by Steph Hodge

[imageid=9419162 medium rep]▪️ After the hit game Confusing Lands was released in 2024, Envy Born Games decided it was time to expand it with Confusing Lands: Icebound Isles. This new game is completely standalone, but if you want to combine the decks, you will create an epic game! If you are a fan of 2-player games, I think this will be right up your alley. This game plays exactly 2-players in about 10 minutes.

From the BGG Page:



▪️ Hey, another game that is both standalone and an expansion! This time we have Tag Team: Arthur's Legacy which can expand Tag Team. In the box you will find 6 new fighters, all characters from the Arthurian Legends, which includes Excalibur! Scorpion Masqué also teased the 3rd Tag Team game coming soon, "hinting at the arrival of an iconic franchise from the world of video games."

From the newsletter:



▪️ Happy Camper just announced a small card game called Beach Bandits. Seems to be a perfect Summer snag. This game plays 2-4 players in about 15 minutes.

From BGG:


It was also wicked cool that Happy Camper had an amazing offer in their newsletter to send one game from their catalog to a Summer Camp of your choice. The submissions are now closed, but I thought I would mention it. Make sure to follow them for future updates and cool offerings like that.

▪️ Looney Labs just announced a small card game called Seven Islands. This is a game for 1-4 players and will take 10-30 minutes. The race is on!

From the press release:



In other news:

▪️ If gaming on the computer is your jam, a big Summer Steam Sale is happening and tons of favorites from Dire Wolf are on sale like Dune: Imperium and Ark Nova. You can check out the Dire Wolf collection here.

by Karl Lange

Origin Story

In March 2020 I was lucky enough to meet the company that held the Studio Ghibli licence for North America at GAMA Expo - I asked them if they would be interested in games designed around the Ghibli movies and they said they would love to see what I could do.

My wife had introduced me to the Ghibli classics like Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Howl's Moving Castle, and Spirited Away a few years prior and I had instantly fell in love with them.

Once returning to Australia, and with lots of newfound time from COVID lockdowns, I set to work coming up with concepts for many of the titles. One idea I settled on was a game inspired by the bathhouse in Spirited Away where players are employees collecting ingredient tickets to make baths for spirits, cleaning the dirty baths once the spirits leave, and managers providing assistance to players via special abilities.

After four months of design and multiple playtests a week, I pitched the game back to the company I'd met at GAMA. Spoiler alert, although the publisher loved the game, due to licensing it was not to be. At that point I decided to keep working on the game and try my hand at self publishing.

Jumping back to the start, how did the design progress?

A lot of inspiration was taken from the movie. I set to re-watching the bath scenes to really understand how the baths worked.

Players would collect bath tickets with ingredients to satisfy the spirits’ wants. I started with five spirit types and five ingredient types. The bath tickets with ingredients were long rectangles in the movie which led me to have two ingredients on most, and some with some singles. This deck makeup led to the idea that players could overpay spirits ingredients to complete a treatment but would receive amber for giving spirits exactly what they wanted, creating an interesting dynamic of playing for efficiency vs accuracy. This tension is fundamental to the design and has survived every iteration.

The spirits themselves needed to start dirty and become clean, this was accomplished by using both sides of the card (dirty with their requirements, and clean with only the points shown on the back). Spirits had between three and six ingredients, with the harder spirits worth more points.
The other interesting dynamic was the cleaning the baths. After a spirit left, the bath should be dirty - achieved again by flipping the card over to a dirty side - and need to be cleaned before another spirit could enter.

An early prototype of what became Mythic Baths
As with a lot of my family-weight games, I tend to favour quick turns with a single action. So to incentivise cleaning the baths, I decided that all dirty baths would be cleaned at once. This action would earn you one amber per bath cleaned (as with Chihiro finding gold on the bottom of the bath from Noface) and fill the tableau with new spirits from the deck. As you can only take one action a turn, this gives the next player a full set of spirits to clean so the decision on how long to wait / how many dirty baths became a core balance in the game.

These core elements remained basically unchanged with balancing of points and resources over the coming iterations.

The managers, who add modifications to the basic rules (like event cards in other games) had many more changes, predominantly in how they entered and exited the bath house. In the early versions, the managers were simply shuffled in with the guests and once X managers were drawn the game ended. This ending was too random as the game length could be very long or very short, and managers could be in for only one round. After that they were added into the manager deck at regular intervals. This was in place for a time but was still not perfect and had more setup than I liked for game of this weight.

After many more iterations, I decided to detach the managers from the guests, and attach them to the ingredient deck, with a new manager appearing each time the deck ran out and was reshuffled. This kept managers in play for longer, but players may only see two managers throughout the game. From there they jumped to when the baths were cleaned, with a new manager starting after each time the 'clean the baths' action was taken. This worked relatively well with managers staying out long enough to be useful, and generally not cycling away too quickly so it was kept for the time being - more on managers later.

The last element with many, many changes was what happened when you collected sets of creatures. At the start, players scored additional points at the end of the game for pairs and sets of one of each creature. This worked well at lower player counts, but in 4- and 5-player games players finish with six creatures not leaving much room for set scoring which was not the feeling I wanted at the end of the game.

Mythic Baths at PAX Aus Collaboratory 2023.After many months of testing and feedback I decided to add an extra element to the game which replaced the set scoring - gaining favor from the creatures. Once you completed a pair of creatures you could choose to take that creature's special action, a set of 1 of each would let you choose any creature's action.

This added an engine building-like element to the game, giving it a much better arc overall, but still had similar issues at higher player counts. More on this later also!

Another element that came into play part way through the design was the reserve mechanic, as often I would have a player express they wanted to 'lock in' a creature they were aiming to complete, giving them more certainty at the cost of a turn.

Interestingly, once introduced this was one of the most divisive actions, with about half playtesters thinking it was the strongest action, and the other half thinking that it was useless, often debating with each other in the feedback sessions - to me, this said it was working perfectly as it allowed for many play styles.

At this point, I was confident that I had a good game and moved to finding an artist.

Art Direction of the Game

Deciding on how to theme the game was a tough decision. I had originally thought to use generic spirits, but after some consideration and consultation from others in the Australian tabletop industry, I decided to make the game its own and use mythical creatures from all over the world. I set to researching mythical creatures from around the world for an art brief and looking for an artist in a cute whimsical style.

The creatures I settled on were:
• Jackalope - a half jackrabbit half antelope from North American folk law
• Tatzelwurm - a half cat half snake from south central Europe
• Cerberus - three-headed dog from Greek mythology
• Sea-lion - half lion, half fish from the Philippines heraldry
• Owlbear - half owl, half bear from fantasy tropes

I spent many hours looking for artists on deviant art and art station before seeing some of Emily Hancock's art on the game Gift of Tulips. I remembered we had actually met at GAMA in 2020 and I hurriedly hunted down her business card to reach out.

Emily's cute animal drawings and vibrant plant drawings would fit perfectly in the world I was creating bringing color and life to the game so I jumped at the opportunity to work with her on the game.

As soon as Emily's sketches started to come through, I knew I'd made the right choice as her creatures were adorable.

Part of the brief was to have various clean and dirty elements that I could add to the creatures to make each image in the game unique - Emily did an amazing job making each creature look different while keeping everything coherent.

For the managers, I asked Emily for a diverse range of characters and let her creativity lead the art for eight of the ten characters with amazing results. The last two characters were to be of my wife and myself.

Look ma! I'm in a game!
But wait, you said you were going to self publish the game?!

You are correct dear reader, that was my original plan until Good Games Publishing expressed interest after playing at Pax Aus Collaboratory 2023. The game fit well into their catalogue and they liked how Emily's art was progressing, so the deal was made.

One big advantage of having a publisher on board was the additional development put into the game by Kim Brebach.

One of the first changes was to increase the frequency of being able to use the creature favors. To do this, we changed the favors from abilities that would trigger on sets, to a token you would earn if you used your nourish token (reserve action). These become a one-time use that you can use on any turn giving more flexibility, with the tokens refreshing each time any player completes another of the same creature. This change kept players more engaged out of turn while allowing players to go for breadth (collecting each creature to get all the actions) or depth (to trigger the same action multiple times).

Favour tokens and reference card.
Kim is also a huge fan of Japanese culture and Spirited Away so we leaned into the theme, changing the highest value creatures into troublesome guests. These creatures have global negative effects that restrict play to all players in some way and were designed to be the opposites of the same creatures favor action.

To bring in the sense of staff rushing around to remove the troublesome guests while trying to keep the other guests happy, we added a semi-cooperative element where players can partially complete troublesome guests, earning amber (points) for the ingredients you contribute. Alternatively, you might just ignore them and let someone else focus on them, or you may try to complete them entirely yourself, scoring big points. This allowed us to change how the managers functioned too, having the managers change when a new troublesome guests enters (the previous floor manager making a swift exit when they see trouble approaching!). This brings all the upkeep into one step (flip baths, welcome guests, change manager if a troublesome guest arrives) keeping the majority of the turns flowing fast around the table.

Who's a troublesome little puppy?
It was a great experience designing and art directing the game and I am so happy with how everything has turned out, I want to end on one of my favorite comments on the game from many players over the years that

Mythic Baths was released at UKGE 2026 and is now available around the world!

Youtube Video

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!

by Erik Anderson Sundén

This designer diary will tell the story on how The Glorious Guilds of Buttonville came to be.

We, Christian Kudahl and Erik Andersson Sundén, started to explore joint designs less than four years ago. Erik had played Mindbug and loved it. Christian had heard of Erik from his adventures at Fastaval and Whirling Witchcraft and was curious. So we started to talk. Relatively soon we both agreed to try to make a game together.

We seem to thrive when we work intensely! So we tried a few ideas and shot them down after a few iterations. Especially Christian pushed the idea of abandoning things quickly if they didn’t show great promise already in the first test (as he can really be quite lazy). This can feel quite tough as you still may think “but I can fix it”, but exploring new ideas is just a lot more fun. We wanted a game that was immediately really fun, so that our job polishing the last few edges would be super easy.

And so one day we stumbled over the concept of Buttonville. We agreed to create the simplest of systems so the game rules were something like this:
1. Draw cards.
2. Play as many cards as you want from a set and trigger the ability of that set.

Each set has a cool ability which sometimes even gets more powerful the more cards you play. This was the core of the game and already from the first test, we saw something showing a ton of promise. We knew we had to continue down this rabbit hole to see what the game had to offer. It’s fun when you make games, you can yourself be surprised at the experiences they throw back at you. It is a bit like having a kid.

We saw that the system was simple enough to not get in the way, so the heart of the game was really the cards. Depending on what you put on those, the game could be a breezy experience playable with families or a brainburning puzzly hellhole that would make even heavy eurogamers quit in frustration. We aimed for a happy medium.

We made the game modular, so each game you select some number of stacks that are used in that game. (A stack consists of multiple copies of the same card). This gives a lot of variety between games and leaves new combinations to be discovered each play. This idea is certainly not new, and Dominionprovided some inspiration here. Not for the gameplay, as Glorious Guilds of Buttonville is not a deck builder, but for having a big box with stacks of cards, only some of which are used in every game. Other inspirations include Guildhall and Ethnos having abilities increasing in power based on the number of cards played.

And all of a sudden things exploded. We went into hyperspeed mode and more than 50 cards were created in less than a day. Erik loves to brainstorm ideas and just throw them out there, no thoughts of consequences and no sorting of good or bad effects. Page up and page down. Christian is great at finding the gold nuggets among those ideas and polishing them to crispy unique (and well-worded) effects. Christian even suggested that our rapid work pace made him think of us as he listened to MacGyver by They Might Be Giants.

Playtest at the lunch break of the division of applied nuclear physics at Uppsala University
After working on the game for what feels like only about a month, Erik proposed sending it to Thorsten Gimmler at Ravensburger. Usually it is a good idea to make your idea really refined before showing it to a publisher - if they don’t like it, they might not want to see a more polished version again later. On the other hand, we are both quite impatient (especially Erik), so we decided to send it away. And then we waited. What did we learn from the waiting? Erik is WAY less relaxed in a waiting state. He probably checked his mail every 5th minute. Christian was much more Zen.

Thorsten: ”From the very first test game, I was captivated by the game. Many games have extensive rules that ensure complexity and replayability. Buttonville, however, has such simple and few rules, yet the combinations of cards ensure that the game remains exciting. Since the games don't take long, I played three games in a row during my first test. Further tests quickly followed, especially since it was easy to find test players for the game, as everyone wanted to test it again and again. So it quickly became clear to us that we definitely wanted to make the game.”

An early playtest of the prototype at Ravensburger in June 2024
Thorsten came back to us and started by saying. “This game sure has a LOT of cards in it! I can’t believe that I spent so much time crafting this first prototype, but I’m glad I did! Because I REALLY like the game!” and a few months later a contract was signed.

We had a great development process with Ravensburger. Thorsten proposed that instead of picking the card sets completely random, we could group them into sets of similar effects, for example drawing, getting currency, spending currency etc. This was a great call and allowed us some freedom in designing cards. If a card for example rewards you for spending coins, you really need there to be another card giving you coins or that first card will just be a dead draw.

Erik and Christian (especially Erik) created well over 100 more card stacks. Some were super simple and some more advanced (Christian even used the expression “crazy mess” now and then). We playtested the cards and sorted them back and forth in good and bad, simple and hard. Together with our editorial team at Ravensburger, we decided to mostly focus on the simple and easy to understand card effects, and only one or two of the crazy messes snuck their way into the final game (You know who you are, Slimebob!).

Photo Credit: [user=W Eric Martin][/user]
Thorsten: “Working with Christian and Erik was really great and a lot of fun. We coordinated with each other regularly and discussed our test results in video calls. It was great that we always had the same vision for the game. It just worked really well. We made small improvements again and again, replacing some cards with new ones or simply improving and adjusting others slightly. We also made a big leap forward by designing the entire system to be modular. This allows everyone to freely assemble their own set. Of course, this also had the practical benefit of not having to test each set multiple times. ;-) But this means you are not limited to previously tested sets. You can keep putting together new sets and be sure that they will work!

The signing event at SPIEL 2025.
The game premiered at SPIEL Essen 2025. We were happy to be assigned a signing slot at the booth of Ravensburger. We had a decent number of visitors who wanted a signed copy, a fair amount were happy designer friends who congratulated us. We had a great time! And then! As the time was getting close to the end, something started to happen. A huge queue started to build up and we started to get excited. Did the hype spread to the entire convention already? Christian, the more observant of the two of us, noticed that every single one in the queue was also carrying a green box… hmm.. As we turn around Stefan Feld is standing behind us: “I will take over from here.” (Just kidding, Stefan was super friendly and congratulated us on our game.)

Almost a year has passed, and now it is time for the game to be presented at Gen Con! We look forward to its American reception!

From the left: Erik Andersson Sundén, Thorsten Gimmler, and Christian Kudahl

by Steph Hodge

Capstone Games recently announced their Gen Con lineup of games! Here are the details!

[imageid=9526276 medium rep]▪️ It gives me great pleasure to talk about All Mine! because it reimplements Scharfe Schoten, a game I hold on to tightly in my collection because it never made its way to the US market. I am very pleased to learn of this new release from Capstone Games. It does seem to be a new age of trick-taking games, so it doesn't surprise me to see All Mine show up and essentially resurface. This game is played by 3-4 players in about 30 minutes.

From the BGG Page:



▪️ Ants was originally released from Cranio Creations at Spiel 2025, but now will be available in the US market from Capstone. It is a heavier strategy game for 2-4 players and plays in about 90 minutes.

From BGG:



▪️ Night at the Zoo is a new tile-placement game for 1-4 players that will play in about 30 minutes. The catch is that you need to program your movement and understand the patterns to do that.

From BGG:


▪️ Along with the base game, you can acquire the expansion Night at the Zoo: Latecomers. Now with more animals and added variety!

From BGG:


▪️ Finally, another big game called Papyria. This game is originally from Irongames, but will now be available in the US from Capstone. It has a Rondel mechanic, which is very intriguing. The game plays 1-4 players and takes 90-120 minutes.

From BGG:

by Kristian Karlberg

The Birth of Jackpot
Version 0 - 2020
The earliest version of Jackpot: Set the Reel was born at KalCon, a small Swedish board game convention where Kristian was demoing and recruiting backers for Goetia: Nine Kings of Solomon. During the event, inspiration struck and this childhood memory of us playing slot machines on the ferry between Finland and Sweden made us tinker with the idea of making a deck builder slot machine.

Even back then, we were fascinated by slot machines as a physical and emotional experience. There’s something universally recognizable about the rhythm of spinning symbols lining up. Part of the original vision was simply recreating that feeling in tabletop form: revealing three cards at a time like the reels of a slot machine and letting players chase combinations.

Kristian likes to take picture of the very first versions of a game. This is the very first hotel-room-prototype of Jackpot.
Breaking the Bank
Early in the development, players were trying to hit three-of-a-kind as often as possible in order to gain coins - just the way the old slot machines worked. The coins in the bank eventually became the timer of the game thus making the working title “Jackpot: Break the Bank”.

Artwork
People say that you should not spend money on artwork for prototypes, but Kristian stumbled upon some beautiful cherries somewhere and decided to track down the artist, who was surprised that Kristian had found some of his old artworks.

He agreed to sell us the art pieces to use, since Kristian was convinced that he would make this into another Kickstarter, so he might as well get the rights to use his artwork straight away. The artwork would end up being used to draw looks and raise interest, but these art pieces never ended up in the final version.

Early Artwork used in Prototype
Designing Variants
That “breaking the bank” concept stayed at the heart of the game for a long time. Every decision players made brought the table collectively closer to the end.

Early versions experimented with all kinds of mechanics. There was a hold mechanic inspired directly by video poker, where players could lock certain symbols while rerolling others. At one point the game drifted surprisingly close to being a memory game, asking players to track information across turns. We also introduced income mechanics tied to clover symbols, giving players more long-term strategic engines to build around.

One early mechanic that Kristian thought was interesting was the fact that you gave your cards to your opponents, and if they used those cards when they won some coins, you gained some coins because your cards were used. This caused the players to get an influx of coins out of turn. The coins could then be used to purchase new cards to improve your hand.

Early on, the game used achievements with decrementing values, so the first player to hit a three-of-a-kind would get the highest victory point token. Variants of this remained in the game and eventually ended up becoming simply cards that were awarded to the players.

Decreasingly valued VP cards awarded when hitting 3 of a kind
Later iterations used a game board where players were moving between casinos and trying to break each and every one of the banks.

A version had players move between casinos and collect poker chips

The hold mechanic showed promise, but caused the timing of the game to become strange. Players needed to be finished with their turn at the same time to create order.

The Pitch Project
The game eventually took shape into something representable. During the peak of Covid, Jay Cormier and Sen-Foong Lim realized the lack of opportunities for designers to pitch games to publishers, so they organized an event called the Pitch Project. The workshops during this event built the foundation and taught us how to properly pitch games to publishers.

Sell Sheets
The requirement to enter the competition was to make a Sell Sheet and use that to qualify for the online pitch where dozens of publishers would look at your game.

The sell sheets went through many iterations. Initial versions had too much text, then later versions were too rules-heavy, and slowly the feedback shaped them into something more refined.

Evolution of the sell sheet
First Contract
Jackpot qualified for the Top 50 out of roughly 750 submitted sell sheets and was set to hold a two minute video pitch for publishers. Shortly after the Pitch Project, the game was evaluated by multiple publishers and was eventually signed by an American publisher and entered a longer development process.

Development
Seeing another team engage deeply with the design was exciting and slowly but surely made improvements to the game.

The development team aimed to improve Jackpot’s pacing and deck-building feel by reducing or removing the coins while keeping and refining popular features like wild cards, and allowing longer gameplay for better progression. Some of the ideas explored during that period still echo in the current version of the game. Hold was scrapped, coins were cut, and eventually clovers were introduced as currency, shifting the focus towards pacing, accessibility, and making every turn feel active for all players.

Game Is Put On Hold
Unfortunately, the publisher later ran into internal difficulties and had to let the project go. After a couple of years, the rights reverted back to Kristian, along with a huge amount of valuable feedback gathered during development.

Jackpot was put on ice whilst other designs were made. Two years went by.

Enter Kenny Zetterberg
For the next couple of years, Kristian and Kenny Zetterberg started to make multiple designs together. At some point, they revisited Jackpot and began tweaking it further, while also exploring what else could be done with the jackpot mechanic.

Jackpot itself remained on ice while other designs explored what we now call the “jackpot mechanic”. This was added as an action selection system in other projects, eventually leading to a eurogame using that core idea.

Prototype of the eurogame Kalix using the Jackpot mechanic
Exploring the jackpot mechanic in other designs proved valuable. We realized that, contrary to traditional slot machines, partial matches needed to be rewarded. Matching one or two symbols still gave players something. The game became more generous, more energetic, and far less swingy, keeping players emotionally engaged even when narrowly missing the perfect result.

A crucial discovery during this period was the income phase. At the end of each round, players received income that could be used to purchase more cards, whereas earlier versions only rewarded wins directly.

Clover indicating income at the end of a round
Jackpot was occasionally revisited, and bonus actions were introduced when players achieved two-of-a-kind, which felt like the missing piece. The game timer was changed to “first to 33 VP wins,” and the game was ready to be pitched again.

Reddit
During the sell sheet design, Kristian posted in the r/tabletopgamedesign subreddit for feedback. Dranda Games had seen Jackpot during the Pitch Project and noticed that several years had passed without release. An old sell sheet post caught their attention, and they reached out to test the game.

Conversations started, prototypes were sent, and before long Jackpot had found a new home.

Dranda Games
The development team at Dranda Games loved the game but felt there was more design space to explore, particularly inspired by mini-games found in modern slot machines.

We began experimenting with very small mini-games integrated into the core gameplay. Designing these was an interesting challenge, as players would only experience them for a few turns. They added variety and created playful breaks in the flow of the game.

Some experiments proved too complex and were cut, including Roulette and Minotaurs Maze, which required too many components and slowed the experience.

Mini-game development exploration

Seven Seas mini game Prototype
Kickstarter - Jackpot: Set the Reel
What started as a simple idea in a hotel room opened up many doors and possibilities, and six years later found a home with Dranda Games. Jackpot reached its funding goal on September 5th and has its official release at UKGE 2026.

As a bonus, Jackpot: Set the Reel is now in the beta stage of development on BoardGameArena.

Kenny Zetterberg & Kristian Karlberg at Essen Spiel 2025

We couldn’t be happier with the game and we truly hope you will enjoy playing it!
Thank you for taking the time to read about our journey.

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.

by Danielle Reynolds

“Love” for many can be a roller coaster of ups and downs. I had a six-year relationship with a woman I almost married and after that break up my friends were pushing me to go on apps because they wanted to play “swipe” (and probably have me find love). Most of them were in monogamous relationships and never got to experience Tinder, Hinge, Bumble or whatever the flavor-of-the-week app was.

No offense to my friends but I didn’t trust them to just take my phone and pick what girls I should date so I’d watch to make sure they knew what I liked before I let them play “swipe”. This concept is what inspired the design of Perfectly Imperfect. I wanted players to learn from dating profiles what each other’s red and green flags were in the form of a conversation party game.

This design spent years changing names and directions before it found its way to becoming Perfectly Imperfect. The cousin of this game was a design I attempted based on the concept of getting ghosted but I ditched the concept in 2019. In 2021, a yearish after my breakup, the first form of Perfectly Imperfect began as Date or Hate. Profiles were written to resemble public domain characters like Robin Hood. Each card was double-sided with a girl profile on one side and a boy on the other. That way you could turn the deck depending on a player’s preference. It was cute but people knew these characters. They had many pre-existing opinions and didn’t learn as much about each other as I had wanted.

So I took a second stab at the content with the help of my uncle Terry. We wrote historically bad people/fictional characters into the game. You’re now dating the worst of the worst. The problem is, not only was that not fun, people didn’t want to think about dating a tyrant even if it was written comedically.

So I tried again on my own. This time I wrote them all as gender neutral, researching names that could work for all the profiles. By this point it was 2023 and I was playtesting the game with David Gordon and TAM in New York City. We did some brainstorming and TAM suggested a new take for the look of the game. With the new gender neutral profiles I needed a name that better fit and he suggested Abstract Love. I loved the idea of leaning into something I’m very passionate about, gender identity and sexuality. As a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, I love seeing games with gender neutral writing and characters. I updated the prototype and made fun abstract art for the 60ish profiles I had made for pitching the game. The new look also got printed in a much nicer box thanks to a short sponsorship from Launch Tabletop.

The mechanics up until this point had one player as the Dater and the others as the Friends each round. Three profiles got read and players placed a yes, no or maybe token facedown under each profile. Then the Dater would place theirs and flip to see what matched. You’d score one point per match and rotate Daters each round until you played 1-3 rounds depending on player count. The only additional element was a suggestion offered by David to add a confidence token that gained you an extra point when you matched up. Funny enough, the future publisher Randolph would later relate this mechanic in what was in their successful Oh, Really? game insisting they would have added it had it not been there.

The content hadn’t changed but the facelift gave it a new fresh look that caught publishers' eyes. In 2025, at the Gathering of Friends Joël Gagnon, who I'd met two years before, sat down for a pitch between me and Randolph. When pitching, I explained the journey of the game but it was the fact that most of the content was based on reality and that I had actually done most of the playtesting of the game on actual dates that made them ask to play. I pulled out my prototype and we played. They saw the parallels between Abstract Love and Oh, Really? knowing it would perform well in Montreal at their cafes. They especially loved this game played great at two-players as well as eight-players, giving a slightly different experience but still causing laughter, conversation, and tales that left the gaming table.

Joël took a prototype and a few months later we had a contract signed with a fast turnaround for me to write the content. As most party game designers know, the written content can make or break a game so I did a lot of playtesting to get the game up to the 200 profile cards you see in the final version. Randolph had also loved the gender neutral profiles but suggested switching from real names to user names which gave me a fun way to add plenty of cheeky jokes in. They also wanted to go back to each profile having three interests and there being no images like the Date or Hate version had. We worked to balance these interests with the profile text to make the people seem interesting and allow players to focus on different details. We also added a scoring mechanism for the Dater to receive the same amount of points as the highest scoring Friend.

A challenge that came when writing the profiles was receiving a head injury when returning from Gen Con in August 2025. The passenger next to me dropped their suitcase from the overhead bin onto my head before deboarding the plane. This led to an ER visit and my fifth diagnosed concussion with a new barrier of limited to no screen time as I recovered. So I channeled my inner middle schooler and journaled my thoughts creating all the original profile drafts in my design journal then using the talk to text feature added them into a spreadsheet to share with my publisher. My friend Amanda Rivera was incredibly helpful in reviewing the profiles to fix the talk to text typos, playtesting and helping me brainstorm funny profile names. The journey of this game really showed me how important my friendships were.

Due to my head injury I was restricted in how much screen time I was allowed for months so whenever I got stuck on what to write in the next profile I’d read, call a friend or work on an art project to help with inspiration. One project included two paintings based on the art of my Abstract Love prototype that still hangs above my bedroom.

A huge hurdle came in what to call this version of the game. Abstract Love no longer made sense with the illustrations being removed and didn’t scream dating game. We spent most of September going through different name suggestions until they landed on Perfectly Imperfect which had been one of the profile user names based on the popular saying. It was short, simple, elegant and would end up being quoted many times in casual conversation still to this day by me and my friends.

The timeline for this game had been sped up due to Hachette taking the game and deciding to distribute it in English before Randolph put it out in Canada. Their goal was a Spring 2026 release so I spent August and September 2025 playtesting non-stop in my freetime and tweaking the profiles along with Randolph’s translator Matthew Legault reviewing changed content. The English edition of the game would have me as the writer while the French would be a combination of translations and original profiles that related to French Canadian locations/sayings - so no more Trader Joe’s jokes!

In October 2025 while I was traveling through France after SPIEL I was receiving proofs of the cards and box to review. The illustrator for the game was the same as Oh, Really?. MC Marquis was an incredibly talented artist that made the box look like a piece of art that should stay out indefinitely on people’s coffee tables. I e-mailed feedback from trains and pulled my friends Elizabeth Hargrave, Mattand Donna Leacock to give their thoughts while doing the final playtests in Europe. I appreciated the amount of collaboration that the Randolph team had with me to get this game to the finish line. Not all publishers let the designer be this involved but this game was years in the making and I wanted to see it through to the end.

Fast forward to New York Toy Fair 2026 I got to hold a mass production copy of the game in my hands and make a few videos about the inspiration behind this game. It’s wild to think how many bad dates went into this game between the content and the playtests. A few years ago I had made playtesting at breweries my go to first date idea. Figuring if the date didn’t go well I’d at least have a good story and some more playtesting data. I learned that the game could be just as fun with people you didn’t know as the ones you did. It also helped me learn if a second date would happen or not (there was never a second date back then). I even used the published version of the game to play with my now girlfriend to see how well we matched each other. I always hated dating apps and the pressure people put on me to use them to find love but hey, I eventually found my perfectly imperfect partner and I couldn’t be happier where that relationship or this game is going. I hope people enjoy the game as much as I do now that it’s out!

by Scott Brady

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

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

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

Concept

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

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

First Crack

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

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

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

Prototypes

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

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

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

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

Second Attempt

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

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

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

Third Attempt

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

Solution

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

OSHA Violation

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

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

Testing

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

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

Pitching

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

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

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

Done!

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

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

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

Scott Brady

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

by Steph Hodge

How about some games that will play with a higher player count? Here are a whole bunch of releases coming soon that will handle 6 or more players!

[imageid=9389228 medium rep]▪️ Synapses Games announced Medium: The Hand of Fate to be released Q3 2026. This will be able to combine with any previous Medium game you currently have. This game handles 2-8 players and is designed by Danielle Deley (Medium, That Old Wallpaper) and Nathan Thornton (Green Team Wins, Medium, That Old Wallpaper). This is a new standalone title.

From the announcement:



▪️ Pandasaurus Games just announced Moustache. Originally published by Lumberjacks Studio in 2025. Now Pandasaurus is bringing us this team-based trick-taking game for 3-6 players. Look for this game at the end of August 2026.

From the newsletter:



▪️ Gigamic announced a new edition of Panic Lab is set to be released at the end of June 2026. This game was originally released in 2012 and has seen many iterations over the years. It's real-time chaos is back and will host 2-10 players in about a 30-minute playtime!

From the newsletter:


▪️ Shapely is a new party game from R&R Games for 3-6 players! Your goal is to arrange your shapes so that other players can guess your word. You can play in just 30 minutes. I believe it is already available.

From the newsletter:


▪️ Finally, we have Who's Next? from Don't Panic Games. A new musical party game for 3-7 players. This is a hand management card game.

From the newsletter:

by Steph Hodge

How about some games that will play with a higher player count? Here are a whole bunch of releases coming soon that will handle up to 6 or more players!

[imageid=9389228 medium rep]▪️ Synapses Games announced Medium: The Hand of Fate to be released Q3 2026. This will be able to combine with any previous Medium game you currently have. This game handles 2-8 players and is designed by Danielle Deley (Medium, That Old Wallpaper) and Nathan Thornton (Green Team Wins, Medium, That Old Wallpaper). This is a new standalone title.

From the announcement:



▪️ Pandasaurus Games just announced Moustache. Originally published by Lumberjacks Studio in 2025. Now Pandasaurus is bringing us this team-based trick-taking game for 3-6 players. Look for this game at the end of August 2026.

From the newsletter:



▪️ Gigamic announced a new edition of Panic Lab is set to be released at the end of June 2026. This game was originally released in 2012 and has seen many iterations over the years. It's real-time chaos is back and will host 2-10 players in about a 30-minute playtime!

From the newsletter:


▪️ Shapely is a new party game from R&R Games for 3-6 players! Your goal is to arrange your shapes so that other players can guess your word. You can play in just 30 minutes. I believe it is already available.

From the newsletter:


▪️ Finally, we have Who's Next? from Don't Panic Games. A new musical party game for 3-7 players. This is a hand management card game.

From the newsletter:

by Scott Brady

Three years later and I am no better at keeping ongoing notes about my design journey than I was when I penned the Designer Diary for boop. I usually become so focused on my projects that I’ve never found space to step back and write down what works and what doesn’t. Sadly, many of those processes will never be known and I know I’m the one to blame.

I am immensely proud of what we (Smirk & Dagger and I) have accomplished with the release of boop.and its subsequent releases, Boooop. and boop the Halls! With each new edition I wanted to make sure to give the consumers something more than just a cool skin. Each game needed to offer something new and different. Making changes to the tight, elegant gameplay of the original proved much harder than I anticipated. In the end, the right solution for both versions was to introduce unique rule-changing characters and items that supplemented gameplay and didn’t change the core.

Progression of the Brand

We have been discussing the future of the boop. line for some time, wondering if it should ever expand beyond being a true combinatorial abstract game. So far, we had followed the same pattern and still have one more unannounced entry coming in 2027! Don’t worry, it’s not another holiday-themed version. And the gameplay is my personal favorite of the series! I cannot wait to tell the world more!

Conception

In the meantime, I began thinking about how the boop. experience might be utilized in other game types, either by theme or mechanic. I’ve often heard stories about how people made bags for their copies of boop. to make it more portable. I began playing around with the idea of playing cards and what I would need to do to make an official travel version.

It would have been easy enough to just make a 1:1 conversion of boop. into cards with no rule changes. Basically, just a component twist. This would have been the exact opposite of my philosophy above where I wanted it to be more than just a reskin. The game needed to stand on its own with something unique. That’s when the idea hit me – you could play each other’s felines!

How the Game Grew

The cool thing about using cards is you get to shuffle a deck. No longer do you have a choice of what to play, you must play the card drawn. Not only did this mean you didn’t know if you were going to play a cat or kitten, because all the cards are shuffled into one deck (instead of player decks), it meant you could end up playing a cat or kitten of your opponent’s!

Hence the final name – boop. Shuffle!

Talk about an instant strategy change! The mechanics remained the same, but the thought of leaving behind one of your opponent’s cards instead of your own changed the game quite a bit. I also envisioned the bed to be virtual, allowing for play on any surface.

The edges of the bed would shift as the play area filled with cats. I felt this simple change with the deck of cards and virtual bed was the right thing to show to Smirk & Dagger for consideration.

They liked it…kinda…

Rejection?

They agreed it was a great interpretation of the original game, but they wanted more. Their vision of a card game version was less focused towards a classic abstract, but one that had more surprises and thematic elements. I admitted I could see that too.

As any great partner, they came up with several ideas which we ended up working together on implementing. There are wild cards that can be used by either player. Actions on certain kittens and cats you might recognize from boop the Halls! And then there was the blankie…

In what I will call the cutest mechanic to ever be in a board game, boop. Shuffle includes a blanket card. When drawn, you place it on top of any kitten or cat on the bed. While napping under the blankie, they don’t exist in the playfield. In order to count them towards a 3-in-a-row they must be uncovered! The blanket can be booped like any other item. When they are booped onto another cat, they now nap! If they are booped into an open space, the blankie is removed from the board and put into the discard pile.

Cutbacks

All of a sudden we have a lot more chaos happening with the blanket, action cards, wild cats and a virtual bed. Maybe a little too much overhead for the market we’re targeting, so we elected to remove the virtual bed, relegating those rules to an “advanced version” in the back of the rulebook.

Instead, we include neoprene bed skirts to define the board edges. These also roll up nice and tight to remain portable without adding too much cost to the product. In the end we were able to offer this new boop. experience for half of the retail price of the original game!

Release

boop. Shuffle had an official release date in the US of May 1 and you can already find it on the shelves at your favorite local game store and Barnes & Noble. Smirk & Dagger offers it directly on their website and will have copies available at Origins Game Fair, Gen Con and PAX Unplugged. I’ll be in attendance as well if you would like me to teach it to you myself!

Scott Brady

by Jeff Grisenthwaite

I’ve been playing games on BGA since 2014, but it wasn’t until this past year that I made the leap to developing games on BGA.

My goal is to start a discussion about what I’ve learned about making gameplay feel just right within the unique environment of BGA, using examples from a couple of my games, Soothsayers and Positano.

Simulating that Board Game Feeling

BGA is weird.

It’s a huge collection of online games that bear little resemblance to the experience of console, PC, or mobile games. Instead, BGA strives to replicate the feeling of playing board games together in real life for all those times when we can’t actually be gaming together.

And they connect players with the whole world. One of the tenets of BGA development is to stick to pretty basic, vanilla code, in order to make the games widely accessible, regardless of players’ hardware or browsers.
For Positano, the big challenge was to capture the 3D look and feel that people love about the game but to do so in the 2D non-dynamic world of BGA.

Side-by-side images of Positano in real life and Positano on BGA
The solution was to simulate the 3D hillside and buildings simply by layering images at a fixed angle. It retains the beauty of the physical game, while keeping the technical approach as basic and widely accessible as possible.

Teach Through Play

I don’t know about you, but I try to use BGA as a shortcut to avoid reading rulebooks. The tutorials are great (shoutout to Nekonyancer!), but what can be even better is when the BGA adaptation teaches players as they play.

Here are a few techniques that help to teach the game to new players:

Tooltips: When players hover over a card or other component, showing a zoomed-in display of that component, along with explanatory text, helps players to access additional information when needed.

In Soothsayers, players can hover over any card to view detailed information about it.

Title Bar Text & Buttons: BGA’s standard convention is to present the choices available to a player on a given turn as buttons in the title bar. To help players learn the game, dynamically update the text in the title bar and the text and icons on the buttons to best inform players of their options.

In Soothsayers, buttons explain the costs and effects of each action.

Player Panels: Summarizing key information within player panels, particularly scoring, reinforces for players the important metrics to pay attention to.

In Positano, the player panels help players to understand how each building they construct affects not just their overall scores, but provides detailed scoring for sea views, gelato, and three different public goals.

Animation: Using animation in key places can help players understand the effects of their actions and notice changes in the game state. For example, in Soothsayers, when you use the Judgement tarot to steal a Fate token, the Fate token flies from the rival’s card to yours.

How To Play Rules: Because BGA automates the setup and administrative steps between turns and enforces the rules during play, the text of the How to Play tab below the game can likely be 90% shorter than the full rulebook.

Undo

Before I started development, I asked game communities within Discord and on Bluesky what are their biggest points of frustration with games on BGA. The most common complaint was when games don’t provide the ability to undo your last action or reset your turn.

There are two main reasons for providing the ability to undo at key points:

1. New players are learning the game. After seeing the consequences of their actions, they may need to retry a few turns.

2. Errant clicks. BGA is trying to simulate the tabletop game feeling with as high of fidelity as possible, which is why it feels so bad to have your turn ruined by accidentally clicking or tapping on something and having no recourse.

Not every single action needs an undo, though. Providing too many can slow down games, and players should never be able to undo an action after hidden information is revealed.

In Soothsayers, after completing your turn, a Confirm button displays with a 5 second countdown before it auto-confirms. If you’re not satisfied with your turn, you can choose to reset.


Layout Considerations

The second biggest player complaint is when BGA games require too much vertical scrolling to understand the game state, so here are a few techniques to reduce the need to scroll:

Robust Player Panels: By displaying all the key information within player panels, players often can bypass needing to view opponents’ tableaus or auxiliary boards.

In Soothsayers, the player panels display the levels of all 8 cards in each player’s tableau, who holds the Fate tokens, coins, and the number of cards in each player’s hand.

Floating Hands: Many games demand that you play a card or tile from a hand to a tableau or place on the board. By anchoring the hands to the bottom of the screen and allowing them to float over everything else, players can always view the cards in hand when making the decision for where to play them.

Responsive Design: To accommodate players on tiny mobile screens, on ultra-wide monitors, and everywhere in between, responsive design techniques should be employed to make the best use of every screen size.

In Positano, the goal cards are displayed below the beach board on mobile, but when on a larger monitor, they're displayed to the left of the hillside.

Player Preferences: We’re all different people. BGA games should reflect that by providing ample player preferences to tailor the game experience to your needs.

Soothsayers player preferences include options to change the card size, remove pulsing animations, and more.

Turn-Based Play

Some games work really well in BGA’s turn-based (asynchronous) play mode. These tend to be games with chunky turns, in which you’re making big moves each turn, as opposed to micro-decisions interrupted by other players. Turn-based play on BGA lets you luxuriate in over-analyzing your strategy without worrying about holding up the game.

A few techniques for making turn-based play go a bit smoother include:

Automate Non-Choices: By identifying the spots in the game in which players don’t have an actual choice to make, you can save everyone a lot of time by automating those decisions.

Provide a Robust Log: Sometimes days pass between turns, and other times players are playing multiple turn-based instances of the same game at once, so it’s important to provide a detailed, easy-to-scan log that players can use to catch up on the most recent turns.

In Soothsayers, the log provides small renditions of the cards drafted or played to make it easier to scan.

Simultaneous Decisions: BGA offers a mode in which players can all take their turns at the same time, which can massively reduce the amount of time it takes to complete a turn-based game.

Developing on BGA

Programming games on BGA is not easy. It takes a long time, and the documentation could be more robust. The upside is that BGA connects your game with a global audience who can compete at the highest levels.

My hope with this article is to share what I’ve learned as I strive to provide an ideal BGA experience for my own games.

I’m also hoping to start a conversation! What else can developers do to provide better BGA experiences?

Jeff Grisenthwaite is the designer of Positano and Soothsayers, both available in stores and on BoardGameArena.

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?

by BoltKey

Part 1 – Finding the Right Pace & Depth
Those who follow CGE for a while know that a lot of design happens in close cooperation between the designer and CGE after the game is accepted by the company. I was in a bit of a special spot in this project: I have worked as a full-time employee at CGE, and I have worked on Drillers since late 2023.

The process of CGE deciding to publish the game was quite gradual. I was bringing various prototypes to CGE events, some people that liked the game pitched in with their skills to make the next prototype just a little bit better, and this eventually evolved into the crunch of a real project with real deadlines and stakes. Říman, a CGE in-house 3D artist, was a great partner in the initial phase and contributed many ideas that made it to the final game. We spent many evenings brainstorming and discussing the game, and that’s the reason he is titled co-designer on this project.

There was not a singular moment, contract, email or meeting where we decided “let’s do this”. It was almost like a natural progression.

Development and design of the game were a lot of fun and great adventure, as with any game design endeavor I get involved in. I am writing this diary from my perspective (Adam Španěl) as the lead designer and author of the initial concept, but I’ll occasionally use “we”. That means “the development team”, which mostly consists of me, Říman, Tomáš, Elwen and Mín.

The Story of Drillers
Back in 2005–2010, I spent a lot of time playing flash games. It was a golden era of browser gaming. That’s when I discovered Motherload, and I absolutely loved it. The sense of wonder every time you discover a new type of mineral. The satisfaction of selling your haul, finally refilling your fuel at the last second and upgrading your machine. The courage it took to just go deeper, and keep discovering more.

The series that culminated in Super Motherload in 2013 helped define a genre of "mining games" like Dome Keeper, SteamWorld Dig, and many others. They all share the core loop: dig, gather resources, sell, upgrade, repeat.

No board game I have played quite captured the feeling I got from the video games: you know you should probably head back up as your fuel is running low, but there is that really valuable gem just within reach that would be just enough to buy that upgrade you really need. And the next time you get there might be too late. On top of that, your curiosity of what is hiding in the depths is sometimes stronger than your rational decision to just play it safe and return to camp.

Designing for Myself
I know I should probably focus more on who the target audience is when designing a game. However, I am one of those designers who make games primarily for themselves. The games I want to play, and the games I feel are missing on the market. And if other people end up enjoying them too, that's a great bonus. I knew an exact feeling I wanted the game to create, and the only way to play it was to make it myself.

So, I got to work. The very first iteration contained just the core elements: cards that generated moves and drills for fuel, tiles that created cubes that you could collect in your cargo, and when you reached the surface again, you could buy better cards. I am really glad that these core mechanics "survived" in pretty much unchanged form from the first iteration to release.

Of course some of the mechanics evolved: how the shaft tiles worked exactly, and how the card offer worked, how the card management worked, and gradually mechanics like drones, repair, unique effects, floor cards or permanent cards grew around the game, but the core loop was tight and solid.

Abstracting the Mine
One core mechanic of the mining video games is that as you play you’re constantly reshaping the world as you play. You are creating a maze that you have to later navigate, so it has this kind of "build your own puzzle" element to it, and if you are not careful, you might get lost and perish.

At one point I considered playing around with this idea in Drillers. It turned out to be just too bloated in combination with other mechanics, and it added too much unnecessary complexity that was not so fun. So I decided not to explore this direction any further.

Drillers – Mainboard progress

Game Duration
Drillers is a game with variable and player-driven game length. This creates a sense of urgency and a bit of race. This however poses several design challenges.

Balancing the Game
Drillers is all about optimizing your turns and pushing every card to its limit. There is a big difference between what a beginner can do in a turn, and an advanced player. Since the game is timed by what players have accomplished in the game (how much they’ve mined), this creates huge discrepancy between length of different games. While advanced players usually hit the "sweet spot" of 10–12 turns, beginners' games often stretched to 17 or 18 turns. Combined with the natural learning curve of new players, this initially resulted in pacing friction that lacked momentum.

During development, we noticed that many players played it safe and stayed near the surface, working with the minerals that they could reach easily. While that approach worked, it often led to slower and less engaging moments.

We wanted to bring forward the feeling that we love about Drillers. The need to go a little bit deeper, take a risk and get something more valuable. So we started to shape the game to naturally encourage players to dive deeper:

The Market: Encouraging Diving Deeper
Initially, the prices for selling minerals were flat, but we decided we need to make them variable somehow, to make the new shiny minerals more attractive. We considered a shared market, but that was too complicated. Instead, we created the system where the more you sell of the same mineral, the less valuable it becomes. Eventually, we made the silver and gold prices drop to zero credits if they are oversold. It’s basically a way of pushing the players towards diving deeper for more profitable minerals.

The Floor Cards: What Lies Beneath
There was the idea of floor cards adding special rules floating around, but I was scared of it: I didn’t want to add too much rules overhead. But I think they turned out great. The main principle is that the floor cards only trigger when you actively interact with the floor, rather than just passing through. But the main reason was, again, to motivate new players to dig deeper. The curiosity of what is on the next floor really helped this.

It was a challenge to hit that sweet spot with the floor cards so they are significant enough so you want to care about them, but not game-changing in a way that gives unfair advantage to certain playstyles.

Let’s look at the Hot Tub. The first version gave a discount of 1 drill but also 1 damage. This was just bad most of the game, and usually you wanted to avoid it. The intention was to make that floor a bit more dynamic, with easier access to tiles, but the drawback was too much, so the opposite happened, with many players skipping that floor entirely.

In another version we added 1 extra fuel for each tile on top of the damage. This solved the initial problem of skipping the floor, but created a new one: players could suddenly make very unpredictable moves, grabbing 3 or 4 tiles at once and sometimes ending the game prematurely. To restrict it, we limited the effect to once per turn.. But this was still a bit too weak.

In the final version we gave it a major buff, where for the first tile, you get a discount along with the damage to your hand. Now that’s definitely beneficial, but still can bite you if you are not careful.

Another interesting example that highlights the back-and-forth with the illustrations is Lobby.

The original idea was simple: a safe space where you can prepare for your next big turn. At first, it only had the ability of keeping 3 cards for free. That worked quite well, but in practice, the timing often felt off. When the card was revealed, you usually didn’t get to take full advantage of it.

We brainstormed the theme a bit: first, it was just a “safe ledge”, which felt a bit bland. From there, the idea evolved into something more playful–a rest spot for a picnic table next to a vending machine.

When we were thinking about how the floor should work, we leaned into the theme of the vending machine, adding abilities involving money and getting snacks. Adding these effects ate up the space for illustration, so we dropped the picnic table, which evolved into the garden chair.

This quite wild iteration led to a really sweet floor card. It is a perfect example of the “game design informs art, art informs game design” principle that CGE prides itself in following.

Drillers – Lobby Event card progression

Game End Trigger: Making Progress Visible
Finding the right way to end the game took several iterations.

Initially, the end of the game was connected to the total number of minerals sold by all players. That worked reasonably well, but it was a real pain to track during play.

Then we moved on to a system where all the ground tiles had a number of dots, and if you collected 12 dots, you triggered the end of the game. The same issue, you had to keep recounting dots of other players to see if they were close to ending the game.

Then Říman had the great idea of connecting it to the physical size of the tile, making deeper tiles bigger, and slotting them above the player board. It was intuitive and satisfying, but this led to another problem: when players collected too many minerals and kept building their deck instead of getting the fat points on the lower floor tiles, it made the games exceedingly dragged out.

So finally we connected the dots, and made the end trigger by combination of tiles and minerals filling the track from each side. With that, we have a system that is quite intuitive, takes into account both minerals and ground tiles, but more importantly, you see at a glance how far along everybody is.

I am really glad how that one turned out.

Drillers – Progress of the player board

Ending Turns
Another mechanic we iterated quite a bit was the final turns after the game end trigger.

The first option, that is quite common, is giving every player the same number of turns. I usually don’t like use of this mechanic in games for two reasons. First, you must somehow mark or remember who was the starting player. And second, in my opinion, it adds more asymmetry to the player order than with variable number of turns: the last player approaches the end of the game differently than the first–they know exactly how many turns they have left, which can shape their entire strategy.

Instead I prefer giving players later in turn order extra resources to compensate for potentially less turns than others. Some players reported that having less turns than their opponents felt unfair. We tried quite a few solutions until we found something that felt right. First, we simply gave an extra turn to the player who triggered the game end. This, however, led to the extra turn feeling a bit useless and uneventful, and in some ways boring: the final turn should feel like an all-out finish, but the player triggering the end of the game expended most of their resources to trigger the game end, and didn’t have much of anything left for the extra turn. But we still wanted to give that all-out final turn to the opponents.

So, finally, we settled on the big 18-VP bonus for the closing player, that should compensate for the opponent’s extra turn (along with that extra card we gave just to make the final turn feel even bigger) The solution finally felt quite good for all parties involved.


Thank you for reading our Part 1 and coming under the surface with us.
Next time, we’ll dig into the core mechanics of Drillers–deck-building, decisions and how we shaped the way the game actually plays. If you want to get a head start, you can dive into how the game works by reading the rulebook: Drillers Rulebook.

If you want to be notified when the Part 2 drops next week, subscribe to Drillers here on BGG.
Looking forward to reading what you think so far.

by Steph Hodge

Time to get our feet a little wet with these new game announcements.

[imageid=9531435 medium rep]▪️ Stonemaier Games sent out a May update with new expansions available for several titles, including Finspan. The expansion to Finspan is called Finspan: Sharks & Reefs and it adds 75 new cards, which include new shark cards and coral habitats. Lots of new strategies to pursue.

From the BGG Page:



▪️ Mythic Baths was just announced from Good Games Publishing with a release happening soon. Hopefully available at GenCon 2026. A cute game for 2-5 players that will play in about 30-60 minutes. Your objective is to treat the guests and collect as much aber as possible to win.

From BGG:



▪️ Six-Sided Seas Was just announced for GenCon 2026 release from publisher Solis Game Studio. This is a 2-pirate game, but you can add a set to allow it to play up to 4-pirates. Gain glorious victory in 15-20 minutes!

From BGG:

by Michael

"When a man with a 0.45 straight meets a man with a rifle three-of-a-kind, you said the man with the pistol's straight’s a dead man. Let's see if that's true. Go ahead. Load Shuffle up and shoot draw."

Sorry to any film aficionados, you’ll survive though. Rattlesnake is a two-player duelling card game, lightly inspired by deck-building games. Players start the game with identical decks of cards, numbered one to five, and a central market (The Saloon) between them that holds cards for purchasing. They take turns purchasing cards and attacking each other (or not) by placing runs (sequential numbers) or sets (the same number) face down on the table, then comparing. Defenders take a Hit card to their discard pile if the attacker wins, and when a player has no Hit cards left, they lose the game. At any time in the game, from the moment the game starts, players can play a card in their hand for its ability. The downside however is that card is removed from their deck permanently afterwards! As cards are bought from the Saloon, events come out that change the rules of the game permanently, and slowly push the players into finishing things. The game has an ebb and flow to it that tries to create the tension and stress of actually being in a pistol duel in a run-down western town.

[heading]Prologue[/heading]
A little about me. I am an Australian/British/soon-to-be-Italian game designer, who lives in The Netherlands. By day I am an engineer, so working with systems, whether mechanical, electrical, or cardboard-based is all the same to me. I have been making games for a few years as a hobby/fun activity with friends, but this is the first game I actually decided to publish. More accurately, the first I felt was actually worth publishing. More on that later. What I like though, is telling stories. Board games are not ideal for this, but I try my best to fit a narrative into my designs in some way. The narrative might not be obvious at first glance, but Roland’s art definitely helps it stand out more. By the end of this design diary, I hope you can see the narrative in the game, and it brings it to life just a little bit more.

[heading]Act 1: We pass time between funerals and burials[/heading]
I was watching For A Fistful Of Dollars while my wife was away one week: the original spaghetti western (Western movie made by Italian directors), directed by Sergio Leone. This is where the story of Rattlesnake starts. I was moved by the music, the cinematography, the style, and the simplicity of it all. So of course, I thought, let’s make a game about this. Naturally. What you interpret from that is “oh, he wants to make a game about people shooting each other, easy, seen it before”. I am not so shallow, and there are games that do duelling much better for those things (Kiri-Ai anyone?). I wanted to make a game that tells the story of two people who are stuck in a duel, hiding behind some scrap of anything, desperately trying to figure out how to not die. The same, yes, but also different.

The obvious link is poker. To preface, this was all started way before Balatro was released. Board games take forever to publish. The first step in developing a prototype, normally, is to experiment and fail a lot really fast. So I started researching the history of card games in the Old American West. It made sense at the time. Several Wikipedia rabbit holes later I emerged, bleary eyed, tired, and unaware of where I was, or what I was doing. So the next day I just grabbed a deck of French suited playing cards, and then made a second deck of ability cards, with random scribbled abilities on them. I wrote whatever I felt would be appropriate or just sounded cool.

Four hours pass by and the tattered remains of two playing card decks litter my desk, and my paper waste bin is overflowing and begging me to stop. This is what progress looks like. I had gone through about 20 or so versions of the possible game in a single evening. That’s a new game version every 12 minutes on average. I had also ruined several fine felt-tipped pens in my haste. No time for funeral processions, or even digging the proper hole, just bury the past iteration as fast as possible. Whatever is not dead will climb out of the hole. Eventually, I actually accomplished some design work, and I came up with this bizarre system of two decks, where one would have traditional playing cards, albeit slightly modified, and the other would be full of crazy abilities and bonkers things. I nicknamed this second deck “The Michael Bay Deck”. Players could then choose to draw from either of their decks on their turn. I used spreadsheets and a program called NanDeck to rapidly print out digital versions after this.

The first playtests went well. The testers reported that the game was “a little too swingy” and other quotes like “wait, let me read that card again” and “does this really do what I think it does?”. A resounding success. The cards were built around spending your traditional playing cards (symbols on the left of the ability cards) like a resource to play abilities, but also using traditional playing cards to attack your opponent in a kind of hand comparison game (like poker, ish). Everyone did have fun though, which was a huge positive. The game was more broken than politics, but people were laughing and enjoying it. Great! BURY IT!

I churned through so many prototypes of this that I lost count. I keep almost every version of each prototype I make in general. Version control started at version 0, but each version had decimals. Even the decimals had decimals after that! There were three separate characters, each with their own ability decks, and they were all around different themes and play styles. You’d think with around 20 cards to each character, multiple copies in each deck, that it would be easy actually. But no. In the end, we were just optimising a dead horse. Don’t optimise, just bury it and move on.

[heading]Act 2: Sometimes the dead can be more useful than the living[/heading]
What if, now hear me out…the abilities were on the playing cards? It took much longer than I will admit to reach this conclusion. It was really quite simple, I just added numbers from two to seven, plus the face cards, to the ability cards, and then one entire deck was gone. Buried! Instantly half the components! Seriously, this was a game changer, literally and metaphorically. People went from “oh, that was alright” to “shut up Michael, I’m playing here!”. Great success. I kept very, very detailed testing notes after every single game and had a wealth of info to look back through and try spot the issues. Most feedback has value in it, if you can find the nuggets of truth buried deep within. The note that helped me the most was “there are too many cards and decks”. Insightful I know. But it took about 10 sessions before someone said that out loud. Before then, it was always some arbitrary problem, a feeling they couldn’t describe or explain. I was swimming in a vast lake of vague expressions and blind design suggestions, until someone just shouted “why are you wearing two snorkels?”. Obvious isn’t it? Remove the excess and bury it.

The game was finding its footing more and more with each revision. Five card hands, both players are refreshing at the end of any turn, and abilities are one-time affairs before they disappear forever. The keyword for removing a card from the game was of course, “Buried”. My testing notes document was swelling and gaining self-awareness, consuming and digesting copious quantities of feedback and test data. Every week there was a slew of new prototypes. Monday I would test with my closed group, Tuesday I would fix it and test solo, Wednesday I would semi-blind test with another local design group, then Thursday I would fix and solo test again. The game was starting to feel more and more like two idiots hiding behind barrels and overturned tables, trying to figure out the next move in an actual western stand off, and less of a “I play this card for X” kind of game. The downside is that I have never heard so much swearing in pubs before, and I grew up in Australia. This game brought out the worst in people. This is how I learned to curse better in Dutch as well though, so free language lessons I guess? It meant that I had tapped into the part of the brain I was searching for, poking the right neurons and getting closer each time.

Something was not right still though. So, I did what I normally do, grabbed a shovel and I buried most of it. Gone were the unique character decks, unique abilities, and also after much complaining, the black and white card design. Head play tester, and fellow game designer Steve van Bennekom, summed it up perfectly, “It looks like a spreadsheet threw up on a card game. Put some artwork on the cards please”. The Dutch are often criticised for being rude, but they just cut out all the filler words native English speakers use. Straight to the issue. There is never any “would you kindly” or “have you considered”. They make great play testers. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease though.

DISCLAIMER: Although I used AI art during the prototyping process to help with playtesting, no AI was used in the production of the final game. Roland MacDonald did all the art, which you will learn about later, I promise.

The game was now very similar to what you will see and play today, albeit with more cards and worse artwork. Symmetric decks numbered two to seven, a central market with the “face” cards, and of course wound cards. The Aces were considered as both ones and tens, depending on the hand of cards. This is what some might call the core concept. I can’t remember how many months it took to get to this point, but it was not quick. Balance was always a concern, but Steve, again, solved it in an evening's work one night. He wrote a python script that ran simulated hands both as the player and the opponent, and worked out the possibility of winning based on every single hand combination in the game. It keeps going. He then wrote me a full report, three pages long, detailing his findings, the outcomes, and where the likely overpowered combinations are. I paid for the drinks at the next test session.

Even more data in hand, I was refining more and more. This is also where the real work started. It was time to get serious. I needed more help. So I did what most normal people would do, and I started asking strangers. One such stranger was Roland MacDonald. I met him once, but didn’t know who he was at the time. I’m just going to paste some of the email I sent to him at a later date:

“We met a while back at a game design night, and you tore a friend’s prototype game to pieces (metaphorically). Are you around anytime for a chat and/or a drink?”

That’s really all it took. Turns out he lived 10 minutes from my house. We met up at a local pub, along with the friend who made the mentioned prototype (it was Steve, again). After many drinks, a long chat, we eventually tested out my game. Testing with experienced designers is a different world. Regular players give you a kind of “vibe”, while hobby designers and testers might start telling you a solution already. With actual designers and industry veterans, words sharper than razor blades is what you get. Not cruel, but precise, they cut down to the bone of the issue in a few words, leaving a huge, gaping wound that your ego, hopes, and dreams can ooze out of before you have time to blackout. It wasn’t that bad really, but you’re never prepared the first time. It feels worse, hearing these things the first time. Good feedback, would do it again. But it highlighted something I had forgotten in all the mechanisms and gameplay focus. It lacked something, some kind of spark or thing that really made it special. It was just…fine. Fine is a word you use when someone asks how you are and you want to be avoidant, not to describe something you actually like.

[heading]Act 3: You shoot to kill, you better hit the heart[/heading]
Progress slowed for a little bit as I dealt with some work things, Christmas, and regular life. This would eventually result in me taking off several months from work. Complete happenstance, but Roland also found himself without a project for the first time in a long while. So we did what British people do best, and we went to the pub…..a lot! This wasn’t game design or anything, just two guys enjoying a drink while the rest of the world was at work. It was what I imagined the feeling of zen must be like…but I am probably remembering it wrong.

Problem is, both of us are the type of people that cannot sit still. I had begun guzzling art lessons like a dehydrated dog and revising my graphic design skills while stuffing publishing information into the remaining gaps in my brain, trying to prepare for any outcome for the game. Roland however, was bored. He had gone from full-time, non-stop projects for several years, to watching me twitch uncontrollably as I struggled to find mental space for everything. I got a text one day that just said “Do you mind if I draw some artwork for your game”? The answer is obvious. The ramp up from here on was intense. Roland and I were meeting maybe two to three times a week now, always at a pub, and we would playtest, discuss his latest card art, discuss the next changes needed. I don’t want to think how much money we drank these months.

I really hope Roland does a write up on the card art and the process he went through from initial sketches to final card art. It was really eye-opening for me, but also really shows you why it costs to buy art. The process can’t really be copied that easily, because you’re targeting human feelings, and that’s hard to do with an imitation. By now, we had cut the decks down to their current numbers, with only cards numbering one to five. Eventually, we would even remove one each of the four and five cards from each player’s starting deck (players started with three copies of each card). Even the Saloon cards would be changed to match this number scale, allowing much more freedom to players to craft a play style they like. Changes now were small and gradual. A fine rasp to take the sharp edges off, rather than the surgical shovel used in the early stages.

One problem remained though. Roland hated westerns. After Western Legends, he was sick of it. I think he tried for about four weeks to find a different theme that fit the game. Sci-fi, boxing, fencing, medieval sword fighting, and other weird ideas. Eventually Roland gave in, having found no suitable replacement, and I quote “if I’m going to draw it, then I’m going to draw it how I want!” This was still a man who had asked me if he could draw the cards. What came out of this though, was a look back at the art of the period. The colours of the Old West were not fifty shades of brown, but a colourful expression of a wild landscape that played with the sun and sky. This is where the colour palette used in the game came from, and it is all the better for it!

On the plus side also, pushing him into an uncomfortable style that he didn't want forced him to come up with one of the best card backs ever!

This was now a production outfit. Roland was operating as artist, I was handling game design still as well as layout and publishing, and we both managed play testing. It must be stated, that you need to have friction when making anything. If you’re not disagreeing at least a little, something is wrong. This was not a problem for us! The best example and culmination of this was centred around the card that is now called “Dodge ’n’ Shoot”. The card ability originally was “Topdeck. If you win, ignore an Injury you are about to receive”. Topdeck just means both players reveal the top card of their deck and compare the numbers. Higher number wins, repeat ties until someone wins. This seems simple, right? Well, during a test with Roland and a friend of mine, this was the “discussion” after the Roland played said card to the table and starter dictating what was happening:

Michael: That’s not how that card works, Roland.
Roland: Yes it is.
Michael: What do you mean? I wrote the damn card!
Roland: It is! We both Topdeck, then combat is resolved by the Topdeck! It makes sense!
Michael: No! You just ignore an injury! That is literally what is written on the card.
Roland: The card is wrong, that is not what it says!
….

This continued for a while. The clock inched slowly over two minutes as we screamed at each other like an old married couple, in a crowded and busy pub, while my friend sat there awkwardly like a child in the middle of a divorce settlement. Eventually I stopped and tried to explain one more time what I had written on the card to Roland. The response eventually was: “Oh, I get it now….that’s dumb, why would it do that? It should just say what I said”. The table was silent for a few seconds. My friends eyes darting back and forth like he’s assessing the emergency exits. Then we just laughed after about ten seconds and continued playing as before. Like I said, you need friction, but maybe more important is the ability to resolve the friction. His version is in the final game by the way…

It is now March 2024, and the game is ninety percent finished. Artwork is mostly done, the rules have been ironed out to “clear enough”, and I had already started making the full 52 card print sheet. This is not normal. You should never, ever finish a game to this level before it is signed with a publisher (Kickstarter excluded). The awkward question I have been avoiding like the plague comes up, “So, ready to pitch the game now”? I am not given time to think however, as Roland most likely has already anticipated my response and simply says “Let’s go to UK Games Expo in May, it will be a good place to test it out”. I have zero excuses really, and I really should stop avoiding the part that is the most important. Flights, accommodation, travel companions, and wives are all organised in the week. Remember how I said the game was ninety percent complete? Well, that remaining ten percent would turn out to be around fifty percent of the work.

The following is a lesson in what you should not do. The artwork was finished, and I really do mean finished, and we spent maybe four weeks arguing over colours and fonts. I have a professional ink printer at home with proper, colour accurate cardstock, so naturally we spent a few days just printing out entire sheets of cards, artwork, boxes, posters, just to see and compare the colours. If you think that sounds silly, that’s okay. You’re wrong, but I don’t begrudge you for not wanting to go down that insanely deep rabbit hole. We made full art boxes, Roland cut and folded card inserts, I got all the cards professionally printed and cut, and I made full-art A4 sell sheets. All in all, we made about ten or twelve “prototypes” for giving away at the expo. The week leading up to UKGE I spent a minimum of twelve hours a day working on something, Roland was working on my desk next to me for about eight of those hours usually as well. It was also absolute overkill, and you shouldn’t ever do this!

So, UKGE rolls around… in Birmingham. The first day was all business. Roland dragged me around the expo, introducing me to publishers, sneaking some prototypes into their hands, other designers, and even a couple of pitch sessions he managed to organise last minute. I said little, just watched and learned, answered some questions when people asked me, and tried incredibly hard to absorb all of it. There was so much nuance to dealing with publishers. Nothing is ever a no, but it is an opening for another question though. The amount of info is overwhelming. Sometime in the afternoon Roland told our friend and I that he was off to have meetings for several hours, so we went off to actually explore the expo for the first time that day, and maybe even play a game or two!

Beer o’clock finally arrives (have you noticed the pattern yet?) and we head to one of the terraces outside the expo to relax and wait for Roland to catch up. It is sunny in England, serenity around the terrace, the dull patter of a nearby fountain and birds, and all is right in the world for a few minutes. Then Roland arrives and it begins. He’d been off with Trevor Benjamin (one of the designers for the Undaunted series, among other things) testing the game. Trevor liked it, and said he should show it to Osprey. What a coincidence Roland had a meeting with them shortly! They liked it also apparently. To top it off, the person at Osprey who would likely review it later was a huge fan of Westerns. I made sure to point that out to Roland every single chance I got by the way. Remember exploring the different themes, Roland?! Remember! I know you will eventually read this! Long story short, Osprey were keen, and would review it internally and let me know at a later date. Business as usual.

You’ve seen the box art, and the title, and the BGG listing so you know they took the game. But the story isn’t over. This was just Friday at UKGE, and I had booked myself a table at UK Playtesting for Saturday afternoon, I think it was three hours long? If you don’t know who Playtest UK are, look it up. A really great, helpful community that organise playlists all over the UK. I arrived on time, setup a couple of copies on the table, put the marketing stands, sell sheets, business cards and posters up. I looked completely out-of-place. Most people show up with actual prototypes, rough drawn art, simple place holders etc. Here I was with full art posters and an essentially finished game. The Saturday afternoon slot is supposed to be quieter though, as people are already tired and looking to relax. Wrong. I had three small tables crammed together, technically enough for six people to play in three pairs. Those seats were full from start to finish, and then some more. I had three games running at all times, and I was usually playing in one of the games. People came here expecting prototypes, so they knew what they were getting into, but still they are all very understanding. Every single person filled in the feedback forms, and gave really positive comments. Two people tried to buy a prototype, and I exchanged a couple of business cards with different publishers wandering around, as well as chatting with one or two others who were’t looking for this type of game, but really wanted to know more. It drew too much attention.

At the end of the test session, my friends scraped my semi-conscious body off the tables and helped me pack up. A long, low wheeze was all that emerged from my mouth. I sounded like an orphan from Victorian times with black lung, unable to make more than simple sounds and grunts, indicating mostly through gestures and coughing. More than three hours of yelling over the constant roar of bustling people had taken its toll, and my voice was basically gone. The obvious solution was finishing for the day and going to the pub early. Seemed to work. The rest of the expo was less eventful, and I returned to actually doing fun things for the last day, if you don’t count the eight hour queue at the airport to leave….

[heading]End Credits[/heading]
Jeez, that is a huge wall of text and pictures. I wanted to give you all the actual story of the game development, rather than just the game changes with each iteration, etc etc. You know that the final game is the best parts of everything we tried, so those steps aren’t the real dev diary. Working with Osprey Games has also been quite painless. They would of course contact me in the first couple of months of their own testing, and ask questions about gameplay changes. However, remember all those test notes I took? Every time they asked for a possible design change I just told them the day and test result from that specific change, already tested. Eventually it became clear that we really had finished the game. They had a few artwork changes they wanted to make to meet their own guidelines and criteria, which is normal. Other than that we mostly argued about fonts and colours, and the rulebook of course…

It must be said, that without a lot of incredible people this wouldn’t be here today. My regular playtest group, mostly Steve van Bennekom, who played maybe over one hundred games in the course of development. He put up with my constant testing every week, and shaped so much of the game that you see today. Trevor Benjamin was a huge help, not just for his referral, but also advice and wisdom about the board game industry in the latter days of UKGE. Lastly of course, the game would not exist without Roland MacDonald. Not just because he drew pretty pictures, or knew the right people, or had the right experience, or pitched it to every man and his dog. He basically mentored me, without me knowing in the beginning, in a lot of aspects of creative design. More than that, he pushed me continuously, knowing that I needed a little push to really deliver. Hard work pays off, but you still need luck, and good friends. I know I was luckier than most people, but still had to do silly amounts of work. Hopefully my wife will read this and finally understand now that all her brilliant game ideas are not worth fifty percent of the money just because she thought of it, and that the real work is in the execution.

Hope you like the game at least!
Michael

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!

by Johnny Chin

In March 2026, Game Market West returned to Guildhouse in San Jose, California. It was very exciting to appear on the local news! It’s not every day that indie tabletop designers get this kind of spotlight (editor's note: video linked at the bottom of this report). Seeing our community highlighted on a mainstream platform really shows that there’s growing interest in small, creative voices and the unique experiences they bring to games.

For the games at this event, several designs embraced cozy or wholesome play. Anti-Anxiety Card Game focused on mindfulness and connection, Barista of the Month captured the joy of serving customers, and Light Up The Night delivered a solo puzzle of chasing fireflies into star patterns. These games highlighted a trend toward emotionally driven and accessible gameplay.

Anti-Anxiety Card Game by Studio Cassava (Jared & Hannah)
It's a relaxing 1-2 player card game that helps reduce anxiety for college students and all ages through fun self-care prompts. Play alone or with a partner, connect with each other through mindfulness connections, and explore silly prompts like sharing your favorite joke, or Lo-fi song--or just forcing each other to go on a walk during the game!

Barista of the Month by Anthony Barbieri
Manage your ingredients to serve the perfect cup of coffee in this quick and competitive tabletop card game! I wanted to highlight this game as it was very much a labor of love. Each card was cut out by the designer one by one.

Light Up The Night by Andrew DiLullo
Run through fields of fireflies and chase them into the sky as a small child that believes that's how stars are formed. Light Up The Night is a single player puzzle game that sees you running through the firefly laden fields to chase as many fireflies as you can, while trying to form specific types of stars that tighten your movement choices. The fields wax and wane as you chase fireflies away, how many will you be able to launch into the sky in only 6 short rounds?

Designers also explored storytelling and RPGs.

Florafiora: The Storytelling Card Game by Emily Hancock
Co-op storytelling card game for 4 players. Each player takes a turn as the lead storyteller / (GM). Collaborate on a group backstory together, then explore the Storywheel (alternating location and encounter cards). Tell a full story with no additional game prep in an hour!

HeartBeasts by Charlie Huggins & Ajda Gokcen
HeartBeasts is a collaborative TTRPG filled with magical creatures and cinematic, episodic, fast-paced gameplay—inspired by video games and anime like Pokémon and Persona. Its flexible, unique system draws from "tabletalk" RPG favorites Ryuutama and Fabula Ultima to weave strategy with storytelling.

Overall, GMW Spring 2026 felt like a celebration of variety. Whether you came for quick party games, collaborative storytelling, or complex strategy, this season reinforced what we do best: showcasing bold ideas and the passionate designers behind them. We'll see you at the next Game Market West on September 13, 2026! You can sign up for updates or apply as a designer.

Youtube Video

by Steph Hodge

Are you into the darker themes such as the Cthulhu Mythos and Zombies? Well, here are some upcoming releases that might fit your fancy.

[imageid=9361246 medium rep]▪️ Asmodee recently sent out a newsletter with information about a new Arkham Horror: The Card Game (2026). This core set will now replace the 2021 version of the game, but everything is still compatible if you were to combine the sets. For those who are familiar with the game, it will have new discoveries. They are also releasing 5 new investigator packs.

From the Asmodee website:



If you love reading, they have also released a new book called Bullets in the Dark by Cath Lauria, the latest novel from Aconyte Books.



▪️ Bézier Games announced a few new card games for release this June. The first called Zombie Princess. A trick-taking card game with variable player powers, and is the follow-up to the successful Rebel Princess. For 3-6 players and takes about 30-60 minutes to play.

From BGG:



▪️ Haunted Mouse is another card game releasing soon from Bézier Games designed by Jonathan Cox. This plays 2-5 players in about 20-45 minutes.

From BGG:


How could you resist this adorable plushie?