by Haakon Gaarder

The idea for DECKOcame when I played the fantastic computer game Balatro, a great experience of multiplying numbers and manipulating a bizarre poker slot machine with jokers that seem to hack the system. While I loved this, I felt inspired to create something different. Something a lot closer to real poker with all the betting and bluffing, combined with my own take on what the ultimate deckbuilder should feel like. Poker is a game full of moments that beg for some board game fun to be added to them. So I started making DECKO.

The Design Process
I started by playing a super simplistic version of the game in Tabletop Simulator. A regular deck of cards was in the middle to buy from, and all players had a small starting deck. Every round would be like playing a hand of poker, followed by buying new cards. Playing a too simple and boring version of a game idea is a great way of getting me inspired to figure out what a game design needs to make it fun. It was currently too random and too linear (no big moments, no spikes of excitement); it took a long time to see the effect of your deckbuilding and it could end before anyone had time to build a good deck. I had my work cut out for me.

The first version of DECKO, the "minimum viable concept"
I knew I would be adding jokers and crazier poker cards (inspired by Balatro), and that alone would add a lot of fun to it, but before adding that, I wanted to challenge myself to improve it in other ways. I made the minimum bets go higher and higher from round to round; this happening in tandem with the decks improving would make the game have a nice dramaturgy of escalating stakes. Furthermore, I also changed the starting decks to be as weak as possible, making the deckbuilding feel much more impactful.

A gripe I have with every deckbuilding game I’ve tried is that they seem to be very restricted when it comes to letting players remove cards from their decks; apparently, this is something that must be done in a very small capacity. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could remove a card every round in a deckbuilder? I added that, and it worked really well; it just sped up the whole deckbuilding process, making it an express deckbuilder. A side effect of letting players trim their decks so fast is that inevitably players will be able to make very consistent decks, and one player will then probably have a deck that’s consistently the best. This is probably why most deckbuilders avoid this; they want to avoid an “early winner” spoiling the game before its end. In DECKO this problem is solved by embracing it as a feature; it’s a race to create the most broken deck and earn 60 chips the fastest, leading to the game ending just around that moment that a player gets unbeatable. I want to revisit this format of an express deckbuilder with frequent card burning in future games that are not about poker.

At this point the game already had some interesting balancing going on, as making something almost unbeatable like a deck that gets four aces or a royal flush consistently was hard and took a long time, while more “medium” decks that focused on getting the lower numbers could be made faster. So you could go for a mid deck that would give you lots of wins in early and midgame, spend longer trying to build something stronger, or first do the mid deck and then pivot to a stronger late game deck. Or make a medium deck while hate drafting high deck cards, at the expense of hurting your own deck. Several approaches were viable, and it all depended on what everyone else was doing. I now had a strong foundation, it was time to spice it up and add juicy twists, opening the game further.

An early prototype of DECKO, now with card powers and jokers. At this point burned cards went to a shared burn pile, and there were victory point goal cards that didn't work well.
Adding the Cool Stuff
When adding special effects to all the cards in the market deck (then named flop deck), I used my experience with the simplistic version of the game to figure out which cards should have which powers. Initially the lower numbered cards got the stronger powers, otherwise it would simply be a no brainer to always go for higher cards. The twos got the Crypto mechanism for example, giving you exponentially more chips for collecting them, a hand of four Cryptos would award you 16 chips regardless of winning or losing for example. With more testing it felt like the higher cards were less good than lower cards. These cards are less attractive because you don’t start with any of them. Why would I buy a ten that I couldn’t even make a pair with, instead of an eight that would enable me three of a kind and probably full house soon? It turned out the higher cards needed really strong powers as well to be attractive. Aces were so good by default they didn’t need much help, but you would often be stuck with a single Ace or get very few as all players would buy them. The Assisting Aces were born out of this, now we had aces that would help your other cards by adjusting their number, so they would be useful even if you didn’t get several. The royal cards were in a similar position to the aces, and got all kinds of powers that worked with other cards.

A playtesting session in Oslo, shoutout to Brettspillskaperlauget. This version of the game let you get jokers when folding (bad idea), and could end when someone got to 40 chips (too soon).
Dealing With Luck
A game about poker and deckbuilding is inherently lucky. I had no ambitions of making this a game with no luck element, in fact I think a little luck and randomness is essential in games. But I wanted to make the game as low luck and strategic as possible, and also make it possible for players with bad luck to catch up with luckier players. I approached this directly from both ends. First of all the winning player of each poker hand would not be allowed to buy new cards. The players winning lots of chips (which are victory points in this) would stagnate in their deckbuilding, while those who lost lots chips would be buying more cards and getting better decks. Secondly, the players who folds (that’s when you forfeit a bet) would be able to get any one card in the market display for free. This would be a great boon particularly in the earliest rounds where the luck factor is at its peak. A side effect of this system is that losing or folding can feel better than winning in early rounds, particularly if bets are low. Further adjustments were made in the game to make winning early rounds better. A core part of it is that you need to have a good chip economy to do well in the mid and late game. Jokers are bought for chips, you can’t get jokers when folding and the increasing starting and maximum bets mean you need quite a few chips to be in the bets. The wildcard rounds also have antes (mandatory bets) players must pay. Players who win much tend to get smaller decks as they remove (burn) a card every round while not buying any. This is good because your deck becomes smaller so that buying a few cards can have a big impact and instantly power up your deck. In the end winning and loosing felt just about right. In the first round losing is kind of good (though winning isn't bad either), then as the game progresses winning becomes more and more important, and at the same time who wins is increasingly determined by whoever built the best deck and joker engine, to the point where it usually feels very deterministic in the final rounds.

A playtest session where the game was voluntarily played two times back to back, a positive sign! Shoutout to Spilloteket, Oslo's finest board game bar.
The Jokers
I knew from the start the jokers would be in tableaus next to the players and have ongoing abilities or special actions instead of being mixed into with the decks. Initially the jokers were in one big deck full of random abilities. I used these to add a lot of complexity and twists to the game, and really take a stab at subverting what goes on in regular poker. Like what if someone has a reason to raise their bet even when they have a bad hand? What if someone earns chips by prolonging the round? What if someone can earn more from folding than raising? Could you win the game without winning bets? I had a ton of ideas and made a deck of jokers. I noticed quite early I needed a better system than having them all in one deck. A player that was behind on the deckbuilding could really use a joker that triggers when folding, or a joker that discounts card buys. But if they were randomly buried in the joker deck, tough luck. Something had to be done.

The joker shop, in the final prototype that was very close to the final product. Cards were ordered from makeplayingcards, the mat was sourced at a shop for mats, poker chips from a fancy poker chip brand.
The joker abilities had trigger points, some were used when folding, others when raising, some when drawing cards and so on. Sorting the jokers into separate decks based on their triggers was the obvious thing to do. Not only did it solve the problem mentioned above by giving players constant access to the joker types they might want, it also made the game easier to learn and parse on the table. Instead of reading all the joker text all the time, a player could learn at the start that the blue jokers work when folding, the red ones work when raising and the teal ones are for buying. A quick glance at the opponent’s joker tableau would tell you if they likely benefited from raising, calling or folding the most. Making the jokers anchored to the trigger points made them a really cool feature of the game, making them a core part of the strategy. Will you be a player who folds half your hands with great rewards, or someone that keeps raising bets to repeatedly trigger an effect and win bets?

Adding a Big Twist
The game had really shaped up, but I felt like I could make it more interesting. Something that would make each game different from the last, something that would make you deckbuild differently in every game. Imagine a deckbuilder where you must build your deck not only for one ruleset, but for two rulesets. Or what if you had to build for three rulesets? Originally an expansion idea, I added the wildcard rounds. For two rounds in every game, there would be a random special rule really changing how you win, and a much higher pot. These rules would be visible from the start of the game, so that players could plan for them. As an example there is a wildcard round that only lets you score one card, another one makes you draw your hand from your burn pile. As you can imagine, this will affect how you build your deck. I found one could do really well by focusing on the wildcard rounds at the expense of doing slightly worse in regular rounds. At the same time deliberately ignoring them could work, if you did really well in the rest of the game.

Some of the wildcards in the close to finished version
Artwork and Graphic Design
For all my games I make the art and graphic design myself. I really think of how the product is going to work as a whole when I do the visuals. I see it much like being a UX designer, creating an interface for players to interact with the game system. It’s also like being an art director focused on creating a viable commercial product.

Figuring out the look for DECKO involved a lot of sketching and testing out different designs. I usually have to draw things many times before I get to a good result.
DECKO needed to look like a regular deck of cards (to communicate it’s a poker game), but it also needed to look like something more. If it had regular card icons and artwork it would probably look too cheap and not sell well. What I came up with was symbols that represent meta items from the world of poker, the clovers are made of poker chips, the spades are two cards, and the hearts are poker tables. For a while the game was going to be named Meta Poker, but I changed it as I didn’t want it to be mistaken for just being another home made poker variant. Part of the look of regular decks of cards is having a very restrictive color palette. Usually there’s mostly black and red, and small amounts of blue and golden/dark yellow. I decided to make a restricted palette a core part of the design (a limited palette usually makes graphic design better anyway!). I went with red and gold for diamonds, black and teal for clovers, blue and black for spades and red and black for hearts.

In the beginning I was thinking of having a hell theme for the game, it had the tagline “13 clowns gather in hell to play poker”. I pivoted away from this, choosing a more whimsical theme of just having random poker and clown related stuff. In the end the game has more of a style and vibe rather than a theme and story, which felt refreshing and liberating to me as I usually work with a lot of worldbuilding in my head. The presence of flames on the cover and burn board is a remnant of this original theme, which I kept in because burning cards is a major part of the game. The graphics were given a raster dot texture and some white specks imitating chipped off paper as if the game is already well used, adding to the meta theme and suggesting something is slightly off (something strange is going on with this poker deck!).

Making the artwork for the royal cards proved the most challenging, as I had to teach myself how to make characters that are like mirrored conjoined twins. It became easier with some practice. I first sketched them out fast to test the concept, then created the final art in vector graphics. I worked within the boundaries of the strict color palette I had established, only allowing myself to use the suit colors and sticking with dark/golden yellow skin and black hair for all the characters (making them look ethnically ambiguous). The queens each have unique abilities that are hinted at in their artwork, and the kings have beards and some sort of fake or proxy crowns.

Some of the fold jokers, identified by their blue coloring. Most of them have a catch-up mechanism theme, fitting well with folding.
The jokers were the most fun to draw, as they could be all kinds of things that vaguely represented their abilities. Also here I went with a color scheme limitation. Each joker type would have one color that would be the main color on the artwork, that could be combined with colors from the other joker types in small amounts, as well as black and golden yellow. It was important to have the main color prominent to let the players easily identify their type.

The final production of the game with it's deluxified components
Crowdfunding and Reception
The game had a successful crowdfunding campaign offering a deluxe product with a playmat, gilded cards and some very heavy poker chips. The stretch goals were presented as glossy booster packs of jokers that were opened when they were unlocked. Backers have received their games, and from looking at the BGG ratings this is my most well received game this far. I’m very grateful for all the backers who believed in this project and took a chance backing it.

Some of the booster packs the stretch goal components were marketed with.

Promotional picture of the base game and upcoming expansion.

What’s Next for DECKO?
This autumn a new expansion for DECKO will launch on Gamefound! It will add what backers have wished for the most, lots of new cards! It introduces the Pistachio deck, which can be used separately or together with the vanilla (base game) deck, massively increasing the replay value with 52 new cards. New jokers and wildcards will also be introduced.

I hope you enjoyed reading this designer diary, and that you want to give DECKOa try! Feel free to ask any questions you may have here.

Thanks for reading!
Haakon

by Justin Bell

If you missed my roundup of the pre-fair Novelty Show, click here.

***

“Man, this thing is HUGE.”

I was talking to someone on the second day of SPIEL Essen 2026 and we were talking about the sheer scale of a thing we had both been to a number of times. Even for those of us who have been going for five years (me), 13 years (this other person), 25 years, or just this show, it felt like the first day of SPIEL Essen 2026 was the most crowded I had ever seen the show.

“Felt like a Saturday,” said another show veteran I spoke to. “And that’s sort of shocking, given that there’s an entirely new hall that was also jam packed all day.”



Over the course of my four days at SPIEL Essen, I have to think that the people at Merz Verlag (the people who run the show) are at least considering the fact that Messe Essen is getting a bit tight. Walking space in some of the halls was really jammed at times, with no offender worse than Hall 3. Hall 3 (the main hall dedicated to "expert" and strategy games) was often so crowded that I could swear I saw people having actual panic attacks as they tried to navigate the halls with their new toys, and I’m not making light of the situation at all. (Saturday featured more families than Thursday, and the mix of stroller traffic alongside parents letting their toddlers walk in Hall 3, or the Galleria / food truck area at lunchtime, was quite often a challenge.)

So, space is an issue…and the show organizers say that SPIEL Essen won’t get any bigger, with a cap of the 230,000 visitors who can attend the four-day show now. I will politely respond with: we’ll see.



I’m editing this article in the evening after the fourth day of the show, in part to try to capture as many of my thoughts as possible before I board a flight back to Chicago Monday morning.

In no particular order, here are 22 things I thought about during the fair; apologies for the length and a few too many pictures. A big thanks to every person who agreed to spend time with me, or make silly faces at the camera, or include me in their drinks / dinners / evening booth parties, or let me store my big orange bag (aka “Ol’ Bessie”) as I parked it in various places to avoid moving it around through the halls. Enjoy!



1. I’ve met a lot of people in the tabletop space, but never someone who manages a publisher, designs games, and is a classically-trained singer. Although I think the catalog of inPatience is quite interesting and has a clear goal of providing interesting, small box, solo and two-player hobby productions to the community, I was much more intrigued by the personal story of Shadi Torbey, the designer of Onirim and an opera singer based on Belgium. Games are cool, but opera? Dope.



2. The best booth of the show belonged to the team behind Magic: The Gathering Star Trek…because these people put together a Starship Enterprise booth complete with stairs that lead up a flight of stairs into the main play area. The artwork for the various Star Trek captains over the years was cool as well, but man, the look of that ship made people stop in their tracks. Or treks. (I’ll see myself out.)



3. For the first time in my five years attending SPIEL Essen, I played a game outside the Messe with friends. We played Qork, a game so simple that I could use the next 30 words to tell you all the rules. (Instead, just go out and buy a copy, it’s great, 10 years old, and offers solid, dumb fun.) After Qork, we played Hitster, and laughed as we learned that my very deep but narrow focus on 80s and 90s hip-hop doesn’t seem very helpful when you're trying to win.



4. Chris Whitpan is the man! I met Chris at TraXX (a small but mighty 18xx gaming convention in Colorado) a couple years ago, and we usually run into each other randomly—at or near the Lonny Games booth, to say hi to Leonhard “Lonny” Orgler and talk train games. Then I came to realize that Chris runs the PAX tabletop events. Across breakfast one day and a couple cab rides together during the week, Chris and I spent enough random snippets of time together that I now wish he lived in Chicago so that we could toss him into our other game nights. Not surprisingly, Chris is the guy that knows everyone, so he’s not a bad guy to slide up to at a local drinking establishment.



5. At one of the booth parties on Friday night, I met a guy from Spain who does a podcast and is just generally a gamer. Walking out of a publisher presentation, I ran into Giulia Amici, an Italian content creator I met last year, and she had some interesting opinions about the booths she had visited. Another person I met wanted to chat about the quality of the pretzels at one of the food stands. A community manager for an exhibitor had pointed opinions about the curry on sale outside of her booth’s hall. This is why I love chatting with people who I don’t know—everyone has an angle, something interesting to say about a demo, or the food, or an old game they snagged from a used game booth. You only get that kind of thing at conventions, and I love it.



6. Superstar designer run-in #1: While I was standing in the Devir booth on the show’s second day, I got to meet Isra and Shei, the designers also known as Llama Dice. The White Castle is in my personal top five, and many of the other Llama Dice titles remain in my collection. I might have yelped out loud when I met those two and it was a pleasure to chat about a bunch of things not related to games during a second run-in the next day. It’s always fun to chat with the designers of your favorite games…it’s even better when you get to share a laugh.



7. More Hegemony? Yes please. The best game I played in 2023 has a third expansion launching on crowdfunding next year titled Hegemony: Shadows of Authority. The addition of new action cards, new elements on the Politics Table (including crime and the environment), and a couple new mechanics mean that one of the biggest table hogs in recent memory is getting a little bigger…count me in!



8. There’s a spot outside of the Galleria, at the Messe where the line of food trucks indoors turns into a line of trucks outdoors, that has a vendor with a red tent and an extra-long smoker. That tent does pulled pork, but pulled pork in a few different shades: a pulled pork sandwich, fries topped with pulled pork, pulled pork a la mode. (I made at least one of those up.) In general, I think convention food is never better than fine. But that pulled pork was solid. Tasty, interesting, juicy but not quite juicy enough, a good amount of flavor. This point is here mainly to remind myself that I’m hitting that puppy again next year.



9. I had never met Zev Shlasinger in person before this year’s show. Zev used to run Z-Man Games and now leads Play to Z. It’s pretty hard to out-energy me, but by the show’s second day, Zev looked like a man who was the living embodiment of “always be selling.” Super high energy. Big laugh, bigger than my own by a mile. Customers kept coming to the Play to Z stand, and he greeted each and every person like they were a friend of the family. I don’t know a lot of people who I would call “personalities” in the tabletop space, but Zev absolutely fits the bill. If you haven’t met him, I highly recommend stopping by Zev’s booth at a future show…it will be time well spent.



10. Devir made a big announcement at the fair: the next game in the “Kemushi” saga (games that include Bitoku, Sand, and the recently-released strategy game Shugendo) is Kaiju, War of the Yokai. The major selling point: the three-person design team includes the people who made War of the Ring: Second Edition (currently #8 on BGG’s overall rankings) and Dune: War for Arrakis. The gathered audience for this announcement produced audible gasps when this was unveiled at Devir’s booth party. I have a feeling that now is a great time to double down on my imaginary Devir shares.



11. The random run-ins you get with designers of all shades at SPIEL Essen is an absolute thrill. I bumped into Simone Luciani three different times on the first day of the fair. I met up with Cardner Babakitis to grab her new games. During a meeting in hall 2, I made eyes with Fabio Lopiano, and after we exchanged pleasantries, he stopped to sign autographs by other fans. (Fabio, can we get more corporations for Shackleton Base? Call me.) I had an interesting conversation with Daniele Tascini outside of the Board&Dice booth. Martin Wallace and I had drinks at a booth party one night. Liz Davidson and I…well, Liz Davidson and I did what it seems like we do each time we run into each other, which is laugh a lot.



12. I demoed four games this year. One is already available: ICE Second Edition, from This Way!. The other three are inbound, either through retail soon or crowdfunding in the next few months: Chimerium, from Synapses Games (possibly the world’s first chimera crafting game?), Ports of Call: The Board Game from Game Inventors (the supply and demand mechanics were very interesting, and it is based on a video game from something young people won’t recognize: the Amiga!!), and Foundation: Isaac Asimov, based on the Foundation novel series. I had a blast sitting through all the games; this is why I believe so much in the idea of “try before you buy”, and SPIEL Essen is an excellent opportunity to do that before backing or buying a new game.



13. There were massive queues everywhere during the fair, but the line I will remember is the one that built up each day in front of the Combo Games booth for their new release Queen Alice. Around 10 AM on the show’s second day, I heard a small stampede coming my way, then looked up to see geeks of all shapes and sizes making a beeline for the Combo booth. (A few hundred copies of Queen Alice were available to buy from the booth each morning. They never lasted long.) When combined with the lines for CGE’s Kingdom Come: Deliverance—The Board Game, situated near Combo in Hall 3, there were some nasty lines snaking around a number of nearby stands. Look, you can’t blame or penalize a vendor for selling games, and this gets back to my concerns about Messe Essen being able to handle the increasing size and scale of this event. There will always be hot games on display!



14. I made a point to meet with a lot of small and/or “new to me” vendors at this year’s show, and even though I booked almost 40 meetings, there were dozens of vendors I still wanted to meet. Every time I find myself getting down about games feeling too “samey” or serving as safe bets from established brands, I meet a publisher who worked on a single game for the last six years with a really original idea. I’m actually loving where things are from a variety perspective in tabletop…for every large, or even medium-sized, publisher, there are shops with 1-5 employees who are crushing it right now with fresh ideas and a very steady output of games with top-notch art, production, design, and development in place.



15. Starstruck designer run-in #2: after lunch on the third day of the show, I strolled the Messe with my friend Danni and spent some time catching up. At each show, I only buy one game; it’s fair to call out that this is a first-world problem, the admittedly-privileged life of a game reviewer. This year, I decided to hit the Saashi & Saashi booth to buy Railway Porters. As I was paying for my copy, I noticed a man standing near the booth’s business/storage area and realized that I was staring at…Saashi Takarai himself! A moment later, I was getting a picture with the designer of some of my favorite games, including Come Sail Away!, Let’s Make a Bus Route, and my favorite Saashi & Saashi design, Photograph (Wind the Film!).



15a. As I was snapping a picture with Saashi, I looked to my left and saw a woman whose nametag got me even more excited: Takako Takarai! Takako is the artist for all of the Saashi & Saashi games, so I asked Saashi and Takako to join me for a picture and I did my best to not lose my mind that the moment was really happening. Saashi and Saashi! At the Saashi & Saashi booth! They even autographed my copy of Railway Porters!!



16. Every time I go to SPIEL Essen, one thing really shocks me, as a man in his early 50s trying to imagine what gaming life will look like as I age: there are a bunch of people at SPIEL Essen in their 60s, 70s, and maybe even older who are walking the halls to pick up new games. I love it. I’m not saying that other shows discourage older players from attending; everyone loves a customer, regardless of age. But at SPIEL Essen, the wide range of ages is quite noticeable and I embrace it.



17. The thing that everyone fights when they go to a convention: trying as hard as they can to NOT lose their voice. This is particularly true for any kind soul who agreed to demo a game dozens of times across a multi-day show. I have to pound cough drops all day to even come close to having a voice by a show’s final day. At one of the booths, a distributor provided mics and small speakers so that their demo teams could be heard at each table without straining to be heard among the crowds in hall 2. That’s the only way to fly!



18. At three different meetings on the show’s third day, a marketer or a publisher used the word “deluxify” in a sentence. “We’re still not sure which components we’ll deluxify for the next version of _____, but we’re working on it.” I have been saying for years that “deluxify” would have its time in the sun, and I was on the cutting edge of this significant change in the way we talk about games. The edge, baby!



19. I can only comment on the meetings that I attended, but I was surprised how often a theme emerged, unsolicited, around a focus on releasing fewer games in 2027 and 2028. Sometimes, this came from publishers that already make just one or two games a year, and these same publishers are excited to see those with larger catalogs consider making fewer games. In one case, a publisher planned to come down from six games in 2026 to 4-5 games (including expansions) next year. I love games, but the rapid rate of releases means I go to a fair with 1,800 games and have no shot of seeing any real slice of that total…and that’s only the publishers who have a booth at SPIEL!!



20. The afternoon on the show’s final day, Sunday, felt like a Saturday at past shows in terms of foot traffic. I was still ducking and diving out of the way of people at 4:45 PM on Sunday. Even at SPIEL Essen last year, I spent time wandering the relatively quiet halls late in the day talking with publishers who were beginning to break down their booths to get out as soon as they could after 6 PM. This year? People were still buying games, demoing the hottest titles, and waiting in long restroom lines late in the show’s final day.



21. I was forced to ship two boxes from the fair this year—a large box Saturday, then a medium box Sunday. In total, I shipped 97 pounds of games (44 kgs) back to Chicago. That was expensive—about 600 euros—but I’m more obsessed with what the number will be when I get the bill for the tariffs back to the US. The shipping operation at the fair? A mixed bag. On Saturday, it took 56 minutes for me to navigate box packing, a wait in line, then some work with a slower agent. (I tried my best to be pleasant.) Sunday, I was in and out in 17 minutes, well in advance of the 6 PM hall closing time.



22. There’s a level of sadness when I leave the Messe on Sunday afternoon, and that kicked in again for this year’s show. Some of that is the genuine love I have for the people, but some sadness was linked to regret: I didn’t make enough time to try out more games. There’s not nearly enough time across four days unless you really commit to a battle plan to hammer two, maybe three of the halls. Hitting every stand and demoing games as much as you can is critical, but just talking to the people who love talking about their games with players is a thrill.

SPIEL Essen is still my favorite show of them all. My feet are thankful that the show has ended…but I’m already fired up for SPIEL Essen 2027!

by filippo landini

I first started thinking about a game that could recreate the experience of walking in the woods back in August 2021, right after returning home from summer vacation.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve spent part of August in the Italian Alps, as my mother was born in Val di Fiemme and we still have my grandparents' house there.
Even now that I have a family of my own, I love going hiking in the mountains with my wife and kids. Those moments are deeply relaxing and peaceful, and I thought it would be wonderful to capture that exact same feeling in a board game.

When designing a game, I don't always start with the theme or the atmosphere I want players to experience. Often, I'm drawn to the idea of making a mechanic I came up with work, or tweaking a system I tried elsewhere and found interesting.
For Brushwood, however, the spark came directly from thinking about the beauty of the mountains and the tranquility of those walks.

The core idea—building the journey of a walk by laying down forest cards side by side—was the very first building block, and it remained completely unchanged all the way to the published version.


The rest of the game, on the other hand, went through a major evolution between the first prototype and the final edition. Unless I’m miscounting, I think I went through as many as 16 different versions, tweaking everything from the cards to the main board. Initially, I wanted to include as many forest elements as possible to capture everything that makes a hike enjoyable and exciting. On top of what’s in the game today—like birds, mushrooms, and squirrels—the early cards also featured butterflies, beetles, and bees.

As is often the case with me, I tend to start designing by overloading the game with options. Maybe out of fear that it will feel too simple, maybe to offer more choices, or to create deeper strategic layers... Whatever the reason, during development, I also experimented with lumberjacks, rangers, scouts, and explorers.

But as the design progressed, I realized the importance of stripping away the excess and keeping only what was strictly necessary. The goal was to ensure a lighthearted, pleasant gameplay experience that still offered just the right amount of tension in the player's simple decisions.

The card drafting system—a square board with two draw piles on each side—also remained identical from the first prototype. Originally, though, berries were placed in pairs in the center of the board, corresponding to each card stack. When a player moved the shared pawn, they had to choose whether to pick the berries or draw the card from the space where it stopped. While this structure created an asymmetry in the number of cards players finished the game with (which I really liked), it forced players to constantly refill berry tokens and caused way too much analysis paralysis.

On top of evaluating the next three available cards, players also had to consider three possible pairs of berries—an overload of information that didn't fit the relaxed vibe I wanted to convey. So, I redesigned this dynamic by placing a designated space for berry tokens on the board between the cards. This allowed players to choose a forest card to add to their tableau and, alongside it, take one of the two berries located to its left or right.

While this solution worked better than the first, it still wasn't quite there. I remember testing the game during a meetup with other Italian designers, where Paolo Mori gave me a few invaluable suggestions to simplify the berry collection. His feedback helped shape the definitive system that I eventually presented at the SPIEL Essen fair in October 2023. At SPIEL Essen, I pitched the prototype to several publishers, and almost all of them asked for a review copy. Korea Boardgames was the fastest to offer a contract, even though another publisher had requested to be notified before I signed anything.

When I accepted Korea Boardgames' offer and informed the other publishers that the game was no longer available—asking if they’d like me to arrange the return of their prototypes—I received a response that I still look back on with great fondness. One publisher wrote back: "One final personal question: If it is not needed, may I keep the prototype to play it with my mother-in-law once in a while? That would be great." The mother-in-law in question was over ninety years old and enjoyed playing Brushwood so much that she wanted to keep the prototype. That little anecdote filled me with immense pride!

Development with Korea Boardgames took a bit of time, not because of the game mechanics—which ultimately saw minimal changes—but rather to find the right art direction. In December 2023, an illustrator had initially been selected, but a few months later the team decided to entrust the artwork to Matt Sanz, who hit the nail on the head and did a fantastic job. We heavily focused on designing a card background sequence where the trees weren't repetitive, but still formed a seamless forest panorama no matter the order cards were placed next to each other.

The goal was to create three or four variant backgrounds with varying tree layouts whose left and right edges connect seamlessly in any sequence. The end result came together perfectly and looks fantastic on the table.

The game was originally slated to debut at Nuremberg in 2025, but due to these artistic updates, we decided to push the launch back by a year and officially present the game at the 2026 Nuremberg Toy Fair, in the final form you can finally enjoy today.

by Richard Garfield

The Origin

I forget the exact chain of events that lead up to Christian sharing an early prototype of Final Titan with me. We were talking about autobattlers, a digital game form that I think is particularly good for board game players. My early attempts to make autobattler board games felt clumsy; like they would be more fun on computer than around a table. We were also talking about making an analog to Magical Athlete – a simple battling game with warriors that have special powers rather than a simple racing game where the racers have special powers. I am not sure if I realized, at that point, that Magical Athlete was effectively an autobattler.

way, to avoid having to go in and fight it. The fights themselves are resolved through rolling a single die, which in turn triggers all kinds of attacks, rerolls and crazy abilities. It sounds dumb, and it kind of is. Yet also strangely exciting once you try it.No ThanksThe gameplay, described briefly: Each player drafts a team of Titans. These take turns fighting 1-on-1 in the middle of the table. When one Titan wins, it stays in the middle and the other players spend resources in a

. But they were also a small company. We considered if a company of that size could really pull it off. I remember Richard had a strong vision for the game, and he really wanted it done right. He agreed to go with Nerdlab on one condition: There should be 100 Titans in the game. This is an absolutely crazy and wildly ambitious number. I think most companies would do 20-30. But Marvin agreed and we are all extremely proud to have delivered on that promise.Mindbug participated in those very early playtests and immediately offered to sign the game. Despite it being in a rough and very early prototype state, he immediately saw huge potential in it. Nerdlab had knocked it out of the park with NerdlabMarvin from

, though I had a vague idea of how it worked. This was one of those designs where the initial prototype was already working extremely well and though many mechanisms changed, the feelings and excitement of the players remained from those initial plays. Magical Athlete: An amusing fact is that at that point, I had actually never played Christian

The Interaction
The thing that most excited me about Christian’s design was the interaction, which he described as a No Thanks! style auction. I am always interested in the interaction in games – I enjoy many low interaction games but feel that higher interaction games are often underrepresented. Being able to interact more with another player can bring a host of problems – and I have a big virtual toolbox for ways to deal with that, and this felt like something new.

To illustrate what I mean, consider my game King of Tokyo, which was originally an exercise to make Yahtzee more interactive. In King of Tokyo, I use a king of the hill style interaction; players can generally only affect a player who is on the hill (in Tokyo), and a player who is being attacked can always retreat from the hill. This makes it so you can have a highly interactive game but aren’t constantly needing to choose who to pick on, and can limit how much people can pick on you.

With Christian’s No Thanks! interaction, you have a champion and players bid for the right not to challenge them. Eventually someone will have to challenge the champion, but players aren’t choosing which other player to pick on, and, they have some agency in what battles they are involved with; it serves a similar purpose to the interaction in King of Tokyo but feels fresh. It also reminded me of Poker; even though Poker is usually played with many people, the interaction often ends up being two players with other players saying “No Thanks!”

This idea is powerful – in a game where you want to be the last standing the best position to be in is always watching other players fight. Bidding for that position rather than, say, the right to fight makes a lot of sense.

will probably never think of it as an auction game, but indeed one of the central mechanisms is a no-thanks style auction, where players are spending upgrade-cards to avoid going in and fighting the blood thirsty Champion that is waiting in the middle and probably totally overpowered.Final Titan: Players of Christian

Evolving the Interaction
Originally the bidding was done with chips, each player had some chips and could spend them to avoid a fight. Early on, however, we felt we could use cards instead of chips and give the cards some play value. This would give players some more decision making with the card play, and with figuring out which cards to spend to avoid a fight. As anyone who has played No Thanks! would expect, the chips were already much more interesting than they seemed at first since the value of the chips changes based on what the current distribution of chips are. Making it so that the chips were different from each other gave us another layer of interest.

This wasn’t an easy transition, however. We were all on board for adding these cards, but what cards to add and how powerful they should be? I would guess, in fact, that this was the biggest design challenge in the entire project. I believe the main issue always came back to power level. We wanted the cards to be spent to avoid fights, not just played to win fights.

If the cards become powerful enough to reliably swing a battle then the dynamic is more about collecting and spending cards than it is about ducking dangerous fights, particularly since we wanted to give a bonus card to the victor each time. At its extreme, no one will spend cards to avoid fights – the next person in line will challenge rather than give up a card and the dynamic becomes one focused on the cards rather than the hero match-up. A good game can be made this way – and in fact I think we went through several – but it is much more pedestrian… you step up on your turn and decide how many cards it is worth investing, rather than spend cards to duck the fight and possibly get a big haul of cards when you choose to fight.

I remember many iterations where alarms were going off in my head as players became too attached to their cards and would always step up to avoid spending them. This sort of thing is sometimes difficult to spot as a designer, because we know how the game is ‘supposed’ to be played and we tend to play it that way. If we aren’t actually in the game though, and people choose – correctly or not – to play in this way the entire game can suffer.

Final Titan worked fine, in fact, I think it worked great with the cards just being blank. That emphasized everything we wanted the game to be about, finding the right matchups and only being able to avoid the wrong ones so many times. However, we couldn’t simply make the cards weak – there were some versions we played where the cards were so weak and uninteresting that I stopped paying any attention to them. At this point we would be better off going back to chips, which felt like a lost opportunity. The cards had to be strong enough to consider and compare, but not so strong that you wouldn’t look at a fight and say… “nah, I think this should be someone else’s problem.” To me, it was that particular decision that made this game special.

One approach that worked pretty well was making cards that were situationally good, or good for particular characters or matchups. These could be relevant and potentially game changing, and yet clearly worth pitching to avoid the wrong fight.

The other problem facing the cards was keeping them from slowing down the game. If you have cards that you can play during the fight, then you risk slowing the game down a lot. Cards like ‘reroll an attack’, or ‘dodge an attack’ will inevitably lead to the game slowing down as players stop to make sure there is no card play, or barrel ahead and hear “wait – go back, I didn’t get a chance to play this card!” There were some natural windows to keep the cards in which wouldn’t slow the game down much – like – cards that are played before you roll, or before the fight starts, or after the fight ends.

: Ah yes, figuring out the right way to do cards was definitely the trickiest part of development. I was particularly sensitive to the occasional occurrence of “Oh don’t roll your die yet, I was considering playing a card”, despite it generally having very good gameplay. In the end, we went for all card plays happening before the start of each fight, to make the fight flow as smooth as possible.Christian


Evolving the Fights
The way the fights worked also evolved over time. At first we threw everything into the game to get a sense of what worked well and what didn’t. This is often a technique I use, rather than carefully prescribe a domain which I know will work, I try it all then cut back as needed.

One of the most important features added was a critical hit, which eventually lead to a fun, distinct ultimate power for each fighter. This came about in part because situations could often feel hopeless, and it gave the player a way to win.

The other side of the coin was the fail, the miss, the blank side of the die. The presence of that along with the ultimate power meant that every roll, in general, could succeed or fail; which kept the matches alive and with the possibility of surprise far longer than when these were not a baked in part of every character. There will still be hopeless situations, like with poison, but their rarity makes them special.

There were some times where we experimented with giving the standing champion a disadvantage in order to make the turnover more reliable. I think there was one character in particular that made us consider that – maybe it was a well-known Barbarian – who had a bit of difficulty winning the first match but would heal and get stronger after each victory. I always came down on the side of wanting the champions, if anything, to have more defensive power because it is the entrenched victor that has an epic battle to oust that stands out as the most exciting sort of story that can come out of Final Titan. The standing champions usually have a disadvantage anyway since they often have diminished life points, and always have the disadvantage of their opponent being able to choose the best matchup from those available. I think the game just tends to become more exciting as a champion notches up a few victories; and if they can ride that all the way home? Well, it is a short game, play again!

: For a while, all characters had the same “ultimate attack”, which was simply a KO. The guys at Nerdlab really wanted each character to have its own Ultimate attack. I remember fighting this for months as I did not for a second believe that there would be enough design space to make this a reality. In the end, mostly to finally shut them up, we gave it a shot giving each character their own ultimate attack. It immediately worked super well and I kick myself for having fought against it for so long.Christian

The Flavor
Final Titan was a battling game, a game in which players drafted and then fought some sort of character in a series of 1v1 battles that would leave a single champion. But, what were those characters? Where was that battle? The first draft was a collection of characters taken from public domain books, including, for example, King Arthur, Alice (of Alice in Wonderland), Frankenstein’s Monster, Sherlock, the Artful Dodger, and even Moby Dick. It was meant to be a placeholder flavor, but its charm helped guide it to its final place.

As champions were added to the mix, many were not public domain – which we intended not to use but to inspire us for mechanics and tone – like Conan and Shelob. As we understood and explored the mechanics more we began to make champions from the mechanics – for which we often used a faux-superhero flavor.

To this point we hadn’t really decided what the flavor was going to be, and there were many places it could have gone. I remember one approach in particular was kids battling toys in a toy grand melee; so all the champions would have been Dolls, Toy Cars, and Stuffed Animals, for example. The merit of such an approach is that it looks fresh, unlike, say, generic fantasy. The problem with such an approach is that a potential player doesn’t really understand what is going on immediately, and when they are picking the champions they often can’t read much into the images. You have some idea of what a dragon or an ogre might represent in a battle, but, a rocking horse and a football?

In the end we chose to go with Superheroes. It was easy and fun to translate what we had into superheroes, and the origin of the characters from its public domain roots often gave them an original, but plausible presence. Tying them together with art from their comic books really gave the game a cohesive feeling – one in which any onlooker could tell what was going on. Also, it felt endlessly expandable – so we could make as many as we wanted, and any fans of the game could easily add their own if inspired to do so.

: As a little anecdote, I wanted to have a character representing my home town of Odense, which is probably most famous for being the birthplace of author Hans Christian Andersen. We chose one of his characters, The Ugly Duckling, though of course it was represented in an over the top crazy muscular version which felt fitting to the game.Christian

The Name
During most of the game development we called the game G.O.A.T. We all liked the name; I even mocked up a box cover complete with a goat bursting through the background. However, it turned out that there are legal claims to the name and we would be better off choosing a different one.

As usual, this process was difficult. When my games have had to be renamed, they often end up being unable to stand up to the original name, at least in the minds of the people who had lived with that name for so long. Sometimes you end up with a worse name, like I think happened when "Fat Dracula" got changed to The Hunger. Occasionally a better name, like when "Inconceivable" got changed to Half-Truth. Sometimes we give up and go back to the original as happened with Magic, which changed to "Mana Clash" briefly before we went back with Magic: The Gathering.

With G.O.A.T. we couldn’t find anything that pleased us all in the same way. We worked on it quite a while and it felt like we weren’t ever going to find something with the feel we wanted – light humor with something of the nature of the game reflected in the title. It was undoubtedly not helped by the fact that we had people from at least four different countries weighing in who saw, for example, different connotations for the word Titan. For a long time my favorite name was one of Christian’s (I think), 100 Titans. I liked it because it felt humorous and would also force us to deliver at least 100 characters – which was the sort of epic number of champions I wanted to see. Also, leading with a number felt distinctive.

Not everyone cared for 100 Titans, though. One reason was quite legitimate, which is that it did commit us to 100, and also it might look weird if we added more. We ended up with Final Titan, and for me, this name works quite well. I liked that it told you something about the game, and felt a little cheesy but was still, to me at least, pretty cool. I hope that the rest of the team has grown to like it as much as I have.

is now being released into the wild. I actually expected the game to be quite divisive, but so far it has been extremely well received from reviewers and players, who really seem to feel that same weird excitement of rolling a die and seeing what happens. I will end with a quote I really liked from a comment here on BGG:Final Titan

: And here we are, at the end. Development was long as this was one of the most ambitious projects I have been a part of. But we are very happy with where it ended: A box of 100 cool, different, weird, and wonderful Titans to keep players excited and engaged for a long time (actually more like 140 if you include expansions and promos). While development is a lot of hard work, we also got the pleasure of continuously seeing new and exciting artwork from the super talented team of artists that worked on the game. Seeing our ideas turn into these amazing comic-book-like characters was such a thrill, it is just the best feeling.Christian

by Justin Bell

On the day before SPIEL Essen opens to the general public, the fair hosts a media session and awards activity to show off the latest and greatest data. Part of the press conference includes an awards announcement for the Deutscher Spiele Presse (German Games Prize); the main category for family and adult gamers was won by the game Artengarten (Sanctuary), the lighter Ark Nova release designed by Mathias Wigge and published in Germany by Feuerland in 2025.

In a release shared by the events and PR team behind SPIEL Essen, Merz Verlag, lots of fun info was included:
* The show’s first three days are already sold out; assuming Sunday also sells out, more than 230,000 visitors will stroll the eight halls of Messe Essen this weekend, a new record.
* The fair has broken its attendance record for four years in a row.
* 997 exhibitors will have wares on display this weekend…and, you can tell even from the release, everyone wishes that the number topped a thousand. (Next year? Probably, although I’m not sure where else Merz Verlag will be able to accommodate more booths!!)
* Those exhibitors call 53 different countries home. While Germany, the US, France, China, and Poland lead the way, even Iceland has a booth this year. Kuwait does too! The people who make these games, toys and puzzles come from everywhere, so it is a delight to have the opportunity to meet people from so many different places.
* There are more than 1,800 novelties repped by those exhibitors this year. It’s gonna be tough to see everything, but you can’t argue about one thing: gamers of all shades should be able to find SOMETHING they like!

Of those 1,800 new products, about a thousand of them were on display at the press event that opened up for a few hours after the press conference, known as the Novelty Show. In essence, press members get to snap photos of the show’s hottest games up close, before the masses descend on each publisher’s booth and get in the way of my very amateur-looking photos taken with my Pixel phone’s camera. (I kid…sort of.)



The other great thing about the Novelty Show is the access to a range of each publisher’s representatives, to chat about the games or the things they have coming up soon. That might mean anything from a conversation with a marketing rep about plans for upcoming crowdfunding campaigns, to a studio head excited to talk about their 2026 results, to game designers who can provide a brief overview of a game you have never seen before.

I’m always fascinated by what each exhibitor decides to do for the Novelty Show. In limited cases, a smaller exhibitor might have someone who sits in all three of these roles, like Leonie Grundler, the founder of Lioness Games who also designed Biome and struck me as the lead marketer for the items in the Lioness catalog. (She is also one of the tallest people in tabletop, so it was a little shocking to meet someone at the Novelty Show who was noticeably taller than I am.)



The Novelty Show is so large that Merz Verlag organized the event in the Grugahalle, a multilevel event and stage space in between the Messe and the Atlantic Congress Hotel Essen. A funny tagline surfaced among the gathered media/content creator community during the Novelty Show: “wait, there’s a downstairs, too?” Those who entered from street level saw an entire floor’s worth of games…and then learned that the morning press conference that took place upstairs had another whole floor of games, but there wasn’t clear signage for anyone who skipped the initial press conference.

So, there’s an opportunity for next year. The other ding: the exhibitors on the first floor had lighting that was poor in certain parts of the space. That meant many of my pictures required flash photography and/or professional equipment to really shine. A number of media members get away with using mobile phone cameras for their images; some exhibitors suffered a bit from the lack of better overhead lighting.



Strolling the Novelty Show took a couple hours. Hugs and high fives were available everywhere I looked, and everyone had their full, normal-sounding voice for what is likely the final time of the weekend.

There were a number of highlights, outside of the catch-ups and the networking on display.

For the first time, I met designer Friedemann Friese (2F-Spiele, and the designer of many “F”-titled classics over the years, such as Findorff, Fishing, and Funkenschlag, which is the first edition of the game now known as Power Grid). Friedemann is hard to miss, not only because of the bright green hair but more because of the big, hearty laugh.

He was the person manning the 2F table, on the Grugahalle’s upper level. We had a brief conversation about tabletop celebrity status that resonates, now that I have met other popular game designers over the years.

At SPIEL Essen, Friedemann is a celebrity; making great games for 20+ years will do that for you. But he was so excited to meet players from around the world, something he gets excited for every year. “I only have to be a celebrity for five days, then I can go home and not be a celebrity for the rest of the year!”

At the Czech Games Edition booth, I ran into Eleni, a member of the CGE marketing team who handles teach and promo videos for the company (and who you usually see running around doing CGE vlogs at SPIEL Essen and Gen Con). Eleni had a busy morning, including putting the finishing touches on the edits for the now-live teach-while-playing video for Kingdom Come: Deliverance—The Board Game. I’m still shocked by how many people I have met or know through my networks who have been anxiously awaiting a rulebook, so this teach video will probably have thousands of views by the time I wake up Thursday morning.



I also ran into Branislav Berec at CGE’s booth, the man behind the Nithrania—Game in a Nutshell video series of board game instruction videos. I love Branislav’s work, and it sounds like we’ll be seeing more content from him in the very near future. The teach space for medium- and medium-plus strategy games is crowded, and for good reason: there are so many providers of great content right now, in a category that seems to be getting bigger every year.

The best part of that stand visit was getting a picture with designers Vlaada Chvátil and Tomáš Holek, dressed in costume for their appearances tied to Kingdom Come: Deliverance—The Board Game. They’ll be at the CGE booth all weekend signing autographs and taking pictures with fans.



And, even though I thought I had a long journey to Essen from my home in Chicago, the reality is that many people come from outside of Europe to attend the show. Two of my favorite people in tabletop are Maggie and Amy, the Australian couple better known to their community as Thinker Themer. I ran into them while running around the Novelty Show.

It sounded crazy to me when I heard it, but it felt even crazier after talking to them at the show: they are doing a multiweek round-trip tour that launched in Australia, then went to Tokyo Game Market in Japan, then arrived in Germany for SPIEL Essen, then they’re flying back home to Australia. I love board games as much as anyone, but I could feel my body weight shift when they shared the flight pattern. I’m turned over just by flying to Germany…imagine doing that across so many more time zones. Thinker Themer, we salute you!

I’ll let the pictures do the rest of the talking. But first: a big thanks to the people who stopped me at the Novelty Show to say thanks for the work I’m doing here at BGG. It means a lot, but it also helps to know that for some, the work is resonating in ways I was hoping for when I joined this team. It’s pretty cool to meet people from all over the world who read BGG to get some of their tabletop news. From the BGG folks behind the scenes to the community here and abroad, it’s great to be one slice of the news pie you bite into every time you need it!

by Steph Hodge

[imageid=9603186 medium rep]▪️ Libellud Just released Take Time: Mirage. You will need Take Time to play as this is a small expansion that includes one more envelope to play and a new mechanic to include in past envelopes to increase the difficulty. from designers: Alexi Piovesan & Julien Prothière. This expansion plays 2-4 players in about 30 minutes.

From Asmodee:





▪️ Another game that just released last week is Star Trek: Space Hunt from Matagot. From designers Roberto Fraga, Yohan Lemonnier, & Delphine Lemonnier. This game reimplements Captain Sonar and Sonar. It plays 2-4 players and takes 25-40 minutes. Buckle up, we are jumping into wapr speed for this!

From BGG:



▪️ Blood Rage: Valhalla from Tycoon Games is set to release this November. From designer Eric M. Lang (Blood Rage). This is a whole new game that plays 3-5 players and takes 60-90 minutes.

From Asmodee:




▪️ The Lord of the Rings: Circle of Conflict from Office Dog is set to release this November. From designers Stephen Buonocore & Geoff Engelstein. An epic game for 2-4 players that takes 60-90 minutes to play. Many tough choices to make in this dice game.

From BGG:



▪️ For those who enjoy digital games on your phone, there is a new app for Castle Combo from Catch Up Games and Mantita Games. This is currently available for both Android and iOS. New additions to the game, like a 12-chapter campaign solo mode!

by River Kang

Hello everyone, I’m River Kang, the developer and editor of Coffee Rush: Winter. I’m happy to share some of the story behind the game with you.

Coffee Rush: Winter is a standalone version of Coffee Rush. We wanted to preserve the fun and flow of the wonderful original game while capturing the atmosphere of a cozy café in winter. That led to many discussions about everything from new drinks and a modular ingredient board to the shape of the mugs and the light spilling out of the café windows.

To share some of that process, I’ve adapted an earlier interview with Coffee Rush designer Euijin Han, graphic designer Sooyeon Lee, and myself into this post. Here’s a look at the ideas we explored, the challenges we faced, and the details we refined along the way.

Q. Why winter?
Sooyeon Lee (Graphic Designer): There were two reasons. One was that the seasonal feel of the base game was yellow-green, in other words spring and summer, so we wanted to present something completely different. The other was that we felt cafés in winter had a distinctive atmosphere.
Euijin Han (Designer): We drink all sorts of beverages in spring, summer and autumn too, but winter has so many drinks with real character, such as hot chocolate and vin chaud.

Q. How do the rules differ from Coffee Rush?
Euijin Han: A lot of the feedback we received was that people wished they could rearrange the ingredients on the board. So we made the board modular and let players assemble it themselves. We also added more drinks suited to the winter theme. We tried not to stray too far from the original Coffee Rush. The basic principle was to keep most of the core structure and make only minor changes. The two biggest changes are the modular ingredient board and the new drinks.

River Kang (Editor): We wanted to make a game that people who had been enjoying the original Coffee Rush could play this one in much the same way, while also offering extra options for those who want a little more freedom.

Euijin Han: Oh, and upgrade tiles were added as well. There are six in total: four from the base game, one from the Piece of Cake expansion, and one newly designed for Winter. Players choose four to use.

Q. What changed in the design?
Euijin Han: Design was what we paid the most attention to while preparing Coffee Rush: Winter, so quite a lot changed. First, we changed the shape of the cups. The original cup is a round cappuccino cup, but we turned it into a mug for hot winter drinks such as hot chocolate and added an engraved snowflake. We thought this style of cup fit the winter theme well.

River Kang: We also took the aprons off the pawns and gave each one a differently shaped scarf. We had heard that some players with color-vision deficiency had trouble telling which pawn was theirs. Even in the base game, we used different shades of red and green to make them easier to distinguish for players with color-vision deficiency, but we heard that players were still getting confused, so we decided to give each pawn a different scarf.
We made a similar seasonal change to the ice, shaping it like a snowman. The most important change, though, was switching one of the ingredients from caramel to fruit. The fruit piece itself is shaped like an orange slice. There are a lot of citrus drinks in winter, so we wanted to make that change.

Sooyeon Lee: We also redesigned the rush tokens as cookies, with three different shapes. The shapes make no difference to the rules, but they are cute.

Q. What Did You Focus on the Most?
Sooyeon Lee: The visual side, above all. We changed the various components to suit the season, and we redrew all of the artwork. Illustrator Siwon Hwang created the artwork for Coffee Rush in 2022, and her skills have developed even further over the past three years. So while we were at it, we redrew almost everything: the package, the board, the drinks. Other than the existing drink and ingredient icons, almost everything was redrawn.

River Kang: You could say that our main focus was bringing the winter theme to life through the artwork and 3D components.

Q. What was difficult, or what did you worry over?
Euijin Han: The biggest challenge was how little time we had between the initial idea and the completion of the final version. We also debated whether to change the rules more boldly. We thought about adding something like an obstacle to the board, or introducing variations to the tiles. We explored changing the rules in various ways. But it felt like it did not suit the cozy, playful feel of Coffee Rush, so we took it out.

Sooyeon Lee: On the art side, finding the right color palette for winter was a bit difficult. From the beginning we wanted the feel of winter at night rather than winter in daylight. We wanted the artwork to convey the feeling of winter: a slightly dim world, light spilling out of buildings, cold outside, and warmth inside. So we asked the illustrator to capture the feeling of a winter evening. But when the art came back, it was much darker than we had expected, and the overall mood felt gloomy. Many of the reference images we had found showed dark exteriors with warm light glowing from inside, so we had not anticipated this problem. Once we saw the artwork, however, we realized that the box art was too dark overall.

After a great deal of discussion, we finally asked: “Please aim for a level of brightness somewhere between 5 and 6 p.m. on a winter day.” We wanted enough light to be visible inside the shop so that players could feel its warmth. After all, the coziness of winter comes from being indoors. Finding that middle point, giving the feel of a winter night while keeping the Coffee Rush look from seeming too drab, was a little hard.

River Kang: Getting the component sizes right was another challenge. We made new 3D components, and when we received samples made to the dimensions we had initially envisioned, there were problems: some pieces were too large, and the cup was too deep. The cup in the original Coffee Rush is round and narrows toward the bottom, so the ingredients settle in naturally and the wide opening makes them easy for players to see. But a mug is deep and not wide at the top, so the ingredients became difficult to see. So we solved this by adjusting the size of the ingredients and raising the bottom inside the mug. If you look closely, you can see that the cup’s interior base is about 3 mm higher. We adjusted it so the ingredients look full whether you look from above or from the side.

Euijin Han: Balancing the proportions of the drinks was also a major challenge. When the ingredient changed from caramel to fruit, every drink that used caramel had to be reworked. That meant new drinks had to come in, but simply replacing caramel with fruit in the existing recipes did not work. Caramel drinks mostly contain coffee and milk, and if you put coffee and milk together with fruit, wouldn’t that be a drink that is hard even to imagine? So we had to readjust the proportions of all the ingredients.

Coffee Rush has four regular ingredients and four special ingredients, and the ratios of cold drinks to hot drinks, milk to coffee, and regular drinks to specialty drinks are all carefully balanced. To match those proportions in Coffee Rush: Winter as well, we made a table comparing the new and existing drinks so we could keep the ingredient ratios as consistent as possible.

Q. How did the ideas for the new drinks come about?
River Kang: As soon as designer Euijin Han proposed fruit tea, I wanted to include vin chaud (editor's note: French mulled wine). The broader idea was to include warm drinks with fruit flavors that fit the winter theme. Korea has many kinds of hot fruit tea, so we wanted to include drinks like those as well We researched fruit-based drinks from various sources and asked people for suggestions. As we built the ingredient list, we selected the ideas that seemed like the best fit.

We also created a few new drinks that suit winter even without fruit in them. One of those is the white chocolate latte. Snow is white, so the drink naturally feels wintry. The combination is identical to that of the chocolate latte, but we created new artwork for it. We added an affogato as well. It is a distinctive drink that contains both a hot ingredient and a cold ingredient. Since the ice is snowman-shaped, we thought, “Let’s make an affogato with a snowman in it.” We came up with a combination in which milk plus ice makes ice cream, while steam plus coffee makes espresso. That is how the first drink in the Coffee Rush series to contain both ice and steam came about.

We also included a drink called bicerin. It is visually appealing because it is made in three layers. We had also received a request to include an unusual drink, so we decided to add it.

Q. What do you think people will like about it?
River Kang: I think the greatest strengths of the Coffee Rush series are its beautiful artwork and components, which players can now enjoy in a fresh winter setting. From an experienced board gamer’s perspective, another strength is the modular ingredient board. You can arrange the ingredients freely, somewhat like in Catan, which means you can have a different experience every time you play.

We also redesigned the ingredient trays so that all the ingredient tokens can be divided evenly between the two trays. This lets players place the two trays in separate, easy-to-reach spots around the table during play. I also put a lot of care into the box insert, which holds all of the components. It was designed to keep everything neatly organized, so packing the game away should be much easier.

Q. Any fun stories from development?
Sooyeon Lee: The snowman ice originally had a nose. But the nose was so small and pointy that someone might get hurt during play, so we had to remove it. Sadly, the snowman ice became a little less cute.

Q. This is the first spin-off. What are your hopes for it?
River Kang: We set out to remake the game while preserving its original fun and flow as much as possible. At the same time, we tried to address some of the shortcomings of the previous release in a different way, so I hope people are satisfied with those changes. In fact, I think the most important thing is for people to enjoy the game without being particularly conscious of what has changed. I think that if someone finds themselves thinking, “Why did they change it this way?” or “This is inconvenient,” then we have failed. That is what concerns me most.

Euijin Han: I hope people can choose the game according to the mood of the day. Shall we play Coffee Rush today? Or Coffee Rush: Winter today? I hope people can enjoy both like that. The best thing for us would be for people to love them both. One of the reasons we made Coffee Rush: Winter is our wish that people enjoy a version with a different, more wintry look. One of the most rewarding experiences after the release of Coffee Rush was seeing a child at a board-game demo event who, without knowing the rules, put whatever ingredients they wanted into a cup and excitedly said, “Dad, look, look at this! I made this.” That is why we put so much effort into the artwork and the components. I hope people have a good time playing it together.

Sooyeon Lee (Graphic Designer): If I hear people say, “I bought it because it’s pretty,” or simply, “It’s so pretty,” I’ll feel like we’ve achieved what we set out to do.

Q. Will more titles in the series follow?
Euijin Han: The Coffee Rush series will continue. It may not be about coffee, though; the next game could involve a different kind of food. I cannot say for certain that every future title will be called Coffee Rush, but the Rush series can definitely continue.

Q. Finally, a word each for the people who will play the game.
Sooyeon Lee: It’s cold in winter, so people tend to stay indoors more, and I hope they have a good time indoors with Coffee Rush: Winter. You don't even have to go outside!

River Kang: When you line up the three boxes on a shelf, their colors look really nice together. You can choose between Coffee Rush and Coffee Rush: Winter according to your preference, and if you’ve played the original, you can enjoy winter in a slightly different way. I hope you get to enjoy the whole series.

Euijin Han: I hope Coffee Rush makes its way around the world, so that even people in countries without winter can experience winter through Coffee Rush: Winter.

by Milan Tasevski

The Great Harbor has had quite an interesting journey since it first arrived on our table.

The game originally came to us from designer Matteo de Nardis, under the working title Lubecca. At its core, we immediately saw something we liked: a clever dice-placement system built around constructing your own engine, with plenty of interesting decisions packed into a relatively straightforward structure.

But as we started developing it, we also began seeing just how much further we could take the idea.

From Lubecca to Carthage

One of the first major changes was the setting.

Around the same time, we were looking to expand the world we had created with Magna Roma, and it felt natural to explore another part of the ancient Mediterranean through a very different type of game. This felt even more fitting because Matteo is also the designer of Magna Roma, making the connection between the two projects feel very organic.

That eventually brought us to Carthage and its incredible harbor.

The Great Harbor of Carthage was one of the most impressive engineering and commercial achievements of the ancient world. It gave us exactly the setting we were looking for: merchants, ships, colonies, trade, construction, and a city whose power was deeply connected to the sea.

And once we made that decision, the game started changing with it.

This wasn't simply a case of changing the artwork and names. The setting inspired new systems, new interactions, and new ways of connecting the different parts of the game.

Simplifying Without Making It Simpler

A big part of our development philosophy was to make the game easier to understand without reducing the number of interesting decisions.
One example was the way dice interacted with harbor tiles.

Originally, dice were placed at the corners where four different tiles could meet. In addition, in order to place a die, you were required to match its number. This created plenty of possibilities, but it also meant that every placement required players to process quite a lot of information.

During development, we changed this so that dice are placed along the edges between two tiles instead, and that you were free to place a die with any number - the number would just affect how much you gain from the placement.

It sounds like a few small changes, but these changes had a surprisingly large effect. The board became easier to read, turns became quicker, and the decision of where to place the die remained just as important.

And these were exactly the kinds of changes we wanted to make. Fewer rules to process, without losing the decisions behind them.

Building More Than a Harbor

As development continued, the game gradually expanded beyond the Great Harbor itself.

The placement of dice in the Great Harbor board remain at the center of everything you do, but they now connect to a much larger economic machine.
You draft dice. You place them in the harbor and gain resources and cards. You develop your colony. You construct buildings. You attract useful people. You build and crew ships. You trade valuable goods. You prepare voyages and send those ships into the Mediterranean, sometimes having to deal with pirates along the way.

All of these systems feed back into each other, and that interconnectedness became one of our favorite parts of the game.

The Icing on the Cake - Trading

During the final stages of development, we introduced a push-your-luck trading mechanic, and this ended up being the icing on the cake for us.
It added something we don't see very often in Euro games: a moment where careful planning suddenly turns into tension, risk, and everyone around the table watching to see what happens.

Do you take the current successful trade and walk away, or do you push for something better and risk losing the opportunity? It sounds simple, but it created some of the most memorable moments during development.

We had so much fun playtesting this in the office that we were literally screaming whenever someone pulled off a successful trade at the far edges of the Mediterranean! Every time somebody decided to push their luck one step further, everyone stopped what they were doing to see how it would end.

For a game with so much planning and strategy, having these sudden bursts of excitement gave The Great Harbor a personality we really loved!

Keeping the Game Moving

We also paid a lot of attention to pacing.

The Great Harbor contains plenty of strategic possibilities, but we didn't want it to feel slow or overly procedural. The game lasts only five rounds, so you rarely have enough time to do everything.

Do you develop the colony? Build more ships? Push trade? Prepare voyages? Focus on prestige? Or try to build an engine connecting several of those things together?

And because the dice available to you are never exactly the same, you constantly have to adjust.
That tension between building something long-term and reacting to what is available right now became one of the defining parts of the game.

A Game That Changed a Lot

Looking at The Great Harbor today and comparing it to the first prototype of Lubecca is quite fascinating.

The foundation is still there. You can still see the original idea that made us interested in the game in the first place.

But around it, almost everything has been examined, questioned, adjusted, simplified, expanded, or rebuilt at some point during development.
And these are only a few examples. There were many other changes along the way, from ships and voyages to the colony, economy, and the different ways players can build prestige.

For now, we are incredibly happy with where the journey has taken the game.

What started as a clever dice-placement prototype has gradually become The Great Harbor, a strategic Euro game with its fair share of planning, building, and engine creation, but also those wonderful moments when somebody decides to risk everything on one more trade and the entire table suddenly erupts.

Thanks for reading this!
- Milan, Archona Games

by Charles Amir Perret

Super Meeple is posting this diary on behalf of the illustrator of Mythologies Arthur Boccard. If you haven't read the Designers' Diary for the game, you'll find it HERE.

From Concept Artist to Illustrator


@boccardarthurWho am I? I originally come from the video game industry. I started working in the field in November 2022, and during that time I had the opportunity to contribute to two productions as an environment and character concept artist, at Artefacts Studio and Microids Lyon. Being a Concept Artist is first and foremost about listening, adapting to an artistic direction, thinking in terms of process, and staying creative under tight deadlines. From my perspective, it is closer to design than illustration.

Still, I wanted to try stepping into the world of board games. I believe it is vital to move between different creative environments. It helps me change my perspective.



Illustrating a Game

When I embarked on this adventure thanks to Igor Polouchine (Origames), I had very little idea of how much work would be involved or what processes would be used. I was in for quite a surprise. For this game, I had an average of just one day per card, including feedback and revisions.

So I knew I had to focus on efficiency, because I simply wouldn’t have much time to spend on each illustration. I started by putting together a reference board, exploring different colour palettes and technical approaches.

My main reference was the work of Yohann Schepacz, both in terms of colour and his painterly approach using Photoshop’s Round Brush.

I wanted to see what I could achieve using this technique. I started with the Egyptians, and they set the direction for everything that followed. I began with one card, then repeated the process to see whether I could make it consistent and stable. There weren’t many iterations — it was more or less a case of going full speed ahead. As soon as I had an idea, I ran with it.

I took a risk and came back to Igor after ten days with the first seven Egyptian cards, giving him a much clearer idea of what I wanted to explore. For me, the best way to work was by blocks or families of cards, so we could consolidate the feedback. I was given a great deal of freedom, and I’m still grateful to Igor for that trust. First block delivered. I was still working with the idea of a flatter art direction, closer to Eliot Baum’s style.

First test: Ra.

The main challenges that emerged when illustrating the game were the framing dictated by the UI, distinguishing gods from creatures — which I struggled with at first — and giving each family its own identity.

Reference image provided by the art director, giving me a quick indication of the UI placement

Giving Each Mythology a Strong Identity

As mentioned earlier, my main reference was the work of Yohann Schepacz.

I wanted this game to be an opportunity to immerse myself in the way he approaches his work. It is highly graphic, uses very little colour, features strong lighting, and is created entirely with Photoshop’s Round Brush.

Here, the brush itself becomes central to the visual identity. There is nowhere to hide behind gradients or soft blends. Every transition has to be painted.
What I find interesting is that you can see the struggle in every one of these cards. Little pieces of me emerge through them. I think that makes them feel very alive.

Quick photobashing using my references. This allowed me to see whether the approach could work from a colour perspective → Result for the associated families
I established a few simple rules to guide me through the first productions:

• A background with a dominant flat colour and a secondary pattern

• Gold, white and black shared by all cards

• One dominant colour and one secondary colour for the characters of each family

I also tried to give each mythology its own theme to help guide the design process. I didn’t always have time to think things through properly. Sometimes, I simply had to start without having found a solution yet—things had to move forward, and I couldn’t really afford to get stuck. The Chinese mythology is a perfect example. Working with porcelain helped me enormously when developing the shapes of the characters.

Environments

I have rules, but I don’t always follow them either. When it came time to tackle the landscapes, I hesitated — and it shows.

Normally, I make extensive use of textured brushes. They allow me to fake detail and add complexity while keeping the amount of time spent under control.
Here, it’s a mixture of both approaches.

textured brushes used
For the creation of the boards, I wanted something calm. If there was architecture, I didn’t want it to dominate the image. I wanted the sky or a body of water to take centre stage and echo the family’s dominant colour.

The whole thing had to contrast with the density of the cards. It all comes down to where you cut the horizon.

Landscape composition diagram
Checking and Making Changes

Replayability and Endless Possibilities
The changes were made in blocks: minor adjustments here, a few cards redone there. Overall, the process was fairly efficient. The revisions often came down to problems identifying a creature or a god. For example, the Draugr originally had horns. I liked the graphic solution, but it didn’t fit the idea of an undead creature. Freya had a helmet and a shield. I had been misled by the references I was given. Mamacocha also went through a lot of changes. I struggled to find a clear visual reference to the sea. The Hindu family had its fair share of changes as well. I admit I struggled quite a lot with this one. I couldn’t get far enough into its world or create figures that felt clear enough.

Reference provided → First version — too warrior-like → I wanted to bring her back towards the fishing deity. It wasn’t exactly very sexy. → Finally, I added a much clearer marine element, as if she were emerging from the sea foam. Final version.

We hope you’ll enjoy playing Mythologies as much as we enjoyed bringing its world to life. If you haven’t read it yet, don’t miss the Designers' Diary, and discover how this whole adventure began. And this is only the beginning: we look forward to expanding this rich universe with new mythologies in the future. After all, there are still plenty of gods to draw and quite a few more worlds to explore.

by Charles Amir Perret

Super Meeple is posting this diary on behalf of the designers of Mythologies, Maxime Babad and Mickaël "Froh" Garcin, and we invite you to read the illustrator's diary for the game HERE.

Genesis
The origins of a unique game, according to the two designers who made it…

Mythologies — or Mythic Mashup, as we called it in the beginning — did not exactly spring fully formed from the heavens. It went through a long and sometimes winding development process before becoming the game you know today. What began as a journey for two people was sometimes complicated, often exciting, and always enriching. A collaboration that could be restrictive at times — and, on more than one occasion, a genuine lifesaver.

In these notes, we invite you behind the scenes of Mythologies: a game born from the unlikely combination of strategy, ancient myths (obviously!) and an almost unreasonable amount of replayability. Discover how two distinct visions gradually came together to create a gaming experience unlike any other.

The Primordial Spark
The meeting, the first spark, the initial chaos.

Fun fact: After two and a half years of development, Mythologies came to life. Yet its two designers had only ever crossed paths once… briefly, at Cannes.

It all started with a fan-made project based on Blood Bowl Team Manager, for which Mickaël designed around twenty additional teams. Maxime, already the designer of Saint Seiya Deckbuilding, joined the dream team, also being a passionate fan of BBTM. Then Mickaël joined Maxime’s playtesting team for his second game to be published, Death Note.

Little by little — or rather, through tackles to the carotid and more than a few unfounded suspicions — our duo of passionate gamers came together, united around a shared vision: a game built on replayability, interaction, originality, and a strong theme.

The Mythic Mashup project was born.

Woven Destiny
Key dates and the first divine choices.

October 18, 2018 First contact. Maxime offers to help with the Blood Bowl fan-made project. Mickaël tries to score a free game (spoiler: he fails).

[Mickael waves hello! Click to wave hello too]
"Hello, I thought you’d be all over this ;)"
"Hola. Welcome. Feel free to ask any questions if needed, but also feel free to send me a free copy of Saint Seiya*."
*the deckbuilding game designed by Maxime
2020 - Max takes advantage of lockdown to recruit playtesters for Death Note.

- Hey Mickaël, how’s it going? (Well, within a reasonable radius of your home, with the required paperwork.)
- Could be going better, but I’m surviving.
- Would you be interested in testing my next game, Death Note, sometime?
- Absolutely.
Max is still owning his questionable jokes five years later. Mickaël, meanwhile, prefers to forget them.

Late 2021
Max suggests to Mickaël they move on to a “real” project, in order to finance Mickaël’s solid-gold swimming pool (filled with normal water, since liquid gold is rather impractical). They decide to create a game together. Max wants a drafting game. Mickaël wants a swimming pool. The project is launched.

The Founding Myth
Civilizations, creatures, and the sacred foundations of the game.

When Mickaël came up with a historical Civilizations theme, Maxime suggested reusing the universe of a prototype modestly named Gods Pantheonic Battle, in order to use its templates.

It was not far removed from the concept of Civilizations, but it gave the game a more epic dimension, while allowing us to reuse the card files already prepared for the prototype and adapt them.

At that point, we had a foundation of six mythologies, each containing four Deities and three Creatures. More than enough to test the first mechanics of Mythic Mashup and its famous carousel…

The six mythologies were already quite diverse, including the Hindu and Inca mythologies alongside much better-known cultures such as Ancient Egypt and Greece, the Norse, and Japan.

With a few exceptions, these 36 Deities and Creatures are still present in the final version of Mythologies. Among the Egyptians, the Criosphinx and Hieracosphinx were replaced by the Mummy and the Scarab. And the Norse Berserker became the Draugr it always should have been.

The Carousel of Souls
From a curse to the resurrection of a concept.

The foundation of the game was meant to recreate the experience of a carousel found in autobattler video games (Dota Chess, Teamfight Tactics, etc.). In other words, each round would begin with a Selection phase during which everyone would try to grab units from a rotating board, with units passing by as it turned. Depending on their position, players would try to quickly claim the ones they were interested in before they slipped past them and were taken by the next player.

We quickly developed a prototype of a mechanically rotating board, on which players could select a card from a mythology whenever the arrow on their section of the board pointed toward that mythology.

Unfortunately, this choice created several problems:

• Card readability on a moving platform: this required the cards to be extremely simple.

• Stress and lack of time to rethink your strategy when a coveted card was taken by an opponent: making it difficult to strategize.

• Mechanical boards that were too complex and expensive to produce for a publisher: possibly the number-one issue. It was simply impossible within a limited budget, and represented a major publishing risk.

We had to find an alternative solution. But we wanted to preserve two key ideas:

• Open drafting, allowing players to anticipate their choices and their opponents’ strategies.

• Simultaneous selection, making for fast games and sudden reversals.

Goodbye carousel, hello Destiny cards. These are drawn at random during each Selection phase and determine the random order in which players can select one of their two cards — or choose not to — from each area of the board, one after another.

We kept our key ideas, but introduced a new source of tension through uncertainty: Which mythology will I have access to next? Should I pass up an available choice in the hope that the next one will still be there? The stressful tension imposed by the rotating-board mechanism was therefore replaced by the tension of dilemmas and “bets” on our own choices and those of our opponents. “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” as they say… You’ll be the judge.

Offerings and Gems
Personal Pantheons and sacrificial strategies.

Alongside the selection system, we needed these mythological entities to serve a purpose. Rather than having gods beat the living daylights out of each other with superpowers, something other games already do very well, wouldn’t it be more interesting to combine them in order to create a unique culture?

How could we measure the relevance of our choices without direct confrontation and without repeatedly comparing values, while still keeping the game moving at a good pace?

From the outset, building an original and unique Pantheon seemed to us to be the more interesting approach, and a great promise of depth and replayability for players. What if the positioning of these Creatures in our Pantheon could give us more than simply collecting them?

That is the whole point of the tableau-building system we wanted to create.
To do this, we needed to identify ways for players to move toward victory. Different paths to renown? Resources with different values? Offering tokens to collect or spend? We knew we were starting with a game rich in combos and depth, where every choice would have an impact, while absolutely wanting to maintain the goal of short games.

The Tablets of Ancient Knowledge
Design choices: text or symbols, tradition or modernity.

Defining a game’s mechanics starts with clearly identifying the experience we want to offer, then trying to stick to it — to keep it as a guiding principle throughout the game’s development. There are multiple dials to adjust and just as many points of balance to find: the length of the game versus the feeling of growing in power, depth versus accessibility, richness versus complexity, and so on. Finding effective and enjoyable gameplay is the foundation of game design, and the more criteria you set, the harder it becomes to find something that meets all of them.

Board game design has evolved considerably over the past two decades, favoring short games, clear rules, and another particular feature: cards with as little text as possible (or even no text at all). This is the case for many modern games aiming for the same playing time as ours.

We stuck to the first two constraints (short games and clear rules), but chose to embrace text on the cards. This gives us greater versatility in terms of effects, and therefore more thematic depth. Likewise, we chose to move away from the constraint of dynamic drafting, which only introduces new cards each round. It may seem like an insignificant choice, but it is often one of the points players come back to after their first game.

Our game offers a feeling of growing in power, not because the cards in Round 2 are stronger than those in Round 3, but rather because they combine with one another, while the Deities come in to add those spikes of power.

A completely sourced and impeccably formatted graph depicting a typical game of Mythologies.
Here, the tension can be felt from the very first round, thanks to a drafting mechanism that is both simple and tactical. During this phase, players can take risks, anticipate what their opponents will do, but also react to their choices and adjust their own strategy accordingly. The game is driven by opportunities and highly varied card combinations, with effects that can be extremely versatile depending on the situation.

This choice also brings several benefits:

• Beginners have fewer cards to read in later turns, since some cards have remained available.

• More experienced players can rely on those remaining cards to guide their combinations.

All of this takes place in a game where every card has several uses (effects, immediate gains, and value toward objectives). In other words, a card that may initially appear bad often really isn’t — and may not remain so from one game to the next. This is the discovery aspect that means no two games will ever be alike.

The Epic of the Pantheons
Romans, Chinese, Celts, Zulus: the chosen ones of the expanded Pantheon.

After various iterations and major changes to the gameplay, we reached the point where we felt that our mechanism was the right one. At the very least, it was solid enough to serve as a foundation for developing more content.

We started by expanding the bestiary with a fourth creature for each mythology (and later a fifth, then a sixth). But above all, we realized that we had a concept that was perfectly suited to modularity and replayability. With six mythologies, we had 15 possible combinations of four mythologies, and 180 different setups, with these setups defining the objectives of the game.

Since the heart of the game was mixing mythologies together to constantly discover new synergies, we quickly wanted to expand the number of mythologies, with each new mythology increasing the number of possible combinations exponentially.

Mickaël always developed projects with 30 factions or more, while Maxime wanted to make games that could be played hundreds of times and have each game feel different. So we immediately launched into the design of four additional mythologies at once. That brought us to 210 mythology combinations and 2,520 setups!

For our additional mythologies, we chose the Romans and Chinese on the one hand, as they seemed like obvious choices.

The Romans: A culture that is both rich and well known, with plenty of material for introducing new Deities while avoiding duplicates with the Greeks. The Creatures were a little more difficult, as we had to find ones that were more characteristic of Roman legends than Greek ones.

The Chinese: Probably the best-known mythology in the world that we had not yet included in the game. Here, choosing the Deities was the difficult part. Not only because there are so many of them — which is also true of many other mythologies — but because we struggled to determine which ones were considered the main figures.

By cross-referencing different sources of information (encyclopedic references, specialist websites, AI and native speakers), we settled on the final cast, which we felt both represented the major Deities of the Chinese Pantheon and met our game-design constraints.

For the other two mythologies, our goal was to explore cultures that are less frequently represented. We wanted to move away from Antiquity and the Mediterranean basin, which are often favored in cultural works. Since our game highlights historical and cultural knowledge, we chose to reinforce this aspect by giving players the opportunity to discover as many new cultures as possible — cultures that many of us are not very familiar with.

We chose the Zulus, with their mystical and wild bestiary, as worthy representatives of the African continent.

We had to dig through the depths of the internet to cross-reference enough reliable sources to properly identify the Deities and Creatures that could be highlighted in the game. The sources were much rarer and more scattered than for any of the other mythologies we had incorporated.

Finally, our last choice was the Celts, whose beliefs turned out to be much darker than we had imagined.

It is a mixture of different cultures, and the Deities are not as clearly established as those of the other mythologies. Their bestiary, on the other hand, is truly unique, with a strong focus on sometimes rather sinister legends (the Headless Horseman, for example).

Although the game is highly mechanical, we made sure to give each mythology a particular influence, expressed through one or two major themes for each of them.

Thus, the Incas focus on sacrifice, the Greeks on movement and interaction, the Hindus on summoning, the Norse on aggression, and so on.

And individually, wherever possible, each card has an effect related to the role that the corresponding entity appeared to play according to our current knowledge. Thus, Anubis rules over the abyss, Valkyries strike down Deities, Râkshasas are shapeshifters, and so on.

The Eternal Return
Replayability and infinite possibilities.

One of the most important aspects of Mythologies is its unparalleled replayability for a tableau-building game, and even more broadly for a game of this format.

Its high degree of modularity comes from the fact that the game was designed with this goal in mind from the very beginning (those who know us are aware of how important replayability is to both of us). We very quickly incorporated key elements into the heart of the game’s design. They became the core of the game design, and we never questioned them afterward.

The starting point is that you have to choose four mythologies for each game — or draw them randomly; that works too. What matters is that every combination works. Since each mythology has its own particularities, levels of interaction, key mechanics, and so on, each combination of four mythologies will give your game a different feeling. With eight mythologies in the box, that already gives us around 70 different experiences, along with all their synergies to explore.

And that’s without counting the fact that you will not see all the cards from each mythology in a single game. You can get your full dose of gaming pleasure by playing several games with the same configuration.

Seventy different experiences is already a significant amount. To go even further, the central board is assembled from the boards of the 4 mythologies in the game. This assembly, which we call the Sanctuary, serves in particular as the market from which players obtain cards. But the order in which it is assembled is crucial, because each board is double-sided, with the beginning of a sentence on one side and the end of that sentence on the other.

The way you assemble the four selected boards will therefore create two unique sentences, which serve as the objectives for the game. That gives us a grand total of 840 unique pairs of objectives!

Each pair of objectives creates genuine choices: emptying your Pantheon, placing Creatures in ways that may be less than optimal, filling certain columns…
This focus also provides a degree of predictability for player interaction. And it creates genuine dilemmas during your turns, even when you know the game very well.

A card may therefore not necessarily be interesting because of its effect, but may be extremely interesting because of what it provides toward an objective.

Obviously, some objectives are similar — for example, if one objective asks you to fill one row or another. Except that the cards you play will not have the same effect, provide the same gain, or have the same usefulness depending on which row you play them in.

The value of each card will therefore vary from game to game, but also over the course of a game depending on how it develops. The same very powerful synergy in one situation may be far less profitable in another configuration. In Mythologies, it is impossible to rely on your usual strategy for winning. The key word is adaptability. You will always have to adapt your choices to the objectives of the game, its development, and the opportunities available to you. And who knows? You may discover new horizons with cards you would not normally have played.

As for synergies, we worked extensively to ensure that the mythologies combine with one another rather than each operating independently.

Do the Egyptians reward crushing? You will be able to find effects in other mythologies that interact with crushing. Do you have a card that generates significant gains? It may require the presence of different mythologies in your pantheon. This allows us to avoid the pitfall of “mono-faction” games, where the optimal way to play is to dive headfirst into a single color, sometimes competing with other players doing exactly the same thing.

So we leave behind the routine of following the usual plan, because you will have to consider every card available to you — which will inevitably maintain a certain amount of tension during the drafting of those cards.

The Oracle’s Quest
Finding a publisher, or how to read the signs of the gods of the market.

Finding a publisher is easy.

Finding a publisher who will actually sign is more complicated. You have to understand the timing: publishers are overloaded, have projects planned for the next three years, and have absolutely no room left in their schedules. Then along comes our UFO of a project, with significant graphical demands (lots of illustrations!), and a game aimed at experienced players that nevertheless only takes 30-minutes to play. That is very rare.

Quite a few publishers saw our project, and we thank them for the time they spent on it. Some may have gone through the pitch a little too quickly, and the feedback we received from physical prototypes showed us that not everyone really engaged with the game, with feedback that was sometimes strange and sometimes very interesting. But that was fine. We persevered.

After a year of back-to-back meetings, Charles-Amir from Super Meeple, having tested different iterations of the game throughout its development, increasingly appreciated its specific qualities and understood the direction we were heading in. He probably realized that his inbox was going to receive this project every month until his death, and therefore, out of sheer desperation, accepted.

The work did not stop there. Hundreds of games and countless pieces of feedback had to be taken into account. Directions to pursue, and others to abandon. What makes a game project interesting is maintaining a direction. Because a project that tries to please everyone will ultimately please no one.

The Fleeting Apex
The Wheel of Time cannot be stopped.

One aspect that is somewhat unusual for this type of game, which focuses heavily on combos: Mythologies is NOT an engine-building game.
The more powerful combos we create, the more tempting it becomes to repeat them and improve them in order to extract the maximum benefit. We absolutely did not want players to feel as though they were repeating the same sequences over and over, with the additional risk inherent to engine-building games that the gap between players simply keeps growing as the game progresses. On the contrary, we wanted players to reassess the situation and their options every round, with no automatic moves. This is truly a mantra for us, burned into our philosophy of what makes a game engaging and captivating all the way to the final scoring.

Although the open drafting aspect contributes to this, other, less mechanical elements also help keep players engaged until the very end. We made sure that the game did not contain too many permanent effects that could be reactivated every turn. We adjusted the timing for completing objectives, imposing certain constraints on players at specific moments, even if that meant rearranging their Pantheons just before or after in order to optimize their cards in a different way.

The fact that the game ends after four rounds also contributes to this. In only four rounds, well-optimized one-off effects can be far more profitable than permanent passive bonuses.

Player interaction adds another layer to all of this. The more we allow players to throw a spanner into their opponents’ plans, the more we force them to adapt. But don’t worry about this last point! It is obvious that some players do not like having their plans disrupted, which is why the level of interaction is modular. Each mythology is more or less focused on interaction, and this level of interaction is clearly indicated. It is up to each player to choose more or less interactive mythologies for each game.

The Heroes’ Pact
Working as a pair: synergy, balance and shared faith.

There are several advantages to working as a pair, especially when you complement each other. One of the main points was to determine, from the outset, the objectives we wanted to set for the game: accessible rules, fast games, high replayability, and good depth.

These objectives guided most of our design choices. If an idea went completely against one of these four pillars, poof, it was gone. It sounds simple when presented this way, but each idea was often beneficial in one respect while detrimental in another. We therefore had to take the time to weigh the pros and cons. An unavoidable task, for which two perspectives are better than one — even if it can easily lead to lengthy debates.

Even with clearly defined objectives, even with important shared references, and even when we have a fairly similar vision of what makes a good game, disagreements are bound to arise from time to time. Most of the time, they stem from a misunderstanding. It is therefore important to take the time to listen to each other, put yourself in the other person’s shoes, and get to the root of the problem or disagreement. What is the other person trying to achieve? What exactly is bothering them? Which part of the proposed solution is bothering you? It requires genuine introspection to silence our egos and move forward.

But there you have it: disagreement is the art of compromise.

An art… that is rather verbose, since our discussions on even the smallest subject can require an enormous number of paragraphs filled with pseudo-justifications, all in the hope of being right.

Pulling the Threads of the Fates
Where we talk about destiny.

If the game finds its audience, we obviously have plenty of things planned. Even before Super Meeple took the project under its wing, we had already worked on expansion concepts and additional mythologies (yes, they already exist). And because we are (perhaps a little too?) passionate, we have also continued working on them alongside the development of the final game. But for all these great ideas to become reality, that cannot depend on us alone.

It depends on you, dear players, who will have embraced our vision and our gaming proposition — which we hope will convince you of its merits as you play more and more games.

Thank you, valiant players.

If you’re heading to SPIEL in Essen, come and find us at Hall 6, Booth F301. Come and talk to us about the struggle, the excitement, the brilliant ideas, the questionable ones, and all the compromises that somehow turned into a game. We’ll be delighted to delve deeper into the joys and tribulations of game design — and, if necessary, explain how two perfectly reasonable people managed to spend so much time arguing about ancient gods.



Mickaël & Maxime

Discover the Illustrator’s Diary as well: PART B — Making Myth a Reality

by Pablo Jiménez

Editor's note - an artist diary for Kano was published at the same time, which you can read HERE.

Part 1: Early Concepts and Thematic Shift

I remember the first time we met with Pablo Jiménez. He had a simple but incredibly fun and efficient mechanic to capture colorful gems. They were just placed on the board and some scoring would happen. General patterns that we would share or not. The first exciting thing was to repeat a well-known movement from games like Candy Crush: switching to adjacent gems. And it was a fantastic start.

But the problem was that all the gems were left on the table, with the bag getting empty, and when the objectives were common, the luck of the draw was driving too much of your score. But we agreed that there was something there and that we would work on this game together. This was the start of a long adventure. We tried many ways to make the combinations interesting and varied—pick up contracts, perform specific ones—but nothing really clicked.

He took the best part of a year and nothing significant had happened. At the same time, the mechanic was still quite fascinating and we decided that "Gems of Saqqara" was something we were so excited about we could not give it up.

And this is when it came to its first massive turn: One friend who’d been looking. At the prototype maze a version drawing on their passion for Japanese culture and the school of painting that used ink and gold. Gems were replaced by paint pots and a tatami mat was use to show them. It was rolled out to serve as a board. Extremely cute handmade pots were produced. The game had a direction, and unbeknownst to us, our main problem was essentially solved because from there it would be a smaller leap to be making a Kano-style painting.

Some people believe that substance is superior to form. I believe the form gives a guide for substance. Playing with pots, trying to solve a mathematical abstract problem, I realized I was going nowhere. There was no real soul in the game, and so it stayed for another year, always in the back of my mind while other projects based on themes were making progress.

Part 2: Refining the Mechanic and Balancing

It was Christmas vacation time and we, of course, played games at home. After a frustrating experience playing another game, I realized the problem: the game was promising an experience, creating an exciting picture, but it was just purely an optimization problem with bits and pieces placed in position without ever trying to deliver the promised experience. It was like building a town just by putting together cubes and numbers in the way that caused a high number of points.

That’s when it hit me: if the paint pots combinations were representing a painting, then we should actually see your painting in the end. I reset my computer and printer and, after eight hours spread over ne and a half days, I had built the first version of what would become Kano. It didn’t work yet, but I knew all the right paths and started to share them with Pablo.

I created fixed objectives and scoring rules. I had to go quickly because our best friends and board game fans were coming over to spend a few days with us for New Year’s Eve. The size of the board was made smaller to make the experience around 30-minutes instead of 45 and, more importantly, create some space constraints. Removing eight squares made a big difference. I found a discarded plastic tray that would hold all the pieces in place and in order. It was so convenient that we later insisted that it should be part of the final game.

When our friends came and the testing began, I quickly observed that whilst the game was designed as a race to score points faster, they would play it just for the enjoyment of completing the puzzle and creating a picture. The masterpieces in particular were played more than anything. I realized it was needed as a guide to first plays, something clear and simple to do while learning how to play the game. I also quickly had to make sure they were balanced and did not score too many points. Interestingly enough, even in the final version, despite not being the highest scoring option on average the masterpiece remain the favorite of new players.

Our friends love for the game was real, and we played many times. They were eager to get their hands on a final copy. There was so much to do and we were far from finished.

The great news was that at this stage Matagot was ready to commit and find an artist to illustrate the game. It was through a board game miracle, with the help of a friend publisher recommendation they eventually got in touch with Jun Sato.

With this news came another one, and that is that the beautiful pots could not be manufactured at costs that would keep the game accessible. There were simply too many of them. So once again, it was form that pushed substance. This constraint gave us a choice: get rid of the beautiful pots, or have a fully functional game with fewer pots. Of course, we chose the latter, and this is how we made the calculation that if at any point in time every player had a maximum of five of them on the board, we could reduce significantly the total amount: 16 on the mat and 20 on the player boards made 36.
And since we have five colors, our target was 40 pots.

That seemed correct, but after a lot of testing, we realized that it didn’t quite flow properly. Too many pots could be stuck of the same color and the balance of colors was off in the central board. And since we really wanted that pool of five available colors to represent inspiration and therefore create interesting puzzles and constraints we removed one more from the bag, and this led to the limit of four on the board and seven of each color. Now players could not just wait for the color they wanted they had to change their plans, it just didn’t work if they stuck to the one or two pots of the color they hoped for.

The cost constraint led to a better gaming experience. Creativity it seems was at its best when challenged.

Part 3: Final Touches and Player Experience

From this point onwards, the theme drove almost all the rules decisions. For starters If there was a limit on the players’ board that’s because naturally the paint would dry. Dry paint would not be removed it would be made messy and cloudy, not scoring any points because it’s a mistake from the painter.

During advanced testing, somebody asked if they could paint over, and the obvious thematic answer was yes.

More testing brought up the question about claiming a picture on the following round instead of right away. Again, all the paint had been positioned on the canvas. It made no sense not to claim the picture, so the rule was obvious.

As we played more and more, and after many iterations, the initial listing of all things that could be painted started to move into something different that would become the red, white, and blue objectives. Red would be variety, White would be position on the board, and Blue was the position of paintings one next to the other. The puzzle had become quite crunchy; you constantly had to choose between speed and point efficiency. It eas impossible to complete all objectives. As we played more and more, people enjoyed the balance between the three types of objectives.

In order to reinforce the feeling of a race, we also had an intermediate scoring which pushed players to go faster right from the start. Competition was fierce and we loved it.

This is where a new problem appeared. As Matagot was getting art pieces from Jun Sato and cultural advice from Tomoko Sato, they were also running tests with a larger audience. It quickly appeared that we had created a great game for us. Not for new gamers. We had played it a lot, and enjoyed the additional challenge, we relished the frustration of never being perfect, of not finishing the painitng. So we had to go back to the drawing board. It was tough expanding so much, besides deciding what we would remove.

Another piece of advice that was provided to us was that people really enjoyed playing casually and were not so keen on the competitive aspect we enjoyed.

This led to a realization, we had a rule that gave negative point for empty squares. To ensure maximum impact of this rule the game ended at the end of the round following the round where at least one player had five or less empty squares. You read that right. It was hard. Only exceptionally good players would have a full board and complete painting at the end of a game. Frustrated casual gamers would carry on playing after game end. So the theme came to the rescue, clearly in a race to paint, someone had to cross the finish line.

Obviously, the negative scoring is also something that changed. The penalty led to ending the game one full turn after the board of any player had fewer than five squares open. Quite a lot of things to count! But players were frustrated because the painting was often incomplete. The end-frame rule was redesigned to please the casual Zen gamers. For gamers wanting competition, a bonus was awarded to whoever finished the board.

It is always a difficult decision once you’ve worked on developing balanced elements to remove them. This is where a friend, an extremely humble and talented designer, made a big difference. After playing the game a couple of times, he told me that the game had an expansion built In. The blue objectives. That framing was a perfect way to look at things. We didn’t have to abandon this design lifeline.

While the blue objectives were put it aside as an expansion that may or may not see the light of day, At first we also excluded the competitive mode, now accurately named Samurai, it seemed coherent to remove this harsher part of the game. We were getting close, but as things happened, Matagot realized—thanks to one of their contacts and a YouTuber—that the Samurai mode was truly a very short rule and that gamers who wanted to increase competition actually enjoyed it a lot, and it made its comeback into the game.

That simple rule really changes the way the game felt and I’m glad it was kept in the end, opening the game to a wider range of gamers.

That rule actually changes the game curve completely with the intermediate scoring. It also increases the balance between the red objectives and the white and Masterpieces. Everything is more balanced; mistakes are paid for faster.

To some degree the game can adapt to the audience. If no one wants to win, but rather enjoy the process of playing, it’s a simple Zen experiment with players often choosing what is pretty over what is point-efficient. If players want competition, it’s an exercise in speed and adaptability that runs with them, as fast as they can or want. Change your plans for a high pace or stick to your guns for a higher amount of points per square. But of course, keep your finger on the scoring trigger unless you want the others to decide when to score.

Jun and Tomoko Sato, who had played the game and came up with the wonderful idea of the clouds, provided incredible moral support. They adjusted some elements to be more accurate culturally but also accepted some core principles of the gameplay. The game really felt Japanese and we hope you’ll also feel like you are painting.

At this stage, we are after close to five years of a journey that started in the sands of Saqqara and ended in the cobbled streets of Kyoto.

We hope that this account of our journey was somewhat interesting and informative. Thank you for reading.

Thank you, Merci,
Angel & Pablo

by Matagot Contact

Editor's note: a designer diary for Kano was published at the same time, which you can read HERE.

Jun Sato first connected with Matagot via an Instagram DM. That short message revealed possibilities in an industry still unknown to us. At the same time, however, based on my past experience, I was convinced that the task would be extremely difficult for him. The reason for this is that, particularly over the past few years, he has focused his activities exclusively on creating purely original works rather than commercial illustrations.I was worried that having to follow specific color schemes or draw prescribed characters and buildings might stifle his creativity.

After a long discussion with Jun Sato, he expressed a strong determination to see this project through to completion. Accomplishing the task required an assistant―much like Sherlock’s Watson and although he already had several professional partners, he concluded that I was the ideal choice for this role, given my expertise in both painting and traditional Japanese styles. Initially, I suggested that he create the artwork digitally to facilitate the workflow, but he strongly preferred to paint on paper. When using an illustration drawn on paper for commercial purposes, the biggest issue is color specification.

With digital data, colors are assigned numbers, making them easy to recognize. It required some ingenuity to ensure that the colors drawn on paper were perceived accurately by both the workshop in Kyoto, Japan, and the company Matagot in Bordeaux, France.

In the early stages of illustration production, communication with Matagot was not yet fully established. However, it was necessary to align our understanding regarding the game's primary color palette.I painted candidate colors onto a paper board and shared them with Matagot through numerous videos and images. Maxime, who handled my case, was very polite, prompt, and kind in our email exchanges, which put me completely at ease. The creation of art always remains within Jun Sato in a mysterious form, never to be revealed to the outside world. However, in this job, I had to share information accurately and in a way that was easy for others to understand. Jun Sato kept notes to accurately track every color used in the illustration, but the volume of these notes eventually became enormous. The work proceeded with him recording the specific color mixtures and quantities of paint used in handwritten notes.

Another concern was grasping the rules of the game. We weren't very familiar with board games, so we felt uneasy about not knowing the rules. However, there was a wonderful opportunity to put those concerns to rest. Arnaud Charpentier, the CEO of Matagot, visited Japan and gave us the chance to play a demo version of the game. It was highly significant that Jun Sato met Mr. Arnaud Charpentier in person at that time. For an artist like Jun Sato, who creates original artwork, a dialogue with a client not only stimulates his creativity but also serves as a catalyst for pouring even deeper passion
into his work.

Grasping the game's rules was also a great help to him in shaping his ideas for the designs of the characters―such as the animals and people―that appear in the game, as well as for the design of the main animal. The puzzle pieces included "T" and "L" shapes, which gave Jun Sato a great deal of trouble. However, because he was accustomed to creating original works, he was able to devise and propose a way to harmonize them. He was particularly particular about the lines of the clouds. He paid meticulous attention to ensuring that the clouds in the background connected seamlessly.

In traditional Japanese painting, clouds represent time and space. In a game, even if you place a randomly acquired graphic element in a location that might seem unnatural at first glance, separating it with clouds allows the entire composition to come together as a unified painting.

In his original works, he consistently depicts a world where biodiversity is preserved and all forms of life pursue happiness together, cooperating with and understanding one another. Ultimately, in creating the illustrations for KANO, we succeeded in bringing to life a world where humans and nature coexist a defining characteristic of Jun Sato's work. I feel as though each of those pieces is a small miracle.

While Matagot (France) and Jun Sato (Japan) differ significantly in their values―stemming from the distinction between Western and Eastern perspectives―they were able to share a common goal for this project: giving form to themes of greater significance to humanity, such as humanity itself, nature, creativity, and sensibility. In artistic collaborations, it is rare to reach a state of mutual understanding that transcends nationality and identity. We are grateful for this valuable opportunity.

Furthermore, I have deeply moving memories associated with this project. After finishing the illustration work, Jun Sato and I reunited with Arnaud Charpentier at Tokyo Game Market and shared the joy of holding the completed KANO in our hands. After that, we traveled to Bordeaux, France, and visited Matagot, where we had the opportunity to interact with Maxime and the people involved in this project. An autograph session for Jun Sato was held in Bordeaux, where he was able to meet people who had been eagerly awaiting KANO. And the trip to Paris after Bordeaux became an unforgettable memory.

In his twenties, Jun Sato visited Paris repeatedly while dreaming of becoming an artist. Holding an autograph session for KANO in that city he had long admired gave him a wonderful opportunity to reflect on his original aspirations. Through this project, I was able to discover a new and different side of the artist Jun Sato. Jun Sato's existing fans likely feel the same way. A work of handmade art has transcended time (time zones) and space (national borders) to become a finished board game.

It is truly wonderful that people who play this game can enhance their sensitivity and enrich their hearts through the creative experiences it offers. We hope that many people will play KANO again and again, savoring the joy of collecting and arranging pieces each one a small miracle in itself.

JUN SATO Office
Art Director
TOMOKO SATO

by Steph Hodge

[imageid=9200434 medium rep]▪️ Devir is releasing Gaudí this month both at Spiel and at retail. New game design from Dani Garcia (Barcelona, Windmill Valley...), this new title will surely look stunning on any table. For 1-4 players and plays in 60-100 minutes.

From BGG:





▪️ Thunderworks Games released Questline recently from designers Marc-André Lavoie and Martin Lavoie. This game plays 1-6 players and takes 15 minutes. Small box card game with a real-time element.

From BGG:



▪️ Drops of Evil from Horrible Guild is available this Spiel! From designers Hjalmar Hach and Lorenzo Silva (The King's Dilemma, Railroad Ink: Deep Blue Edition...), I was told this has been brewing for a while! Perfect release for some October fun. Drops of Evil plays 2-4 players in about 60 minutes.

From BGG:




▪️ The Jailbreak is a cooperative scenario-based game from Adam's Apple Games, LLC. From designers Joel Kennedy & Karl Lange, this is a small box card game for 2-4 players and plays in 20 minutes. Great for those who love to work through missions that ramp in difficulty as you play! This game will have limited supply at Spiel and is set to be released in Q1 2027.

From BGG:

by Dominic Crapuchettes

The Nature system currently has a BoardGameGeek rating of 8.6 - well beyond my wildest expectations! This designer diary tells the story of its most recent module, Nature: Climate.

The first five modules introduced entirely new material, but Nature: Climate takes a different approach: it's a redesign of an Evolution expansion. I saved it for last because I knew it would be the most challenging module to create.

Evolution: Climate is widely regarded as the pinnacle of the Evolution series, so its successor was going to face intense scrutiny before it even shipped. It had big shoes to fill, and I was daunted by the challenge.

So I started with the people who know the game best: the players.

I reread every review, comment, and forum thread I could find, then surveyed nearly 500 Evolution: Climate fans with two simple questions: What should we never change? And what would you most like us to change?

The answers from that poll became my guiding principles.

What to Keep
Evolution: Climate is a highly thematic game, generating epic stories about how how life on Earth evolves over eons of time. That core concept was the sacred cow I could not tamper with.

Another aspect that stood out immediately is the extra trait slot. People loved the extra variety a fourth trait slot provided for their species, so Nature: Climate keeps it. And fans wanted more traits overall, so Nature: Climate doubles the number of the base game, making it the largest module yet. Since Nature allows duplicate traits, the number of possible species combinations grows far beyond a simple doubling.

What to Change
This was harder to solve: players wanted the climate to swing more dramatically, but they also wanted the game to feel less random. Those goals sound contradictory — more movement should mean more chaos, not less. But things are not always as they seem...

Looking closely at Evolution: Climate, we realized the problem wasn't how far the climate moved. It was when the movement took place. You adapt your species first, then learn which way the climate moves. You could make the smartest possible decision and still get punished by a threat you couldn't mitigate against.

So we flipped the sequence. In Nature: Climate, the climate moves first, then you adapt in response.

That single change allowed us to make the climate swings much more dramatic while giving players more strategic control. You know where the climate will end before deciding which deck to draw from and how to adapt your species.

The Climate Movement
Perfecting the climate movements took real work. One of my goals for the module was for it to tell a different story every time you play. I want players to think they've mastered the strategy, play again, and land in an entirely different ecosystem. One game might start in a temperate ecosystem and slowly slide into a blizzarding ice age. Another might spike into scorching heat immediately. Another might swing hard in one direction and then reverse course.

I would roll five times and plot the climate movement for a game, then do it again for 30 games
I have more than 20 tabs of systems I modeled by hand to see how the climate would move. Then I color coded the cells to help visualize the movement. It was a painstakingly stupid method.

Then Jared Cleary, one of the Nature playtesters, offered to model them in a statistical program. He could spit out 200,000 games in ten minutes!

Together, Jared and I modeled more than a dozen candidate systems and ran hundreds of thousands of simulations on each, tracking how fast the climate reached its extremes, how long it stayed there, and how often it reversed. The system had to move in a way that felt dramatic, but it also had to stay simple enough to explain at the table.

Here is a visualization of the system we decided upon.

With this model, once every two million games, the climate will march straight into an Ice Age, and then march immediately back, ending the game in a Scorching Age. It might never happen, but if it does, it will become the kind of story your group still talks about for years.

We weren't just balancing numbers. We were designing stories.

The two extremes are also deliberately asymmetric to increase the number of different stories that get told.

In an ice age, large, round animals have an advantage because they retain heat more efficiently. Think mammoths.

In extreme heat, the advantage reverses: smaller animals and heat-dissipating traits become valuable.

Those differences ripple through the ecosystem. Predators need to be at least as large as their prey, so cold climates can support large predators in ways that extreme heat cannot. Food availability changes, too. Warm, humid environments can produce enormous amounts of plant food, supporting far more animal life.

We also wanted the extremes to actually hurt. If an ice age could support as many thriving species as a lush rainforest, the simulation wouldn't feel right. The rules become deliberately more punishing at the edges of the climate track. That's where the world should feel like it's closing in.

So the climate track isn't simply a difficulty meter. It changes what kind of game you're playing. Different traits become valuable. Different species combinations work. Predator-prey relationships change. The synergies change.

That's exactly what we were after: enormous variety, real drama, ecosystems that transform as the climate does, and extremes that feel genuinely extreme, but underneath all of it, skill still had to matter.

by Justin Bell

Usually, I play games four days a week. Mondays, with my review crew; Wednesdays, with a group in Chicago I’ve known for years; Fridays with my wife; the occasional Saturdays with a group that gets together for a few hours in the afternoon. (I play games with the kids almost every day, so I’m not short on opportunities to chuck those dice.)

Working through multiple plays of review copies occupies much of my week, but on Wednesdays I usually play games from the personal collections of both myself and others. Three weeks ago, I hosted the Wednesday play session, and as the host, I got 3-4 “main” games ready to play by refreshing myself on the rules, a set that also ranged by player count that included Orléans, Coimbra, and Railroad Tiles. There was no chance we would play them all, but I like to be prepared…you just never know.

I also prep a couple of small box games when I host, shorter games like card games and party games that we can squeeze in with a few extra minutes.

On that night, my small box game of choice was Xylotar, the trick-taking game designed by Chris Wray that reimplements his original game Magic Trick. Xylotar hadn’t hit the table all year, so the dust was blowing around a bit in its section of the closet.

We wrapped up our game of Orléans, a five-player game that ran long. A couple guys from my table were cool doing something for about 20 minutes before heading home…and that’s when I met eyes with my copy of Xylotar.

Hello, old friend.



There’s a moment during the Xylotar teach—a moment that occurs AFTER players ask why the cover features a polar bear named Bobby McColdsnap deviously staring at a rainbow-colored xylophone synthesizer guitar, creating what is easily the richest backstory for any trick-taking game ever made—where I get to see the sparkle in the eyes of other players. It’s the same glint that I, myself, get every time I play the first of Xylotar’s three rounds.

“...so, after you organize the card values in your hand from high to low, tuck the ‘High Note’ card on the left-most side of your cards…then pass your entire hand to the person on your left,” I said. “Then take your newly-passed hand and fan out the cards face down in a line in front of you. That’s correct: you don’t know the exact value of the cards in your hand.”

Oh, we have something here, the player's faces seem to say.

That’s before they get to see the magic of the bidding system, quickly understanding how to carve out what kind of hand they have, and finding ways to hit their bid exactly to score five bonus points in a round.

Like all 3,700 trick-taking games released each year (a rough estimate), Xylotar is a trick-taking game with a twist. But it’s a blast. It’s a trick-taking game that plays 3-5 players, and I most prefer it at the max player count. It’s got cards with musical notes as suits, suits that range in total cards, and despite the fact that my big hands struggle to shuffle those cards, fanning them out to then learn that I have a terrible scoring hand for the round gets me all fired up to hit a bid of zero.

Xylotar is a game that I seem to fall in love with all over again every time I get it to the table. Part of that is because I love it, a fresh reminder of why I continue to occasionally push it to the table. And, part of it is because I love the reaction of other players when they try it.

“That first round…hmm. I liked that one a lot,” said one player following my most recent play.

“The bidding system is really cool,” said another.

Part of the attraction with Xylotar is that it is not a game everyone knows. “Hello, old friend” is likely not a line one uses when they whip out Terraforming Mars or Hot Streak or Jenga or a game that hobbyists likely know. Xylotar currently holds down spot 4,450 on BGG’s list of the top-ranked games in the database. If you are lucky, you had the chance to see someone from Bézier’s marketing team dancing around their booth at a convention in a polar bear suit.

This gives Xylotar a bit of cachet; it's a discovery for many players. My favorite moment when breaking out games like this comes when someone pulls up a game’s shopping listing on their phone and buys a copy while they are still at the table.

“Thanks for showing me Xylotar; I think my ____ [insert name of partner, gaming group, or roommate here] will like that, so I just grabbed a copy!”



Rediscovering the games that you already own is such a thrill.

Each time I play Hansa Teutonica, I find myself admiring its genius, even though I don’t choose to play it very often. I only seem to think about playing Concordia when I have to table something for six players, then we play it and find everyone musing about how we “need to play Concordia more often”, then we don’t. This really hits home every time I play an average (or worse!) game that was released earlier this year, and that inspires me to play similar games I liked more that were released five, eight, 20 years ago.

When I look for that older game, I utter the same line almost every single time when I peek into my game closet: “Hello, old friend.” The game was always great, but I neglected it for so long that I simply forgot how good I felt each time I got it to the table.

Just a few days ago, this happened again, when a friend suggested Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon for game night. I jumped at the chance. Even though I’ve played Shackleton Base and its expansion four times this year and it sits prominently on a shelf right in my eyeline at home, playing “Shack Town” with only the base game made me utter, out loud, “hello, old friend” to everyone in the room when I arrived at my friend’s house to find the game set up on the table.

Teaching the corporation rules got me all excited, as we discussed the corporation actions of Moon Mining, Sky Watch and To Mars. Drafting shuttles for resources, workers, and turn order felt like putting on that old, comfy, ratty sweater you wear when you are doing work around the house. I sipped bourbon and laughed like Santa as we worked our way through round-end maintenance and claiming workers from the crater. As I evacuated a laboratory from the crater using the To Mars corporation action, I thought back to previous plays featuring my favorite corporation combinations.

Even during my second or third turn of the first round, I knew it wasn’t about scoring the most points…I was already a winner because I was nestled in the warmth of a board game that brings me joy. That’s why we play, right?

by Emiliano Sciarra

The BANG! System's Long Voyage to the Caribbean
It may seem strange to say it now, with Black Flag! about to be published by DV Games nearly a quarter of a century after the release of the first edition of BANG!, but a pirate setting was actually the very first setting I considered for the second title in the BANG! System. The oldest notes I have managed to track down date back to a game simply titled Caribbean, dated March 30, 2004, but the project itself goes back to 2003, just one year after the release of the original game.

There were several reasons for this. One of them was that, at the time, the Caribbean setting was considered overused in board games (unfortunately missing the wave generated by Disney’s blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, released in Italy in September 2003, and the films that followed).

This very first incarnation of the game already featured the concept of the Ship, which had only two characteristics: Range and Size, while the number of Broadsides allowed each turn was fixed at two. In fact, much of Black Flag! was already there: Cannons, Sail and Sailor cards, the Storm (which at the time was actually a Doldrums), and above all a brilliant Mutiny card that allowed the player who used it to switch sides for as long as it remained in front of them. This card created what I considered an extremely interesting and layered decision: if I am an English player who has mutinied, how should I play? As a Spaniard, hoping to remain one until the end of the game? Or should I continue playing as an Englishman, trusting that someone will remove the Mutiny card before the game ends? It was all very compelling, but there were at least two problems to solve: players who had the Mutiny card tended to play it on themselves at the right moment; and even by forcing it to be played on others, the best strategy was to hold onto it until the very end, when the factions had become clear, hoping there would be no time left for anyone to remove it.

Even more complicated was finding a way to remove player elimination from the game: a daunting challenge that would keep me busy until 2010, when I came up with the scoring system later used in Samurai Sword. As anyone who studies the game carefully can see, player elimination in BANG! is not merely a stylistic choice: it is a fundamental pillar of almost every game mechanic as they were designed. For example, elimination is the game’s true timer: if you remove it, when does the game end? It also serves as the game’s intrinsic scoring system: the winner is determined by who is (or is not) still in play. Finally, it acts as an indirect balancing mechanism: a player may bleed themselves dry to eliminate another, but if they succeed, they make enormous, measurable, and permanent progress toward their objective, because the eliminated player will never return to seek revenge. This mechanism works well in a harsh and unforgiving Wild West setting, but it is far too punishing in other contexts — not to mention that some players dislike it, considering it an objective flaw, even though it is in fact a deliberate design choice, with both strengths and weaknesses.

The Roles were hidden until the end, and the Pirate, like the future Ronin of Samurai Sword, doubled their score.

Whenever your Ship was sunk, you could play one of the Ship cards in your hand. These Ship cards were shuffled into the deck together with all the others, and they could also be played simply to switch to a different vessel and restore your Hull Points to their maximum, at the cost of giving up your card draw for the turn. If your Ship was sunk and you did not play a Ship card, you were automatically assigned a Pinnace as a temporary replacement: a weak vessel that was easy to sink.
The game ended when the draw deck was exhausted, and to speed this up there were Hourglass cards which caused the top 8 cards of the deck to be discarded.

From Tobago to Kyoto
Despite reservations about the setting, development did not come to a complete halt. Six months later, the game resurfaced under the name Tobago. To avoid explicitly referring to Pirates, the independent faction was represented by a Dutchman: something that did not convince me at all, because a game about the golden age of piracy has to have Pirates flying the Jolly Roger! The Ghost Ship also made its appearance, brutally sinking your current Ship before passing to the next player, but allowing you, for one turn, to command a vessel far superior to any other. The Mutiny card was still there as well, along with all the problems it brought with it.

Publishing plans changed over time, and in 2008 the game took on a different shape and a different setting. Without going into too much detail, I experimented with a new scoring system (only points earned against members of your own faction counted, meaning it was necessary to keep track of who eliminated whom) and I had already decided to separate the equivalent of the Ships from the main deck.

For a while I continued working on the project without any significant breakthroughs. The game worked, but it was still somewhat rough around the edges, and the Mutiny mechanic had not yet been solved. I shifted my focus to future expansions for BANG! and especially BANG! Duel, until a few years later the discussion finally turned to creating the next game based on the BANG! System rather than just another expansion (and “just” is a relative term: every BANG! expansion requires the same meticulous care and playtesting as a full-fledged game). At first, it seemed the new game would be inspired by Chinese martial arts, but then came the request for a version set in feudal Japan.

A simple change of theme with only a handful of mechanical tweaks would have been enough, but I don’t like repeating myself, so I took the opportunity to expand and transform the original system. I therefore took the existing foundation and spent a couple of months immersed in studying the (wonderful) culture of Japan, searching for the right ideas and sources of inspiration for the cards.

I refined the scoring system thanks to a flash of insight that came to me while I was driving alone, mulling over the problem along the winding curves of the Via Aurelia highway. I also reworked the game flow into the form it has today, adding elements that fit the concepts of honor and traditional Japanese combat, including the rule that makes players untouchable if they have no cards in hand, the various Weapons that were actually used during the period, and so on. The concept of the Ship made no sense in that setting, but other cards did: for example, the Peasant from the Rising Sun expansion is exactly what the Sailor used to be, while Quick Draw corresponds to the Cannons.

It was painstaking work, but it paid off in the end, as I had the immense satisfaction of receiving compliments and full approval from our Japanese partners. It confirmed that doing serious research when designing games can lead to the results you hope for — and sometimes even to results beyond your expectations.

Back to the Caribbean
Samurai Sword was a success (and still is), and I had already begun working on the next setting, but for various reasons the project was put on hold and only revived in 2020; and even then, to my great disappointment, it still wasn't about pirates...

When the plans changed once again, after another three years and yet another prototype built from scratch and ultimately abandoned, I finally decided the time had come to stop hesitating and finish what I had started, bringing BANG! to the Caribbean once and for all. Codename: CaraiBANG!

The beginning was not encouraging. The rules I had developed twenty years earlier no longer fully satisfied me, and the game also needed a new scoring system because, as before, I didn't want to simply transplant Samurai Sword onto the high seas. The real challenge was to make it explicit which side was ahead, reducing the long discussions that often arise among Samurai Sword players (which are fascinating, but not for everyone), while still avoiding the need to reveal everyone’s Role, especially the Pirate’s. After an initial phase in which it seemed the game might sink before it even left port, I came up with the idea of a “tug-of-war” between the two teams, with the Pirate acting as an additional weight on the scale. With the Roles now clearly defined, the Pirate no longer had to ask, “Who should I eliminate?” but rather, “How far can I afford to push the Treasure in one direction?” The game became a constant struggle for control of the score, without losing the tension that is characteristic of the BANG! System.

At first, the Roles were still hidden, but for the tug-of-war system to work, it had to be clear what at least one of the two Roles involved actually was: the one belonging to either the player who had been sunk or the attacker. Years of experience, especially with the original game, had shown that with experienced players, the Roles are often fairly obvious after just a couple of rounds around the table. So, my playtest group and I asked ourselves: “Why not reveal the Role of the player who was sunk? It should take about two or three rounds to sink everyone, which is roughly the same amount of time it takes players to deduce the Roles in BANG!” The insight proved to be a good one, and suddenly many pieces of the puzzle fell beautifully into place.

The original rules I had developed back in 2003 were not so bad after all when viewed from this perspective: the Ships, with the addition of Ammunition and a cost, worked very well and fit the setting perfectly, becoming almost like an extra character; and the pirate theme, enriched by the films released in the intervening years, provided wonderful ideas such as Parley, the Kraken, and Davey Jones: concepts that were not invented by the screenwriters, but which those films helped bring to the general public. The “drifting” rule (draw a card as soon as you have no cards in your hand outside your turn) was introduced to avoid punishing players too severely for attacking and then being left defenseless, while also adding a great deal of unpredictability and many memorable situations.

Two major obstacles remained: the endgame was either too slow or too predictable, and it proved impossible to balance even-numbered tables as satisfactorily as odd-numbered ones, since the sides were too asymmetrical and the dynamics were simply too different. After a couple of years of experimentation and endless discussions, I arrived at the introduction of the Corsair in place of the Pirate in games with four, six, and eight players: a fascinating Role, and one that is both challenging to play well and difficult to design. As for the ending, for about a year the most stable version had already featured the Ghost Ship haunting the players, but it was too slow because it skipped over players who had been sunk. Changing it into Davey Jones and making its effect apply even to players without a Ship dramatically shortened the game's duration, as if by magic, while also making it consistently stable. The final piece was finally in place.

In Port
Looking back, I am very satisfied with how it’s turned out. In terms of gameplay, I see Black Flag! as sitting halfway between BANG! and Samurai Sword: the former is raw and visceral, while the latter is more refined and lends itself to highly elaborate discussions among the players. Black Flag! reduces the need for speculation by making the score immediately visible to everyone, at the cost of giving up hidden Roles until the end: and, in my opinion, that is an entirely acceptable compromise.

Above all, neither the classic strategies of the original game nor those of its Japanese-inspired successor apply here. As a result, this is, in every respect, a brand-new game with an identity entirely its own.

My only regret? Having to abandon my beloved Mutiny card. Unfortunately, it stubbornly refused to be balanced, and in the end, I had to cut it. Many people think that designing a game is all about coming up with one brilliant idea. In reality, it often means having the strength to let go of dozens of brilliant ideas that simply refuse to work in that particular context.

It is amusing to think that the second derivative title for the BANG! System was already conceived back in 2003, yet had to wait more than twenty years before setting sail. Apparently, it simply had to find the right wind.

And who knows, perhaps one day the tide will finally turn for the Mutiny card as well.

by Mark William

Howdy everyone. I am Mark William, former video editor, current data insights officer and the designer of Tanglung. This post is adapted from the blog series that I wrote on the game’s page.

The Malay word tanglung [tahng-loong] is a direct loan from the Cantonese term for lanterns: 灯笼 [dang1 lung4], literally meaning ‘light’ and ‘basket’. Brought in to the Malay Archipelago by early Chinese Settlers, paper lanterns have been part of the Mid-Autumn Festival for centuries. Lighting up animal-shaped tanglung and carrying them around neighbourhoods together have now become a shared cultural experience for Malaysians.

Tanglung Tokens
Tanglung is my first published game, developed by Evan CheahEvan Cheah, illustrated by Yuki Joe Gaik KeeYuki Doodles and published by LUMALUMA. It is a game that tries to capture the feelings of the final bit of chess where you are trying to corner the king.

To have a better idea of what I am talking about, here is a brief description of the rules.


Limitation Breeds Creativity
There is a saying that necessity is the mother of invention. I like to think if that is so, limitation is the father of creativity. Tanglung started its life as an entry to the 2025 ABGF MY (Asian Board Game Festival Malaysia) 18 card game competition. During that time, I was already playing around with the notions of minimalism. Of ‘pack small and play big’, and the competition’s constraints of 18 cards with no extra components perfectly encapsulates that idea.

Tanglung (formerly known as We Are Kings) won 1st runner up in the ABGFMY 2025 18 card competition
If I couldn’t have a big sprawling table presence I could still take up that play space not physically, but mentally. The game is represented in reality by 18 cards, but it exists in the yomi/donkey space that is the players minds.

Shedding Light On Its Purpose
Initial versions of this game were serviceable, but initial playtests had a recurring thread in the feedback. What was the point? The game was technically sound, but the possibilities felt endless and gameplay felt like busywork. It lacked a pulse.

The prototype stage
In the beginning, the sole objective was capturing your opponent twice. But that felt more like a side effect rather than an objective. But through some deep soul-searching and playtesting revealed two more goals. Flipping the final facedown card when explored, and outwitting your opponent tactically by leaving them with no valid moves. Now the game has a direction.

3 Acts Told in 16 Cards
Cole Wehrle said that “Games are these weird narrative spaces. You can’t have beginnings, middles, and ends the way a story can have.” And I agree - but games still need progression.

We Are Kings (Tanglung) was extensively tested both offline and online
At first all 16 cards were set up facedown. Players had a huge possibility space where every move felt as valid as every other. So I thought let’s have some cards face up - that signposted where players may want to go, and gave a shape to the decision space.

But it still felt static where the beginning of the game felt the same as the end. So then we added the rule that when you use the cards for their movement powers, they are then removed. Having cards be removed as you use them also helped to reduce mental load while also letting the game have an escalating tension.

[imageid=9768099 medium square]
Seeing the Lantern For the Trees: Letting Go
This part will be significantly different from the designer diary - as it was written before the game was released.

I have been in the creative industry for the bulk of my working life. I was no stranger to that delicate dance between your creation as a personal expression and as a professional and collaborative pursuit. Yet I would be lying if I said that it wasn’t a struggle.

As designers, we become attached to ideas, mechanics, and the stories we tell ourselves about our designs. Yet if I held on too tight and did not allow people into this space that is Tanglung; I believe it would not have made as much of an impact as it does.

Tanglung gave Yuki the illustrator a reason to dive deep into the history, aesthetics and cultural significance of the lanterns to the Malaysian people. Tanglung gave LUMA a reason to share about the lanterns at the George Town Heritage festival. My mother-in-law was even interviewed as she made lanterns the traditional way when she was younger.

Gameplay wise I’ve seen the smiles that people had while playing the game, the laughter, and of course that face when you are locked in - brows furrowed, jaws clenched and for some people red faced, yet internally they are having the time of their lives (one of the inspirations for Tanglung was this exact feeling when I was playing Hive with a friend and we didn’t speak throughout the game but as soon as it ended we were laughing, teasing and giving play-by-play analysis of what went right and wrong).

Perhaps most humbling of all are the testimonials from players using Tanglung (which has a puzzly but cosy solo mode) to keep their minds active and comfort themselves in hospital wards post-op. That deeply moved me.

This is all a long-winded way of saying: If I hadn’t let go, Tanglung would have just been my game. But by letting people in, it became ours - a shared experience, with effects outgrowing the people involved.

Tanglung is available at retail through “Play Play Asia” an onsite shop that curates tabletop games from across Asia.
It will be at Spiel 2026 in Essen, Germany. I will also be there (Say hi!)
We are working to get it available to be purchased online in the future.

by Nicolò Chioato

Twenty Days, a Couch, and a Rubik's Cube
It was the autumn of 2022, and I had just undergone surgery for two herniated discs in my back.
My recovery came with some fairly strict instructions: I couldn't stay on my feet for too long, but more importantly, I couldn't sit down. That meant no board games, no computer, and not much television either. For about twenty days, I could essentially do only two things: walk or lie down.
A tragedy.
Fortunately, at the time I was learning how to solve a Rubik's Cube. So I spent a lot of those days lying on the couch with the cube in my hands, turning it over and over, studying it, and trying to memorize the algorithms needed to solve it. After staring at it for long enough, one day a rather strange thought occurred to me:

"What if the creator had chosen these particular colors for a reason?"

What if yellow meant loot? Blue meant the sea? Red meant danger? Green meant open plains?
What if, all these years, we had been solving the cube as a simple puzzle without realizing that behind those colors there could have been a story of journeys, monsters, treasures, and adventures?

Of course, I didn't actually believe Ernő Rubik had hidden a fantasy game inside his cube. But the idea was there now.

One Face, One Tiny Adventure

There was one property of the cube that particularly fascinated me: the six center pieces always remain in the same position relative to one another. Everything else moves, rotates, and gets scrambled, but the centers do not. So I started imagining that each center could represent a hero, while the eight squares surrounding it formed a sort of micro-map. Suddenly, when I looked at one face of the cube, I could see a scene.

The yellow hero, for example, became a thief, specialized in recovering as much treasure as possible. There was a monster to his right. Another was approaching from the opposite corner, skirting the orange desert in front of him. Behind him, the sea blocked his escape, but to his left there was treasure waiting to be claimed.

All he had to do was defeat the monster beside him, and the loot would be his. Nine colored squares had become a tiny adventure.

One of the first scenes I imagined while looking at a face of the cube: the yellow hero surrounded by monsters, terrain, and treasure.
The First, Gloriously Useless Prototype

At that point, I wanted to see the idea physically in front of me. I happened to own a LEGO cube onto which pieces could be attached on every side. I could even place a LEGO minifigure in the center of a face, which seemed perfect for representing the hero. It felt almost made for the job. So I built the first prototype of Dungeon Cube.

It didn't work.

The first Dungeon Cube prototype. Much more useful for discovering what not to do than for actually playing the game.
The problem was that I needed to communicate far more information than those tiny LEGO pieces could convey. A monster, a chest, a trap, a coin, a mountain — on such a small space, each element needed to be recognizable immediately. LEGO pieces were either too abstract, or, when I tried to make them more descriptive, simply too large. I needed symbols.

From LEGO Pieces to Stickers

The second prototype kept the LEGO hero in the center of the face, but the other squares were replaced with stickers. Monsters, treasures, and obstacles could finally have a clear visual identity.

The second prototype. Visually, it was getting much closer to the final idea — but the actual game was still missing.
Now I had a hero, and I had a vocabulary of symbols. The important question remained: What was the player actually supposed to do with them? My first idea was to connect the symbols physically to the hero. If a mission required the hero to equip a sword, the sword symbol should end up next to the minifigure's arm. If the hero had to confront a monster, that monster should be directly in front of him. And that was when the core mechanism of the entire game began to emerge:

Manipulate the cube to bring the right symbol into the right position.

The missions would give narrative meaning to those configurations. You were not simply moving symbol X into position Y: that symbol might be a sword the hero needed to wield, a monster they had to face, or a treasure they needed to reach. A configuration of nine squares could tell a story.

Giving the Colors a Meaning

At this point I returned to the question that had started the whole project: "What if these colors really did mean something?" I decided that each color should have its own thematic identity.

Red would contain monsters, dangers, and threats to fight or avoid.

Yellow would contain treasures, coins, gems, and other rewards.

Blue would represent the sea, water, and similar elements.

White would contain allies, help, and generally positive elements.

Green would represent travel and open spaces.

Orange would represent mountains, difficult terrain, and challenging routes.

These associations changed and evolved during development, but one thing I still find amusing is that the final version of Dungeon Cube remains surprisingly faithful to them. I now had the heroes, the symbols, the colors, and the missions.

It was time to actually play the game.

A Puzzle Wasn't Enough

The first tests were disappointing. Simply using a symbol's position relative to the minifigure wasn't precise enough. It wasn't always clear which square counted as being "in front" of the hero, when a monster was supposed to attack, when it could be defeated, or exactly what consequences it should have. I could have written everything explicitly on the mission card: "Move this symbol to exactly this square."
But then the game would have become: "I managed to get symbol X into position Y in three moves instead of four."

That wasn't what I wanted. I wanted the player to have a specific objective, but I also wanted things to happen while they were trying to accomplish it.
Perhaps while trying to reach a treasure, they would encounter a monster. Perhaps they would be forced across a mountain and suffer fatigue. Or perhaps they would unexpectedly discover something useful. The cube couldn't just be the puzzle. It also had to generate the consequences of solving that puzzle.
That was when I came up with what I called the connection points.

Connection Points

Every symbol on a movable square would have one or more small connection points. The hero's center square would have corresponding points of its own.
Whenever a connection point on an outer square lined up with a matching point on the hero, that symbol became active.

That was all I needed. Now you could look at your face of the cube and immediately understand what was happening.

- If the activated symbol was the one required by the mission, great.

- If it was a monster, you fought the monster.

- If it was an obstacle, you suffered its effect.

- If it was a bonus, even better.

Connection points solved one of the fundamental problems of the design: they made it immediately clear which elements on the face were interacting with the hero.
For the first time, you could actually read a face of the cube. The system seemed to work. Then I ran into a much bigger problem.

Too Many Moves, Too Many Monsters, Too Much of Everything

I started writing more complicated missions. A mission might require, for example, two different symbols to be present on the same face at the same time. To create that kind of configuration, the player inevitably needed to make several moves. Initially, I resolved the hero's face after every single move.

It was a disaster.

Getting two symbols into the right positions could require a long sequence of rotations. Every rotation meant checking the face again, activating new symbols, fighting more monsters, and resolving more bonuses and penalties. A simple mission turned into an endless chain of effects. It was clumsy, slow, and almost impossible to control. This problem stopped development for weeks. I had the object. I had the concept. I had even found a way to turn the squares of the cube into a little story. But I couldn't turn it into a game that was actually enjoyable to play. I seriously considered abandoning the project.

The Solution Was Already Inside the Cube

Then, one day, I was back on the couch. I was studying algorithms for solving the Rubik's Cube when I noticed something that, of course, anyone familiar with the cube already knows: some algorithms allow you to rotate the lower layer — or even the two lower layers — without changing the upper face.
And suddenly I saw the solution. Not every move needed to have the same cost.

A player could freely make any number of moves that did not disturb their own face, while having only a limited number of moves that were allowed to change it.
In the version I was developing, this meant having two moves that could disturb your own face, plus unlimited moves that did not, before resolving it.

That one rule changed the entire game.

Complex missions could now be solved in a reasonable number of steps. Players could focus on the objective and manipulate the rest of the cube to prepare their position, but unexpected consequences still happened. I had finally found the balance I was looking for: enough control to make plans, but not enough control to prevent every surprise. That was probably the moment when Dungeon Cube actually started working as a game.

Six Faces, Six Heroes

I began writing missions and testing them.
But while working on them, another detail of the Rubik's Cube kept returning to my mind. There are six center pieces. And in my game, each center represented a hero. Until then, I had mostly thought of the game as an individual experience, but why not use all six faces? What if several players played on the same cube?

I loved the idea of the cube representing a single shared world viewed from different perspectives. Each player could have their own hero, their own face, and potentially their own asymmetric abilities. Starting from the mission system, the most natural multiplayer structure was a race. Everyone would try to complete the same mission, but each player would work from their own face of the cube. At the end of their turn, they would physically pass the cube to the next player. The first player to complete the objective would be the one who had managed to do it using fewer turns — and therefore fewer meaningful moves — than the others.

This was not a dexterity race. Nobody had to perform cube algorithms faster than anybody else. It was a race of efficiency. And during the first multiplayer tests, something appeared that I hadn't fully planned.

When you improve your own face of a Rubik's Cube, you inevitably change the others as well. In other words, while trying to help yourself, you are potentially making life more difficult for your opponents. With the rule allowing unlimited moves that did not disturb your own face, this could even become intentional. A player could use those "free" moves to leave as many problems as possible on the next player's face, forcing them to spend their precious moves clearing the obstacles. The interaction came directly from the physical structure of the cube. And once players became comfortable with the system, it was a lot of fun.

IDEAG

By this point, the prototype had almost reached its final mechanical form. I tested it with friends, collected feedback, and continued making changes. Eventually I brought it to IDEAG, the Italian gathering where board game designers bring prototypes to playtest and exchange feedback. That was when I noticed something I hadn't really been able to judge while testing mostly with people I already knew.

The prototype attracted people.

A Rubik's Cube turned into a board game was immediately curious. People would stop, look at it, and want to understand what it was and how it worked.
I received a lot of feedback there, and several of those suggestions found their way into later versions. The game worked. But there was still one thing that didn't feel right. Failing a mission was too frustrating.

Failing, but Becoming Stronger

That problem found its solution after the game was signed by Red Glove. Development was handled by Federico Dumas, who introduced an idea that completed the structure of the game: a roguelite-style progression system. If a player failed a mission, they would not simply start over from scratch. The failed attempt still earned them a reward that could be spent on bonuses and upgrades. On the next attempt, they would therefore be slightly stronger. If they failed again, they would gain even more tools to work with.

Failure was no longer just a punishment. It had become part of the progression. This also meant that a particularly difficult mission could no longer become an impassable wall. You might not beat it on your first attempt, but by continuing to play you would gradually accumulate enough advantages to find a way through. That was the missing piece.

Six Heroes, One Story

At that point, the main mechanisms were finally in place. But the game still needed something I had not been able to give it myself: a real story capable of connecting all those missions. This was where Simona Lombardo joined the project. She wrote six stories, one for each of the game's heroes. Those six adventures were not separate stories. They intertwined into one larger epic narrative, with meetings, twists, and different endings. That narrative structure finally gave the missions something they had previously possessed only in embryonic form:

A context.

A reason to face them.

A world to be part of.

Dungeon Cube

Then came the illustrations, the final graphic design, and the components. And the little prototype born during a forced recovery — after passing through a LEGO cube, stickers, minifigures, connection points, countless tests, and more than a few moments when I thought the whole thing would never work — finally became:

Dungeon Cube: La Furia dei Drahakor

Dungeon Cube: La Furia dei Drahakor in its final form.
Looking back, I find it amusing that so much of the final game was already hidden, although I couldn't possibly have known it at the time, inside the very first question I asked myself while lying on the couch with a Rubik's Cube in my hands:

"What if those colors really meant something?"

by Steph Hodge

[imageid=9848748 medium rep]▪️ Czech Games Edition (CGE) announced Codenames Party! An all-new way to play Codenames. Now on Netflix! You simply need your phone connected to the tv as a controller. If you have Netflix, you are ready to go!

From the newsletter:





▪️ Office Dog released Gunsen: The Battle for Toshi Ranbo from designers Matthew O'Malley and Ben Rosset (Fromage & The Search for Planet X). This game plays 2-6 players and has a box playtime of 60-90 minutes. The race is on to complete 7 objectives first.

From BGG:



▪️ Azul Kids from asmodee is available now! From designer Michael Kiesling (Azul). This is a new stand-alone game for children and families. Designed with kids in mind ages 5+, Azul Kids plays 2-4 players in 20 minutes.

From the Asmodee Website:




▪️ Capsule Collector will be one of many games found at Spiel from Korea Boardgames. Capsule Collector is a small box card game for 2-4 players and plays in 15 minutes. From designer Joohyun. Be sure to check out all the titles from Korea Boardgames!

From BGG: