the bill.

For me, nothing beats the cards just a hair larger than tarot cards: the standard cards used in the Dixit series, a hefty 10mm wider than a deck of tarot cards and illustrated with some of the best art in the business. My copy of Dixit, Dixit: Cérémonie (the one I grabbed at Festival International des Jeux in Cannes a couple years ago), gets love from time to time simply because of the cards, and shuffling those Dixit cards is a blast because they are so large.

When you first open a new game and the cards arrive in like-color sets or in numerical order (because they were printed and packaged that way), I love doing rounds and rounds of shuffling to properly mix the cards. If I have my Game Topper set up and I have a vault in which to safely spread and mix dozens or hundreds of cards, I might do a traditional “wash”, making a mess of the cards by spreading them all over the place, to then package them back into a proper deck.

But I prefer to shuffle the cards, using any traditional method you can think of: the “Overhand”, the “Riffle”, the “Pile.” Some people, myself included, find comfort in the stacking and restacking of traditional poker chips while considering their next move. A fidget spinner is much preferred over the handling of a cell phone. But often, I find myself quietly shuffling and reshuffling decks until I think they are properly mixed. It’s so peaceful!

The process of shuffling cards is easier if the cards are my preferred size. And if they are not, I find myself cursing the sky because the card size is too small to be shuffled easily by my big hands.



Remember the game Gutenberg? Medium weight Euro, currently resides in roughly spot 1,500 here on the Geek’s list of overall game ratings, very handsome wooden “type” pieces that players needed to fulfill order cards.

My plays of Gutenberg have mostly faded from memory. But the 140 cards included in the box? Those cards will always stay on the brain.

That’s because the Gutenberg cards were surprisingly hard to shuffle. The cards were oblong, 45mm x 90mm, presenting players with long, narrow cards that sat alongside a player’s board to inform what types were needed to complete a card’s requirements. For the large-handed, the cards were a pain to shuffle, and sometimes, I found myself passing the buck on shuffling responsibilities. (I could not pass the buck when I did my solo plays, though, and like many games, Gutenberg uses a very short deck for a bot’s decision tree that needs to be reshuffled constantly.)

Rankster, Ticket to Ride, Zero to 100, or Ipso? Same problem. Tiny square or rectangular cards that begged to be “shuffled” using the wash method, to make a mess of the cards on a table and then gather them all up again to form decks for players to draw from. My big issue with smaller cards sometimes ends up being fatal: bending these smaller cards to Riffle them might lead to me bending a card or two a bit too hard, leaving a crease that is noticeable during future plays.

I recently received a review copy of Devir’s new party game, One Round?. Fun game, but the cards are not easy to shuffle…because the cards are shaped a bit like pie pieces drawn from a circular center. That means the card sides are the same length, but the ends are different sizes. Watching players try to shuffle the cards was occasionally a separate dexterity challenge, and I blew it a number of times as cards exploded out of my hands when I tried to Riffle the cards into a clean stack.

Sometimes, my hand issues blow up even when the cards are a size familiar to my hands. While the game itself is glorious, The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era features the cardstock type that frustrates my hands the most: bendable, almost twistable, slick, waterproof cards from the fine people at Chip Theory Games. I’m a writer, but I should have made video content each time I tried to shuffle any of the decks from that game because it would have become the funniest video clip of the year.

Cards were flying all over the place if I didn’t concentrate on shuffling the cards. The plus side of these cards: they are indestructible. The negative? They are the only cards I’ve held that seem to have a mind of their own, constantly trying to scurry away from my control whenever I would try to keep them contained.

Maybe we need to add a filter to the BGG advanced search function so I can search for games based on card size? That might solve an issue or two down the road. It’s tough out there for the big-handed!!
Published — 13. Juli 2026 ⏭ BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek

The Annual Kid Game Clearout

✇BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek
Von: whenindoubteatout
13. Juli 2026 um 08:00

by Justin Bell



It’s that time of the year again: the Annual Kid Game Clearout.

There are a few requirements for the Clearout. First, you gotta have kids, although some in my network suggest that you just have to entertain kids regularly with games, so grandparents, some extended family, and even your local neighborhood babysitter might qualify.

Second, you have to have an area that is dedicated to your kid game collection. My wife and I used to live in a condo where the kid game area was a small portion of the IKEA shelving we used for that most universal of parental realities: the corner of our basement that we had carved out for nearly every kid thing in the house that was not in the bedroom shared by the children.

You know the corner: the 30 books that the kids were most likely to want to read as they fell asleep in your arms…the stuffies that doubled as both a best friend and a soft projectile…the loud instruments that the kids used to wake up guests when we had family sleeping over. All of that, plus so many other things AND the kid-friendly board games, all lived in this very tight section of the house.

Third requirement, and the one that drives action: you, the responsible adult, badly want to rebuild the kid game space with things that the kids will actually use now. Those things might be games, but depending on the ages of those kids, those might be hand-me-down clothes best for a 15-year-old. You’ve got to adapt to the ever-changing needs of the audience.

For a couple years, Roll & Play was a winner, before it gave way to The Sneaky Snacky Squirrel Game, before that gave way to The Quest Kids—a game that was so popular at home that we ran out of score sheets—before that gave way to titles like Outfoxed!, ICECOOL and Qwirkle.

So, it won’t surprise you that we play a lot of board games at Casa de Bell. And, lately, the kid game area was starting to make me a little anxious.



After wrapping up a couple review plays of Rush Hour Duel (the newest in the line of the Rush Hour collection of games, a line my entire family loves), my 12-year-old and I realized that we hadn’t done a Kid Game Clearout this year. “Let’s take a look at the games in the kid closet,” I suggested.

My 12-year-old responded with their signature eye roll—”jeez, I was kinda hoping to do almost anything else,” the eyes suggested—before joining me and the nine-year-old to look at the somewhat jammed arrangement in our dedicated activity closet. (Moving into a house was a big upgrade for us…now, I can just make the Nerf bullets, loose boxes of LEGOs, and oversized Chewbacca figures that are constantly rejected disappear simply by closing that activity closet door.)

My family takes roughly the same approach I use for The Maybe Pile in my hobby game closet. A portion of the games are deemed untouchable—a loosely-agreed upon principle tied to whether we have played the game even once since our last Clearout—and a portion of the games are immediately added to the donation pile. The games that land in the middle are then brought up to the kitchen table, and over the next 2-3 weeks, we play all of those maybes to decide if a game goes back into the closet or not.

“All I care about is Dungeons, Dice, & Danger,” said the 12-year-old. “Don’t get rid of that one. I don’t care about the rest.”

“So, what about Really Loud Librarians? I’m pretty sure you picked that up at a Goodwill store last year.”

“No, I didn’t.” (Then they paused for a moment.) “OK, I did. But we don’t need it any more, so you can give that one away.” It was later determined that the 12-year-old also added Power Hungry Pets, Balance the Baker, Slappy Salmon, and a game that was so unloved, It’s Not It!, that it was still in the shrink wrap. All of those were added to the donation pile.

With their contributions finalized, the 12-year-old ran off to do whatever preteens do on a Thursday night. We also looked at a few games that we are going to finally let go, such as our completely unloved set of dominos and our kid card game collection set that includes versions of titles such as Old Maid and Go Fish.

The nine-year-old, on the other hand, is a trickier customer. He plays games almost as often as I do; quite a feat, given that I play games 4-5 days a week. This also means he has strong opinions on what he wants to have access to, since he will pull in games that you didn’t think you still owned and ask to play it like we just played it yesterday.

First, we set aside his non-negotiables. That meant all the following games are not leaving, not only this year, but maybe ever: Pay Day, Monopoly, Yahtzee, Battleship, Megaland, Jenga, Mastermind, Scrabble, Bananagrams, Jungo, Rush Hour Jr., Dead Cells: The Rogue-Lite Board Game, Alphabeasts Attack!, The Game of Life, Forbidden Island, ICECOOL2, Outfoxed!, and every single 52-card deck in the house. (He occasionally plays solitaire at the kitchen table while waiting for dinner.)

He was presented with two maybes, and it was genuinely fascinating to watch him think through whether these games should remain in the closet.

The first was the awkwardly-titled Five Night’s at Freddy’s: Night of Frights! Game. I grabbed this as a review copy years ago from the team at Funko (man, I miss Funko) because my nine-year-old is an absolute FNAF junkie. Loves the jump scares from the games. Has read at least one of the books from the guy who made the games. Posters of the characters in his closet, which might lead to a good jump scare for the uninitiated. Knows all the lore. Obviously seen both theatrical releases on the first weekend they hit theaters.

But this game didn’t land for him when we first played it…and then he insisted that we hang onto the game for years. (The game came out in 2022.) Would he try to hold on for another year?

“I didn’t really like the FNAF game,” he admitted. “We can get rid of that one.”

Monopoly Deal was the next one. “I like the Monopoly board game more than Monopoly Deal,” he said. “Maybe.”

So, we added Monopoly Deal to the kid version of the Maybe Pile, along with the following: Reef Rescue, Imagidice!, Tell Me a Story: Mystery in the Forest, Sushi Roll (the dice version of Sushi Go!), Gimme That!, Super Mega Lucky Box, and Happy Little Dinosaurs. A smaller pile than usual this year, a testament to the kids moving into a catalog suitable for players of all ages.



The best part of tabling the maybes is going down memory lane one last time with a title that got a ton of plays during the game’s heyday with the kids.

The night before I drafted this article, I got the nine-year-old to agree to play three of the games in question: Reef Rescue, Imagidice!, and Tell Me a Story. I sat there looking at him differently as we worked through the games; it’s fair to say that after my dad’s passing a couple months ago, I look at him differently every day now anyway, but this was especially true on this particular game night.

Reef Rescue is a memory game that was also my introduction to the Daryl Chow / Origame catalog. Reef Rescue had a run at my house where it just lived on my kitchen table for weeks, as the kids reveled in matching up fish combinations, a three-tile coral reef set, and avoiding the literal garbage that we humans use to litter the ocean. It was one of the rare family games that taught a simple, meaningful lesson about the environment AND turned in a fun 20-minute play experience.

Reef Rescue still works and it is still a nice test for a father who feels like he struggles with memory games in the first place. “Reef Rescue is a keeper!” the nine-year-old said. Good news, then: he still likes it as much as I do.

Next was Imagidice!, a game that is so simple and so narrative driven that I’m not even sure I call it a game any more. 12 six-sided dice are in the box, and each die has six unique images. The instructions are simple: roll the dice, and players use the results to tell a story completely of their own choosing.

Imagidice! is a fantastic tool for teaching kids how to build a story with icons that allow for a great deal of creativity. It also plays in five minutes, so after my son rolled the 12 dice, we took turns selecting a die to tell pieces of a story that began with two men taking a trip on a train, who later realized they had brought their dog on the trip, then woke up on the train to discover that someone had thrown a horseshoe through their sleeper car window, to a moment where they shared a steak in a castle.

Did the story make any sense? Of course not. But was it fun to make up a story from scratch, using dice, one last time? Absolutely. “This was fun, but I think we can give away Imagidice!,” he said. The story we made up ended with the men realizing it was all a dream, but I’m thankful that the experience with my son wasn’t a dream at all.

The third game was Tell Me a Story, and I’m surprised to say that the nine-year-old deemed this one a keeper. In part, that surprise surfaced because Tell Me a Story uses a format similar to Imagidice!: players work together to flip a card from a 36-card deck, beautifully illustrated by artist Melissa Sweet, to cooperatively build a story that features characters that appear multiple times in different scenes in the deck. But the players have to build each card into a scene, and the general fairytale theme offers a lot of room to tell a fun story.

Our play of Tell Me a Story (now known as the Create a Story Cards series) was a shock to my system…because my wife and I used to be the ones to do most of the storytelling with the cards. Now, my nine-year-old reads so many books that he has become the kind of ace storyteller that made it easy to pass the baton back and forth to build up a story.

During our play, it was Toad’s birthday (the first card we drew had a birthday cake), and the rest of our story ran wild as we built up a narrative around a birthday guest list, international visitors, a talking fish, and a jewel thief who wanted to use the birthday location to stash a collection of rare diamonds.

Moments like these with your kids are hard to beat, and the next morning, my mind was still buzzing as I watched my child grow up a tad. I’m excited that he wants to keep Tell Me a Story…because maybe he’ll actually want to play it again. Maybe he’ll use moments like these to build his storytelling skill set at school. Maybe he’ll end up being a writer or an artist instead of a soulless corporate director like me.

A man can dream. For now, there are more games to play. It’s all about creating those memories…and creating more space in the activity closet.
Published — 06. Juli 2026 ⏭ BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek

Illustrator Avenue: Bartek Jędrzejewski, PHALANX

✇BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek
Von: whenindoubteatout
06. Juli 2026 um 08:00

by Justin Bell

Welcome back to Illustrator Avenue! In this edition, I spoke with Bartek Jędrzejewski, who serves as the Art Director, Illustrator, and UI Designer at PHALANX, the publisher of wargame titles such as Purple Haze, Successors, and Keep 'Em Rolling: 1941—Race to the Rhine.

Bartek and I first met online before trading correspondence offline to build this interview. Enjoy! And if you like this series and/or are an illustrator or graphic designer, please reach out. I’d love to chat about future features in this series.



Justin Bell (JB): Hey there Bartek! Thanks for agreeing to be a part of this interview series. I see that you have tabletop artist credits that date all the way back to Dominant Species, released in 2010. Before tabletop, what were you doing prior to your time in the industry?

Bartek Jędrzejewski (BJ): Hi! First of all, thanks for having me—I’m really happy to be part of the series.

Regarding Dominant Species—that actually wasn’t my first project and it happened much later than 2010, which was the year when GMT initially released the game. We published the Polish version in 2023, while also giving it a complete visual redesign. Later we also published our new version for the French market and the sequel, Dominant Species: Marine, both in Polish and French.

As for my beginnings—they were pretty humble :). Drawing and creative endeavours were always important for me. I started as a freelancer around 2015—at first it was small gigs—some concept art, simple (and not very good) illustrations and random graphic design work. Since sometimes it was financially rough (who would have guessed, right?), I also took some graphic side jobs, such as ads, posters or a menu for a Vietnamese restaurant for example.

Honestly, I couldn't really afford to be picky back then. At the same time, I was constantly learning and practicing. Trying to improve my illustration skills and understanding of art, visual storytelling and design. As time passed, I got more commissions from the tabletop industry and also got in contact with PHALANX. At first we worked on a commission basis for a couple of projects, but in 2019 they invited me to join their team full-time. Fast forward to today and I'm still working with them:)

***

JB: Many of the titles you’ve supported look like historical wargames, so let’s start there. What periods of history intrigue you most? Based on where you live, are there any past conflicts that feature Poland in your work? Given the wide range of games you’ve illustrated over the years, I’m always excited to meet a history buff!

BJ: Yeah, I’ve always been interested in history, although I probably wouldn’t call myself a hardcore history buff. Funny enough, the deeper I got into working on historical games, the more interested I became in the actual subjects behind them.

I really believe that if you want to portray a culture or a historical period well, you need to spend time understanding it first. Thorough and deep research is a very vital part of any project, even if I’m “just” working on visuals for a board game. It helps in capturing the atmosphere of the era, avoiding clichés, and making more conscious artistic decisions. And to be honest history on its own can be just fascinating once you start digging into it.

Luckily, there are a lot of history enthusiasts on our team who are always ready to recommend books, references, or point me in the right direction. The same goes for many game designers I’ve worked with, especially in historical games, people are often incredibly passionate and knowledgeable. So far I have only positive experiences collaborating with them.

As for my favorite historical period—that changes constantly, also due to whatever project I’m currently working on. Lately I’ve been fascinated by Japanese history and culture. It actually started a few years ago when I picked up Gai-Jin by James Clavell (Shōgun). Later, when I got the opportunity to work on the game Sovereign: Shōgun which is set in feudal times In the Land of the Rising Sun, I started reading everything I could get my hands on: books, recommendations from friends, historical essays, documentaries. I kind of fell down the rabbit hole.

Of course, working for a publisher based in Poland, the country's rough history is also present in some of the games we have been working on. Titles like Coalitions, Coalitions: Raison d'Etat, or 1920: Nest of Eagles touch on particularly important and difficult moments from our perspective. There are also some very interesting projects that are cooking right now and reference Polish history (or an alternative version of it), but I'm afraid I can't tell more about it at the moment ;)

***

JB: What types of games do you like to play, outside of your work as an artist? Maybe more importantly, how often do you find the time to play games? What do your playgroups look like? And what is your all-time favorite title?

BJ: Lately, between family life and work, it's hard to squeeze in enough time to play as often as I would like to. But whenever I do get the chance, I usually gravitate toward games which revolve around player interactions. I prefer games where the tension and uncertainty comes from the unpredictability of other players' decisions, rather than from random dice rolls or lucky card draws. I always had a high regard for games that are easy to learn, but hard to master. The ones with elegant and simple mechanics that create depth naturally, instead of overwhelming players with a multitude of possibilities and a whole set of actions, where the player's task is only to calculate and find the optimal solution to score the most points. I rather appreciate systems that feel intuitive and purposeful, where mechanics are not only "holding" the game, but also help to build the story.

That being said, the kind of games I play depends heavily on who I’m playing with. When I'm with seasoned players playing some strategic and interactive titles I will enjoy fierce rivalry, skulduggery and backstabbing. At home, playing with my wife or kids we usually choose casual games, but that doesn't mean the sessions are less fun.

As for my all-time favourite, I don't think I have the one and only number one game yet - maybe it's still somewhere out there, waiting to be discovered (or designed). If I had to still choose my top games, then I would go with Dune: Imperium, Dominant Species: Marine or Root. For lighter titles, I would go with Dominion, Carcassonne or The Quest for El Dorado.

***

JB: Who are some of your favorite tabletop artists? How about your favorite graphic design and UI work in the industry? I love learning more about what work other artists admire from afar.

BJ: Uff, that's a tough one, since there are so many incredible artists in tabletop right now. In general the games are getting prettier and more visually ambitious each year and publishers, fighting for our attention, are serving us real feasts.

Lately, I've been mesmerized by The Old King's Crown—the worldbuilding, visual style, storytelling and pure draftsmanship is at an incredible level. I also love how cohesive the art with the mechanics is—the whole product tells a great and consistent story—I think it's one of the most visually striking games out there, if not THE most striking one.

In general I appreciate when illustrations, typography, UI, iconography, and overall art direction all feel like parts of the same world. When a game achieves that level of consistency and cohesion, it becomes more than just “good-looking”, it becomes immersive. There is a threshold at which you stop simply playing the game and start genuinely "experiencing" it. Visuals, UI and UX are key in achieving that, I think.

I also believe that good art direction follows the rule that it's better just to imply things that don't need to be explained. Nicely executed but generic and "obvious" illustration gets boring fast and honestly doesn't bring much of an essence to the game. For me if it doesn't serve a role in a whole product it doesn't belong there. The games that I find great in terms of its visuals are usually the ones willing to take creative risks and establish a strong visual identity of their own. Harmonies is a great recent example of that approach.

And while I admire the work of established artists like Ian O'Toole, Andrew Bosley or Vincent Dutrait (who doesn't, right?), I always try to look for inspirations in other areas of art and design. For example, when I was working on the UI for Coalitions (a diplomatic/war game set during Napoleonic Wars) I spent a lot of time studying architecture and Empire-style furniture designs from the era. There were whole rooms prepared for Napoleon with richly decorated tapestries, chairs, cushions, etc. and some of those beautiful designs lended itself to the final look of Coalitions. When I was working on HUANG, a game based in ancient China, I spent probably too much time scrolling through online collections of the British Museum or The Met. It was an important part of the process though and I found a lot of references while doing that.

***

JB: I’m always intrigued to learn more about when an artist is brought into the fold during a game’s development cycle. Based on your work at PHALANX, when do you typically get involved? And how many projects are you juggling at any one time? For example, I see that Coalitions has both a base game and a number of expansions.

BJ: That changes from project to project, but I usually get involved during the development stage, before open playtesting begins. Thanks to that I can witness the process of creating the mechanics and start to think about its visual representation. Getting early onboard is especially important if we want to work on the UX part of the game, because this is the part where the tasks and responsibilities of developer/author intersect with my field. Good UX and UI design is intertwined with the mechanics and shapes how intuitive the game feels to play. My role is usually to analyze the flow of information and figure out how visuals can support the player experience without overwhelming it.

But honestly every project is a bit special and has its own specifics. For example with Purple Haze, much of the interface solutions were made by the author, Bernard Grzybowski. My task was just to refine, beautify and update the design according to the developers' changes. On the other hand, I got to play Coalitions long before I started working on it. Also I was not the only illustrator involved in that project. I did the illustrations for the base game, but for the expansions we outsourced them to other artists. Part of my work was to find the right people, prepare briefs, give feedback and help them bring it to the finish line. That aspect of the job—collaborating with other artists and shaping a unified visual direction—is something that happened in a couple of other projects and I’ve really grown to enjoy it over the years.



JB: Let’s talk about an upcoming project that you are working on. Walk me through an image from the game; how did this go from concept to what it looks like in the game’s final production?

BJ: Sure! So this is a box cover I created for one of our upcoming titles.



The game's called Dust in the Wind and it's a spiritual successor to Purple Haze: a party-based, story-driven, RPG-like experience. Dust in the Wind is set in the Wild West, in the early 1870s and players take on the role of cowboys and cowgirls who will wander this land in search of fame and fortune.

Because the game is heavily narrative and draws inspiration from Western films, we wanted the cover to feel almost like a movie poster. Something that gives the gist of the atmosphere, story and characters from the plot and at the same time is eye-catching and visually striking. However, we didn’t want to blindly follow conventions and typical clichés, but rather create something that breaks away from the typical Western style imagery, something that can stand on its own.

The creative process usually starts with some rough sketches and composition ideas.



I thought about what kind of characters and situations I wanted to show, and then did simple comps. This is probably my favorite stage of the whole process, since it is basically experimenting, guessing, and quick-sketching. It's the time where every idea is welcomed, nothing is precious yet and I can jump between different ideas quickly. Basically it's a kind of controlled chaos.

Once I feel like I've explored enough paths, I refined and polished the strongest comps, and presented them to the rest of the team. Together we discussed what works best and chose the direction we wanted to follow.







(A note about these storyboard titles: Red West was just a working title for this game. Later we decided to change it to Dust in the Wind.) After that it's time to go back to my studio and start the last part of the process. For this project I decided I want to first draw the characters by hand. I started with pencil sketches and then moved to inking.





When it comes to drawing I feel more comfortable with traditional mediums—the feel of a moving pen on paper is unique and simply joyful (and art without fun doesn't count). I was not really worried about small mistakes or imperfections; I knew I could fix that later, when I bring everything into digital form. After doing that came the most time consuming process: coloring, rendering, detailing, and finalizing. At this stage I wasn’t making many compositional changes, since they are too time-costly. The earlier sketching phase was really where most of the major decisions were made. After many hours of scribbling, tweaking, overpainting and drinking coffee, the illustration is ready.



A big thanks to Bartek for spending some time answering my questions for this interview. Also, a big thanks to the team at PHALANX for giving me some time and space to work with Bartek on a discussion about an upcoming title. You can check out the complete PHALANX catalog at https://phalanx.co.uk/.

—--

Are you an illustrator and/or graphic designer involved in the creation of images and iconography for the tabletop space? Please reach out! I’m building up a repository of people interested in contributing to this series. Just message me here on BGG and we’ll get to work. Thanks for reading!
Published — 29. Juni 2026 ⏭ BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek

The Shiny New Toy

✇BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek
Von: whenindoubteatout
29. Juni 2026 um 08:00

by Justin Bell



Let’s talk about stuff for a moment, shall we? Because while we sometimes like to talk about how much we love playing games, today we’re going to remind ourselves why it is so much fun to just open the daggone box.

When a new game arrives—be it a deck of cards, or something bigger—I love to spend time absorbing the total package. That starts with all that stuff, a process that begins as soon as I rip off the shrink. In the case of a new game like Revenant, you sit back and really marvel at how far game production has come, especially when companies like Mindclash Games partner with Panda Game Manufacturing to get every single bit of the production and storage solution process just right.

Mindclash sent a review copy of the Admiral Edition of Revenant a couple weeks ago. I decided to set the game aside until I returned from a family vacation to spend an evening sifting through the goodies. I can see why so many BGG users are happy with their new toy based on the comments I see here on our site as well as other distant corners of the interwebs. It reminds me of the many reasons why I think tabletop production is at its peak. From a production perspective, there’s no better time than now to be a fan of these glorious, and admittedly somewhat overdone, packages.

My rule is simple: when it feels like everything in the box is one step too far, that means a company absolutely nailed it.



With Revenant, that starts with the box. It’s big, maybe even too big, with a sharp image of an endangered spaceship on the cover that can be seen from across the street. Revenant’s cover announces itself from across a large living room. It shouts “play me” from its position on a high shelf at your local board game cafe. The box is too big…and perfect for the purposes of this discussion.

Did I need both plastic Voidborn ship miniatures AND cardboard Voidborn tokens? Absolutely not…which also means I have just enough ships for the moment when my nine-year-old gets his hands on the Revenant box and decides to have a miniatures battle between the ships from the Voidfall Galactic Box and the ships from the Revenant box. It’s good to have options when your kids destroy your stuff.

(An aside: I know that some of you really do prefer the cardboard options in both Revenant and Voidfall over the plastic minis. Fine. Let’s just agree to disagree and move forward as friends.)

I don’t want a storage solution sheet or reboxing video. I want a full color, written guide that takes me through where each little bit, where each oblong cardboard bit, where each set of tarot-sized cards should go. Publishers can’t skimp on this. When I say deluxe, we mean deluxe. I want to feel like I just strolled onto the 18th green at Augusta National, living that country club life with all the fixins. I want to feel like a VIP, like the restaurant only exists to serve me. That “Employee of the Month” parking spot? It’s mine…all mine, every month, not just this one.



If I pony up Admiral, Deluxe, Ultimate, Kingpin, Anniversary, or Collector’s money, I want to see that money on my table and feel it in my soul. That means I need to know how to put away 400 components, from the people that built the storage solution, without the need to go online to watch my neighbor Stu doing it from his poorly-lit basement. (Stu’s a good guy. He just needs deluxe lighting to show us a deluxe unboxing, right?)

Oh, and that storage solution? I want it to look like the one I have in the Revenant Admiral Edition. Spaces for both the big stuff and things as small as a single token or a set of four small cards. Sections for each player’s bits. Pockets deep enough to comfortably fit cardboard components, both to place these tokens but also to easily get them out. Plastic covers that seal each layer real tight, because I am definitely taking this game to a friend’s house and need to ensure I can whip that thing out and get it set up quickly for the nerds in my life.

I’ll even take a little foamcore or sturdy cardboard to use around the edges, so that my rulebooks and my player mats and my common boards and my market boards and my solo boards and my player aids don’t move around when my car hits a speed bump at just the wrong speed. (I blame the bump, not my bad driving.) I’ll even accept a little “lid lift” as long as the bits don’t move around inside the box.



While I was arranging some of the Revenant cards, I found myself once again marveling at the graphic design from Ian O’Toole and the Mindclash team, some of which has carried over from the artist’s world-class work on Voidfall. (It’s shocking how well this works in Voidfall, isn’t it? For a game that has four rulebooks, I’m amazed to find that I never need to relearn the game thanks to the excellent iconography.)

Some of that marveling was also tied to the unnecessarily high quality of the card stock. I found myself sorting the Scanner and the Operations cards, flipping each one, making sure there were words or icons on the backs, as if the cards would have shown up accidentally blank or something. The cards look good in the light and feel great in the hands.

Should the unsleeved cards feel this good? No. That means the card stock is one step too far…which means it is just right.

All this deluxe toy business made me think back to some of my favorite all-in editions over the last couple years, ones I have bought, titles I have received as review copies, games I’ve been lucky enough to play thanks to the people in my network.

Nothing beats the moment a friend opened their Legendary Edition of Dwellings of Eldervale years ago. Things that we know to be standard now weren’t quite the standard five or six years ago, from a Game Trayz storage solution to a fancy rulebook to a box that, when thrown at just the right velocity, could take out an intruder thanks to the sheer weight of the thing.

But the Legendary Edition of Dwellings of Eldervale is legendary for another reason: miniature standee bases with sound effects built in. I don’t want to just see a large demon, troll or Kraken on the board…I want to hear it! Did these toys need sound effects? Of course not…which means we need to have them.

(Yes, I continue to remind the fine people at Cardboard Alchemy that Andromeda’s Edge—also known in my circles as “Dwellings, in space”—only missed on one part of their own gloriously massive All-In Deluxe edition: raiders like the Mortality Sphere need a base where I can hit a button and hear a sound effect. EVERYONE knows that this is a requirement. It is a requirement, because it is completely and totally unnecessary…meaning, you guessed it, that it is completely necessary for the needs of myself and every other self-respecting, dice-chucking fan of Andromeda’s Edge.)



I recently reviewed the Arkwright Anniversary Edition over at Meeple Mountain, and after finishing my review plays, I gave the game to a friend in my network. When this friend saw the rulebook, we both joked about the unbelievably massive size of the 50+ page manual. It feels like you are reading a copy of the 1982 Sears gift catalog (not Seers Catalog, but Sears, Roebuck & Co.!). The rulebook is so large and so readable and rich with so many pictured examples that I can’t think of another rulebook that went out of its way to be ridiculously, gloriously deluxe.

“That means the rulebook is just right,” I said to an empty room.

Sweet Lands. Oh my goodness, Sweet Lands! I still can’t believe how ridiculous the Sweet Lands components are, in part because the game’s components are the same in both the retail and the Deluxe version. (The Deluxe version has minor additions, such as card sleeves and different player tokens.) I’m not even sure I recommend playing Sweet Lands so much as I recommend seeing the production in person. The game looks fantastic, all the wooden bits look fantastic, and the cards are gorgeous, with illustrations that made me sit and stare for long stretches.

Everyone in my circles knows about titles like Galactic Cruise and Luthier, but I like that the publishers of those games (Kinson Key and Paverson, respectively) have branded themselves as newer publishers who care about both form and function in equal measure. That means everything about those productions feels over the top, in a way that makes those games easier to table. The games play well and they look sensational.

As I was putting the Admiral Edition of Revenant away, I snuck another look at the Tray Manual to make sure I had everything in its proper place. (Mindclash really does these Tray Manuals better than anyone; between Voidfall, Perseverance, and Revenant, putting the game away is almost as much fun as setting it up.) Signed, sealed, and delivered back to my review game stack, I admired the box one last time before making my way to bed.

Now the real fun begins: getting a game that looks great to the table, in the hopes that the game’s gameplay matches its stellar production.

Breaking out those shiny new toys is such a thrill. What’s your favorite deluxe version of a game? Share it in the comments…I’m excited to hear more about the toys you tabled this weekend!
Published — 22. Juni 2026 ⏭ BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek

The Body Clock is Set

✇BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek
Von: whenindoubteatout
22. Juni 2026 um 08:00

by Justin Bell



Ray Charles and I agree: night time really IS the right time, particularly when it comes to my energy level.

Some of that is tied to the fact that I have children (ages 12 and 9) and I have a wife, all of whom typically go to bed by 9 or 10 PM every night. That means Dedicated Justin Time starts around 10, and I try to squeeze a lot in between 10 PM and maybe 1 AM every day.

In some ways, nights for me start as soon as my typical weekend afternoon siesta ends around 4 or 4:30 PM, because I try to take a nap each day on the weekends and select days during the week, especially if I can find or create a gap somewhere each afternoon when “that 2:30 PM feeling” kicks in.

So even though I love mornings, I find that my body’s peak energy sweet spot typically runs from about 5 PM until 1 AM. I have a passion for things like happy hour, dinner parties, evening networking events, and the Chicago nightlife. I also have a passion for playing board games at night, typically starting after 7 PM and running late, if I can find the right people to hang with me.

For me, the body clock is set. Board games exist in my world as an evening activity, and that activity is not limited to playing lighter fare at night either. In fact, some of my best memories of the last 10+ years are playing heavy games that ran late, that went past midnight, that featured people squawking at each other into the wee hours of the morning.



Conventions are sometimes worse for me because I will always find a way to start a game late when “free play” halls are open 24 hours a day. I have many memories of doing what I consider the absolute worst thing one can do at a show: opening a new treasure at like 10 PM, then ripping off the shrink and trying to table a new game by learning that game from the rulebook (“Justin…NOT FROM THE RULEBOOK!!”) when I have no business trying something like that.

You know the situation. “Yeah, I just picked up a copy of [insert new strategy title here]…we should DEFINITELY play it tonight. No, there are no teach or learn-while-playing videos out there because the game is so new. Yes, this is the right time to punch the cardboard chits, set it up then learn it by reading the 24-page rulebook tonight.”

“Is there any chance we finish this by 1 or 2 in the morning?” a brave soul, doubling as your group’s voice of reason, will offer.

“Absolutely. All we have to do is get through the rulebook; I’ll bet we are up and running in 20, maybe 30 minutes.”

Then you try to play the game…and find that you’ve just finished the first of four rounds, and it is already 1 AM.

But thanks to Ray Charles’ voice in the back of my head, my body is always telling me that night time is the right time to do just about anything. So, I’m the joker who tries this or just agrees with your plan—learning a new game from the rulebook is absolutely the right idea late at night during a show, so we should go ahead and commit to learning it. Strike while the iron is hot, even when it looks like everyone else is essentially asleep.

I still remember when a friend tried to get a game of 1861: Railways of the Russian Empire rolling, a first play we started at like 10 PM. (No, we didn’t finish.) A first play of Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory that went from a teach to a final turn that ended just after 1 AM on a Monday night? No sweat; those five hours just flew by.

Rebel Princess: Deluxe Edition at a convention free play space that started after midnight? Home, sweet home. A five-player game of Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy that started at 9 PM and required a teach? Count me in, even as one player hid in the corner of the map to earn a victory while the other players space-battled their way into a four-hour slugfest at the center of the playspace. (Naturally, that was the second game of a very long night of chucking dice.)

I’ve got dozens of stories like this, and I’m thankful that I’ve found other players who love playing games late at night as much as I do. That’s because I struggle carving out the time to play games during the day.



I certainly like the idea of playing board games starting at, say, 11 AM or noon on a Saturday. But the reality is that being a dad also means trying to avoid tough conversations at home.

“Honey, listen…my friend Beth is doing a game day from 12-6 PM. I’m thinking that, well, maybe I just bail on the family all day long, and you can run the kids to soccer, then band practice, then that third-grader birthday party downtown. We’re cool, right?”

Talk about a recipe for divorce! Instead, I try to carve out one day each month when I actually do bail on my family and tackle daytime gaming. Lately, that means starting around 4 PM with friends in the suburbs on a Sunday here and there. But getting out of parental responsibilities is tough and it never feels great, so I try to balance the day gaming option where I can.

Even if I wasn’t a dad, my body still loves afternoon down time. That makes my already-legendary lack of patience a bigger issue, so I try to avoid these trouble spots by not making critical board game decisions at 2 or 3 PM on a Saturday. Plus, no one I know plays games early, and I’m not a part of a 6 AM commuter game day where I can do card games with folks at a coffee shop downtown or something. (Maybe I need older gamers to join my network, since the people I know who love early mornings the most are also seniors. Some of those folks have already retired, so I’ll have to start making a list of potential gaming buds out of local retirees.)

Maybe it’s different in other parts of the world. There have to be people playing Grand Austria Hotel in an actual hotel lobby somewhere at 8 AM, right? Wargamers who kick off new campaigns at the crack of dawn? Post-yoga trick-taking game mornings with folks from a local gym?

I’ll keep an eye out; maybe mornings give me a chance to shake up the night owl formula that has worked wonders over the years.

In the meantime, nights will do. Thankfully, my body prefers late nights anyway.
Published — 15. Juni 2026 ⏭ BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek

Read the Player Aid!

✇BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek
Von: whenindoubteatout
15. Juni 2026 um 08:00

by Justin Bell



One morning this past February, I was standing on a scale in my bathroom, doing my normal routine of knocking out the weigh-in before getting the kids ready for school. The number that came back wasn’t to my liking, the third or fourth or tenth week in a row where it was not to my liking. After I helped get the kids on their way, I dropped about $100 on a 12-month subscription to the Weight Watchers app to start tracking my meals and committed to a goal of losing at least 20, and ideally 30, pounds by the end of the summer.

As of this posting, I’ve lost 25 pounds, and assuming I stay on track with continuing to build better eating habits, I should cross the weight-loss finish line soon. But I think a lot about that day in February; I just hit a breaking point, and I got so angry when I saw the scale that fateful morning that it pushed for immediate action.

A similar thing happened this week, across three consecutive nights of gaming where players sent me to the breaking point. This article is both a love letter to some of the recent changes I’ve observed from publishers, and some interesting opportunities for players.



Last Monday, my review crew and I had the chance to play our first game of Entropy, the new Board&Dice release designed by Tommaso Battista, Simone Luciani, and Nestore Mangone. The game doesn’t have much video content on the interwebs yet, so I taught the game live to a group for this four-player game.

Teaching a game on site and in person to any group of players is typically a minefield, a minefield that gets progressively more dangerous as a game’s complexity rises.

I’m still scarred by the experience I had watching a person try to teach me Feudum almost six years ago. I see in my Logged Play notes that the teach took 80 minutes, for a game that ultimately took only a little longer than that to actually play. When you see a game’s Complexity Rating land in the 4.5-and-above range, it usually means you are in for quite a sit as you try to learn a game.

Entropy is certainly not that—I think the game’s complexity rating here on BGG will land in the 3.5-ish range once you, the people, begin to share your thoughts in volume—and it took only about 25 minutes to explain the game’s core concepts, main actions, and end-game scoring conditions.

But one thing was key during my Entropy teach, a hallmark of how far we have come as a community: I taught the entire game from the included player aid cards, and asked players to follow along from the aid, in part because everyone had their own. (My only gripe with publishers for this article: please, please, please include one player aid for each player! Competitive gamers don’t have a “share” gene! This is why they like competitive games! One player aid per box is not going to cut it, people!!)

With our teach complete and our snack bowls filled—it was a Kit Kat “Bunnies” night, alongside zero-calorie sodas, a selection of bottom-shelf bourbons, and the Kirkland Signature Kettle Brand Krinkle Cut “Pink Salt” potato chip night, because Costco recently decided that the words “Himalayan Salt” were simply too difficult for a standard American consumer to comprehend—we got to work playing the game. But something interesting happened as we began play:

Everything I had just taught, from the basic movement of a player’s worker pawn, to how actions worked, to scoring conditions, to limitations of components that can be placed on a player’s planets, quietly left the brains of these usually reliable players, almost as if I had taught the game in Dutch, but everyone at the table pretended they spoke fluent Dutch as they nodded along during the teach.

“Hey, sorry about this, but before I move…I know you said that I can move up to three spaces, but in which direction?”

“If you look at the ‘On Your Turn’ portion of the player aid,” I began, “that’s where it shows the rules for movement.” (There are also chevrons on the board that point in a clockwise direction near each space, and we will come back to this.) The text on the player aid: “Movement: move 1-3 spaces clockwise. Finish on either outer or inner space.”

“When I take the Create Life action, I see the icon that means I have to drop the matching action marker there to take the action, so I’m good there. But how many cards can I discard to take the place of icons I am missing from my planet-star combo to play a card?”

“If you look at the ‘Actions’ area of the player aid, on the side that has the major actions—yep, that side—you’ll see that you can discard one other card with one of the four icons you are missing to play the card you want. And don’t forget about the part you see in that same section of the aid: each planet can only accommodate three life cards.”

Although my basement gaming lair is pretty chilly during the summer when the air conditioning kicks in, I could feel my temperature rising a beat. Oh, another question:

“I’m trying to understand the icons for my Focus cards.” (In Entropy, each player gets their own asymmetric, lettered set (A, B, C, or D) of bonuses, which power each of the game’s three major actions. Think of this like the Experiment boards in Nucleum, where players can upgrade some of the standard actions they take to earn additional bonuses.) “What does this first symbol mean?”

“I don’t know, but I also can’t see your Focus cards from where I’m sitting,” I commented. “What does your player aid say for the set of Focus cards you have?”

“Oh, right, thanks, I forgot that was on the back of the ‘On Your Turn’ player aid card. Looks like I get…”

This continued for the majority of our experience, although like all games, the rules began to settle in for everyone—myself included—by the end of our first game. And, I can’t fault human nature: it’s simply easier to ask the rules guru at the table a thousand questions, since they know the game better than everyone else does. You’ve done it, I’ve done it, we’ve all done it…although, I take listening to a teach very seriously, because I teach so often myself.

The problem with this is the play experience for the rules explainer. I have been a vocal supporter of not only thanking your tabletop teacher for spending the time to both learn a game and be willing to teach it thoroughly to new players, but also acknowledging that it is so difficult to both teach a game and enjoy playing that same game.

That’s not because the game is new to the teacher, assuming this is their first time playing it. That’s because the learners at the table don’t take the time to consider all the tools available to them while playing, and being able to answer 75-100% of the questions that can be answered. That starts with the player aid.

Some of you know that I write an article each year on Meeple Mountain summarizing not only the best and worst games I played in a year, but also summarizes my thoughts on the stuff we really care about: the best rules for deciding a first player, the best individual components, the best dice. One of the categories is best player aid, and I love how far player aids have come over the last 3-4 years as highly complex games get summarized on a sheet or double-sided cards.

Recent titles such as SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Galactic Cruise, Covenant, Arcs, Salton Sea, the Perseverance games, and La Pâtisserie Rococo provide excellent player aids, sometimes with little cues such as specific rulebook page numbers where a player can get more info even when the aid isn’t enough. (The aid for SETI is the gold standard in this category.)

Some of my favorite games of the last few years didn’t have a player aid, such as Clinic: Deluxe Edition and Railway Boom, but I can get over that if there are strong visual cues and a sort of board-based player aid on the main play area. Clinic has one of the best in the business, and Railway Boom does a great job with the information loaded into the auction area on the bottom third of the board. Sometimes, even a game’s player boards have enough turn action and clean-up/maintenance information to get by.

All of this provided information is great…but only if players bother to read the aid or look for other visual cues around the play area.

I’m certainly biased because I teach a lot of games, and I know how hard it can be for a person to spend a lot of time on the front end to get to know the game well enough to be comfortable teaching that game to others. It’s a lot! But players need to own their share of the investment. I’ve just spent 10, 30, 80 minutes teaching you the game…could you do me a favor, and simply listen??? Could you first look at the player aid before asking me another question, a question that may have just been answered because another player asked the exact same question two turns ago???



Over the next two days, I did another play of Nippon: Zaibatsu (with the upcoming Genro expansion) and a second multiplayer game of Entropy with two new players at a game night with a strategy gaming group in downtown Chicago. Many of the same things popped up, with questions about some of the game basics that could have been answered by the player aid, had a player acknowledged its existence first. (Kudos, as well, to the makers of the excellent “Player Handbook” included in Nippon: Zaibatsu, another game that can be taught from the player aid.)

By the end of that third straight day of beginning multiple responses with the prompt “if you look at the player aid...”, I snapped. (OK, you’re right: “snapped” for me is pretty light in the scheme of things. I happily went about my evening and watched the wild ending of the fourth game of the NBA Finals later that night…then immediately began to write this column.)

I’ve been thinking about ways to solve my own problems. Do I need to be more forceful with players as they consider their questions? Like my buddy John, should I start mining the Files area on BGG for every game in my collection that doesn’t have a player aid, so that I can start printing my own? (Thanks, BGG community; some of you have made great aids from scratch, particularly for older titles.) Where possible, should I send out PDFs of the player aid files in advance, so that players can have those handy on their phones while they study up on a new game?

Publishers have begun to do their part. And the drum I beat is not just tied to these medium or heavy-weight strategy games…because I say it every week: every single game needs a player aid. UNO needs a player aid just like SETI does. That’s because new players forget rules all the time. Heck, I forget a rule or two all the time with games I’ve been playing for years. Now that most games have player aids, we as a gaming community need to level up…and review those player aids when we have questions about a rule.

That’s the least we can do, right?
Published — 08. Juni 2026 ⏭ BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek

Some Do, Some Don't

✇BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek
Von: whenindoubteatout
08. Juni 2026 um 08:00

by Justin Bell



I have spent the last several months revisiting the game Rats of Wistar, a design from Simone Luciani and Danilo Sabia released all the way back in…2023. (Yes! A game three years old!!!) When I first reviewed the game over at Meeple Mountain, I talked about the many details that worked for me in a four-stars-out-of-five article.

Since then, I like where Rats of Wistar has landed in the overall scheme of the tabletop strategy gaming landscape. It’s holding onto a spot in the top 1,000 games on BGG (as of this posting, spot 930, a spot that might have changed even while you were reading this article), and that feels about right. The general consensus: Rats of Wistar is a solid way to spend a strategy gaming afternoon, with a strong action selection system. There are plenty of reasons why the game hasn’t landed higher; Rats of Wistar is a game most people in my network have heard of, but many have never pushed to try, at least not yet.

I suspect that, for a few players, Rats of Wistar is probably one of their favorite games. For others, even a single play made those players hope that they never see Rats of Wistar in a dark alley again (a dark alley with proper game tables and just enough lighting, of course).

I love going to the Ratings & Comments area on BGG to see what people think about a game, to see the trend line of a game’s comments after it first hits and then again later (months, and often years, later), to see how public opinion has possibly shifted. Our BGG community is a colorful bunch, so I often go in just to read what people think of a title after I have played it for the first time or after finishing a full review.

The commentary on Rats of Wistar is emblematic of how I feel about game opinions, too. Some people have games they love…and it’s wild to see how differently others feel about those exact same games. Certainly, no single game is for everyone. But I am continuously amazed by how widely opinions can vary on the same title.



Rats of Wistar is a lot of things—a worker placement game, a hand management game, a game about racing for public milestones, a tableau builder.

It’s also a game with two decks of Invention cards: 100 “basic” Invention cards, and another 80 “advanced” Invention cards, and all 180 cards are different. Some of the cards have one of five Skill icons: Intelligence, Agility, Stamina, Perception, or Strength. Some cards have no tags at all. Most cards are worth positive points at the end of the game, while a few are worth negative points. All the cards in Rats of Wistar have a cost to play, which includes a mix of resource costs (wood or metal) as well as conditional requirements, such as other tags from played cards.

The best Rats players typically play the most cards. I spent about six months lurking in the top 25 on the Rats of Wistar implementation on Board Game Arena, and I learned a lot from the world’s best players (mostly by getting smoked) on my way up the leaderboards. Now, I mostly play Rats for fun, because of the things many of you have called out in the Ratings & Comments area on BGG. That also means my stress level is lower—Friendly Mode has been a blessing—and this has not diminished my love for the game.

So, again: Rats of Wistar is a card game. It is a swingy card game, for all the reasons most card-driven tableau building games are swingy thanks to the random flop of new cards into the market and the opportunity to top-deck new cards. It’s also a little swingy right from the jump, thanks to a pre-game card draft.

During setup, each player selects a pair of Invention cards, one basic Invention and one advanced Invention card, with the player last in turn order drafting cards first. Rats of Wistar is a very tight action selection game, and going last even in the first round can be a detriment, one reason players might find themselves using one of their three first-round actions to flip turn order by visiting a space known as the Alchemist’s Hut location on the main board.

But the reward for going last is not a bad one, in a game where the right combination of cards to start the game could lead to some juicy bonuses.

In part, this is because there are three public milestones available at the start of each game. Sometimes, the milestones are driven by those card tags I mentioned above; these Skill icons might mean a game where you need to have two Strength icons to get a few points and an instant bonus. Or, you might be in a game where the first player to dig three rooms in their Rat compound (these are not your mama’s rats, friends) earns four points and a card draw of an additional Invention card.

But selecting cards first, in a card game where cards are a big driver, ends up being a big deal. I love it…and so many of you do not. A quick sample of the negative comments on only the most recent page on the game’s BGG Comments area:

“Starts strong…but devolves into a random luckfest unworthy of its playtime.”

“Not my cup of tea.”

“Very snowbally.”

“Was this playtested more than a handful of times?...too much hidden information on the board, too much imbalance among cards.”

I love these comments and respect these opinions. But, you know what’s funny? These are exactly some of the reasons why I love Rats of Wistar! Nothing makes me angrier, especially in games where there are dozens, if not hundreds of cards, where the cards in a game ARE completely balanced. I want cards that are intentionally unbalanced—some Invention cards cost more than others, but provide a whale of a bounty. Other cards in Rats of Wistar have crap powers…but those cards have the Skill icons needed to complete missions and objectives later in the game.

I’ve played games of Rats of Wistar where I was the one snowballing other players. I built up a hand of cards that played well into each other, then got on a run where I played a card which allowed me the chance to play another card for free, or a card that gave me a once-per-round power that tied beautifully into 3-4 other cards in my hand. In other games, I got completely trashed by a player whose hand management destroyed my game or built up combos that I could never compete with.

I LOVE Rats of Wistar for those reasons!



Nothing brings joy quite like spending 15-20 minutes over a lunch break scanning the feed on a game from my recent list of plays.

Whenever I pick up a new game and have a few plays under my belt, I like to dive in to see what everyone else thinks. The beauty of the BGG platform is that people love sharing their opinions here…the good, the bad, the ridiculous.

Sometimes, I come to validate those feelings with my own confirmation bias. I recently completed three plays of a new strategy title, and came in to confirm that some of the things I saw were also things that other players experienced. I also drop in to the Comments area when I play something I love but worry that no one else likes it…it might sound great that I liked it, but if no one else likes it, would anyone else bother to play it with me later?

But my favorite forums always end up being the ones for games like Rats of Wistar. Generally, people liked it, and most Luciani titles have gotten love over the years. Even with the negatives I sprinkled above, the reality is that most people have nice things to say about their experience with the game.

But when people don’t like a game, they flame it, and they flame it hard. I love reading the passion that some players bring to the table with their emotions in these things, and as someone who has also dropped a rant on the boards from time to time, I totally get it.

I really believe that I like a game more when there are some strong opinions, in all directions. I want to fight for the games I enjoy playing, and warding off some of the haters makes me feel a little better about my own thoughts, even in cases where I find myself in the minority. Everyone has a point of view, and now I just need to find other fans so that I can consistently get that game to the table.

BGG is a wonderful platform for everything: meeting people, sharing opinions, reading the news, learning about your next favorite new toy. And when it comes to opinions, so many people have so many interesting things to say!
Published — 01. Juni 2026 ⏭ BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek

Gotta Fit in the Backpack

✇BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek
Von: whenindoubteatout
01. Juni 2026 um 08:00

by Justin Bell



I’m a father in a one-car family in Chicago—we don’t drive quite enough to need a second car, and with bikes and a Vespa-style scooter (and a bus line, multiple subway lines, and my own two feet) lying around, it just never made sense to pony up the cash for another vehicle.

Maybe once a month, I try to play board games during the daytime on a Saturday or Sunday. Everyone I know who has kids accepts that weekends are chock-full of kid activities that make it pretty hard—”impossible” might be a better term, based on the season—to break away and sell a partner on the idea that chucking dice is way more important than back-to-back soccer games, music practice, and shuttling children to the local trampoline park for yet another birthday party with 22 other cake-loving rugrats.

Friends were hosting a game day over Memorial Day weekend, so I carved out the negotiations at home to do games for a few hours that Saturday.

“All good,” said the wife. “But I’ll need the car to get the kids around. Can you take the scooter?”

No sweat. That meant I was limited to backpack-friendly games. When you are a trick-taking fanatic, a backpack might be too much space…and when I was hitting game nights at a bar near the Logan Square subway stop in Chicago years ago, I wielded a Quiver card-carrying case. The Quiver was perfect because I brought a few favorites every week that served as fillers between the chunkier titles brought by others. The standing list at the time: San Juan, Race for the Galaxy, UNO, Honshū, and a standard, 52-card deck just in case Spades, Hearts or Gin needed to hit the table.

But I was prepping for a heavier Saturday game day with serious players, and since we had the day, everyone was tasked with bringing one game so that we could hit a lot of different titles. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I was starting a series of review plays of Nippon: Zaibatsu, so I broke out my go-to board game backpack and tried to put Nippon: Zaibatsu into the bag.

Uhh…nope!



I had a moment of panic. To arrive on time by making the 45-minute drive to my friend’s house, I needed to act quickly. Do we have any bigger backpacks in the house? No, although I’ve got a bunch of larger duffle bags or a big board game caddy, but I hate wearing that caddy when I’m on the bike. Does my wife really need the car? Yes, because she is toting two kids to different parts of the suburbs in the afternoon and Uber isn’t gonna fit.

I stared at the Nippon: Zaibatsu box. While the box is fancy, it’s a little too wide with its insert…normally, a non-issue, but for backpack travel, a no-fly zone. So I got to work.

All four trays of individual player components came out, along with the four player boards and the two containers with general resources like crates, iron, and cardboard money chits. Rulebook and player aids? Clearly a requirement—this was a first play for everyone—but I was worried that all that jostling from the plastic trays might scratch the finish on the cover pages. (This is mission critical...I’m a nerd and I have to treat my toys like royalty!)

The worker meeples had their own dedicated cloth bag from the game box, so I threw that in. Then, I grabbed my handy BGG microfiber drawstring bags (the ones with the circular bottom, obviously) for the other bits: factory tiles, upgraded department tokens, expert worker tokens, round markers, local market demand tiles, starting tokens. The solo bits and the expansion extras were left behind—I never include mini expansions on my first play—and that left me with a very reasonable set of items in the backpack.



The best part about Nippon: Zaibatsu’s footprint might be its strangely normal-sized board. As a man expecting a double-sided, tri-fold board with a decent amount of heft, I was shocked (in a good way) to find that this game’s main board is the same size and weight as the board for your thousand-year-old copy of Monopoly or Clue.

All of this made throwing the game into the bag easier. I zipped up the bag and made it to game day a few minutes late. No one cared that I had thrown all the game’s components, piecemeal, into the bag, and the initial concerns of scratches on the player aids and game manual were as silly as they sounded when I made the argument above.

The world carried on, as one would expect. But now that I’ve gone through it—how have I not faced this issue before? Shouldn’t I just look at all my games and pick the one that can be dumped, in full, into my backpack for travel? I already toss a lot of the packaging extras when I consolidate SPIEL Essen pickups and try to jam 40 “large square” (12”x12”x3”) titles into two checked bags, so this shouldn’t be such a stretch.

The truth of it is that I love arriving at game night with the original packaging. I love posting up at a friend’s house or a game cafe with the game box at one end, with the box’s bottom half tucked behind, then into, the top half cover so that everyone can see the title of the game. There’s something satisfying for me when I wrap up a game and put everything back in its proper place with some help from a friend or two.

In many ways, teardown can be just as satisfying as setup, even if I don’t subscribe to the same philosophy as our old friend Eric.

For now, I’m a little more comfortable pivoting when needed. And I’m lucky to say that I can usually avoid any issues on this front most weeks…because I’m usually the one hosting game night.
Published — 25. Mai 2026 ⏭ BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek

It's Old Skool Nite! Vol. I

✇BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek
Von: whenindoubteatout
25. Mai 2026 um 08:00

by Justin Bell

Some of you are familiar with The Dusty Euro Series that I craft over at Meeple Mountain: one-off reviews of Euros that are at least 10 years old at the time the article goes up.

I’m lucky to know a lot of players who love to dig into the crates to dust off classics from time to time.

Every so often, I not only play a single older title for game night, but a few all at the same time. I will write about those nights here and discuss the good times shared at the table. I know some players are obsessed with “the cult of the new”, but there are thousands of “old”, great games out there and I will use this platform to ensure people keep getting all kinds of games to the table.

Enjoy!



My man Dan recently celebrated a birthday by hosting game night at his place. While the chatter leading up to the night was tied to some of Dan’s favorite games, such as Marco Polo II: In the Service of the Khan, Caylus, and Lost Ruins of Arnak, Dan claimed that he was open to playing almost anything, as long as folks could make the quick trip to his house.

After we worked through some pizza, Oreo Double Stuf cookies, Dot’s Pretzels, and something that looked like it was healthy (I am told the word I’m looking for is “carrots”), we broke out the bourbon and got to work. Dan’s birthday turned out to be a party of six, so we decided on Uwe Rosenberg’s 1997 negotiation classic Bohnanza to start the night.

Bohnanza is one of those old games that I think a lot of people have heard of, but I don’t think a lot of players—particularly younger players or those who are newer to the hobby—have run out and tried. You can find copies online and I’ve seen copies in stores, particularly hobby stores that have a used game area, but it’s rare that I see Bohnanza used as a “gateway” game for new players like other titles typically used in those circumstances.

That’s a shame, because while I’ve only played the game twice, I came away from this recent play thinking the same thing as some of the other people at the table that night: Bohnanza might be the designer’s best work, and it is absolutely the most straightforward Rosenberg design that I have tried.

Bohnanza is a negotiation game, where prospective bean planters use cards to plant beans into one of two “fields” (simply two empty spaces in front of a player) to earn coins…most coins wins. On a turn, a player must play one or two cards from the “front” of their hand (right or left, but a player must decide this at the beginning of the game and they can never rearrange the cards in their hand), to either continue a matching set of beans from their fields, or wipe a set to create a new field.

Depending on the number of cards in a player’s set—and depending on the number of that bean type in the entire deck, which makes some beans more rare than others—they can wipe a set with enough copies to convert some of those cards into coins, with each converted bean equal to one victory point. After playing cards, a player draws two cards from the top of the deck, flips them for all players to see, then (usually) adds those cards to their own fields if they match before opening negotiation for card trades with their opponents.

It is this last point that makes Bohnanza highly group dependent. Dan is a part of my Wednesday gaming group, with a lot of jokers who talk as much or more smack than I do (hard, but possible), and who prefer the yelling and screaming portions of any game night. Spoiler alert: Bohnanza has a lot of those moments, particularly when players are jockeying for one more blue bean, or trying to negotiate black-eyed bean “futures” by making empty promises for favors later in the game (favors that are absolutely not binding), or yelling because someone’s earlier promise for red beans resulted in that player throwing said red beans into the discard pile to make way for a new set on her next turn.

(Yes, that last part happened to me. Yes, I’m still angry about it, despite the fact that another player and I shared the victory thanks to a matching number of coins and leftover cards remaining in hand. Grudges run deep!)

Bohnanza does run a bit long for my tastes. Our six-player game went for about 70 minutes, mainly because all six of us yelled as much as we could to convince other players that each of us had “the best offer”, every single turn. That’s a LOT of negotiating. But still…

“I think this is the best game ever made,” one player said when we were wrapping up. That player, a game designer himself, got a couple nods from others at the table.

It also reminded me of something else I think about when I’m writing game reviews: when prospective game designers (or even established ones) play games like Bohnanza and they, themselves, are designing a negotiation game, do they think about the fact that making a game as good, or better, than Bohnanza should be the inspiration to make something great?

It’s a fascinating thought.



The second game of the night was the second edition of Camel Up, released in 2018, although the original came out in 2014, ensuring that it qualified for inclusion in this article. (In our play group, Camel Up 2E is known as “the version of Camel Up with box cover art that reads Camel Up, not Camel Cup.” Long-time players know what I am talking about!)

For a few years after the first edition of the game was released, one of the Wednesday night guys would always start the night with Camel Up, because it can accommodate up to eight players and we always had a couple folks showing up late. This also meant that I came to despise Camel Up for a period of time; good or bad, I just don’t want to play the exact same game every time I come to game night!

Camel Up, like Bohnanza, is also a yelling and screaming game. One player, who had played Hot Streak but was seeing Camel Up for the first time, listened to the teach and wondered “did Camel Up rip off Hot Streak?”

“No,” someone said, since Camel Up came out first. “But you are going to get some Hot Streak vibes for sure, especially when camels start going in the wrong direction.”

That’s because the second edition of Camel Up has the same shenanigans as the first edition—dice, camels, a random assortment of ways camels can move forward by moving on their own versus riding on the backs of other camels, betting on camels to finish first or last in both a round or the entire race—plus two new camels, one black and one white, that are moving BACKWARDS all game long.

When a forward-moving camel lands on a backwards-moving camel, that might mean that the pony you thought was certain to win might get carried three spots backwards on multiple turns, throwing an already precarious situation into further disarray. Oh, and did I mention that in the second edition version, there are six dice in the pyramid dice shaker (one for each of the five normal camels, then one die for both the white and black camels) but only five dice are rolled in each leg of the race??

The winner of our play of Camel Up guessed on his very first action of the entire game which camel would finish the race first…and he was right, winning by the difference his total gave him by guessing earlier than anyone else, three points. Camel Up is a gambling game through and through, and having NOT played it for years made it all the more enjoyable.



At this point, one of the guys in the group desperately wanted to get his copy of the also-old, also-brilliant Reiner Knizia game Samurai to the table, so we broke into two groups of three. It was about 9:30 PM on a school night, so my dreams of Dan picking Marco Polo II were off the table. Still, I wanted to honor the birthday boy with one last play.

“I’m good for another hour or so,” I said. “I’ll play whatever you want.”

“How about Puerto Rico?” he asked. Two of us raised our hands to join him; I hadn’t played Puerto Rico in a couple years, at least not “IRL.” (I play the Puerto Rico app all the time, plus I’m more of a San Juan guy than a Puerto Rico guy; San Juan plays faster and serves as a solid filler in my home while scratching most of the same itch.)

Puerto Rico is no stranger to you, the fine people who read our content, as a former #1 overall slot holder and a member of BGG’s Hall of Fame. (Shameless plug: I’m one of the folks featured in the video.) But I swear I say this every time I play Puerto Rico, even when I play it by myself on the app or online on Board Game Arena:

Why doesn’t Puerto Rico hit the table more often?

The other guy at our three-person table hadn’t played Puerto Rico in so long that he needed a full teach…eight, maybe nine minutes later, we were good to go. The production of the original game is gloriously basic; I don’t believe in using cardboard money, so it was both a personal insult and a genuine hoot to distribute coins that felt thinner than notepad paper. Setup was done in a flash, especially with three of us, and we were up and running quickly.

Puerto Rico, like Race for the Galaxy and other games that feature the hallmarks that made them so innovative “back in the day”, uses the nuances of the active player advantage or “privilege” to such great effect. Just picking a role each turn—especially the ones that had just enough coins piled on from previous-round neglect to make them attractive—was a joy, picking up the physical role tiles to kick off a new set of actions.

I went hard on the Settler action and quarry tiles, piling up four quarry tiles in what felt like a blink of an eye, making Builder actions really cheap later once I got enough colonists in place. One player went big on production and market benefits, and was the only player to participate in the coffee and tobacco markets. Another player decided early on that he needed his own boat for shipping, so he bought a Wharf tile then piled up a nice array of corn, sugar, and indigo fields to create a handsome shipping empire.

Turns were moving quickly, just the way I like it. I got to socialize my terrible British accent by saying “well ‘allo, Guvna!” every time we passed the Governor tile, dictating the new first player for a fresh round of actions. Taking turns that benefited only me was also a joy, a joy shared each time another player did it to the rest of us. (Curse you, Dan, for taking those three coins on the Trader tile and selling the final item to the Goods Market, closing the rest of us out of making money that turn!)

Scores were close at the end: 52, 47, 47. But I was happy to see the birthday boy go out a winner. I blamed myself for tossing a bunch of corn into the ocean—bad craftsman and captain timing, and haven’t we all been there?—but I can fix those problems another day.

In the meantime, I got to bask in the glory of enjoying old games with friends. I’m excited to hear about some of the classics all of you got to the table over the holiday weekend!
Published — 18. Mai 2026 ⏭ BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek

Uh Oh...It's Getting Warm Outside!

✇BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek
Von: whenindoubteatout
18. Mai 2026 um 08:00

by Justin Bell



I checked my phone’s weather app for the upcoming week. The forecast showed a steady diet of inbound beauty in Chicago: lots of sunny days in the high 60s and low 70s (Fahrenheit, for my friends abroad), an outlook of blue skies, and a healthy dose of days where temperatures would rise into the 80s.

Most people in Chicago love it when the temperatures start to warm up; I still believe Chicago is the best place on Earth from Memorial Day to Labor Day. It’s just a totally different place when you add warm weather to the already solid roster of great people, great restaurants, great sports (well, maybe “good” is more appropriate for our pro teams) and great sightseeing, because we also have a beach ready to go when people don’t want to fly to places like Florida, and the summer street festival season is something else.

I, too, love warm weather. Unfortunately, when it gets warm in Chicago, every board gamer I know essentially stops playing games to take advantage of the weather. As a player, and as a game reviewer, it’s the toughest time of the year to find bodies.

***

One of my former steadies is a strategy gaming group formed during the early months of COVID. For a stretch of time, 6-8 of us would gather a few times a week and mask up to play games all over the city. The group was reliable, in part, because most of us had nothing else going on. We found each other strictly because of availability; the world had shut down, but gamers seem to always find a way to chuck those dice.

I’ve never played board games on a nearly daily basis like I did for the first two years post-COVID. I was playing games four, sometimes five days a week for stretches, especially in the dark days of winter when the best thing you could do was survive the trip from your house to a buddy’s place and find parking that wasn’t “dibbed” by some guy’s lawn chair in Avondale.

Even in that group, everyone scattered from early June through late August. It was like college let out for summer break, and you could only find your high school friends for drinks and mozzarella cheese stick specials at the local TGI Friday’s / Bennigan’s / Chili’s. (Gosh, I miss a good round of greasy cheese sticks.)

Nowadays, it sets in with my review crew right around the first week of May. I always put out the call the weekend before review crew night with the normal request: ”Games this Monday! Who’s free?” Usually, we fill seats within a few hours. But when summer approaches, the rapid response rate turns into a trickle.

“I can’t make it this week.”

“Yeah, I’m taking a vacation with the family all of next week.”

“Friends in town, we’re doing drinks on a patio in the city.”

“Out” (not even showing enough respect to end this already abbreviated sentence for formal punctuation!)

Now, some of this is the double-edged sword that I have set up for myself: I’m a nerd, but I prefer playing games with nerds who also have a pretty robust life away from the table. Part of this “mistake” is my own; I need more people in my life like me, who have kids, or are getting older, or have nothing going for themselves on Monday nights. (Like, seriously, who has hot plans on a Monday? It’s Monday, for crying out loud!)

And that’s usually in early May. By late May, it’s DEFCON 2 at my place. Review nights are so close to summer extinction that I begin refusing some review requests from publishers, because I know it’s going to be a challenge to get players often enough to get 3-4 plays of a new title in before posting a review.

***

Gaming at home is unaffected by the weather. My wife, or my two kids, or any mix of those three are around often enough on a rainy day or after Saturday morning cartoons or when I’ve tied the night’s dessert to playing a new card game. (“Yeah yeah yeah; we have ice cream coming up. But first…”)

Because I do at least one play of each review copy with the family, or we play a lot of the family classics for fun, I’m still playing games 2-3 times a week at home.

But for my other groups, those warm outdoor temperatures make it tough.

I love the Logged Plays feature on BGG. While I was drafting this article, I was curious about my recent summer activity, so I looked up my summer plays over the last five years. Each year’s lowest monthly count happens not in December for the holidays, or convention months like October where I’m out of pocket for a week or two. For me, it is ALWAYS summer.

In 2021, it was May, with 27 logged plays. 2022, it was March, with only 19, but then I went back and checked out why—I was in the final month of a job at another company, and I was out of town for almost the entire month. The second-lowest total was June, with 30 plays. In 2023, it was July, with 19.

You get the idea. Since a lot of the year’s big US releases hit at Gen Con, then the global releases hit SPIEL Essen, summer usually ends up being the time that I begin to clear the calendar for the hottest upcoming games and convention hauls. To cleanse the palate, I love to play games in my collection that don’t get enough love during other points of each year, and mix standing favorites with titles that can get a lot more love than usual, especially with the kids.

Last year, it was a solid mix. Union Stockyards hit the table, one of those fun, underappreciated one-hour Euros I love to whip out from time to time, in the family of Chicago-themed games that also happens to feature hogs, real-world businesses, and a solid, snipe-y area control battle. Stone Age came out! Rococo: Deluxe Edition was still great, and it was still ridiculously deluxe. My son fell in love with Mastermind and insisted on playing it a bunch in late June.

A few review copies got 2025 summer love as well. Since the Tiletum expansion, Prospect for Silver, arrived in July, that meant I had no choice but to get the base game out to refresh my memory. The same was true with Xylotar, an incredible trick-taking game, to prep for the Xylotar: Unhinged plays later in the month.

No matter what time of year it is, campaign game groups are really challenging for me. Still, I got in the first few chapters of Clank! Legacy 2: Acquisitions Incorporated—Darkest Magic before summer vacations killed off my campaign group.

That means the safest campaigns are with people who already live at the house…which made the first eight missions of Metal Gear Solid: The Board Game with my son a breeze. (“Snake? Snake? SNAAAAAAAAKE!!!!”)

Memories from last year are getting me hyped for the summer ahead, despite the lack of players. Fantastic Factories made its way to the table before dinner a few nights ago, after sitting quietly on a shelf for years. I mixed in a play of Brass: Lancashire with an upcoming hidden role game last week. I’m wrapping up reviews of a couple of the Pax titles from Ion Game Design, a family-weight card game called Circadia, and in the process of relearning Nippon on Board Game Arena, I’m also prepping plays of Nippon: Zaibatsu over the next few weeks. And now that Nucleum: Gibraltar has arrived, I’ll line up a few plays of that one soon.

So, I’ll still get some gaming in while the temperatures heat up. But, I won’t be sad at all when that cold air kicks up again this fall!
Published — 11. Mai 2026 ⏭ BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek

He Loved Being at the Table

✇BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek
Von: whenindoubteatout
11. Mai 2026 um 08:00

by Justin Bell



“Call me as soon as you can man.”

My brother’s third text of the day chased back-to-back missed phone calls. When I’m not writing tabletop content, I work as a program manager for a consulting company. Thanks to a meeting with our company’s COO and Global People Officer, it had been a busy, stressful morning. My phone was on “do not disturb”, so when I flipped the phone over, my brother's communication thread made it clear that there was a real emergency.

Sadly, my fears were confirmed. After a series of alarming health changes over the past few months, our father had collapsed at his home in upstate New York. Even though CPR had been administered relatively quickly, my father’s pre-existing health issues and the morning collapse led to a visit to the emergency room, which quickly became a visit to the intensive care unit.

The situation quickly became tragic. Dad never regained consciousness, and he was placed on a ventilator. Suddenly, machines were the only thing keeping him alive. I booked a flight to Rochester and arrived about four hours before Dad was set to be taken off of life support.

You always think you will have more time.

“Immediate family only,” the signs outside the ICU said. That meant just five of us—stepmom, half-sisters, my brother, me—spent Dad’s final hours in a small hospital room, holding Dad’s hands and shedding plenty of tears. We also did what we loved to do any time the group was together: laugh about the memories that have lasted a lifetime.

A few of those memories were about games.

***

My father was never the person who suggested playing games; in fact, he never seemed to even enjoy playing them.

As a kid, we played a lot of the traditional “roll and move” games with Dad, like Monopoly and Parcheesi. From time to time, we tricked Dad into joining something like The Game of Life. UNO? Obviously. The Rummy family was always lurking nearby: Rummy, Rummy 500, Rummikub, Rummoli (the Poker/Rummy variant of Michigan Rummy that I grew up with).

It felt like Dad was always working late, so games were usually limited to weekends, and my time with him was further limited thanks to a divorce that changed our family dynamic when I was just a child. For my father, games clearly felt like work, so he was less inclined to playing games and more inclined to other leisure pursuits—long meals, action movies, road trips, televised golf tournaments (which mostly doubled as “dad naps”, a tradition we carry on in my home today).

Later in life, Dad could occasionally be tricked into playing games, but there was a limit to how many rules he would bother to learn before throwing up his hands. Like the relatives of many players in my network, Dad seemed to hate just about anything that was “too complicated.” (This is only funnier because my dad loved to play golf—itself a very complicated sport—and he worked in complex management roles throughout his career. I get it: everyone’s brain needs a break. But often, the “too complicated” label felt like lip service.)

Occasionally, the sibs and I pushed Dad to try something new. Seven or eight years ago, I brought a bunch of hobby games to a Thanksgiving family weekend, and forced my dad to play Luxor, the Rüdiger Dorn hand management game. (Although I love other Dorn designs, such as Istanbul and Goa, Luxor is still the Dorn title that hits the table the most.)

Luxor is a relatively rules-light experience that plays in about an hour. The main hook: players manage a hand of five movement cards and a small pool of adventurer tokens, tokens that must be moved forward on a track that ends with a treasure tomb in the middle of the board.

On a turn, players can only play either their left-most, or right-most, card from hand to move one of their tokens toward the tomb. (Cards in a player’s hand are never shuffled or moved, only played when they reach one side of their hand.) At the end of each turn, a player must add a new card to their hand from a draw pile, which must be inserted into the middle of their now-four-card hand to give them a new five-card hand for their next turn.

“This is ___ ridiculous!” Dad said, after hearing the hand management rule two minutes into the teach. (I’m leaving the profanity out, for the purposes of a family-friendly website.) “This game has too many rules.”

Still, Dad decided to play Luxor with my wife and stepmother…and almost won, coming in just a few points behind the eventual winner. At the end of the game, he begrudgingly admitted that he had fun thinking through the best ways to move his adventurer tokens around the map to pick up treasure tokens and sets of cards from the movement track. The best part? Dad didn’t really listen during the teach, so he only ever played his left-most card all game long, and only ever added new cards to the right side of his hand.

My father also hated the idea of cooperative games. “I want to have a chance to win,” he would say, because to Dad, winning meant “beating everyone else at the table.” So, whenever we floated co-op games by Dad (The Crew, anyone?), it was a hard pass.

Now, Dad WOULD play games with a team…as long as the goal was to beat the other team. The day we got Dad to play Codenames—a family favorite for everyone else in the household—is still one of the most shocking moments in Bell Family Vacay history. Codenames is always a riot with my family; when a team’s Spymaster goes on a one-word clue run that scores three or four cards on a single turn, that story becomes legend. (Naturally, when someone blows it and gives a clue that reveals the Assassin, that kind of story becomes legend, too!)

Most years, Dad would politely pass when given the chance to play Codenames. But when he finally did decide to join the family for a play, it was a moment. He didn’t want to play as a Spymaster that first time—let’s give the man a “try bite” first, right?—but simply being willing to join the whole family for once was such a thrill.

***

Ultimately, Dad’s favorite thing about games wasn’t playing games at all. It was grabbing a newspaper—or later, his iPad, since even my father had to come to grips with reading the news in the present—and being at the dining room table while others played games.

My dad loved being near the action. He was constantly looking up from his newspaper, smiling at his family, watching them enjoy themselves, laughing along with the group when something funny happened during a player’s turn.

I recently went to a friend’s game night…not to play, but to simply sit around. I’ve done that a few times over the years, and lately, my work schedule has been rough and I don’t always have the capacity to do much more than sit in the same space as my friends. (I am very good, however, at eating your snacks, drinking your bourbon…or, both.)

A friend was running a game of Blood on the Clocktower, and ten adults laughed their way through hours of fun as they ran two sessions back-to-back. The friends asked if I wanted to jump in, to take on a character role in-between rounds.

“Nah, I’m good,” I said. “I just love being here.” Watching innocent friends get eliminated by their peers was glorious. Standing in a corner of the room with two others as they plotted their way into the next night’s accusation was a blast, too. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but just being around others as they had fun on a game night made me think about how much Dad must have loved just being in the room with his kids.

***

The five of us at the hospital were rolling, laughing as we reminisced about so many great times with Dad. As a group, we laugh with and at each other all the time, and we laughed at some of the funny things Dad used to say, some of the bad fashion choices of the last 40 or 50 years we could remember, that time Dad claimed to be on a diet while pounding eight pieces of fried chicken at a local theme park, Dad’s everlasting appreciation for the musician Prince, and took a moment to appreciate the biggest laugh of anyone I have ever met.

And, the times when Dad would settle into his spot at the end of a large table, a glass of Cutty Sark and a plate of cheese and crackers nearby, watching everyone else having fun playing games.

Eventually, the harsh reality of the hospital situation returned. A nurse walked in; a doctor joined her. We had a few more minutes with Dad before…well, before.

I got in one more squeeze of Dad’s hand. Everyone gave him one more kiss on the forehead, then the doctors did what they could to offer him a peaceful passing.

I’ll miss you, Dad.
Published — 04. Mai 2026 ⏭ BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek

Patience is a Virtue

✇BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek
Von: whenindoubteatout
04. Mai 2026 um 08:00

by Justin Bell



A few months ago, I joined two friends for a play of The Gallerist, one of my favorite titles from designer Vital Lacerda. (Also, Vital: thanks for the intel on hot spots in Lisbon. The pastéis de Belém were absolutely magnificent!)

A friend was celebrating his birthday weekend, so he was hosting an all-day gaming session where folks like me would show up in waves to play the birthday boy’s favorite titles. It had been maybe a year since I last played The Gallerist, so I watched a teach video to warm my brain up to the rules and reminded myself of some of the things I’ve seen work when I’ve won, and (more often) watched others do to win.

The host, who we’ll call “Schmeven”, had built a schedule for the day that was pretty tight. We’re talking two-hour blocks, with some games that were already going to push on the soft borders of that Google Sheet’s time window. The Gallerist was set for 11:30 AM, the first game on the slate. For this particular day, I was intent on arriving a couple minutes early, to help Schmeven keep the events on schedule.

I rolled up at 11:28 AM and buzzed Schmeven’s apartment. Walked in, sat down, and readied myself for the play. Schmeven, who, like me, ensures that the first game of the day is locked and loaded when guests arrive, had done his part and the game was set up and ready to go.

Then Schmeven got a text. Our third player, who we’ll call “Slim”, was running late. Slim had taken the wrong bus line to Schmeven’s house, so he was going to be delayed for another 20-30 minutes.

Foolishly, I had made other plans with the family to start about a half-hour after the originally scheduled end time of 1:30 PM. That part is on me; two hours for The Gallerist with players I don’t know is potentially a gamble. But, hope springs eternal. My thinking: if Slim moves at the velocity of Schmeven and I, we’ll be fine to wrap up The Gallerist in 90 minutes or so.

Schmeven’s quick turn-taking is well established; Schmeven and I have done a two-player game of The Gallerist in just over an hour, and we’ve done two games of Speakeasy in a single sitting in under three hours. He has earned the Justin Bell Gold Speed of Approval and is always welcome at my table; he, like me, takes snappy turns. Even though Slim was the wildcard on this particular day, he just had to play at roughly the speeds Schmeven and I normally play at, and we would be in great shape.

Well...not exactly.

***

Slim arrived, exchanged pleasantries, apologized for the delay, and sat down at his station near me at the table. Slim is a seasoned strategy gamer who entered our gaming circles with a wealth of street cred. I was excited to see what he would bring to The Gallerist during our play.

After everyone was seated, I turned to Slim. “When’s the last time you played this one?”

“Gosh, maybe six, seven years ago? It’s been a while, so I’m a little rusty…I didn’t have time to do a full rules refresh, but I think I remember how most of this works…the player aid IS really good, so I can always fall back on that.”

My heart sank. My soul—what little soul I had left—sank lower, if that was possible. We were definitely going to have to sorta play and sorta teach this game to Slim while taking our own turns. There was no way we were getting through this one in 90 minutes.

Separately, in my review crew, everyone knows that I have a hard and fast rule when it comes to tabling games: if there is a teach video anywhere on the interwebs in English, players have to watch those videos before they come to game night. It saves SO MUCH TIME, and it ensures everyone has skin in the game when it comes to the investment part of knocking out multiple plays of different games in a single night.

I am more lax about this with other groups, and for this play of The Gallerist, I think there was an unspoken expectation that everyone knew the rules, but we never called that out when setting up the birthday schedule. After this experience with Schmeven’s birthday play of The Gallerist, I’m thinking about changing my tune.

***

As I expected, Slim tested every bit of my patience during our play. I’m told patience is a virtue, but I’m beginning to question that.

I’ve only joined Slim for a couple of game nights, but I have found that Slim is a player who verbally talks out his options before taking a turn. I do this from time to time, especially late in a game with friends where I can talk through one or two options on a turn that might swing the game. But certainly not on every single turn.

Slim’s turns looked a lot like what some friends call “min-maxing”: exploring many, if not every, possible outcome before making a selection most beneficial to the current game state. Again, no problem late in a game, and I am on record as telling other players that on the final turn of any game, you can take as much time as you want…no one wants to see a player lose a game because they made a major blunder on their final action.

But, Slim’s min-maxing happened on almost every turn for the first nine, maybe ten turns.

The Gallerist is an action selection game where players have a choice of four major locations. Each major location—the International Market, the Sales Office, the Media Center, and the Artists Colony—offers two unique actions. When a player moves their pawn to a new location, they pick one of the two actions there, and execute it. On successive turns, the active player must move their pawn to a new location to take a different action.

I never mind when a player is thinking through which of the three locations they want to move to next, nor how they will best execute the action at their chosen location. But a player needs to fully understand what’s possible at each location, and Slim’s rust showed during those moments. Often, that meant Schmeven and I were explaining what actions were possible at each of the three locations available to Slim on that turn, which meant talking through the possible outcomes of SIX different actions.

Every turn.

When I do a full teach of any serious strategy game for new players—this exact scenario happened just two weeks ago, when I got to play Chicago 1875: City of the Big Shoulders with a couple new players—I just turn my brain off completely when it comes to building my own in-game strategy. That’s because I find it difficult to manage both what I want to do, and what others need to understand in order to enjoy their play of the game. Just when you begin to think through your own turn, a question comes in that breaks your concentration.

For a learning game, totally fine. For this play of The Gallerist, I was pretty excited to get into “the art of strategy,” the game’s tagline.

I quickly became the surly, impatient curmudgeon who rushed through his own turns so that we could simply wrap up the game. By turn four, my main focus became trying to mask my anger, in service of Schmeven, the birthday boy who (I hope) was having a great time just getting a game off the shelf that doesn’t see the table nearly as often as it should.

Maybe two-thirds of the way through our play, Slim was in great shape on the rules and finished off a victory, navigating his own turns with ease. And, to Slim’s credit, he acknowledged the help that was provided by his tablemates during the game. Our play took just over two hours, which in some ways was a miracle.

My only regret? Not doing a full teach of The Gallerist for Slim the moment he acknowledged that he hadn’t played the game in years. Teaching The Gallerist to a new player only takes about 20 minutes—the player aid really is great as a teaching tool—and for a seasoned player with even distant plays under their belt, getting a quick re-teach is usually enough.

It’s also fun to see how I change as I get older. I don’t mind losing, and I’m certainly less competitive than I was ten years ago. But, I do mind waiting. (Yeah, it’s your turn!) If patience really is a virtue, then I guess all I can say for now is that I am working on it!!
Published — 27. April 2026 ⏭ BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek

Two-Handed, Intentionally

✇BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek
Von: whenindoubteatout
27. April 2026 um 08:00

by Justin Bell

Late last summer, I had dinner with an industry contact, and we got to talking about life, love, and the pursuit of tabletop happiness over a handsome buffet of cheap prosecco, garden salads, and chicken fingers. (Extra honey mustard, please.)

Eventually, our conversation turned to one of my favorite questions. “What’ve you been playing lately?”

The contact answered with a grin; like many, this contact mostly talked about games that they are not involved with professionally, since industry folks are usually playing games in development at their own company most of the time. One of their answers really intrigued me.

“I’m actually playing one of these games ‘two-handed’ a lot recently. In fact, sometimes on weekends, I pour a glass of wine and intentionally do that with titles that I can’t get to the table with my game groups.”

I paused for a second, making sure I heard this correctly: the contact was intentionally playing multiplayer games as two distinct players, alone?

“That’s right,” they replied. “Sometimes, I like to take longer turns thinking about what I would do as the active player, and it’s easy to imagine playing as someone else in a game that I know really well.”

We moved on, but the thought stuck with me. I digested it along with those tasty tenders, and let the thought marinate for most of the last few months.



As a media member, I “two-hand” review samples all the time, playing as two distinct players to get a feel for how the game plays. I always do this with games I receive that have not been released yet. Designers are often unavailable to teach their upcoming creations directly to peasants like me, so I usually have to grind through a rulebook on my own to learn a pre-production copy (PPC) of a rulebook before a video content creator has been contracted to produce a formal teach video.

Two-handing (or, “dummy-handing”, in my personal parlance) is a necessary tool for my efforts. I take teaching new games seriously, so the two-handed or three-handed plays really help me suss out the potential questions I’m going to face from other players. Usually, though, I don’t two-hand an entire playthrough…I might do two or three rounds in a four-round game, especially in a game that has mid-game scoring elements or pre-round steps that evolve over the course of a longer play.

But intentionally two-handing a game all the way to the end? Playing a game from my collection, for fun, by myself, pretending to be multiple players? I’ll be honest: I never even considered it. These days, half the games I review have a dedicated solo mode that simulates a two-player game, or—in what is becoming my growing preference—automas, geared by difficulty level, that can be added to multiplayer games to simulate a higher player count.

And many of the board games I want to play have a dedicated app or an implementation on Board Game Arena or Yucata, so if I really want to play, say, Race for the Galaxy by myself, I don’t have to two-hand it…I can just pull out my iPad and play against three bots of varying difficulty.

But there is something to the idea of putting a board game on the table, handling the fancy components, and playing a game live. I already play a lot of video games and I already play a lot of app-based board games, so maybe that industry contact was onto something.

I looked in my game closet and considered a couple of games on the Maybe Pile. It was virgin territory for me, playing some of the games in my collection two-handed. The results surprised me.



The current game on the top of the Maybe Pile is Evacuation, the Vladimír Suchý title from a couple years ago. Evacuation is a game I enjoyed when I reviewed it on Meeple Mountain, but it’s a game that has only hit the table once since my review plays in late 2023 when I bought a copy at SPIEL Essen that fall.

Evacuation’s play mode bit is divisive in my circles. Some players only want to play Evacuation in Race Mode, the rule set that is the main play variant in the game’s rulebook, while others prefer Points Mode, where a full four rounds have to be played to determine a winner. But I think the game hasn’t come out as often as I expected because it never got an expansion (not that it needed one, since there are 3-4 game variants and mini expansions included in the base game) and Suchý fans I know prefer some of his other titles, such as Pulsar 2849 and Underwater Cities, over Evacuation.

I decided to embark on a two-handed game night with Evacuation in tow. I passed on the glass of wine, but bourbon was handy. One refresher of the rulebook and I had the rules down again—a compliment, for a game that I hadn’t played in more than two years—and setup was a breeze. I set up a Race Mode game for two players, and I was up and running in just a few minutes.

I went through the motions on my first few turns, in part because I hadn’t played in a while. Evacuation’s big hook is the game’s goal: over a series of rounds, players have to evacuate their population from the “Old World” and settle them on the “New World” on the other side of the main board’s map.

As it turns out, what players REALLY have to worry about is the production level of the game’s three main resources (food, energy, and steel) on both worlds, tracked with three small discs on each player’s personal board. You start the game with a fully-functioning economy, but then you have to break that economy and rebuild it through settlement on the other side of the board…and, fast. All the while, players have to manage an action point system that gets very expensive very fast, as players spend energy from one or both sides of their personal board to get everything done.

That race in the base game mode ends when a player has bumped their three resource trackers to space eight or higher, at which point some final calculations are done to come up with a winner. And since I was playing by myself, I took my time feeling out what I remember liking about the game.

And as I took my turns, trying to build up a profile of what each of the game’s two players should do on their turn, something weird happened…I noticed I was having fun.

Not just a little fun, mind you; I really enjoyed puzzling out the best way to optimize each player’s board. These medium-weight Euros, the ones that feature tech tracks or personal milestones, make playing a game two-handed very straightforward. So, I used the two different sets of technology tiles to drive each player’s strategy.

If a tech gave me production powers for, say, steel, I leaned hard in building more “prefab” steel factories. When a tech gave me an ongoing power that provided additional rewards when I built stadiums—in a funny nod to all things sports, Evacuation provides “happy faces” to players who build stadiums, and each player has to build three stadiums for the New World by the end of the game—I went even harder on building more stadiums for that player.

I tried my best to pretend I was the purple player (purple being my favorite color) and to pretend that the yellow player was my hated rival. Still, I always gave yellow the benefit of the doubt, taking chances to stab the purple player whenever I had the chance. When yellow was the first player at the end of a round (turn order changes only between rounds), I always tried to block purple from getting the best bonuses, the technology upgrades, or the symbols they might need to build new population centers in a future round.

It felt weird to snipe myself…but hey, I’m a two-hander now!

The game experience just got better and better. Whether it was purple’s turn or yellow’s turn, it was always MY turn, so downtime was…zero. I experienced all the highs of putting together a solid plan. I’m not the kind of player that usually suffers through “analysis paralysis”, or AP, so I took my time on some turns and breezed through others. But since no one was waiting on me to finish turns, I never felt the burden of other players looking over my shoulder.

Undoing an action? All good, it’s still my turn, since I’m the only one taking turns! I spent time feeling out how each tech upgrade would benefit future strategy, so it was fun to explore the game in a bunch of different ways, but all during the same game. Having the chance to take so many turns made all the systems click faster, since I had more space to get so much of it wrong.

I had so much fun that, when the Race Mode game was over (Justin beat Justin thanks to a slight edge in minimum production levels), I decided to run it back. For my second play, I did Evacuation in Points Mode, using the Advanced Action variant as well as personal goal cards, which made it even easier to focus both purple and yellow on their distinct strategies.

After setting up the second game, I switched out the nine tech tiles from each player board and swapped in a new set for each player. The Points Mode game went the full four rounds, with yellow taking home a much deserved victory and a greater appreciation for the system Suchý created here. By essentially playing the game four times—maybe it’s better to say that I got to explore the system from four different perspectives, rather than doing four complete plays—I finished with my highest set of production levels and took much better advantage of the advanced action system than in previous plays.

These two plays cemented my belief that Evacuation should stay in my collection. It also left me wondering why I had not tried to two-hand any other games in my collection before now.



As it turned out, that industry contact was onto something.

The ol’ two-hander might have legs. I consider myself lucky to have 3-4 game nights a week with friends and family, but I think I will complain a little less often that I cannot get some of my favorites to the table. Those plays of Evacuation only took about two hours in total, so time certainly was not an issue. I’ve got some favorites that are getting a little dusty on the shelf; carving out time for a two-hander once a month is very easy to do, especially on a weeknight where I want something to do while watching the NBA playoffs in the background.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not about to spend entire weekends intentionally trying to play a heavy strategy game by myself as two or three other players. But I’m open to salvaging plans to play with other humans by just playing a game by myself instead. On nights where I set something up and players bail last-minute, I’m now a bit more open to the idea of playing that game on my own instead of angrily putting the game away.

A new pile of games is now building, next to the Maybe Pile in the game closet. This pile, the Two-Handed Stack, now serves as an activity to attack solo, especially when the eyes have burned out from staring at a screen for too long.

My early-to-bed in-laws recently spent the weekend, and that meant I needed a couple of quieter activities I could mess with after everyone went to bed…enter the Stack. Sometimes, I want to show the kids new-to-them favorites from the adult game collection, but they get a better offer to hang out with their buddies for another round of Fortnite. All good…I’ve got the Stack. My pile of review copies runs out early each summer, and using review nights to tackle the Stack sounds good to me.

Old dog, new tricks? Sounds like my two-handed game nights for the next few months!
Published — 20. April 2026 ⏭ BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek

Love is a Beatdown

✇BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek
Von: whenindoubteatout
20. April 2026 um 08:00

by Justin Bell



“Daddy, can we play Thunder Road: Vendetta?”

One of the rules we have here at Casa de Bell is absolute: if the kids want to play a game from the adult game closet, I always say yes. (There’s only one game off-limits around here: Voidfall. That’s because I’m not teaching it…yet.)

One of the beauties of having kids who are now 12 and 9 is that many of the games in the adult game closet are drifting into the family game closet. As the kids get older, it’s been such a joy introducing new concepts and mechanics that were a bit dense even two or three years ago.

The nine-year-old was the one asking about Thunder Road: Vendetta. He was interested for two main reasons: first, he wanted to play the base game with the Carnival of Chaos expansion, because he loves the arena-style nature of that expansion map.

The second reason is why he really wanted to play: my boy was hoping to have another chance to beat down his dad.

In our first play of Carnival of Chaos, he acquired a “Super-Weapon” called Li’l Sammy, then used said Super-Weapon to shoot down my chopper—normally, choppers are invulnerable—on his way to a dominant victory where he wiped out all my cars.

(Yes, TR:V superfans, you are correct—there is a different scoring system in Carnival of Chaos, tied to “scrap”, the in-game cash that can be earned for damaging opponents. However, my son and I are simple with our approach to this game—the score is all about car kills. He won that first matchup three eliminations to one.)

After his victory, my son spent the next few days gloating about his victory.

At dinner: “Daddy, can you pass me…the Li’l Sammy?”
Before bed: “Hopefully you can beat other players to make up for your loss to me in Thunder Road.”
Walking to school: “I kinda want to play Thunder Road again to see if I can get the Li’l Sammy card. It was so cool shooting down your chopper.”

And on and on. For better or worse, my kids like variety; over the next few weeks, they kept asking to play other games. Weeks turned into months, and while I had the chance to play Thunder Road: Vendetta with other adults during that timeframe, I didn’t break out the expansion again until last week. That’s when my son walked into the game closet, saw the handsome red all-in Maximum Chrome edition copy of Thunder Road, and remembered Li’l Sammy.

“Daddy, can we play Thunder Road: Vendetta? Hopefully, I can get Li’l Sammy again.”

***

After I finished up the work day, I set up the Thunder Road: Vendetta base game with Carnival of Chaos on our kitchen table.

I insist upon using the Choppe Shoppe expansion content. That’s because I—well, now, both my son and I—love using the crew leaders and the car upgrades. The leaders use alternate “command boards”, the dashboard that accommodates each round’s extra die to trigger powers like nitro or the chopper, with asymmetric powers.

My son selected Bumpo the Clown as his crew leader for this play, a spooky-looking character who reminds me of Sweet Tooth from the Twisted Metal car combat games on PlayStation. Bumpo’s power is fine—he can reroll the direction die when his cars move in a slam—but his command board includes the Bump power, which triggers on 6s and allows Bumpo to move the other car on the first slam that turn, even if Bumpo has the smaller car in that slam.

I went with Machine Gun Joe, Esq. to lead my crew. Joe has a somewhat overpowered ability (at least, in the eyes of the nine-year-old, who has a tendency to call everything “OP” if it is not his own powers) to reroll the shoot die once during every attack action.

While I love the crew leaders, the best part about the Choppe Shoppe expansion is the car upgrades. During setup, each of a player’s three cars get outfitted with their own individual powers. For this game, I had a couple of simple upgrades—the Boost Switch, which gave me a +1 on movement, and the Heavy Frame, which grants the assigned car an extra damage slot (three slots instead of the normal two).

But I also had the Onboard Computer, which allowed me to ignore the effects of damage tokens when I assigned it to my large car (The large car is always the one that takes the most damage). So while I would still take damage during the game, it wouldn’t turn ugly, like things tend to do during a Skid or a Blast-Off.

With setup complete, we got rolling. The way the Terrordome (whoops, “Carnival of Chaos”) works, players drive their cars from three different entry-point track pieces outside the arena directly inside, then spend the game navigating pop-up hazards in the form of traps known as “Killer Pillars” that can eliminate cars through various game effects.

Of course, there are other hazards like those pesky opposing cars bent on using all manner of Super-Weapons and their Choppe Shoppe upgrades to take you out. There are a bunch of ways to get wiped out in the ring, and in my experience, games of Carnival of Chaos are a little quicker than the base game, especially at higher player counts.

Thanks to six Super-Weapon tokens scattered around the board, players are always gunning for the best stuff in the game. And while both my son and I were hoping Li’l Sammy would show up so that we could build on its legend, both of us drew cards that represented a bunch of fun toys that we tried to use to take each other out.

Unfortunately for my son, I got my hands on the Super-Weapon goodies first. Sometimes, love is a beatdown.

***

My first Super-Weapon pickup was the BFG…no, not that one. Here, the Big Friendly Gun (complete with a picture of what looks like a big chain gun with a smiley-face balloon on top) deals an extra face-down damage token each time the gun’s owner shoots and hits. I used that to deal two damage to my boy’s small car (the Doom Buggy) on a single turn, making it inoperable.

The Big Friendly Gun made more friends later in the game, when I used it to shut down my son’s medium car, the Avenger. My boy fought back. He grabbed a Super-Weapon token that became the Laser Kebab, which can shoot from the front arc of its assigned car any number of spaces, not just the one-space range of spaces directly in a car’s front arc. He poked holes in two of my cars the next two times he had the chance during his turns from across the arena. Damage, yes, but no inoperable status plays or eliminations.

Slams of inoperable cars into Killer Pillars and a Blast Off that shot one of his cars into the arena walls got me to a place where I was running a 3-on-1 break for the rest of the game. (Thunder Road: Vendetta vets, be honest: isn’t it a blast to watch what happens during a Stunt Die roll of a Blast Off? Goodness gracious, it’s hard to beat those moments in any game!)

Later, I picked up the Auto-Cannon for one of my cars, which lets a player shoot, move, then shoot again. My final Super-Weapon pick-up was the Torsion Dynamo, which removes a car’s guns but guarantees that the opposing car always moves in a slam. (Putting the Dynamo on my small Doom Buggy made that puppy a force!)

None of that mattered though…because as it turned out, I found an opportunity to take out my son’s last car with flair, using maybe my favorite elimination method in the game.

On my final turn, I was able to slam my son’s final car, the Eliminator, forward one space…right into the same space as his chopper, which he had tried and failed to use on his previous turn to take out my medium-sized Avenger.

Any car that ends its turn in the same space as any chopper is automatically eliminated. My son grew up in that final moment, and took his defeat like a man, ending our run of chaos (ahem, Chaos, with a capital C), with daddy taking home a three-to-nothing victory.

Even though Li’l Sammy never reared its ugly head, my son and I had a blast. Chucking those dice and talking a little smack and kitting out our cars and trying, but failing, to use our choppers, nicknamed “Blue Thunder” and “Airwolf” to wipe each opposing set of cars off the grid…it was all kinds of fun, win or lose.

I love playing games with the kids. I’m loving the chances I have now to get in more plays of the games I prefer, creating more memories along the way. And, I don’t mind handing out the occasional beatdown, especially when I can avenge an earlier loss.

That’s because I know what’s coming. The kids love wiping the floor with daddy from time to time, and giving them more chances just means playing more board games.
Published — 13. April 2026 ⏭ BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek

Behind the Hype: Eveline Foubert, Mighty Boards

✇BoardGameGeek News | BoardGameGeek
Von: whenindoubteatout
13. April 2026 um 08:00

by Justin Bell

Yep, I get it—two new interview series across back-to-back weeks! (Don’t worry, I’ll be back to sharing random musings with next week’s column.)

I love the work that our team here at BGG puts into Designer Diaries, much of which is driven by the game designers themselves. I especially love reading Designer Diaries after I have played a game that recently got the Diary treatment, to get a sense of why the designers made certain choices during the journey from concept to final production.

In that spirit, I will conduct interviews with the people involved with every other part of the development cycle. A great deal of work goes into making a board game, well beyond just the game’s design. The business of tabletop is fascinating to me, so much so that I count more people behind the scenes (marketing, art, production) as a part of my network than designers, fellow content creators, and gamers. I still meet fans who give the lion’s share of the credit to a game designer for a product making it to market, without realizing how many people collaborate to make those dreams a reality…even in cases where a designer self-publishes a game. It’s quite rare that a game makes it all the way to your hands when only one or two people were involved. It takes a village!

So, let’s talk marketing. Our inaugural piece on the marketing process of prepping a tabletop game features Eveline Foubert, the Marketing & Events Manager at Mighty Boards. I met Eveline a few years ago at a show and we hit it off right away, mainly because of her willingness to talk smack almost nonstop.

We recently had a back-and-forth online, about Eveline’s background, the core audience for Mighty Boards titles, and the upcoming campaign for Yotei, launching on crowdfunding this week.



—----

Justin Bell (JB): I’m always curious to learn how people even find a marketing job in tabletop. How did you get your start with Mighty Boards?

Eveline Foubert (EF): Well actually, I scored my first marketing and PR job in the video game industry about 12 years ago. I was an avid Borderlands gamer, dressed up as CL4P-TP at a local expo (yes, there are photos), and ran into the marketing director of 2K Games! He loved the cosplay so much that we started chatting and eventually he offered me my first internship. From there, I eventually moved on to Electronic Arts, where I worked for a year or two before taking a short break from games. I travelled a bit, worked in the affiliate marketing and tech industry for a while, and eventually ended up in Malta. Five years ago, a mutual friend let me know Mighty Boards was looking for a marketing manager, and it just felt right to get back into the gaming industry!

***

JB: Mighty Boards has been around for a while now. How do you and the team define your core audience? I know that Mighty Boards makes a range of game types, but for this particular campaign, what kinds of players are you going after?

EF: We’ve come to see our core audience as players who appreciate beautiful illustrations, interesting themes, solid game mechanics and strategy. They might not always play on a weekly basis and aren’t necessarily looking for the heaviest games, but they do want something that feels engaging and memorable every time they play. A collaboration with a famous game designer doesn’t hurt either. With Yotei specifically, we’re aiming to reach an even wider audience, including people who are just getting into the hobby, and people who love Japanese games and experiences. Yotei is a game that works really well for both hobby gamers and those who might be newer to modern board games. It sits right at that intersection between accessibility and depth, which is a space we always aim to claim.



***

JB: I know the team works in a glamorous, floor-to-ceiling glass structure similar to a museum like the Louvre. (I’m kidding.) But I do know you sit with the team in Malta. How does that influence the point at which you learn about upcoming titles and begin to get involved in building ideas for your next campaign?

EF: Our office is even better: this little rock in the Mediterranean offers 300+ days of sun per year, so we get to go swim after work and play games on the beach! That being said, the rock is little (compared to mainland Europe), so we get most of our board game news online, through industry connections or at fairs we attend. We spotted Yotei at SPIEL Essen last year and completely fell in love with it. The team at Kumagera put their heart and soul into turning their local town into a board game and it’s hard not to appreciate the charm of Yotei and its people. In fact, Gordon Calleja and David Chircop (two of the principals at Mighty Boards) are in Japan right now, experiencing Hokkaido first hand!

***

JB: I know that a lot of your games go straight to crowdfunding. What success have you had going direct to retail? Is that an option at this stage?

EF: Retail is definitely an important part of our strategy, and we’ve seen solid success bringing some of our games to retail. Art Society was our first big retail project, which became the Game of the Year at Barnes & Noble! This year, Tenby definitely takes the cake. Deciding whether a game goes to crowdfunding or not depends on various factors, like community demand, funding needs and timeline. Crowdfunding is definitely a very big part of our strategy. It plays a key role in building awareness and creating demand early on. It also allows us to build stronger relationships with our community, as we often invite backers to help create a project by deciding on certain components or graphic design used in the games, and gather feedback. For Yotei, we felt a crowdfunding campaign was the right choice, as we can help the Kumagera team reach a bigger audience, and offer a Deluxe Edition that contains exclusive components made with actual Hokkaido wood, locally sourced and produced!



***

JB: I know the Yotei campaign is going live soon after this article goes up. In advance of the launch, what can you tell us about the campaign? And is this another one of those campaigns where there will be stretch goals every 15 minutes, every day, just once, not at all?

EF: Yotei is a Machi building game for 2 to 4 players where you use potatoes as a currency to build the most enchanting Hokkaido town. The game truly brings the charm of northern Japan to your table with gorgeous illustrations by Maria Kato based on real life locations, game design by Huy Pham, and locally sourced wooden components by Kumagera. You’ll buy or bid on fields, forest and mountain plots, and harvest potatoes. You then use your resources to serve ramen, host a potato festival, open a ski resort or a serene hot spring! The game offers a perfect blend of tactics and strategy that gives players a satisfying peek into life in Hokkaido.

We always aim to deliver a strong, complete experience from the start. Of course, there will be some surprises along the way, but the goal is to keep the campaign clear and enjoyable rather than overwhelming. We want backers to immediately understand what the game is and why it’s special. A big part of the campaign will highlight the real-world inspiration behind it, especially the connection to Hokkaido and the people involved in its creation. For Yotei, we will be offering some surprises and limited exclusives in the campaign, made of real Hokkaido wood! You’ll find a schedule of the planned drops and surprises on the campaign page, so you know exactly when to check the campaign page for news!

***

JB: I’m sure you’ve defined the profile for the types of gamers who regularly buy Mighty Boards products. But for the “normie”, the “muggle”, the casual gamer who might be new to crowdfunding…how do you draw them in?

EF: For new players, it’s key to make the experience feel inviting rather than intimidating. Of course visuals play a big role, but clear communication and instructions make backing a game more approachable. From explaining the gameplay, to a step-by-step guide on how to back a game, we aim to lower the barrier to entry so everyone can jump on the crowdfunding train.



***

JB: I remember when you were driving the campaign for one of the Vengeance: Roll & Fight titles, tying it in with the release of a John Wick film. I thought the parallels were perfect for the game alongside the flick, and in a world where thousands of games come out each year, you’ve gotta find a way to stand out. With Yotei and other games you have releasing in 2026, what plans do you have to get creative with spreading the word?

EF: Standing out is definitely one of the biggest challenges right now, as so many great games come out every year! I believe the key is always to try to focus on what makes each game genuinely unique. With Yotei, that’s very much the connection to a real place and the people behind it, which gives us a lot of authentic storytelling opportunities. We’re working closely with the team in Japan to capture that through video, photos, and behind-the-scenes content.

***

JB: For the casual fan—heck, even for the hardcore junkie—what do you wish more players understood when it comes to the ways games are marketed and sold?

EF: A thing people don’t always see or know is how much work goes into bringing a game to life beyond just the design itself. The designers start the magic spark, but the whole team—development, art and graphic design, production, logistics, marketing, sales, events, support etc. all play a huge role in shaping the final product and making sure the players get a great gaming experience. From when a game pitch comes in, based on the amount of work the game and graphic design needs, the fastest turnaround time is usually a full year. Bigger projects, like Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaan, took more than three years to make!

What some people might not realise is that marketing isn’t just about selling a game—it’s about helping the right people discover something they’ll genuinely enjoy. With so many games releasing each year, even great designs can go completely unnoticed without strong storytelling and visibility. A big part of marketing is testing—different messages, visuals, and audiences—to understand what actually resonates. I believe good marketing helps the right players find what they like in a very crowded industry.


Wait a minute...the Enchantress character from the first Fateforge expansion looks...just...like...


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JB: Be honest: do you play a lot of games? Not Mighty Boards games, but other titles? Or do you separate church and state by not playing games much at all?

EF: I’m a big fan of competitive two-player games, and will never say no to playing Dune: Imperium. I’ve even been dragged into a full day of Twilight Imperium and actually enjoyed it! Last year’s favorites that hit the table on a regular basis were Compile, Cyclades, and Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth. I try to play on a weekly basis, but I do have to balance my time with other hobbies and outdoor adventures!

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JB: I have questions about the playlist for this year’s SPIEL Essen booth party…assuming I’m still invited (a major question mark), who do I need to speak with to ensure more hip-hop makes the list in 2026?

EF: ... That being said - we’re bringing some exciting stuff to SPIEL this year! You’ll see For the Gods!, Yotei and the new Art Society expansion, Friends in High Places, on our demo tables, as well as two (!) brand new projects. Trust me, you’re gonna want to keep an eye out 😉

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