by Anton Hallmann

"The game is ugly as the night“ - said the first reviewer I saw about the new artwork. Well, that is a good start into writing a blog post about redesigning an existing game, I guess. So I prepared my next failure and started writing about the process.

Contrary to what some people think, a redesign isn't simply replacing old illustrations with prettier ones. If only it were that easy. Sometimes changing the artwork means changing almost everything around it, not only because the Game Designer did some adjustments to the game.

And to put an (obvious) disclaimer in front: By no means is the first edition design not good or even bad - in most cases we realize the things, which we could’ve done differently only when the product is released and used. (And don't even get me started about the two year gap between first touch and release and the urge of changing everything midway, which is like an itchy spot that you can't scratch.)

How I Blindly Said "Yes"

Back in 2023 I sent my portfolio to a handful of board game publishers.

I feel most comfortable in illustrating for editorial, infographics and children's books. But board games had always fascinated me. They're one of the few creative fields where almost all my learned skills (from typography to composition) come to use - you design an entire object. Box art, rulebooks, player aids, cards, boards, icons, tokens... every single element has to work together. It's a designer's playground.

Fortunately, [user=Uli Blennemann]@UliBlennemann[/user] from Spielworxx got back to me.

The game? Québec.
My reaction? "...Sure!"

Nice, I got a commission, but unfortunately I had absolutely no idea what Québec was about. Looking back, blindly agreeing before researching the project may not have been the most professional approach. On the other hand... I often receive inquiries about topics I know nothing about. Learning new things is always a pleasant side effect of the job.

First Things First: Learn the Game

I already knew that the game was originally published in 2011 by le Scorpion Masqué and designed by [user=filou]Philippe Beaudoin[/user] and [user=Zendor]Pierre Poissant-Marquis[/user]. Since I didn't own a copy, I did what most people do these days. I looked for a playthrough.

Watching a game teaches you something that reading the rulebook never quite can. You don't just learn how the game works - you learn where players hesitate, where they get excited and which parts of the table naturally draw their attention. Plus I did not need to work myself through another rulebook.

I stumbled upon Heavy Cardboard's playthrough. This one stood out in particular, because both designers were present in the chat. A big advantage: Besides learning about the mechanics, I also learned something that immediately influenced the entire redesign: One of the designers is color-blind. That single piece of information completely changed how I approached the project.

Accessibility Isn't a Feature

It's easy to think of accessibility as something you add at the end of a project. But, oh wonder, it isn't.

Good accessibility usually results in good graphic design.

If information is easier to distinguish, if important elements stand out naturally, if the interface does not cause any friction with the players to understand what's happening, everyone benefits - not just players with visual impairments.

Color blindness alone affects a lot of people. Roughly one in twelve men and one in two hundred women have some form of color vision deficiency, with red-green color blindness being by far the most common. (And that is a big chunk of gamers, too.)

Looking Through Different Eyes

As a designer, I spend a lot of time choosing colors that look good together. I particularly love a limited color palette. Québec one the other hand required lots of colors: 4 zones of power, backgrounds and 5 player colors. (which led to many iterations of color through the process) 🙃

Here's the original board viewed through the lens of red-green color blindness (deuteranopia).

Suddenly the political districts started melting into the background. Meanwhile, Religion and Culture - both relying on fairly similar shades of blue - become difficult to tell apart. None of this was intentional, of course. It's simply one of those things that's easy to miss unless you actively try to design for accessibility.

Fortunately, the solution wasn't particularly complicated, because the original board used a richly colored background underneath the hex tiles. Which was beautiful, but not very helpful for reading purposes.

Replacing it with a neutral, slightly aged parchment immediately allowed the colored hexes to stand out far more clearly. Instead of competing with the background, the hextiles became the focal point. As cheesy as it sounds, sometimes less is more and removing visual noise can be very helpful. Although I did not had the intention to trim it down to an excel sheet.

Then Came the Real Puzzle

Accessibility via color was one issue, the other was the construction of the game board. Looking at you cascading mechanism.

It is the heart of the game and therefore should work as smoothly as possible. In the first edition the cascading zones of power were placed in the 4 corners of the board, which led to long distances between the cascading zones. So instead of spreading them into four corners, I brought them into a circle next to the central play area. Suddenly the cascade became much easier to follow. And the visual information of how many workers you have in one zone is in one space, a clear visual hierarchy, which reduces eye movement.

I had this change in mind from the beginning, it felt natural - which is usually a sign that it was the right decision. (But to be fair: I somehow thought "cascading" means going in a circle, oh boy.)

Part 2 - I Like Things In Order

By this point, we had made the board easier to read and the cascading mechanism easier to follow. And one personal preference of mine: having as much content as possible on the game board itself. Whenever possible, cards should have dedicated spaces on the board instead of living in a vague area somewhere off to the side. It makes setup cleaner, the table easier to read, and gives the whole production a sense of intention.

Québec contains two different types of cards.: There are five Leader cards, all of which remain visible throughout the game. And then there are the Event cards.
Normally that wouldn't be particularly complicated, except in Québec, here the very first Event stays in play until its objective has actually been completed. Makes two slots for Event cards. Which means the game needed seven homes for seven visible cards.

The Board Can't Be the Size of Canada

Space is always a problem and so the most tempting solution to make the canvas bigger is not a real option. Unfortunately, board games are no exception and eventually need to fit inside a box. And for most players even more important the board has to fit on a dining table. Not everyone owns a dedicated gaming table the size of a medieval banquet hall.

Uli had already specified the box dimensions: 308 × 308 mm. Working backwards from that eventually gave us a board dimension of 780 × 560 mm. Big enough to breathe. Small enough to fit on a regular dining table. Probably. And so the first rough version was born and looked like that. Blue was the color we were going for, because Québec's flag code is blue and orange. Which was handy because the Bang Wong Palette suggests blue and orange as most color blind friendly.

It already looked surprisingly close to where we eventually ended up. The center contained the heart of the game: the hex tiles resting on map inspired by a historical map of Québec, based on Jacques-Nicolas Bellin's 1744 map.

The left side housed the Leader cards. The right side became home to the Event cards, the four zones of power and a player aid that explains the cascading mechanism.

Everything in its right place, but everything... had problems. The first one is obvious: Looking suspiciously like a prototype, although I thought, that it is almost done... bit delusional.

With A Little Help From My Friends

Thankfully [user=hoshbad]Sebastian Wenzlaff[/user] joined us as editor. And he made all of my design life easier (unfortunately this was not always reciprocal - drove him crazy by always inventing new file names to his perfect system - sorry! 🫠).

Good graphic design is usually a lot of quite ordinary decisions that quietly support one another. Fortunately, this is also where collaboration becomes incredibly valuable. Working with Sebastian meant there was always someone asking the right questions - or occasionally pointing out the flaw I'd become completely blind to after staring at the same file for far too long. His feedback was pointing to the things I could no longer see myself. Working together with someone is a blessing. And working together with Sebastian double.

The first thing we tackled was the centre spaces. Everything not only looked unfinished and way too bright, but also the districts were not clear enough. The visual hierarchy was weak. One of the improvements came from something surprisingly simple: Looking at the original. It had actually handled this rather well. The districts needed stronger visual separation, so we widened the borders surrounding each one and fully colored the district spaces. Suddenly your eye immediately understood where one district ended and the next began.

Sometimes, during a redesign, you spend hours trying to invent something clever, only to discover that the original designer had already solved the problem. So I learned that one of the parts of redesigning an existing game is knowing when not to redesign something.

After myriads of tiny adjustments, the center of the board finally began to behave itself. Now we could get into detail...

The Giant Arrow Nobody Asked For

We all might develop tunnel vision at some point in our work, at least I do quite fast… Once I've spent enough hours staring at a layout, my brain is just to used to the design, that mistakes or uncertainties do play no role. Usually I pass it to a fellow designer to have a look at it (hello my wife!) or just rotate the canvas for a new angle. But sometimes it seems that tunnel vision is infectious and all just have it…

Thankfully we had Uli, who pointed out that the banners on the districts "seem to form a gigantic arrow."
And well once I saw it... I couldn't unsee it.
The district banners collectively pointed left. Not intentionally, but they just did...

It was one of those accidental compositions my eye got pulled toward now over and over again. So the banners first moved upwards and were also slimmed down in a later iteration. Problem solved. Mostly.

The Workers Were Tiny

The next issue wasn't artistic at all. It was practical. Up to this point we had kept one feature from the original edition: the wooden worker cubes. They were meant to stand neatly in rows on top of the hex tiles.

On screen? Perfectly sensible.
In practice? Tiny. Fiddly. Easy to bump. And so slightly annoying.

Anyone who's ever tried placing several small cubes into precisely printed spaces while reaching across a crowded table already knows where this story is going. We eventually swapped the roles of the components. The century markers became cubes. The workers became discs. Such a tiny change. Such a massive improvement. Because the discs stacked beautifully, were easier to manipulate, and made both the end-of-round cleanup and the cascading mechanism noticeably smoother.

It's one of those invisible improvements players rarely comment on. Which is exactly what good graphic and component design should do. When nobody notices it... it's probably working. Or in the worst case players just arrange with the situation.

The accessibility was better now.
The cascade made sense.
The workers were easier to handle.

Now we could finally focus on making the board look less like a collection of individual elements and more like one cohesive game.

Leaders Need More Space

The second construction side was the Leader area. The cards refer to 4 respective personalities from each of the 4 eras. In the first edition they were only written at the bottom of the card. To depict them was the goal. First we made bit more space for the cards and I had placed generic historical figures there.

They looked fine. But there was an obvious question. Why was I showing anonymous people when the actual Leader cards already featured real historical personalities?

The background caused another issue. Both the board and the cards shared almost the same color. As long as every card was in place, everything looked nice.
The moment a card was taken... nothing happened. Well, technically the card was taken, but visually? It was surprisingly difficult to notice. Which is exactly the opposite of what I wanted. Empty spaces should announce themselves immediately. Instead they cleared their throats quietly.

I rotated the Leader cards into landscape orientation. That immediately distinguished them from the Event cards, which remained portrait format. Easier for players to read. Check.

Borrowing a Little Architecture

But I also wanted the Leader area to feel connected to Québec itself. Rather than filling the background with decorative flourishes, I started looking at the architecture of Québec's National Assembly. Its ornamental details and the speakers chair became the inspiration for the surrounding frame. It quietly supports the theme without competing with the information players actually need.

That's often the balance you're chasing. Theme should enrich usability. Not fight it.

After that I just recolored the places where the cards lie with the background tones. Suddenly an empty slot looked... well... empty. Funny how difficult it can be to make "nothing" visible.

The Leader Cards Itself Needed Some Treatment

Changing the board meant changing the cards too. Originally, the Leader cards featured relatively small portraits. Perfectly functional. But once the board itself became more elaborate, those tiny portraits started feeling disconnected. Instead, we decided to put collages of the zones portraits on the cards. The portraits became the focal point of richer compositions that immediately gave each card more presence. The cards felt less like reference material and more like characters. That's important because players spend the entire game looking at them. If something occupies that much visual real estate, it deserves a little personality.

Part 3 – The Point Where Everything Finally Started Looking Like a Game

Continuing making tiny steps and decisions...
Should this icon move up two millimetres?
Should this border be darker?
Is this heading too close to the edge?
Does this symbol still work when printed smaller?
Would anyone actually notice this? (The answer here is always yes.)

After myriads of tiny adjustments, the center of the board finally began to behave itself. The accessibility was better. The cascade made sense. The workers were easier to handle. Nothing was accidentally pointing left anymore.

Here is the board seen by someone with red-green color blindness (deuteranopia). The districts can be easily distinguished, in addition icons support readability.

The Surprisingly Easy Part

The focus of this diary is of course on the elements that changed the most during development, but some of them barely changed at all. The Event cards were one of those (except that I wanted to include an illustration of the historical event on the card). So were the building sides of the hex tiles. Both were established fairly early and remained remarkably stable throughout the project. Most later adjustments were simply the natural consequence of changes happening elsewhere. If the board colors evolved, the cards evolved with them. If icons became clearer on the board, they became clearer on the cards too. Everything stayed visually connected.

One example is the 1663 Event card, whose layout barely changed—but whose colors and iconography gradually evolved alongside the rest of the game. That meant lots and lots of color swapping. But also the change of iconography (which was the part we focused on first to keep it coherent through the game): The first player to build two buildings in three of the four colors (six buildings in total) immediately scores 8 VP, second 4 VP.

Looking Back

When I first agreed to work on Quebec, I honestly thought I was being hired to create new artwork. Instead, I found myself asking questions about accessibility, visual hierarchy, component usability, historical references, table space and how players actually move their eyes around a game board. It demanded a way deeper understanding of how a designer has to approach a board game.

"Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent", said Joe Sparano. Players should just simply play without getting distracted. They find the information they need. They understand what happens next. That's exactly the goal.

If players spend an evening talking about the decisions they made rather than struggling with the interface that presented those decisions, then the design has done its job, even if it is „as ugly as the night“ to some.

But I hope you enjoy the game or maybe even the read too.

by Roger IELLO

As a Godzilla fan, I had always hoped to work on a project like this. Around the release of the first U.S. Godzilla movie in 2014, I created a series of personal chibi kaiju illustrations inspired by the Monsterverse.
Florent Baudry, the project manager of the game at IELLO, came across these illustrations during last SPIEL Essen fair and asked me if I would be interested in working on the, still secret at the time, King of Tokyo: Godzilla game. It was an incredible opportunity: working with both IELLO and Toho.

One of the biggest challenges was defining the visual style. At first, the direction was still quite open, so we explored many different approaches before narrowing it down to the final look. We experimented with ideas ranging from retro Japanese ink drawings to a style that mixed old comic book influences with the nostalgic feel of 1960s and 1970s wallpaper patterns.

The illustrations I created in 2014 were digital watercolor illustrations, and we knew early on that we wanted to use chibi kaiju in some way for this project. Moving toward a digital watercolor style therefore felt like a natural way to bring the old and new ideas together.

About the Chibi Monsters

From the beginning, it was planned to use this exact chibi watercolor style for at least a few illustrations of the power cards, so finding the right direction here was easy.

Through several thumbnails and idea sketches, we refined the concept for each card before finalizing it in the watercolor style.

Here is one example. I already showed you Mecha Godzilla from the old illustrations I created in 2014. Since this was already a very stylized version of Mecha Godzilla, we did not have to change much from the original design, apart from the red eyes.
During the process, we also changed the Japanese sun on the airplanes to avoid any potential cultural issues, and added another finger. Checking the correct number of fingers happened surprisingly often, especially because some costumes had more fingers than others.

The First Standee

After the chibi, which I was used too, we had to start with the monsters standees. I did a lot of reference gathering and style research before starting a series of trials with the first real test illustration. The original Godzilla standee, later used for as an alternative board offered at events, went through several scenes and iterations before we reached the final version. In the final version, you can see the amount of work that went into the brushwork and line art as a reference to traditional Japanese watercolor.

Why? Another version was an alternative style test, closer to traditional Japanese watercolor art. In the end, it felt a little too old-fashioned for a modern game, but we still wanted to keep some of its retro charm without pushing it too far.

Another example with the Mecha Godzilla Standee

This is a good example of how the detailed process worked later on, once the style had been clearly established. We started with thumbnails to explore the overall direction of the composition.

The Design of the Cover

Naturally, we also put a lot of work into the cover. After exploring several thumbnails, we created a selection of color sketches, each taking a different approach.

Some concepts referenced classic movie posters, while others stayed closer to the visual identity of the existing King of Tokyo games. In the end, we decided to explore a stronger shape-based composition and moved forward with a mix between versions A and E.
The following steps allowed us to develop those ideas further in different directions.

Overall, this was a fantastic project to work on, and I really hope there will be some kind of expansion in the future. I would love to design the full roster of kaiju, prepare 3D prints, or even work with TOHO on new ideas.

So far, the feedback has been great, and I am now looking forward to the official release of the game in the USA for Gen Con as well as my next project with IELLO.

Markus Erdt
(editor's note - diary transcribed from an interview with Markus and uploaded by an employee of IELLO)

by Steph Hodge

HELLO GEN CON! We are all ready for these new releases!

[imageid=8916698 medium rep]▪️ Mythologies from Super Meeple is set to release August 12, but will be available for Gen Con pickup as well. This new game is designed by Maxime Babad, Mickaël "Froh" Garcin. Mythologies is a new light civ and tableau building game that plays in 20-40 minutes and plays 2-4 players.

From the Hachette Website:



▪️ Mountain Goats: Legacy from Allplay has a limited release at Gen Con with a wider release set for September. From designers Alex Cutler, Michael Mihealsick, and Stefan Risthaus. This game plays 2-5 players and each session is about 20-45 minutes.

From the BGG:



▪️ Czech Games Edition (CGE) announced the release of Lost Ruins of Arnak: Surprise Shipment, a new expansion for Lost Ruins of Arnak!

From BGG:




▪️ Six Sojourns from Red Raven Games releases July 30. From designer Ryan Laukat, this is an Eight-Minute Empire game. This is a game for 2-4 players and takes 30-60 minutes.

From BGG:



▪️ Bézier Games has a small new card game coming out called Warp 99. From designer Reinhard Staupe (La Habana, David & Goliath...), this is a quick-paced card game where you are racing to collect 99 points first. for 2-4 players and plays in 30 minutes.

From the BGG page:

by Mín

Hi everyone, it’s Mín here, and I would like to share a few things about the new addition to the Lost Ruins of Arnak!

The name says it all: the Surprise Shipment is an expansion even we didn’t really expect. It wasn’t planned originally, but when we were designing the Adventure Chest, there was this little bit of extra space in the card compartments that we ended up with, and we thought it would be cool to use it for some more cards. That is also the reason why Twisted Paths was advertised as the last major expansion–we were hoping to be able to fill that empty space in the Adventure Chest.

When we got back to actually designing the cards, it surprised us that there was actually still a lot more design space than we expected. When designing some of the previous expansions, it was easy to feel like we already exhausted all the interesting ideas for card effects. But as it turned out, there were many fun ideas still waiting for us, some actually changing the game in interesting ways.

New Card Effects

The base game comes with 75 items and artifacts, and the Surprise Shipment adds 50 more unique items and artifacts, which is actually a lot. We tried to aim for effects that are not overly complicated so that you can play with them even with beginners, but they still offer interesting effects that can change your playstyle and open the game to new strategies.

Adding new effects into an existing game can be both easier and harder than coming up with a new game. You already have some framework in place, but you need to fit into it and make sure you do not break anything.

Thankfully, we had the “CGO”–the CGE online testing platform–at our disposal. This expansion was tested there extensively, for which we’re very grateful to the community of testers there! We were pleasantly surprised by how big of an impact this seemingly small expansion had on the gameplay.

Let Us Introduce a Few of the Cards!

For example, the Thermometer card affects the timing–suddenly, you want to play a lot of cards in a turn. Even gaining a fear from an effect does not sound like such a bad idea, because that is also a card that goes to your play area 🙂.

The Golden Wing can also be a game-changer if you are fairly rich and manage to snatch it at the right time. It can be especially useful when you are short on cards and need to travel a lot.

Have you ever had a game where you were just drowning in Fear cards? These artifacts may make that a strategic choice!

And sometimes, especially towards the end of the game, you might be lacking travel symbols when all the cards in your hand are just too precious to use just for the travel icons. That's where these new cards shine, giving you just the extra push you need to reach your destination.

One of my personal favorites is definitely the Stew Pot–a card with great versatility! It allows you to get to the gold side effect of an assistant much faster, and even interact with your opponent's assistant. That can be especially useful in some situations, like when they snatch the one assistant you really need. It's definitely a card that creates some memorable moments and encourages friendly banter! Like:

“Why is my assistant eating at your camp again?”

“Well, if you fed your assistant properly, maybe they wouldn’t come over!” and so on!

Art Progress

We had a lot of fun with the artwork. Milan Vavroň is a pleasure to work with–he comes up with interesting concepts for the cards easily, which was very useful here, especially for Artifact card illustrations. The Item cards are much easier in that regard, since it’s easy to find some inspiration in the everyday world, but Artifacts need to feel unique and mysterious. They represent the culture of the Arnakian past and need to fit into the rest of the world seamlessly, while also communicating the in-game effect visually. For example, we usually try to have the illustration carry the same color as the important resources you gain from the card effect.

Ondřej Hrdina once again worked on the beautiful illustration for the cover, the new sites, and also the Kitten and Puppy cards. The idea we had for this cover was to make it cute and playful.

One of the all-time favorite cards is the Dog, of course. We wanted to create cheaper and weaker versions of the Dog and Cat cards, and when I saw the new cards next to each other, the image you see on the cover just popped into my mind. It was hard to unsee it–I really liked the idea of these two being the first ones to find a lost shipment in the Jungle. So keep an eye out for two new cute and cuddly expedition members - if they're not too busy chasing butterflies, that is!

Sometimes the theme of a card is closely connected with the way we represent its effect, but the intention does not always “survive” thanks to limitations like readability or balancing issues.

The Calendar card is a nice example of the former–we really wanted the effect to slowly change into another bonus from round to round, just like the seasons change. But the icons were too small when placed on the card like that. Placing the icons in the zig-zag looked strange because the round and square icons in different places created a scattered feel. So in the end the idea may not be as obvious from the final effect, but at least those of you who read this Diary will know.

Oh, and the date in the calendar also changed - it’s the date of the day when we (shortly before midnight) sent the Arnak rulebook to print, and with that, all the work on the base game was finished, and all we could do was to anxiously await how the game would be received. We have a few more Easter eggs like that hidden in the game, but let’s not spoil you all the fun of looking for them.

New Sites

When designing new sites, we wanted to keep the balance among the different resources that you may gain while digging at sites. Since we only had room for two extra sites, we decided to go for a unique new effect that is more flexible in what resources it can offer. The effect allows you to take back one of the previously used idols, making both the idol and the slot available for use again. This creates some interesting new combo opportunities!

We hope Lost Ruins of Arnak: Surprise Shipment brings fresh energy to your games of Arnak, whether you’re exploring new strategies or just enjoying the unexpected twists these cards can create. The new expansion will be released July 30, 2026.

See you on the island, explorers!

by Christian K

This is a designer diary for Combo Creatures: The Quick Ones and Combo Creatures: The Witty Ones

Prologue
We, Michael and Christian, met at an event at our local Board Games Café Papas Papbar, for a release party for Biotopia. We quickly got chatting about games and even had a few beers (or at least it felt that way). This kind of meeting between game designers is always an interesting and exciting moment. At the end of the night, we hugged goodbye, and one of us whispered the lovely phrase “we should totally make a game together”.

10 Years Later
Nah just kidding, it was like half a year later or something that we seriously started working together. We started meeting up regularly and experimenting with games. We tried various ideas, but it was hard finding a good common project that actually worked. After we added like five tracks to one of our other games (which surprisingly didn’t make it any better), we felt a bit stuck and like we hadn’t quite found the right game.

"Faunas" (as we called Combo Creatures at the time) emerged as a breath of fresh air. The initial prototype was fast playing and delivered a lot of crazy moments that occasionally had one of us pause and say... “Is this allowed?” The answer was always yes.

The Game
The game is super simple, and surprisingly, most rules are exactly the same as in the very first prototype.
You have a hand of cards. On your turn, you pick one to play. It has a cost, which you pay by discarding other cards. You put it into play, and it has a play-ability that you trigger. Those abilities tend to be quite wild and powerful, often allowing you to play more stuff (sometimes even for free). We wanted to give you the feeling of playing a crazy combo deck in a TCG, but with almost no rules, no complex timing, and very simple and powerful abilities.
[Michael: I remember coming home from those early playtest sessions with an overloaded brain just sitting there staring into space, trying to figure out whether I could have played my hand more efficiently, all while new ideas for cool card abilities kept popping into my head – And right there I knew we were on to something!]

(Ok ok, occasionally on your turn, you don’t have a cool card combo to play so you spend the turn picking up new cards to load you up for a powerful next turn. But most of the time, you are just playing cool combos, we promise!)

To prevent too much time from being spent reading the cards in your hand, we found it useful to limit the number of different cards in the deck. When you play, there are just 7 different ones. You quickly know the cards so you can use your energy to find the best possible ways to play them, rather than reading an endless stream of cards.

A Weird System
With only seven cards though, we were looking for creative ways to increase the variety of the deck and the number of situations that the players will face. We made the deck modular, so you wouldn’t use the same seven cards every game. But within each game, we also wanted more variety.

We came up with this weird system that felt like it shouldn’t work, but surprisingly it did.

Each card comes in three variations. The same ability, but with costs of 1, 2, and 3.
However, the cost is also how many points that card is worth. So, if you play the 2-cost variation of a card, you discard two cards for the exact same ability that sometimes costs one, but you also get an extra point.

So, the dilemma the player faces is, do they play a lot of cheap cards, not getting so many points but triggering a lot of abilities, or do they prefer playing a single expensive card for big points but only the one ability.

The next step was to figure out how strong the abilities should be to make this dilemma work. So that you sometimes go for the cheap option and sometimes the expensive. An especially tricky thing to factor in here is the implicit cost in spending your turn playing the card.

[Christian: I actually remember writing some equations to try to figure out if this concept even made sense, and if so, how strong an ability would need to be so that one option wasn’t always strategically superior. The math dictated that each ability needed to be SUPER DUPER STRONG. This was something we would have to accept as designers. No innocent little “Draw 1 card” abilities, sorry!]

We had a good excuse to put really powerful abilities on the cards. In fact, we had to do it or the game wouldn’t work. This fueled our combo machine to even greater heights. Coming up with simple yet exciting and powerful abilities is one of the most enjoyable things as game designers, and this game was a blast to work on.

Pitching and Publication
The excitement we felt for the game turned out to be contagious; several publishers became very interested, which is an amazing feeling as designers. DV Games was particularly excited about the game. It is not uncommon for publishers to take many months to play your game and give feedback. However, with DV Games, Luca wrote immediately after SPIEL Essen asking for the files, and a few days later they proposed an offer of publication.

DV Games has been great to work with. Marta, our editor, has been tirelessly testing, evaluating, swapping cards around between sets, proposing minor changes etc. It is great seeing someone else match the passion you have as a designer for your little baby game. Seeing the game come alive with the beautiful artwork from Jeff Hong was one of the absolute highlights during development.

Two different boxes (with completely different cards) are being released simultaneously, Combo Creatures: The Quick Ones and Combo Creatures: The Witty Ones. Each one is stand-alone, but they can of course be mixed. Either one is a good starting point. The Quick Ones is a bit more approachable, while The Witty Ones leans into more involved and tricky abilities.

After many years of hard work from a lot of people, the game is at the finish line. But in a weird way, the finish line for a game, where it finally comes out, is also the starting line. This is the first time the wide public gets to see and play it. Fingers crossed you like it as much as we do! Cheers and happy gaming.

by Justin Bell

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

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

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

This is why I am so excited for Gen Con.



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m looking forward to the adventure once again. If you are going to Indy, enjoy the show!

by Roger IELLO

My name is Florent Baudry, and I have been the project manager for the King of Tokyo range for the past seven years. I first joined the line while finalizing the collector’s Dark Edition, and following its success, we quickly started thinking about a new theme for another special edition.

From the beginning, the idea was to create something deeply inspired by Japan, both aesthetically and in its overall presentation. We talked about drawing inspiration from traditional Japanese prints and classic Japanese art styles. Then, when the opportunity arose to work with the official Godzilla license, the two ideas naturally merged. It became the perfect way to pay tribute both to Japan — which inspired King of Tokyo and all of its monsters — and to the most iconic kaiju of them all.

As we explored different artistic directions, we quickly decided not to focus on the modern cinematic versions of Godzilla. Instead, we wanted to capture the spirit of the Godzilla films from the 1950s to the 1970s: the era of actors in monster suits destroying miniature city sets. That slightly old-fashioned charm helped preserve the vintage aesthetic we were looking for, while also creating a stylized vision of Japan that felt both poetic and authentic. It also allowed the wooden components to integrate much more naturally into the overall design of the game.

We therefore based our work primarily on the designs from the Showa era, especially the monsters and movies from the 1960s and 1970s.

The monster selection came quite naturally for five of them: Godzilla, Mechagodzilla, Rodan, King Ghidorah, and Mothra are among the most beloved and recognizable kaiju in the franchise. Choosing the sixth monster was a little more difficult. We had several favorites, including Gigan, but many candidates shared a similar reptilian silhouette. In the end, I chose Hedorah because it allowed us to explore a very different visual identity and create powers that felt unique within the game.

Meeting Markus Erdt, the illustrator, also happened very naturally. In projects like these, timing often plays a huge role. Markus suggested meeting during the SPIEL Essen fair, and before the meeting I looked through his online portfolio. That is when I discovered his chibi illustrations of Godzilla and other kaiju. It immediately showed that he knew and genuinely loved the license. On top of that, the watercolor style of his illustrations felt like a perfect match for the artistic direction I had in mind.

Of course, it still took several rounds of testing before we found the right balance for both the card illustrations and the monster standees. But honestly, this is one of the most fascinating parts of game development: the research phase, the collaborative work, the constant exchange of ideas. In the end, Markus’ illustrations captured exactly the feeling we were looking for — a mix of poetry, nostalgia, and old-fashioned charm.

All of this was then beautifully brought together by the game’s graphic designer, Claire Wach, who contributed enormously to the final visual identity of the project. The choice of typography, the integration of Japanese card titles — actually one of the very first ideas I had for the game — and all the subtle graphic details she added gave the edition a truly unique personality.

For the rest of the components, using wood quickly became an obvious choice, mainly because of the sound. I really wanted the game to feel softer and more natural during play. That is actually where the small wooden base placed on Tokyo came from. In a way, it exists almost entirely for that little “toc” sound you hear when placing your monster figure onto it.

To be completely honest, when we were finalizing the game and sending the files to the factory, I still had doubts about how players would react to it. I wondered whether these artistic choices might feel too unusual or perhaps even too old-fashioned for modern audiences. I think the IELLO sales and communication teams felt the same way: we all loved the project, but we were asking ourselves whether the public would connect with it.

So when the first reactions arrived after the reveal of the initial visuals, I was both relieved and incredibly happy.

I was also especially pleased to see longtime King of Tokyo fans notice and appreciate the small additions created specifically for them, such as the Evolution cards and the little tokens included for the Wickedness Gauge. It is never officially stated in the rules that they are meant for that… but the true fans know. ;)

I sincerely hope that Godzilla fans will enjoy this edition just as much as we enjoyed creating it and let’s finish with some words from Richard Garfield to conclude:
“King of Tokyo wouldn't exist in its current form without Godzilla - the original kaiju, both monstrous and magnificent. Godzilla and his pals inspired us, with their spectacular power and over-the-top battles; their perfect balance of seriousness and fun. It is fitting that he joins the game he helped inspire and so the circle closes - the King of Monsters joins the King of Tokyo.”

Florent Baudry
(editor's note - diary transcribed from an interview with Florent and uploaded by an employee of IELLO)

by Joseph Chen

A Different Approach to My Game Design

After a three-year hiatus in game design, I finally returned with a new project: Honeypot — and it’s very different from my previous game, Fantastic Factories! Fantastic Factories was a puzzly multiplayer solitaire style experience. While I love exploring game systems and min/maxing my turns I discovered that it was actually quite difficult to introduce Fantastic Factories to my friends and family and to get it to the table. Additionally, most of my gaming these days (aside from playtesting prototypes) happens at conventions, and when I’m at the table I want to be seeing, interacting, and bantering with players. I still feel Fantastic Factories is a great game, but its heads-down experience just wasn’t a joy I could easily share and create moments with.

So in contrast, I set a few design goals for my next design (which eventually led to Honeypot):

* It should be highly interactive between players.
* It should have some element of mind games to make the game replayable and a new experience with each different group of players.
* It should be easy enough to introduce and play with people who are not hobby gamers.

Evolution of what the cards looked like (early prototype on the left and final cards on the right)

I Stack You Choose

Immediately I had a game mechanic in mind. A few years ago I played a game that used the “I stack you choose” mechanic, which is a brilliant push your luck drafting mechanic where the draft piles were architected by the players themselves.

In each round, you are dealt three cards; you look at them, decide on the order in which to stack them, then pass that stack to another player. You’ll receive a stack in turn, which is in effect a “press your luck” deck created by an opponent. You look at the top card, then decide whether to keep it or discard it and draw the next card, which you can also discard in favor of the third card.

I thought this was a really fun way to gain cards. Are your opponents going to put the best card first or at the bottom? Or is the final card something you don’t want at all? There was a lot of opportunity for mind games and trickery.

However this mechanic was only a minor piece of that overall game. I wanted to design a game that promoted this mechanic from a supporting role to becoming the star of the show.

Every designer has a different approach to game design. For me, I hyperfocus on where I think the fun is, and I obsessively strip out anything that isn’t in service of that fun. I value simplicity and elegance above almost everything else.

At first I designed the game as a set collection game that used the exact same “I stack you choose” mechanic with just three cards. I asked: “What motivates you to pick one card over another?” The simplest answer is that some cards are worth more points than others. Set collection is one of the oldest mechanics in board games and is generally well understood, so I decided to go with that to validate the idea in the fastest way possible.

For my first playtest, I didn’t make ANY components at all. Instead, I used the cards from Sundae Split (designed by Nate Bivins) and simply dealt out three cards to each player to stack in a particular order. Of course there were some very rough edges, but it ended up being promising and the idea had legs. This led to me building the first prototype with the working title of “Stacked”.

Maximize the Drama

As with any good design, a game needs to have relevant, engaging, and interesting decisions. Additionally, I knew that with a mechanic like this, there was the opportunity to create some memorable moments when players pick either the correct or wrong cards to keep. So I came up with a few guiding principles for the card designs:

* Ideally all cards should be relevant to players at any point in the game. Depending on the circumstances, each card should at least have a chance to be highly desirable or undesirable.

* The value of each card should vary depending on what cards players already have in the tableau – and that information should be open to all other players.

* In order to create memorable moments, the cards should MAXIMIZE THE DRAMA — meaning the game should support big highs and lows as players reveal potentially very impactful cards.

With this in mind, I created a few types of cards:

* Stars — The more star cards you add to your tableau the more they increase in value until you get too many and they become worthless.

* Letters — You want to collect unique letters. A particular letter may be more valuable to a player depending on what letters they have already collected. This rewards players for paying attention to what others have in their tableaus and planning accordingly.

* Negative points — Many set collection games don’t have negative points because nobody would willingly pick them. But for a game where you can compel someone to commit to keeping cards without seeing them first, negative cards supported the design goal of maximizing the drama.

* Draw 2 — The majority of cards in the deck are positive so Draw 2 is often powerful. However there’s always a chance you might draw that final star or a negative card.

* Pears — If you only have a single pear it’s not worth anything. If you have two of them (get it? pairs?) they are worth a significant amount of points. This makes a single pear pretty underwhelming but getting a second one is very good.

There were other cards in this early prototype as well, but these were a few of the interesting ones.

There’s Always a Chance…

Now in a game with this much volatility and swing in scoring, it’s possible players may feel “out of the game” if they’ve had a couple bad turns and collected negative cards. It’s tricky because maximum drama and volatility go hand in hand, and this is the heart and soul of the game. However, I certainly wanted to avoid having a player feel like they’ve lost the chance to win, especially early in the game.

To mitigate this possibility and in adhering to the guiding principles of the design for this game I introduced the Discard 1 card (which later became Discard 1, Draw 1):

Discard a card
This card ended up having a very important function. For players who are ahead and don’t have any negative cards in their tableau, this is a bad card. For players who have negative cards (or perhaps that final star), they have a chance to get back into the game.

“Stacked” (now Honeypot) isn’t necessarily a game that needs a catch-up mechanic, but players need to feel like they can win throughout the game. And that’s largely a psychological thing. If players know they have a chance to get rid of a card that is completely sinking their score, they are more likely to stay engaged.

In addition to the new Discard card, the game design had a few things going for it to mitigate what effectively could feel like player elimination. Ultimately the game is short (20-30 minutes) and so this problem is lessened by knowing you can shuffle up and play again in just a short while. Also there are still opportunities for players to make clever plays and create dramatic moments where players fall into or avoid traps. Plus it’s fun to see others fall into traps even if it wasn’t one of your own making.

All in all, it’s been such a different experience designing a game like this compared to a eurogame, like Fantastic Factories, that is typically low conflict. It’s important to understand what your game is or isn’t. Rather than making sure each card was balanced, the drama is where the fun is, and I believe that you need to lean into the fun. It took some time to wrap my head around it, but that’s why early on it’s incredibly valuable to establish guiding design principals to adhere to.

Overcoming Some Challenges

After some playtesting I identified a few key problems with the design that I needed to fix:

* It was taking a long time for players to collect any meaningful number of cards. For a game where the scoring is based on set collection, only keeping 1 card per round made the pace of the game fairly slow.

* Sometimes there were no interesting ways to stack the cards. With 3 cards there are only 6 different ways of sequencing the cards and if they’re all good cards, it didn’t feel like you were making any meaningful decisions.

I experimented with a variety of solutions and in the end one adjustment stood out far beyond the rest. Rather than stacking 3 cards and revealing/keeping one card at a time, the groundbreaking change was to stack 6 cards and reveal/keep two cards at a time. This dramatically increased the number of possibilities from six to 90 different arrangements of the cards! This provided players with so much more agency. They could pair up good cards with bad cards to try to make the choices mediocre. Or they could go all in and put the best (or worst) cards all at the end. It also meant that as you took cards from stacks passed to you, you would take cards you may not have planned for, creating more possibility of interactions between cards. For example, if you are collecting Disguise cards you might take a pair of cards containing a Disguise that might also have a Berry. Now you find yourself collecting Berries as well and that information can be used to influence the stacking order in the future.

These are the backs of the cards for the prototype, which visually represent the stack of 6 cards grouped as 3 pairs of cards.
Suddenly the decisions within the game were so much more interesting and the pace of the game moved much quicker. Additionally, the overhead of stacking and revealing cards became much easier to justify when there was twice as much happening each round.

Once I had established the core principals and philosophies behind the game and then discovered the right mechanism to deliver on those promises, the rest was history. Balancing, iterating, and refining until it became what it is today – Honeypot, an “I stack you choose” game where you play as secret agent bears trying to set traps and avoid traps!

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.