by Steph Hodge

Gen Con is rolling in!!

[imageid=9479940 medium rep]▪️ Gamewright has announced a few new games releasing this month! Who is ready for Forbidden Legacy from designers Rob Daviau & Matt Leacock (together they created Pandemic Legacy: Season 1..., Ticket to Ride Legacy: Legends of the West, and so many more!). Many are familiar with Series: Forbidden Games (Gamewright), and they wanted to create a legacy game in the series. If you aren't familiar with the Forbidden series of games, they are all cooperative games where you have to collect and escape before the world collapses. The legacy game will take place over 7 episodes that you can play with up to 4 players.

From the newsletter:



▪️ A new dexterity game from Horrible Guildwas announced called Rocking Raft. from deisgner Carlo Emanuele Lanzavecchia (Feuerdrachen). This is a super cute gem-collecting game. It is very simple, as you will just need to collect gems by pushing down on the raft and see what tips off. The gems will go onto your smaller boats that require specific colors. Any extras you can not use will go to the player on your left. The box says for ages 6+ for 2-4 players and plays in 15 minutes.

From the Horrible Guild website:



▪️ Clash of Clans: The Epic Raid was just released from Maestro Media. From designers Ken Gruhl (Cahoots, Happy Salmon) & Eric M. Lang (Blood Rage, Rising Sun), they bring to you this game, which was inspired by the hit mobile game Clash of Clans. The game plays 2-4 players and lasts about 60-90 minutes.

From BGG:




▪️ I am pleased to find out that 25th Century Games has picked up the licensing for Beer Mug Dice which is now avaialble. from designer Andreas Schmidt (Heaven & Ale) This is a hilarious push-your-luck barrel-rolling dice game for 3-6 players, playing in 20 minutes. First available under the name Polterfass in 2013, but it never fully made its US release until now. I have had a TON of fun with this game over the years, and now I hope everyone else can have the same enjoyment as I do!

From the newsletter:



▪️ A shiny new title from Geek Attitude Games called Not Alone: Remastered Edition. I am a huge fan of the original Not Alone. Both games were designed by Ghislain Masson. As far as I know, this is Not Alone with extra materials as described below. The game plays 2-7 players in about 30-75 minutes.

From the BGG page:

by Beth Heile

The Preview lists for SPIEL Essen 2026 is live!

Haven't heard of a Preview list yet? Don't worry! There are so many features on BGG it's hard to keep track of them all. A Preview serves as a list of new and upcoming games that will be available at a specific convention, either for sale or as a demo.

FOR ATTENDEES:
Users attending those conventions are able to search, filter, sort, and save information from this list to help them target games they want to try or buy. Preview lists also have the booth numbers to help you easily create maps to buy/try your favorite games as efficiently as possible.

FOR BGG USERS:
Users visiting BGG can view this list to see which new titles are popular and getting a lot of buzz before a large event. You can use those same search, filter, sort, and save features to create personal wishlists of games you want to learn or buy. If the game is available through a major retailer, you can click through to the retailer directly from the Preview list (full disclosure: BGG may earn a commission from purchases made through Preview links.)

FOR PUBLISHERS:
Posting on a Preview list is completely free but is limited to titles that have been for sale only in the last four months or available as playable demos to the public. Preview lists are a great way to promote your new titles and share any deals or discounts you might be running at your booth. And did we mention it's free?

The process to submit games for a Preview list has been overhauled in the last few months. Please email news@boardgamegeek.com for a full tutorial or if you are running into any problems.

GENERAL INFO
Currently BGG is offering Preview lists for the following conventions:
- Spielwarenmesse - list goes live in December
- Festival International des Jeux (FIJ) - list goes live in early January
- GAMA Expo - list goes live in early January
- UK Games Expo - list goes live in March
- Game Market Spring - Previously known as Tokyo Game Market, list goes live in March
- Origins - list goes live in April
- Gen Con - list goes live in early June
- SPIEL Essen - list goes live in July
- PAX Unplugged - list goes live in October

Please do not contact BGG to suggest other conventions to add to this list. We do not have plans to expand our preview lists at this time.

You can find all active and past Preview lists by clicking on "Browse" in the top menu of BGG and then choosing "Previews".

by Justin Bell

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Jason Katzwinkel

I realize that it’s twee and condescending to repeat popular cliches like “Fortune favors the bold” or “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take,” but it’s important to internalize the metaphors. This is a story about designing a board game.

In 2022, as an exercise, I banged out a quick one-sheet game. It was a roll-and-write game with two six-sided dice called "Mirror Match". The idea was that somebody at the table would roll 2D6, and everybody would write one of the die numbers on one side of their sheet, with the other number in the mirrored space on the opposite side. The goal was to make sets of contiguous numbers. Sets of exactly two 2’s, sets of exactly three 3’s, etc. A few folks played it a couple of times, and it was cute, but not especially compelling.

Over the next couple of months, I further refined the game and added a touch of polish. I themed it as a magical gardening game and named it “Potion Patch” as a nod to its origins as “Mirror Match”. I wanted it to be a mint tin game because… that’s what I decided I wanted. I changed the die pips to plant icons. I upgraded the six-sided dice to eight-sided dice and added two more. On a turn, a player would roll all four, then assign two to themselves and two to everybody else, an effort to add a little more decision space.

I playtested this new version a couple of times, and I was pleased with it, but I didn’t feel that it was ready to pitch to publishers. I was nervous that it wasn’t… enough. I put it up on the shelf for future fiddling.

Fast forward a couple of years. Now it’s late 2024, and I’m preparing for my first-ever board game convention, PAX Unplugged in Philadelphia. At that point, I had a couple of new prototypes and meetings lined up to pitch them. S’Morse Code and Match Hatchery. I put the homespun boxes of chipboard and packing tape into my backpack. And then… right at the last moment… I impulsively threw that two-year-old mint tin into the bag. I had no compelling reason to bring Potion Patch along, but I thought that maybe I could cajole some poor sap into playtesting it with me to help find whatever magic it needed to make it pitch-ready.

In Philadelphia, I had three pitch meetings lined up. One for S’Morse Code, two for Match Hatchery. One of the scheduled meetings was with The Op, but about two hours before the meeting, I received an email. They had reviewed Match Hatchery and found it wanting. Shucks. “Oh, well…” I sighed, “I guess that frees up some time for me. I’ll walk the exhibition floor and figure out ways to get rid of my money.”

At just about the time of the canceled meeting, I made it to the exhibition floor of PAX Unplugged, and I walked around at random to experience the wonders on offer. Two minutes into my wandering, I spied Pat Marino, the Director of Hobby Games for The Op. I only knew what Pat Marino looked like because I had happened to watch a video presentation of his for the Tabletop Game Design Association a couple of weeks earlier. That was the guy I was supposed to meet with for Match Hatchery. I figured that I ought to at least shake his hand and make a quick introduction.

When I did, it turned out that he was sitting there waiting for me. Due to a communication mix-up, he didn’t know that the meeting had been canceled. I explained that, yeah, the meeting was canceled because Match Hatchery had already been thanks-but-no-thanksed. To that, Pat said, “Well, have a seat anyway. Let’s chat.”

Pat went over the finer details as to why Match Hatchery was not a match for The Op, and I really appreciated the insight. Pat was extremely generous with his time, his knowledge, and his candor. I learned a lot about board game design, product development, and pitching in about fifteen minutes. It was a great chat, after which he asked me, “What else ya got?”

“Well, I have S’Morse Code here, but the Op has already reviewed and passed on that option,” I said. What else? I thought. What else can I pitch now that I’m here at a canceled meeting with every opportunity in the world?

Potion Patch. I had Potion Patch in my bag, the wee mint tin game that wasn’t good enough yet. A game for which I had no sell sheet, no pitch patter, no preparation, nothing. Just an unlabeled off-brand Altoids tin. Well… what the heck, why not? The worst that could happen is for Pat to throw the game across the convention hall in disgust, punch me in the face, and stomp off to make sure nobody ever works with me again. I hadn’t touched the tin in over two years. I didn’t even have a solid recollection of the rules.

With trembling fingers, I pulled Potion Patch out of the bottom of my bag and said unsteadily, “I have this.” I cracked the tin. For about five minutes, I stuttered and stammered my way through the core loop and scoring of Potion Patch.

When I finished, Pat stared at the splay of the game for a beat, then pointed at it and said, “There’s no way I could ever sell that. But I see what you’re doing here, and it’s interesting. Take what you have here, get rid of the roll-and-write element, put it in a $40 retail box, and then bring it back to me.”

“Okay, Pat. No problem!”

I took the tin back home and got to work on the mathematical acrobatics it would take to convert the nigh-infinite combinations of four eight-sided dice into a reasonable stack of cards and tiles. I worked on the game on and off for about five months, changing, adding and subtracting mechanisms until I felt it was the game Pat had asked for.

I had playtested the game online a few times, but the real work was to be done at The Unpub Festival in Baltimore. I had lots of Potion Patch playtests scheduled to sand off some rough edges and shake out any anomalies. Then I could finally present the repackaged game to Pat. But—wouldn’t you know it—there he was, right there at Unpub.

On the first evening of Unpub, I sat at a table with my buddy Mike and a prototype copy of Potion Patch when Pat Marino walked past. I whispered, “Mike! That’s Pat Marino! That’s who this game is for.”

Pat walked on by, and Mike barely glanced in his direction. Mike was staring at me. Hard. Finally, in a concerned voice, he asked, “What’re you doing?”

“What do you mean?”

With a touch of exasperation, he said, “Go show it to him.”

“No, I don’t want to bother him. I’ll pitch it to him afterward, once it’s been playtested more.”

Astonished, Mike huffed, “What the hell are you talking about? This is Unpub. He asked you to make this. He’s right there. What are you doing? Go show it to him.”

“Fine. Fine.” I trundled off and chased Pat down. “Hey, Pat. About five months ago, you asked me to take a mint tin roll-and-write and turn it into a $40 retail box. This is that box,” I said, slapping my hand on top of Potion Patch. We chatted briefly; he congratulated me on my efforts and told me to contact him after Unpub. Great.

Later that evening, I found a free playtesting table and set up Potion Patch to rustle up some playtesters and find any cracks in the game. The table filled quickly, and play began. Who should happen by? Pat Marino. He stood at the end of the table and watched a few rounds of gameplay, then asked me a couple of questions about the rules and components.

“Pat,” I said, “I have a playtesting slot tomorrow at 10:00 a.m., if you’re interested.”

The next day, we had a great game of Potion Patch. Afterward, Pat had some additional advice on how to zhuzh up the game just a little more.

“Okay, Pat. No problem!”

I went home and got ready to tuck in for another four months of game development, but Pat contacted me very shortly after The Unpub Festival to ask me for a print-and-play version of the game. “I’ve been talking to people in the office about Potion Patch, and they want to see it.”

“But I haven’t implemented any of the design changes.”

“That’s fine, just send it over. People are very excited to try it.”

I sent over the files, and within a few weeks, I had a contract. Potion Patch would be released as Evenglow.

There was a staggering array of near misses that could have prevented Evenglow from ever being made. I could have opted not to put the tin in my bag. I could never have scored a meeting with The Op to begin with. The meeting could have not been canceled. I could not have watched a Pat Marino video to later recognize him. I could have walked in a different direction on the exhibition floor at a different time, or not gone at all. I could have chickened out of introducing myself. Pat could not have been as generous with his time. I could have been too scared to present Potion Patch. I could not have “bothered” Pat at Unpub. Any single one of these choices or happenstances working out differently would have put the kibosh on the game.



A fragile, accidental weave of timing—along with a few fleeting moments of uncharacteristic moxie—turned my scratched-up mint tin into Evenglow. I could chalk it up to fate, but that would cheapen my contribution: months of small, boring work and grind without ever being sure if it would amount to anything. When an unexpected opportunity presented itself, I had a little extra blood, sweat, and tears to fish out of my backpack.

This is not a humblebrag about how great it is to be lucky or how lucky it is to be great. This whole story is a lesson for you and me both. Have a little faith in yourself. Don’t self-reject. When the ball bounces into your hands, don’t focus on the miss; shoot your shot.

by Fernando Cunha

When DV Games suggested that I write this designer diary for Raindrops, I hesitated... I started working on Raindrops in 2019, and I was afraid I might no longer be able to carefully retrace all the paths that brought it from there to here. But I decided to embrace the challenge, revisit my notes, photos, and memories, to share a little of how this game came to be. Think of this text as a patchwork quilt about the creative process, a passion for games, deep bonds of friendship, inspirations, and all the wonderful relationships we build around a gaming table.

Coming from a creative background (my career spans advertising, video, and animation production), I quickly realized that I wanted to explore board games as a means of expression. It all clicked for me after my daughter, Olívia, was born in 2017, and I began dedicating myself more seriously to the dream of designing games. Between 2019 and 2022, my game designer mode was in full swing, and I worked on multiple projects simultaneously. Inspired by a group of game designers from Rio de Janeiro who organized a playtesting group called Oficina do Playtest, I got in touch with them intending to replicate the experience in my hometown of Belo Horizonte.

Together with other designers, we started meeting weekly to test and develop our projects collectively. A few months later, we decided to launch an online edition of the event as well, making it possible for people from anywhere in the country to participate (especially those who might struggle to put together a local playtest group in a small town). Without us realizing it, this initiative became crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing together and supporting a large community of Brazilian designers through a particularly challenging time. Raindrops was one of the games I worked on the most during this period, going through dozens of playtests and iterations over the months, both in-person and online.

Cardboard Dreams

The idea for this game had been floating around in my head long before I realized I wanted to turn it into a board game. As a child, I loved connecting water droplets that condensed on a surface after the rain. There was something magical and deeply satisfying about pushing one droplet into another and watching them trickle down, pulling several more droplets along the way. Looking back, that was already a game in itself...

My first actual note, however, is brief and dates back to July 2019: an idea for a game about rain, using overlapping cards and some Mahjong-inspired mechanics. I remember putting together a few cards with a 2x6 grid of symbols and experimenting with hiding/revealing overlapping icons. Soon afterward, I cut the pieces into domino-shaped tiles, which quickly evolved into what would become the core experience of Raindrops.


Prototype and First Playtest at Oficina do Playtest

My next note already read as follows:
• 2x1 tiles form a grid.
• Players complete paths of matching colors within that grid (never moving upward).
• When a player completes a path, they collect all the tiles in it, and the remaining pieces "fall" to fill the empty spaces, like in Tetris. New tiles are then added.

From the very first prototype, Raindrops' core gameplay loop proved to be solid and never strayed far from the original concept, even though dozens of mechanic variations and refinements emerged throughout the ideation and development process. In the game, players observe patterns of raindrops on a windowpane and try to find the optimal descending path of connecting symbols. Then, they collect the connected tiles and use them to complete patterns shown on objective cards.

During those very first playtests with the windowpane, it quickly became clear that the most enjoyable part of the experience was watching and making the droplets slide along the tracks. That was the heart of the game. Identifying those interactions so early in the prototyping phase proved invaluable because, after the lockdown, my main playtesting space became the online groups. And tactile nuances like these are much harder to perceive and validate when working solely with a digital prototype.

Online Playtesting Days

Call it hyperfocus, escapism, or a survival strategy, but during the pandemic I worked tirelessly on my games. Every week I playtested, gathered feedback, and iterated on my designs. Here’s a snapshot of the very first digital version of the prototype, running on Tabletopia:

The main challenge at this stage was finding the right balance between collecting tiles on the windowpane board and completing patterns on the individual player boards. The two experiences felt disconnected and not particularly rewarding. The main board featured a mix of 2x1 and 1x1 tiles, which significantly slowed down the refill process between turns. Each player had two 2x4 building areas and competed over public objectives, displayed in the center of the table. Interestingly enough, this objective format (2x4) made its way back into the game near the end of its development cycle!

The next version introduced a major change: two types of objectives: public (3x3) and personal (polyominoes). An optional action was also added: before tracing their path, players could remove one tile from the board, adding an important strategic layer to the puzzle. The feedback confirmed that the game was moving in the right direction, allowing for more control and planning from one round to the next.

In the following iteration, wildcard symbols made their first appearance, enabling more route connections across the board. The interaction between public and personal objectives was also refined, allowing players to score partial points for public objectives completed by someone else. The game's duration (determined by the number of tiles in the bag) was proving to be both consistent and satisfying for the players. I could tell the game was beginning to reach a more "stable" version as the feedback gradually shifted focus, moving away from structural concerns and towards usability and balance perceptions. As I continued making the necessary refinements, I also began preparing the first version of the rulebook, sell sheet, and pitch materials. I owe a special thanks here to Renato Simões and [user=lucaspasseti]Lucas Passeti [/user]for listening to my very first pitch, and providing me with valuable advice, giving me the first push toward seeking international publishing partners.

In the Foothills

With that came a major personal challenge. Up to that point in my life, I had never dared to express myself in any language other than Portuguese. Even though I was able to understand English well enough, I considered myself incapable of holding even a simple conversation with other people.

It was around July 2020 when we traveled to spend some time at the home of dear friends Dani, Chico, and Dudu in Ouro Branco. We had been isolated for months because of the pandemic and felt the need to reconnect, share our anxieties, make plans for the future, and help one another care for our children. We even put together a shared schedule to rotate between work, cooking, house chores, and playing with the kids.

Around that time, I started applying for the growing number of online speed pitching events that were beginning to appear. I also started taking English lessons, and to practice, we spent our evenings playing board games in English (some of our favorites, along with the occasional prototypes). As cheesy as that might have sounded at first, it helped me a lot. I'm deeply grateful to my friends for their kindness, support, and patience. Even though our lives eventually took us to opposite sides of the globe, I still feel that part of us remains in that time and place. Watching our kids laugh and play together in the backyard remains something beautiful and deeply inspiring. Thank you for those wonderful memories, my friends! 💞

The Pitching Circuit

Fortunately, the responses to my applications started coming in, and between July and November 2020, Raindrops was selected for several pitching events and publisher meetings. It was incredibly exciting to see the game begin to attract the interest of players and publishers alike! I'd like to sincerely thank the organizers of some of these events, namely Ian Parovel and Alain Fondrille (Board Date), Heather O'Neill (Metatopia Speed Pitching), and Jay Cormier and Sen-Foong Lim (The Pitch Project).

The Pitch Project was particularly meaningful. Not only because Raindrops became one of the 50 finalists out of more than 750 submissions, or because I had the opportunity to present it to more than 40 publishers, but because it created a remarkably democratic opportunity (especially for designers from the Global South, who often face greater barriers to participating in the industry's major events). Sen and Jay shared an incredible amount of knowledge and advice on preparing sell sheets and pitches, as well as guidance on industry best practices, working with publishers, and publishing agreements. I even bothered Sen in his inbox a few times, and he was always incredibly generous and helpful in every interaction we had. Thank you again!

After these events, I had very promising conversations with at least four publishers. I'm deeply grateful to each of them for the opportunity and for the time they dedicated to evaluating whether the project would be a good fit for their catalogs. In the end, Raindrops found its home at DV Games, and we signed the publishing agreement in December 2020!

Development, Roadblocks, and More Development

The game's initial production target was Gen Con 2022. I won't go into every adjustment that followed in the production timeline, but I can say that the past five years have been particularly intense and unpredictable for the industry. In the aftermath of COVID, along came disruptions in global shipping, wars, inflation, tariffs... A really unfortunate series of events, to say the least. After all of that, I couldn't be more happy to see the game finally being released at Gen Con 2026!

At DV Games, my main point of contact was Marta Ciaccasassi, an experienced game developer who led the project. She has overseen the publisher's most recent major releases, including Bonsai, Koi, and Wonder Book. Marta always kept an open channel of communication, constantly sharing playtest discoveries, proposing alternatives, and openly discussing the trade-offs behind every major decision.

Raindrops entered active development in 2022, and the team's priority was finding the ideal form factor for the central board. A lengthy period of research and development was dedicated to validating different materials, testing the weight and friction of the tiles, and ensuring they would slide smoothly while providing a satisfying player experience. At the same time, production costs, product positioning, and the environmental impact of the chosen materials all had to be carefully balanced. Multiple cardboard and plastic concepts were explored, and several prototypes were produced to evaluate the technical feasibility of the project.

Player tiles were still part of the game during the early stages of development, and the team experimented with some gameplay ideas centered around creating ascending paths on the board (while the falling tiles pushed them in the opposite direction). This led to several new theme investigations that happened between 2022 and 2023. Among them were koi fish swimming upstream in a river, a fantasy-oriented theme where spirits picked up snowflakes, a hot air balloon festival, and even a theme inspired by Georges Méliès' pioneering film editing techniques.

As development progressed, discussions with distribution partners evolved, and the team gained a clearer understanding of how to position the game in the market, Raindrops gradually took on its final form in 2024. Several refinements were introduced to streamline gameplay and simplify maintenance between turns. Instead of competing over public objectives, players would now build directly on Memory cards of 5 different categories by placing tiles onto them. This change significantly improved readability and reduced analysis paralysis while solving the puzzle. The shared competition element was maintained in the form of the Cloud tokens, introducing a light set collection element to the game. Another important change was the removal of the 1x1 player tiles, ensuring that every tile in the display uses the same 2x1 format. When tracing a path, players now always begin from the top of the board. The 1x1 tiles remain in the game as Bonus tiles, helping players complete their Memory cards. The action of removing a tile from the windowpane before taking a turn was also expanded and refined. Players can now choose between three Special Actions: flip a tile, swap two horizontally adjacent tiles, or pick a tile and place it back at the top of the same column. These options provide plenty of room for players who enjoy setting up the perfect turn!

The final piece to complete this puzzle was the arrival of Andrea Guerrieri to create the game's illustrations and graphic design. I was genuinely thrilled when I saw the first cover sketches he shared. I think he captured and translated the cozy atmosphere of the game beautifully, and I'm sure this box will be a hit with cat lovers everywhere! I can't wait to see it on people’s shelves!

Youtube Video
By the time this game reaches players' tables, nearly six years will have passed since signing the publishing agreement with DV Games, and seven since that first note in my notebook back in 2019. And how many raindrops have raced down the window since then...

I hope this game brings you wonderful moments and lasting memories around the table with your favorite people.

Thank you for reading, and happy gaming!

Fernando Cunha

by Steph Hodge

▪️ Panorama from Scorpion Masqué is already available now! This is a delightful tile-drafting game where you will create your landscape panorama. It uses a time track mechanic so the further you move ahead, the longer you have to wait before your next turn. For 2-4 players, this is a breezy 20-minute game.

From the newsletter:



[imageid=9667654 medium rep]▪️ A recent hit at my table have been Sky 5 from Druid City Games. I am drawn to the bright, bold colors, and there is even a rainbow die included in the box. How cool! This is a push-your-luck card game for 2-6 players and plays in 15-30 minutes. This game will have a limited release at Gen Con 2026 and will be officially released later this year!

From BGG:



▪️ Horrible Guild just announced The Amazing Journey for release this October with first looks at Gen Con 2026. This has a travel theme where you will move around the board and make connections and memories. This game plays 2-4 players in about 45-60 minutes.

From the newsletter:




▪️ Winds of Numa Sera was announce from Good Games Publishing as releasing soon. This is a big game that plays 3-4 players and has a play time at 90-120 minutes. Seems epic!

From the newsletter:

by Justin Bell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A man can dream. For now, there are more games to play. It’s all about creating those memories…and creating more space in the activity closet.

by Gunho Kim

Where It Began

With Winterfall on the horizon, we wanted to take a moment to share how this expansion came to life. Honestly, we hadn’t planned on developing another expansion for Wondrous Creatures after Gargantuan Beasts. At least, that’s how we felt toward the end of 2024.

That started to change as we watched the game’s performance in the retail market. Wondrous Creatures climbed the BGG Hotness, sales were growing rapidly, and the response was strong not only in the US, but across other regions as well. Even though the game was still relatively new, players were already asking about the next expansion.

That was the turning point.

So in January 2025, we decided to start working on a new expansion.

Winterfall takes place several years after the events of the base game. As it turns out, Starbeak Island has a rather unusual climate. For years at a time, it enjoys mild, stable weather… and then, just as suddenly, everything changes. A brutal cold sets in. The terrain shifts. Auroras blaze across the sky. Strange phenomena begin to unfold.

And the Captains who once explored the island so comfortably now have to adapt to something entirely new.

Core Content #1: A Main Board That Changes

From the very beginning, one thing felt clear to us: the main board needed to feel more dynamic and interesting as the game progressed.

Placing a worker across two spaces and interacting with adjacent icons is what distinguishes Wondrous Creatures from other worker placement games. To build on this, the base game already introduces Habitat Tiles with various Special Effect icons as the game progresses. But players who replayed the game multiple times grew accustomed to these elements faster than we expected, which meant the worker placement began to feel somewhat predictable.

Since fresh, dynamic worker placement is such a core part of what makes Wondrous Creatures feel distinct, this was something our team kept coming back to during development. Very early on, we all agreed that the expansion should focus on bringing more variety and tension back into that experience.

So how could we make more things happen on the main board?

Our first idea was simply to expand the pool of Special Effect icons placed on the map during the game. But this approach quickly hit a wall. These icons are added permanently, and stacking strong abilities onto the map would clearly break the game’s balance. We realized the problem came from the permanence of these effects, and that led us to a key conclusion: we needed to add interesting effects that exist on the map only temporarily.

That’s how the central content of Winterfall, “Winterfall Events” and “Aurora Events,” was born.

As the game progresses, players reveal event cards and follow their instructions to place various tokens and tiles onto the main board. These can offer powerful one-time effects or impose new constraints.

As the map shifts, players are faced with more interesting decisions.
"Should I play this card now to power up my engine? Or is it better to use that strong effect on the map before another player gets to it?"

Throughout development, we tested an enormous variety of effects and constraints.The ones that made it into the final version became Aurora tiles, Blizzard tokens, and Snowflake tokens.

There were many other interesting ideas that didn’t make the cut. A new “Snowy Mountain” terrain that required flipping an egg to place a worker, a new resource called "Stardust" that could be collected to trigger various abilities, or an egg-tracking board that awarded bonus points for arranging eggs in specific patterns.

These ideas were promising at first, but fell short for various reasons. Sometimes the gameplay wasn’t as fun as we’d hoped, sometimes the balance suffered, and sometimes the rules became too complex. Some of these ideas were hard to let go of, and we may revisit them in a future expansion.

Core Content #2: A New Species — Spirits

The other major piece of new content in Winterfall is a brand-new creature species: Spirits.

Thematically, they're a mysterious species that only appears in winter, materializing on Starbeak Island as the cold sets in. Since Winterfall is the first major expansion for Wondrous Creatures, we felt that adding a new species was essential, and we started exploring them early on.

Before the idea of placing tokens and tiles on the main board had taken shape, the core concept for the Spirits was player interaction.

Their early abilities referenced the score markers of other players, with effects that triggered when you had the lowest score or the highest score. These created new ways to play, whether that meant racing ahead or deliberately staying behind.

These ideas were interesting, but their viability depended too heavily on circumstances and on what other players were doing. In some situations, reaching first place was effectively impossible. In others, falling to last place was so easy that the condition stopped feeling meaningful.

We went through several rounds of revision trying to make this work, but in the end, we decided to move in a different direction.

Once the idea of placing tokens and tiles on the map became the core of the expansion, the Spirits’ abilities shifted toward interacting with those tokens. Spirits gain benefits by removing tokens placed by Winterfall Events or by placing new ones themselves.

That doesn’t mean the early concepts focused on player interaction disappeared entirely. Cards 149 and 160 still carry traces of those original ideas, allowing players to use another player’s Recharge or Energy cards. In the original version, the player whose card was used would gain Victory Points as a reward. Later, to better fit the new token interaction concept, this was changed so that the card owner gains Snowflake tokens instead.

Cards #149 (Gruagail) and #160 (Titanorak) — the surviving traces of our early "player interaction" concept.

Why Winter?

In board game design, mechanisms are often completed first, with the theme developed afterward. In such cases, considerable effort is required to closely connect the two. Winterfall followed a slightly different process.

As mentioned earlier, the direction of a dynamically changing main board was clear from the beginning, and this naturally led us to the idea of shifting weather. From there, the concept of a fantasy winter filled with unusual weather phenomena emerged.

We did, however, consider other themes as well.

One was a rainforest setting, where dense vegetation spreads across the map. Another was an eclipse setting, where a prolonged solar eclipse brings darkness and mysterious events.

Rainforest theme — an early visual mockup we made to test the look and feel.

Eclipse theme — another early mockup we explored before settling on winter.
The rainforest theme was appealing because it allowed for a wide variety of plant life. However, its overall color palette would have been heavily green, making it too similar to the base game. As this is a major expansion, we wanted to create a more distinct visual shift.

The eclipse theme conveyed a strong sense of mystery, even more so than winter in some respects. However, its darker palette felt too muted overall, and it did not support the concept of a dynamically changing map as effectively.

In the end, we returned to winter. Its cool blue tones create a clear contrast with the base game, and the concept of unusual weather provides a natural explanation for the changing board.

Closing Thoughts

Winterfall also includes a wide range of additional content, including new creature cards, new Captains, new Achievements, a new solo mode, and more.

As development progressed, the scope of the expansion continued to grow. While we initially planned to complete it in under six months, the mechanism design phase alone took eight months, extending from January through August. Including art and component design, the full development process took over a year.

It demanded more time and resources than we'd anticipated, but the result has been worth it.

Working on a large-scale expansion like Winterfall reminds us that expansion development demands just as much care and effort as creating an entirely new game, though the nature of the challenge is different.

When creating a new game, the core system must be built from the ground up, often involving long periods of uncertainty for us. With an expansion, the challenge lies in introducing new elements without compromising what already works, which naturally leaves less room for experimentation.

Even so, through continued discussion and iteration, solutions tend to emerge at unexpected moments. Which was true for Winterfall as well.

We don’t yet know whether Winterfall will be the last expansion for Wondrous Creatures, or simply the beginning of something more. The journey had its share of challenges, but seeing players explore and enjoy a world we poured so much care into has already made it incredibly rewarding for us. We’re deeply grateful to everyone who has joined us along the way, and we hope Winterfall brings many memorable moments to your table.

by Steph Hodge

We might have GenCon right around the corner, but that doesn't stop Spiel announcements from happening! A few Spiel games and some new releases too!!

[imageid=9666028 medium rep]▪️ Czech Games Edition (CGE) Just announced a BIG release for this Spiel! It is currently sitting at the top of BGG Hotness called Kingdom Come: Deliverance – The Board Game. Designers Vlaada Chvátil (Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization, Mage Knight Board Game...)and Tomáš Holek (SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Galileo Galilei...) came together to create this mega game for 1-4 players that plays in 120-320 minutes.

From the newsletter:




▪️ Portal Games also sent out an announcement for their new Spiel release called Robo Run. This is a cooperative 2-player game with no talking allowed! Robots only speak in beeps and boops. There are 5 campaigns with many scenarios. Each scenario will be about 30 minutes.

From the Email:



▪️ Stonemaier Games Just announced some games to be released mid July and are on the GenCon preview list. The first on the list is Duel of Meloch. This is a very interesting mash-up of Scythe and Expeditions. This is a 1-2 player game, and one player takes on the Scythe mechanics role and the other player uses the Expeditions mechanics. The game plays in about 45 minutes. Seems like a great game for the fans of these two original games.

From the newsletter:




▪️ The second game that was announced was Wingspan Pocket. As you might expect, this will be a small-box condensed Wingspan experience. It will still support 1-5 players, but the playtime is listed as 25-35 minutes.

From the newsletter:


▪️ Finally, a new expansion for Origin Story called Origin Story: Heroes & Villains. This is a mini expansion pack that adds in new cards for more variety in your endings.

From BGG:

by Chok-Sien Hiew

Malaysia is a country which has many public holidays. We have three major ethnicities and many minor ones. We have different religions and traditions. We have national holidays as well as many state specific holidays. Every year towards the end of the year, I see infographics on social media helping people strategise when to apply for annual leave in the following year. For example if a public holiday falls on a Thursday, your strategy will be to take the Friday off, so that you have a stretch of four days to rest or go holidaying. If a public holiday falls on a Monday or a Friday, you can plan for a short getaway since you will have a long weekend. It was this kind of strategy guide that inspired me to make Malaysian Holidays. I wanted to design a game which the common Malaysian (i.e. non-gamers) can play. I wanted to look for a theme which most people can relate to and like. Public holidays and going on trips are something that unites everyone.

Malaysian Holidays is a simple set collection game. Most of the cards in the game are public holidays. Each card is set to be a specific day of the week, and you need to collect consecutive days in order to go on holidays. That means you want to go on holidays without even needing to apply for annual leave. For example you try to collect cards Monday to Friday, or cards Wednesday to Friday. Once you have a set, you get to go on a trip! In game terms this means discarding your set to score points. The first version of the rules featured a card drafting mechanism which is pretty straightforward.

If you are a boardgamer, you would have seen something similar elsewhere. However upon playtesting it I quickly discovered that this was a little overwhelming for non-gamers. They felt a little lost when I explained the game, and they got confused during play too. In the original rules, everyone draws two cards at the start of a round. You give one to the HR Manager and then the other will become available for drafting. Everyone reveals their card at the same time. The start player of the round gets first pick, and he must pick someone else's card. Whoever's card gets picked will go next. Eventually everyone will claim one card. The last player to claim a card has no choice. They will be start player next round. If you are a gamer, you probably have seen this somewhere else. The idea is I want people to offer good cards, because the more attractive your card is, the higher the likelihood that you'll get to choose a card early. The intention was good, but many non-gamers found this confusing. I needed to simplify the mechanism. Eventually I just let players take turns being start player. Also, all cards being offered are just placed at the centre of the table. Beginning with the start player and going clockwise, everyone picks a card. This is much easier to learn, and it still works well.

My prototype of Malaysian Holidays (photo courtesy of Choon Ean)
In Malaysia, if a public holiday falls on a Sunday, the subsequent Monday will be declared a replacement holiday. To represent this in the game, I have Sunday cards, and you get to use them like Monday cards. From the perspective of clean game design, I am adding rules overhead for the sake of the theme, which is a bad thing. However I feel this is worth the additional effort to create a fun experience for players. It is something they can relate to, so it is not a difficult rule to remember. There are no Saturday cards in the game. This is deliberate. If a public holiday falls on a Saturday, there is no replacement holiday on Monday or Friday. Saturdays are the worst day for public holidays. So no Saturdays!

Malaysia has both national and state holidays. Some state holidays are observed only in one or two states, some in several more. Some national holidays apply to every state except a few. All of these are represented in the game. If you want to win, state holidays are generally inferior to national holidays. Let's say I have collected Monday to Friday, but my Monday is a Penang state holiday, and my Friday is a Johor state holiday. I can't trade this set in to go on holidays. I either work in Penang, or I work in Johor. It is not possible that I make use of both the state holidays when they are for different states.

There is a total of 28 national and state holidays in Malaysia. Well, I count all the Sultan / governor birthdays as one. Every state has one. When working on Malaysian Holidays, I learned about several state holidays I had not known about before. I have never lived in those states. 28 cards is not enough for this game to work. In the first prototype, I had 36 holiday cards. Some major holidays like Hari Raya Puasa and Chinese New Year appeared twice. I found that the draw deck ran out too frequently, which was annoying. Eventually I modified the game to have 64 holiday cards. All holidays appear more than once, but they would be on different days. For example one Wesak Day card is a Sunday, and the other a Wednesday. The only exception is Good Friday. Both copies are on Friday, of course.

Do you know that under Malaysian law only five public holidays are mandated off days? And these don't include the big ones like Hari Raya Puasa and Chinese New Year? The real big five are: New Year's Day, Malaysia Day, Merdeka Day, Labour Day and Sultan or Governor's Birthday. In Malaysian Holidays, these five occur three times, while the others only twice.

I want to convey the Malaysian work culture through this game. The original inspiration is a very salaryman thing - a strategy guide for applying for annual leave. The festivals and holidays themselves already convey the multicultural society of Malaysia. What I also want to inject is some humour related to the typical salaryman mentality. There are two special holiday cards which are called MC. In Malaysia, MC means medical certificate, and it refers to sick leave. These MC cards are jokers, and you can treat them as any day of the week. That means they are the most powerful holidays in the game. In Malaysia there are employees with this mindset: sick leave is annual leave, and you want to fully utilise it and not waste it. There is one type of card in the game called memos. These are attack cards which add some player interaction. Memos are issued by the HR Manager, and they are used for discarding someone else's holiday card. That means cancelling someone's rest day. For example you still have to go to work on Christmas Day because of a system go-live.

When I playtested with Benz, Ruby and Edwin, they all wanted to go to Japan for holidays
Half the holiday destinations in the game are local, and the other half are overseas. During game development, Specky Studio and I discussed whether to change this. My originally intended target audience is Malaysians, so the holiday destinations are places which we Malaysians frequently visit. There are local attractions like Mount Kinabalu, Genting Highlands, Melaka and Pulau Redang, and also countries like Thailand, Indonesia, Japan and China. The reason we considered adjusting this was if we wanted to use the game to specifically promote Malaysian tourism and culture, then it might be more appropriate for all the holiday destinations to be local. This can help encourage local tourism, and if a foreign traveller buys a copy of the game, it would be a more meaningful souvenir, highlighting all Malaysian tourist attractions. Eventually we decided to stick to the original concept, so you will see other countries in Malaysian Holidays.

One very encouraging sign during the development of the game was how well received the theme was. My target audience for the game is non-gamers and casual gamers. Often when I managed to find such players to playtest the game, they instantly liked the game. One particularly memorable incident was when I met a local book publisher to pitch another game. I brought my repertoire of both published games and works-in-progress, to show them that I was a serious designer. Malaysian Holidays was just one of many games to be mentioned in passing. I did not plan to show it to them. At the time my prototype copy was packed in a recycled box originally for meal supplements. I only had a piece of paper glued to the box, and on it I had hand-written "Malaysian Holidays". It was just this "Malaysian Holidays" that caught the attention of the folks I met that day. They asked me what that was. I ended up playing the game with them. Malaysians really like public holidays.

And now I am holding this game in my hand. It is an amazing feeling physically holding the final product.

Game in play

Holiday cards

Local destination cards (1 point)

Overseas destination cards (2 points)

This is my favourite memo card. I read it, and I giggle to myself. Yeah, I laugh at my own jokes.

The art of Malaysian Holidays is done by Lim Chi Qing of Sunny Day. I love her style and she has presented Malaysian culture beautifully. Most of my games are published under my own indie publishing house Cili Padi Games. This is my second game published through someone else. My first such game was Dancing Queen with Matagot. I first released Dancing Queen myself under Cili Padi Games, and only after publication I managed to connect with Matagot to have an international edition published by them. The Malaysian Holidays publishing project was under Specky Studio right from the start. They specialise in using games in education, and they make games that can be used for educational purposes. They are connected to many schools and teachers. Malaysian Holidays contains many cultural and historical elements. There are many aspects that can be used in education. One important reason that Specky Studio wants to release the game in 2026 is this is Visit Malaysia Year! This is a great way to share Malaysian festivities and culture with the world. 28 illustrations of holidays celebrated in Malaysia, and 14 illustrations of travel destinations. I hope you will enjoy Malaysian Holidays too!

Now I imagine East Malaysians when you start reading this blog post you are already grumbling about the box cover of the game. Why is it only showing Peninsular Malaysia? Well the reason is that cover you see at the top is just half the cover. The box design for Malaysian Holidays has two covers, on opposite sides of the box. So East Malaysia is on the other side. Hey, I'm an East Malaysian, I certainly wouldn't allow East Malaysia to be short changed.

by Pete Wissinger

Taiki Shinzawa: The Master of Modern Trick-Taking
Scholars debate when exactly the modern “trick-taking renaissance” started, but it is undeniable that one designer has proven to be the movement’s inventive da Vinci: Taiki Shinzawa.

A prolific genius, Shinzawa has been churning out weird and wonderful card games for over a decade. Many of these games were printed in small batches to be sold at Tokyo Game Market, making them the whispered subjects of treasure hunts for many Western gamers starting to explore the trick-taking wilderness.

Playing a Shinzawa game for the first time is like encountering something from an alternate dimension. He takes the normal conventions of trick-taking and rebuilds them into something alien. His games are puzzling and playful, asking players to be precise in their hand management, but with completely alien tools to do so.

The first Shinzawa games I played were the first ones to get wide releases in the US: Ghosts of Christmas and 9 Lives. Both of these titles are bidding trick-takers, something I grew up playing through Spades and Euchre. These two games, though, pushed me into new territory in a way that was incredibly exciting. Ghosts of Christmas asked me to bid on how many tricks I would win, but then three tricks were available for me to play into at the same time! In 9 Lives I could see what suits players were holding and the hand has an unknown number of tricks, with cards going back into players’ hands throughout the round.

As I continued exploring Taiki Shinzawa’s catalog, I found that there were a few common hallmarks in many of his designs. One of the big ones was that scoring was often very brutal. In American Bookshop, a game where players are attempting to collect only suits of cards in tricks that they could capture the majority of. Any suits where you are not the majority holder? Negative points. Also in his bidding games, players often earn zero points if they don’t hit their bid exactly. The fact that these very opaque games were also so unforgiving is great for a player like me who enjoys the struggle of a difficult game. It feels incredible to pull off a risky gambit in these games. The highs are high, but the lows are also devastating.

Trick-Taking Twist: Bid as You Go
There is a reason bidding is so satisfying in these card games. Looking at the hand of cards dealt to you and making a plan for how you intend to play it is a way to smooth out the difference between a “good” hand and a “bad” one. Winning the most or fewest tricks isn’t necessarily the goal: you set your own goal. How well do you understand the game? Can you make plans that include tactical maneuvers if things go sideways? Hitting your bid requires skill that is difficult to master, creating a satisfying and delicious struggle that continues to be rewarding even after playing a game dozens (or hundreds) of times. There is a reason Bridge is a lifestyle game for so many people!

While precise bidding is a common feature in trick-taking games, it makes them difficult for new players to pick up. It’s intimidating! Before I’ve actually played a round, you’re asking me to predict how it will all go down? And if I’m wrong I don’t score? With so many players only giving a game one or two plays to make a good first impression, this can be a lot for folks who didn’t grow up playing classic card games.

Bidding, though, doesn’t have to always take place before the cardplay begins. Many modern trick-takers have systems that allow for a shifting or evolving bid, giving players the chance to narrow down on a target as the cards play out. For example, in Nokosu Dice, players draft a set of dice that are used as cards in tricks, but the last unplayed die in your supply is your bid. This means that through clever management of your resources, you can wait until the last possible moment to decide on what that magic number will be. In BiD Coin, you have a set of bid cards you are trying to spend before your opponents. Players start each hand bidding zero, but every time a trick pushes you above your current target, you must increase your bid. In Xylotar, players cannot see their hand of cards so knowing how many tricks will be won is impossible. However, at some point in the hand, once they have deduced their remaining numbers through tricks, a player will declare that one of those face down cards is their bid and then reveal it, hoping their deductions have been accurate.

These are just two examples that show how modern trick-taking designers have started to play with the idea that a bid does not need to be declared before the first trick is played. This creates a unique puzzle that can be just as exciting to solve as the long established norms. Giving players some sort of resource to steer towards a bid creates a dynamic arc to each round. In my mind, no game has pulled off this “bid as you go” concept better than Taiki Shinzawa’s Segment Trix.

The Genius of Segment Trix

Segment Trix was a game that I saw pictures of when I started my modern trick-taking obsession, and I couldn’t believe how novel the component hook was. Cards were made up of seven segment numbers like you’d see on a digital clock. There’s sort of a magic to how subtracting segments from that boxy “8” creates a legible shape for every number! This game is so playful in its use of those numerals.

The cards in Segment Trix looked like those digital clock numbers, but players were given a special resource: wooden segments. These little pieces could be added to a card to change its printed value! For example, with one extra segment on top, a 1 could become a 7. One in the middle could turn a 0 into an 8. This was already getting me excited before I learned what the REAL hook here was: the number of unused segments in a player’s supply at the end of a hand… is their bid of how many tricks they need to have won!

Unfortunately it was impossible to find a copy of Segment Trix for a long time until it was re-released as Twinkle Starship in a small print run. I grabbed a copy and was excited to see if it lived up to the legendary hype that had been building in this tiny corner of the hobby.

The gameplay turned out to be brilliant because of the flexible bidding system. This might seem easy enough at first. Couldn’t you just use enough sticks on the last trick to hit your bid? Naturally, it’s not that easy. For example, if a player is on the final trick, has two segments remaining, and has won one trick so far, shouldn't it be easy to just drop a segment on that final card? Not if that last card is a 4, which cannot make a legal number with one segment. Or an 8 which cannot use any segments. Also be careful not to accidentally win that trick you’re trying to dump a segment into!

The hand of cards and stock of segments work together to break your brain when you first get into it, but the game is not intimidating. It’s fun to change the numbers on cards! It is a thinky game that also manages to be sort of silly because players have such a high amount of agency to do strange things when playing into a trick. This is not a careful card counting game, but it also isn’t a totally random and chaotic experience either. There’s nothing quite like it and it lives up to the promise of that component hook.

Taking the Time
After the success of No Loose Ends, Paul Salomon from GameHead was eager to find the next Shinzawa game that deserved its time in the spotlight. I told him that the one I thought never got its fair shake but had mass appeal was Twinkle Starship. We played it together and he was immediately enthusiastic about publishing it. The game is just so immediately exciting. It may have seemed too niche when it was first released in Japan in 2020, but the greater hobby market was now ready for a trick-taker that was this innovative.

Like with No Loose Ends, the core gameplay didn’t need much in the way of major changes, so our first important task was to try to find an appropriate theme for the game. With No Loose Ends, we were able to reverse engineer Shut the Books into a theme-forward design that actually reinforced the mechanisms for the game. Twinkle Starship and Segment Trix were themeless in their presentation and lacked a strong identity that paired well with that rock-solid gameplay.

Going with something time related seemed correct since the digital numbers immediately reminds one of a clock. Manipulating clock numbers made me think of time travel. Sometimes the most obvious connection can really make a game sing. The little rods that change the numbers of the clock can represent fuel for the time machine. It was easy to imagine how a stellar production could bring this story to life and the time travel theme ended up informing all of the development decision we made for the game.

Segment Trix had impeccable trick-play and bidding so that didn’t need to change for Trick to the Future. The only areas that were lacking were the very harsh scoring and the inflexible player count.

This was the first themed prototype design from Paul Salomon
Going Beyond
Scoring in Segment Trix was simple: if you hit your final bid, you score two points per trick and one point per segment captured from cards in tricks. A player who did not win tricks equal to their remaining segments scored zero points. Ouch. If a player won zero tricks they scored ten points, but only if they could get rid of all of their segments.. A lot of great incentives were baked into this system. Using segments made a trick more valuable, it was important to be precise with your resources. However, the game was so odd to get the hang of that getting no points for being off by even a single trick seemed unreasonable for new players and could easily lead to a runaway leader, making people less likely to want to play more hands if they made even a small mistake.

Because of the time travel theme and the rods representing fuel for mad science, we changed the scoring to be a bit more forgiving but spicy in its own way. If using fuel segments in tricks represents your time machine operating, then using too little fuel wouldn’t be a big problem. You need enough fuel to return to your normal time. However, running out of fuel while time traveling would be a huge issue. This lended itself to incorporating a busting mechanism into the game. Winning too many tricks means you’re lost in time, winning too few is ok… but you could have traveled in time more!

What this means mechanically is that you get those points for tricks and segments like in the original game so long as you didn’t win more tricks than your remaining segments. However, using your fuel exactly right would double points so being precise was still important. This turns the bid into almost more of a push your luck mechanism. Since players have so much control early in the hand to win or lose tricks with fuel rods, it creates a feeling of standing on the edge of a cliff if you don’t play it safe.

Here are some concept sketches for the player boards used to track fuel rods
Paul and I went back and forth for a long time on how to incorporate the “nil” bid into this scoring system. The flat point value from the original game wouldn’t quite work here since we were dealing with numbers that could be doubled. Giving up all your fuel rods is such an interesting strategy because ultimately you are feeding point into trick that other players will be taking. The reward needs to make up for this to make it worth it to avoid all that potential doubling. A good shoot the moon zero bid mechanism needs to be more enticing to players than winning exactly one or two. It should be worth the risk to dodge the easy tricks. We landed on making the reward scale with the potential points you’re giving up. If a player wins no tricks, they score 3 points for each empty fuel space on their player board.. This was easy to internalize, thematic, and still rewarded zero trick players who didn’t manage to get rid of all their rods. It also scaled nicely with different player counts.

The Final Journey
As for playing the game beyond the original 3-4 player count, we had to run some experiments. It is common for tick-taking games to only list the option to play a game with a number of players that would give a similar, even experience. The main consideration tends to be the number of tricks that would be available per person or how the deck would need to be manipulated.

When Paul and I tested the game with five players, we found that all the core mechanisms worked, it was just a bit of a zanier experience. Scores could diverge wildly, but the bidding and segment play were still fun. By adjusting the number of segments each player received, the game totally worked as a bigger, swingier experience. While some players may not prefer this, it was a riot when we tested it with large groups.

As for the two-player experience, this turned out to be surprisingly satisfying. A key development was removing the trump suit at two players. This made bidding even more precarious, adding extra uncertainty. Because of the shifting bid system, this turned into a cutthroat game of trying to push your opponent over the edge by feeding them tricks they couldn’t handle. A dueling card game atmosphere emerged and players could be hyper attuned to their opponent’s bid in a way that lost very little of the game’s core promise.

Trick to the Future gives Taiki Shinzawa’s masterpiece the treatment it deserves. The thematic production is out of this world and has tons of meaningful quality of life enhancements. This includes dual-layer player boards for fuel that help track the new nil bid and keep your supply separate from those won in tricks. There is also player aid on every card as to what numbers the rank could be transformed into with rods. I’m thankful that Paul brought me back on to develop this one after No Loose Ends because these two games are the pinnacle of what the modern trick-taking renaissance represents for me. This isn’t just rehashing the same old thing. These show that there is brilliance to be found in iterative game design. Taking apart a well trodden system and putting the pieces back together into some sort of wonderful new creation that can take you from the past to the future.

by Ryan Migalla

I love trading card games. I don't love what they ask of you. In designing Quickdraw I found I can design a game that gives that TCG experience - deck design, synergy discovery, iterating against an asymmetric opponent - but without the endless commitment.

An interesting space. But more interesting? Quickdraw accomplishes this with just 18 cards.

A bold claim, delivered by a unique double-edged team building and resource system that I'm excited to apply to more ambitious projects. More on those plans later, first, how did Quickdraw come to be?


[heading]The Inspiration[/heading]
Like any good chemical reaction, Quickdraw was formed via a few core building blocks and a catalyst. These building blocks were 1) a design segment, 2) a form factor, and 3) an interesting mechanic.

Design Segment
I wanted to design a game that I myself wanted to play, and one I could actually finish without getting burnt out in year five of design. I landed on a 2-player, dueling, small-box game. It's a favorite genre of my wife and I. Grab a small box game with high replayability and head to the local brewery to sip delicious drinks while challenging each other. It's a very familiar segment, so I know what the player would want/expect. And seemed a lot easier than starting with whatever my version of Cones of Dunshire would be.

Form Factor
I was at Pax Unplugged when I first stumbled across Button Shy via the keynote by Elizabeth Hargrave. She explained their concept: games that consisted of just 18 cards and a rulebook that fit in an awesome ultraportable wallet. I was immediately intrigued by this as a design constraint.

I'm a person who loves design constraints. Give me a blank canvas and I'll flounder, but give me an interesting set of constraints and my creativity flourishes. The idea of building a deep game with just 18 cards excited me a lot. I went to the booth, bought two games, (Tussie Mussie by Elizabeth Hargrave and Revolver Noir by Xavier Davidson), and played them in line with my wife. They did not disappoint, and I knew I wanted to try and add my own unique flavor to this sub-genre.

Mechanic
In 2020 I had my most insane boardgame experience. My friend Kevin hosted a virtual Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth game where we all joined through Zoom and he managed everyone's had of cards physically over webcam. I won't go into that madness of "Kevin, I know it's Zach's turn but can you show me my hand? Thanks, wait what does that second card do?" But it's worth noting that what I took away from that game wasn't "never play games with Kevin again", it was "wait, that was actually an insanely interesting mechanic..."

The mechanic I'm talking about (because there are a lot in that game) was the skill check where you flipped a set number of cards from your deck based on your ability and then had to reveal a number of pips determined by the difficulty rating of the task. Cards had zero, one, or two pips. You generally needed to reveal a total 1-3 for a success. So, two pip cards were really valuable. However, the cards also had abilities on them you could use if they were in your hand. Do you see the tension coming? It became a very interesting decision space of do I want this card in my hand or in my deck.

It's a minor mechanic in Journeys in Middle Earth, and I honestly couldn't tell you how to play the rest of the game, but that simple interesting mechanic stayed in my brain.

(If I mis-explained any part of the game please direct your comment hate to Kevin.)

Catalyst
The catalyst arrived as many of my gaming ideas do, when listening to a board podcast (probably the Board Game Design Lab or Crowdfunding Nerds). Someone mentioned a Wild West game. I don't remember what the game was, other than it was a completely different game type, but that theme made my game fall into place. Time to build a Wild West shootout.

[heading]The Design[/heading]
The idea seemed to coalesce all at once. It would be eight Lawkeepers vs eight Bandits, where four are deployed with attacks and abilities and the other four form the ammo deck. The core tension stems from the best units to deploy are also the best ammo in your ammo deck.

Simple Game Mechanics
The key to any good card dueling game is that the rules are simple, and the intrigue comes from the card selection. Quickdraw accomplishes that with rules that can be summed up with four step.

The first part of each round is team building. Players look at their eight unique units and decide on a strategy and how to arrange cards between being deployed to fight, or in the ammo deck to support.

After deciding which four units to deploy, the remainder are shuffled as the ammo deck and randomly dealt face-down to each deployed unit. Players take turns activating units and win by being the last one standing at the end of the shootout.

On a player's turn a unit is selected to activate. Their attached ammo card is revealed, and if the Ammo Value of the revealed ammo card is greater or equal to the Ammo Needed for their attack, the attack succeeds. The target unit is dealt damage equal to the damage value of the attack. One damage and they are turned sideways, two damage and they are defeated and removed from the board.

Players take turns activating units that shoot back and forth across main street. The last team standing wins!

Intriguing Game Strategy
Pretty simple gameplay, but once you start dissecting the central tension, you find a whole lot more. Remember, the central tension in Quickdraw is that the units with the strongest attacks and abilities also have the highest Ammo Values. The distribution of Ammo Values for each team is 6, 5, 4, 4, 3, 2, 2, 1. So if you deploy your four strongest units, your ammo deck would only have ammo values of 3, 2, 2, 1.

Most attacks and abilities need a 3 or 4 to succeed, so the very strong units you deployed are going to be very useless without high enough ammo available. Conversely, deploying your weakest units will give you a very consistent ammo deck, but they might not have enough fire power to best your opponent.

This creates the central tension of the game. You're trying to find that balance between power and consistency and also looking at different card abilities to find synergies that allow cards to effectively play stronger than their ammo value.

A great example of how this plays out is with our favorite bandit pair- Brother and Sister.

Brother has the rare 2 damage attack. Incredibly powerful since with one shot, he can take an enemy unit off the board. However, it needs 5 ammo to succeed. As a reminder the ammo distribution is 6, 5, 4, 4, 3, 2, 2, 1.

If I deploy Brother and the three other strongest units, the ammo deck would comprise of 4, 2, 2, 1 – meaning a 0% chance for Brother to hit.

However, if instead of playing Captain Blythe (6 AV) and Bruiser (5 AV), I put them in the ammo deck, now Brother has a 50% chance to hit since the ammo deck would be: 6, 5, 2, 1.

That’s the basic math, but the card abilities let you stack the odds even further. If I also play Sister, she can give Brother her ammo after he shoots. So, his first shot has a 50% chance to hit, but if he misses, on the next turn he can take Sister’s ammo, which would then be a 66% to hit – bringing his chance to hit at least once up to 86%.

86% chance to one-shot a unit seems pretty good! But what about the opportunity cost? That strategy required two shots to do 2 damage. Two more consistent units might’ve been able to pull that off with similar accuracy and without painting a target on themselves like Brother. Plus is that strategy too Brother dependent, and when he’s defeated do the Bandits collapse?

Sure, there’s only eight cards in each team’s pool, but the interconnectivity of their synergies and the balance of deployed strength vs. ammo deck consistency means there’s plenty to think about in the team building phase, and in the shoot-out phase.

Locations
There is one last element to the game that provides another layer of strategic decision making – location abilities. The Battle for Silver City takes place across Main Street and units are deployed on either side to three different locations: the Street, the building, or the roof.

The locations provide simple but impactful abilities. A unit in the Building has cover, which means enemies targeting units in the building get a -1 ammo modifier. So, while Sheriff McGraw usually only needs a 2 to hit, if she’s shooting into the building, she’d need a 3 or higher. Units on the Roof get to cancel the effect of cover, but only one unit can be deployed to the Roof.

The Building is safer, the Roof is more accurate.

So now the deployment decision. Maybe you want to protect Brother to let him get more shots off, so you put him in the Building. But you realize that a -1 penalty dramatically affects his ability to hit opposing units in the Building, so maybe he's better on the Roof? Again, it’s the small decisions that stack up that influence your game plan and how your team will respond to your opponent.

The success in the design is that the limited card pool, the simple abilities, and the basic locations add together in a very dynamic but comprehendible way. You can visualize the probabilities and how the synergies will play out to craft a strong direction for your team. But chance and your opponent’s set up will mean there's never one right answer.

[heading]Challenges During Design[/heading]
Balance
Balancing small numbers is HARD. Just as small adjustments in your deployed team can have large impacts on your strategy, seemingly small design changes can have catastrophic impacts on balance.

As we saw above, Brother maxes out at 50% accuracy with an attack that needs 5 ammo to succeed when you stack the ammo deck with 6, 5, 4, 4. However, if you make the smallest possible positive adjustment to Brother’s attack so that he needs 4 ammo to succeed, now he’s 100% accurate and incredibly over powered. Go one point in the other direction with an attack that needs 6 ammo to succeed and now unless he’s on the roof, he can never hit a unit in the building.

It becomes easier to see why games like Pokémon and Yu-gi-oh use numbers in the hundreds and thousands. A balancing change from 120 HP to 130 HP is a much more fine-tuned lever to pull than an ammo value going from 4 to 5. But the small numbers are what gives Quickdraw its easily understood and punchy abilities. So, while it took a lot of iteration (on the order of hundreds of solo playtest games), the challenge was worth it for the gameplay it delivers.

Design Requirements to guide development
To make sure the game was as dynamic as possible, without losing track of the central tension, I implemented several high-level design requirements.

1. Every card should be playable as a deployed unit or as ammo. With only eight cards in the card pool, if a card that is unbalanced and never gets deployed, or is always deployed, this significantly limits team building decisions. This means each card must be balanced exactly to its Ammo Value. A card that performs worse than its Ammo Value ends up always being ammo since it's more effective than being deployed, and vice versa. The issue is exacerbated at either ends of the spectrum where the highest and lowest Ammo Values have the most impact in the ammo deck.

2. No specific team configuration should be unbeatable by all opposing team configurations. Similar to the first requirement, but possibly more important, if one configuration of cards is unbeatable, the game is broken. Once that configuration is found, then there's no point in playing.

3. Different core archetypes on each team should have a rock, paper, scissors relationship. Meaning for example, the archetypal Sherrif build should be able to beat the archetypal Captain build 70% of the time, but lose to the Bruiser build 70% of the time, and be evenly matched with the Brother/Sister build.

This is for sure the most aspirational of the requirements. To achieve this, after each iteration I would develop three favorite builds per team and then do a round robin each to see how they fared against each other. The balance percentages aren't perfect, but they are good enough where this requirement succeeded in its purpose of enabling meta decision making. Anticipate your opponent, build to counter, but be wary of the double bluff!

[heading]"It Feels Like a TCG"[/heading]
So back to my crazy statement about my 18-card game providing a substitute TCG experience. Does all of this design actually deliver on that claim? I very much think that it does, and that's not just my personal delusions talking.

As I brought my game around to conventions and events, my demos naturally attracted a lot of TCG fans. Beautiful cards laid out on a playmat creates that familiar and engaging feel.

The demos went very well, and what I didn't expect was how often conversation would turn towards TCG nostalgia. Talking about the old days of buying every set, favorite decks, keeping up with the local scene, and so on. The common thread here wasn't that players had fallen out of love with TCGs, but that TCGs ask a lot and eventually life had gotten in the way.

What these players appreciated about Quickdraw was that it provided what they loved about TCGs but in a manageable format - deck construction, a unique mana system, strategic/reactive decision making, and meta gameplay. We've already covered the bones of Quickdraw, but now let’s put it in the context of a TCG.

Deck Construction and Discovery
With Quickdraw, instead of a 60-card deck you're focused on eight cards. That means you can really feel the impact of each card and easily conceptualize it up front. I love that I can quickly build a team and then look and say, "hmm but now Crazy Carl is only 25% accurate, oh but if I move him to the roof he jumps to 50%!"

And even with these few cards there are exciting moments of discovery as board state changes and you find different end states. Don't believe me? See what happens the first time you leave Sheriff as the last unit standing...

My favorite part of running playtests was watching two new players learn the game, play a round, and then immediately re-review the units they didn't deploy to find better synergies.

A Unique Mana System
Nothing affects a TCG more than its mana system. It's why a Magic clone will always feel like a Magic clone even with completely different cards. And what is the ammo deck in Quickdraw if not an incredibly interesting and unique mana system?

Rather than adding mana until you have enough to cast your card or use your attack, the ammo deck serves as an RNG system to control the action. However, it's a rigged RNG system that you built yourself. You can't blame your draws if your units never get a shot off, you can only blame yourself for putting too many strong cards on the field instead of in your ammo deck.

Strategic, Reactive Decision Making
Building your team is only half the battle. Now you have to use them wisely to defeat your opponent’s key units before they do the same to you. And with only four units with 2 HP each, each shot that gets through hurts. The back-and-forth action, tough decisions and dramatic moments make the whole game feel like the final climactic rounds of a classic TCG game.

Meta Gameplay
What do you do when you lose an epic match in a TCG tournament? Go home and hope it goes better next time? No. You spread out your cards and think where you can make changes to do better next week.

Well, with Quickdraw you don't need a week. Rounds take 10 minutes, so start the next one right away to tweak your strategy and claim victory.

[heading]Up Next[/heading]
I definitely didn't start down this path planning on designing TCG adjacent games. But given that I've been playing dueling card games since my brother and I were in elementary school actually playing Pokémon, I might actually be the best person for the job.

I'm incredibly excited about the core Quickdraw system and its ability to provide powerfully unique experiences in this space.
The next item on the roadmap is a second set for Quickdraw that introduces new teams and new abilities, but with the same core system. Battle for Silver City has tight abilities, grounded play, and a beautiful western feel. So naturally set 2 will be Quickdraw: Aliens vs. Marshmallows!

Ok, maybe not super obvious, but that's the point. I want to show the other end of the spectrum, wacky concept with elevated abilities, to show what is possible with the Quickdraw system.

My vision is a whole host of standalone sets that constantly let players discover new synergies and strategies. And maybe a future where sets can be mixed and matched for exponentially more options! If you want to follow along and weigh in on future sets, sign up for my mailing list and/or come join the RAM Games Discord community.

Apart from coming out with more sets, I'm also thinking of other ways to implement this system to provide for unique gameplay experiences. To that end I've began working on a roguelike version of Quickdraw. The quick gameplay loop, high impact of upgrades, and the pyrrhic nature of victories in Westerns sets up Quickdraw as a perfect base to develop a tabletop roguelike on.

I don't have a ton to share with this yet, but again, for sneak peeks, including alpha tests when its ready, come join our Discord community!

[heading]Thanks for Reading![/heading]
I hope you find this interesting, and even better yet, took something away from it. I'm really excited to grow Quickdraw and come up with more ambitious projects that bring joy to my player segment.

Give me a shout out in the comments of what you think. Do you think I can really frame a game as TCG adjacent with only 18 cards? What other ways would you want to see this system implemented? What's your favorite game that feels like a TCG but isn’t?

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.