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 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 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 Justin Bell

“I mean…how are you DOING all of that???”

The exasperated player to my right had finished their turn, and they were staring at my player board as I was finishing up a very long turn of my own. The game we were playing: Timespan, the upcoming SPIEL Essen release from the team at Alion—by Dr. Ø…the same publisher that gave us last year’s strategy title Recall.

As profiled by the designers themselves in a recent Designer Diary posted here on BGG, Timespan is a peaceful, simultaneous play civilization game. Now that I’ve played it, Timespan has a few similarities to the recent “conveyor belt” civ game Ancient Knowledge.

While I enjoyed Ancient Knowledge, I think Timespan is the game that will connect with more players, in large part due to its excellent—and exceptionally clean—action and resource management systems, its setup variety, a unique batch of cards, and a very straightforward teach.

That, and the combos. Oh my goodness, the combos.



As I placed Timespan into the permanent collection—seven plays in, it’s safe to say that Timespan is a keeper—I looked at my other games that offer sexy, combotastic things I look for, especially when the player count stays low.

The player count bit is worth noting, because as much as I love combos, I don’t like to wait for every other player in a four-player game to finish combos of their own. So, give me my combos, but all I need is enough time to figure out my next series of combos…ideal for a two-, maybe three-player operation.

The loaded combo plate game I come back to the most is Tiletum, a Board&Dice release designed by Daniele Tascini and Simone Luciani. I love Tiletum because I love dice and I love combos…but, I generally avoid Tiletum at its full, four-player count. Two or three players? Perfect. That way, I can wrap up a turn, start milling on the ways I can attack my next turn based on the dice left on the action wheel, and by the time I have a few thoughts, bam: I’m up again.

It’s the moment during any combo-rich turn, when you unleash your genius on the rest of the table (stay with me here), that I love most. “I’m going to take the light blue die, which gives me six iron, but only one action point, to take the Merchant action. But thanks to that move I made earlier, I have a +3 bonus action point marker for Merchant actions, so that gives me a total of four action points.”

At this moment, your friends might be giving you the side-eye…but, no matter. Remember: you are a genius.

“I’m going to use a bonus tile to take a two-point Architect action, so that I can move into position to use the iron and some stone I picked up on a previous turn. Then, I’m going to hoover up a couple more action tiles, then build this pillar in Firenze but also fulfill a contract with that iron I just picked up…”

And on and on. In a game of Tiletum, there will be three or four times—maybe more, depending on the players’ skill levels—where you feel like the queen of the world, the king of the castle, a noble of distinction, as you round out a turn with a final, massive VP salvo of scoring bombs that will make you say something out loud akin to “the prosecution rests, your honor.”

And it will feel good. No…it will feel great.

Sometimes, it’s not even about winning the game. It’s about setting up the massive combo plate that you will deliver late in the third round of a four-round epic, by—depending on the game—moving your pieces into place at just the right moment to sell everything you can all at once, or spend six workers across two action areas to fulfill two huge public milestones and trigger end-game scoring for the card tableau that’s been waiting to explode for a few turns now.

Now, watching another player’s combo can lead to mixed emotions, certainly like what I mentioned at the start of this article. “Track envy” might kick in as you watch another player’s combo land them at the end of a 15-space track that you have no chance of reaching. Or, you might celebrate another player’s huge turn with an envious, mocking round of applause as you wonder how that player was able to accomplish so many crucial game elements with a single worker. Or, you might just nod in approval, as you wrap up combos of your own.

I have called out my love affair with Rats of Wistar here before; SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is another combo plate special. Sometimes, the combos are small, but I still love them, in games as varied as En Route, Inventions: Evolution of Ideas, or Yokohama. When one thing gets me even a single other thing that allows me to trigger an action I otherwise could not, I want to taste that moment…because I want to feel clever as I can.

Combos give you that. And Timespan…Timespan has a LOT of that.



Like the best combo-rich environments, Timespan offers a very nice, slow burn that crescendos into a final round that many of you will need to experience in order for it to be believed. I’ve now seen games where it feels like reaching 75 points will be a struggle before the fifth and final action phase…then the game ends, and you look up to see that you have 133 points. Or maybe a lot more.

It is for this reason that I think many players, media, and industry types will have Timespan on their end-of-year top 10 lists. As the Diary indicated, Timespan is the kind of medium-weight Euro with zero direct conflict. As much as I love direct conflict in other games, Timespan is very clearly going for a different angle—”peace” is a trackable, scorable resource—and many people in my network are looking for a game that can be just as robust solo as it can be with other players.

So, come for the setting and the theme as a race through history, although I would admit that Timespan doesn’t really feel like a civ game. Fine, but stay for the combos.

During one of my multiplayer games, I showed the new players how a first round could look, and even during that sampling of gameplay, the two other people sitting with me began to see the magic of getting resources, then using the upgrade system to buy basic resources like wood or spending them to upgrade different resources, to then have enough resources to buy that card you thought was out of reach in the game’s first round.

With an expanded worker pool and an action tableau unique to each player, Timespan dials up the combos to fever pitch even by its third action phase. From time to time, I would look up and see other players literally giggling with excitement as they were messing around with their tableau. Luxury tiles boost action strength. Advancing on any of the game’s five tracks (science, culture, spaceship, balloon, and ship) might offer bonuses that change the scope of that round in real time. A player’s tech board might have a one-time bonus that feeds the start of a new combo.

Getting all of this into a 90-minute package (or about an hour when playing solo) is quite a feat…but, again, simultaneous play changes everything. Now I see why so many designers are coming up with ways to squeeze these efficiency engine-building experiences into tighter timeframes: everyone loves the puzzle, and no one likes the waiting.

Love a good combo? I’d love to hear from you. What are some of your favorites? And do we need to add a “combo” family to the BGG categories we use to track games?

by Justin Bell

Welcome to my second edition of “Behind the Hype”; if you missed the first, I spoke with Eveline Foubert at Mighty Boards a few months ago.

This week, I’m sharing a conversation I had with my friend and colleague Rawan Anbar at Gigamic, the massive French publisher and distributor of quick, family-friendly abstracts, party, and strategy titles such as Quarto, Looot, Akropolis and the team’s upcoming SPIEL Essen release, Odysseus. Between a video call and some back-and-forth via e-mail, our condensed conversation is highlighted below. Enjoy!



Justin Bell (JB): Hey hey, Rawan! Hope life in France is treating you well today. Let’s start with your time at Gigamic; how did you find this role, and were you always interested in doing marketing work in tabletop?

Rawan Anbar (RA): Hey Justin! The weather isn’t great in France today, but I’m doing very well. I found the role through LinkedIn. I had just graduated when I came across the job posting, so I decided to apply. The process moved very quickly: I had a video interview two days later, then they invited me for an in-person interview the following day. About a week later, I received the good news that I had been offered the position. I have now been at Gigamic for more than four years. To be honest, the board game industry was not originally part of my career plan, but I am really grateful that I had the opportunity to enter this world. It is such a fun and welcoming industry, full of passionate people. I have had the chance to meet wonderful people—publishers, content creators, retailers, and of course my own colleagues. It has been a really rewarding experience, and I’m very happy to be part of it.

***

JB: Gigamic has been in business for almost 30 years, correct? As an established brand, I’m curious to understand Gigamic’s definition of its market as well as the ways that it markets products to that core market. Many of the Gigamic games I have reviewed over at Meeple Mountain have generally been quick, but outside of that, the broad themes vary quite a bit. How do you and the team define your core audience?

RA: Gigamic has actually been creating games for more than 35 years. At our core, we are a family-oriented publisher: we aim to create games that bring people together, whatever their age or level of experience. Our catalogue is diverse. We do have some titles for more experienced players, but our main focus is on accessible family and party games. Akropolis, one of our flagship titles, is a good example: it offers meaningful strategic choices while remaining easy to learn and enjoyable for a wide range of players. We want to move away from the idea that board games are only for dedicated gamers. For us, games should be welcoming, social, and fun for everyone, from children and families to occasional players and more experienced board gamers.



JB: Being a French company, it makes sense that Gigamic is pretty big in France, and I know your team’s presence at shows like Festival International des Jeux in Cannes is always going to be sizable. But outside of France, how does Gigamic market its catalog? I’m curious about Gigamic on the global stage.

RA: Internationally, we have a dedicated export team made up of three people: Thibaut, Pierre, and Benoît. They work closely with our distribution partners around the world, including in markets such as South Korea, Mexico, Japan, Germany, and many others. Their role is to build strong relationships with our distributors, introduce them to our new releases, and support them in bringing Gigamic games to local audiences. They regularly travel to meet partners in person and attend trade shows and more local events. Maintaining that human connection is particularly important to us. Every market has its own culture, players, and retail landscape, so working closely with local distributors helps us present the right games in the right way.

***

JB: When you are not at shows, where are you based? So many of my tabletop connections work out of offices, but just as many work from home. What is your situation, and what do you prefer in terms of work environment?

RA: We are based in northern France, more specifically in Wimereux. One of Gigamic’s core values is maintaining a close, human, and family-like working environment. We are mainly office-based, although employees can work from home one day a week. This balance works well for us. Remote work provides flexibility, but being together in the office most of the time helps us maintain strong internal relationships, collaborate more easily, and work as a real team. In a creative industry like ours, informal conversations and a shared enthusiasm for games are also an important part of how we work.



JB: In my “Behind the Hype” interview with Eveline, we talked a bit about crowdfunding…but it seems like Gigamic does not use the crowdfunding model for release, with all of your “homegrown” games going straight to retail. What is Gigamic’s stance on crowdfunding new titles?

RA: Gigamic’s main approach is to bring our games directly to retail through our established distribution network. We value the relationships we have built with retailers and distributors, and we want our games to be accessible to players through those channels. Crowdfunding can be a very useful model for certain types of projects, especially larger productions or games with a strong collector-focused audience. However, for Gigamic’s core catalogue, our focus is on developing games that can have a long life in retail and be easily available to a wide audience. We are always open to following changes in the market, but our priority remains creating accessible games and supporting our retail partners.



JB: When you sent me a review copy of your upcoming SPIEL release Odysseus, I had to laugh, and everyone in my circles said the same thing when they saw the box: “it was pretty smart to release a game called Odysseus around the same time that The Odyssey hit theaters worldwide.”

So, there’s obviously a big marketing tie-in to the movie. As a marketing leader, that seems like an easy win. Was the game’s theme always tied to Odysseus, or was that just a lucky moment?

RA: The Odysseus theme was part of the game from the very beginning—it comes from the game’s own creative identity and mechanics. The timing with The Odyssey film is a very fortunate coincidence rather than an official tie-in. The film has created a broader cultural interest in the story and in Greek mythology, which makes this an exciting moment to introduce the game to players. It has also helped us from an SEO perspective: more people are currently searching for Odysseus, The Odyssey, and Greek mythology, which increases the game’s visibility online ahead of its release and helps new audiences discover it.



JB: How are you marketing Odysseus to the strategy gamer channels and markets? What are you doing to help the title stand out?

RA: For Odysseus, we are building a multi-channel campaign designed to reach strategy gamers while also making the game visible to a wider board game audience. At the beginning of October, we are planning a contest and giveaway here on BoardGameGeek, which is an important platform for players looking for new strategy titles. We are also producing a trailer in both French and English to present the game’s universe, gameplay, and strategic depth to international audiences. We will support the launch with digital advertising across social media and relevant websites, as well as targeted communication through our press contacts and board game influencers. They will help introduce the game to their communities through previews, content, and coverage around the release. At SPIEL Essen, Odysseus will also have dedicated banners to make it more visible on-site. Our goal is to create visibility before the show, give players a clear idea of the experience the game offers, and make sure it stands out both online and on the convention floor.



JB: What do you wish more players understood when it comes to the ways games are marketed and sold?

RA: I think I would like more players to understand that marketing a game is not just about making it visible—it is about helping the right people discover it and understand why it might be right for them. There are so many games released every year, so even a very good game needs a clear message. We have to explain the experience behind it: who it is for, how easy it is to learn, how it feels to play, and what makes it special. It is also a long-term process. A game does not become successful overnight just because of one post or one review. It takes communication, relationships with retailers and distributors, events, content creators, and, most importantly, positive experiences shared by players themselves. At Gigamic, we try to be honest and clear about what each game offers, so that players can find the games that genuinely match what they are looking for.



JB: Although you seem to be pretty good at the abstract games you show me every year at conventions, I always wonder about how much time you spend playing games outside of your “day job.” So…do you play a lot of games? What are some of your favorites?

RA: Actually, I’m not a hardcore board gamer, and I think that gives me a valuable perspective in my role. It helps me look at our games with fresh eyes and better understand the experience of people who are not already deeply involved in the hobby. I play mainly to discover our games, prepare for events, practice explaining the rules, and develop communication plans. But outside of work, I don’t play board games very often at home. That said, two of my favourite games are Slide and Qawale. I really like games that are simple to understand but still offer meaningful choices and strategy.

***

JB: Because you are Egyptian, I have to ask: do you still believe that Egypt was robbed during the match against Argentina in this summer's World Cup?

RA: I’m not the biggest football fan, but yes, unfortunately, I still think we were robbed! I remember you messaging me during the game, saying how well they were playing. In the end, it’s only a game, but I’m still very proud of the Egyptian team.



A big thanks to Rawan and the team at Gigamic for a peek behind the curtain. To learn more about Gigamic and the current catalog, you can visit the team’s website at https://en.gigamic.com/.

Do you own or support the marketing function for a tabletop publisher? Let’s chat! I’m going to do interviews like this on marketing and other areas of the tabletop business from time to time, and I’m always interested in meeting more people. Just message me here on BGG and we’ll get to work. Thanks for reading!

***

by Justin Bell

I spent most of the last few years turning down opportunities to review legacy and campaign games. However, I turned that idea on its head at this year’s edition of Gen Con by picking up not one, not two, but SEVEN games that fit the description of a sizable tabletop investment.

So, I added the following games to the “bag of hauling” in Indy: Regicide Legacy from the team at Badgers from Mars, Mountain Goats: Legacy and Enchanted Ivy (both from Allplay), Forbidden Legacy (Gamewright), Encyclopedia of Monsters (Scorpion Masqué), Codenames: Critical Roll Adventures (CGE), and Mini Rogue: The Council (a roguelike from Nuts! Publishing that features a campaign).

Part of why I jumped back into these types of games is that magical moment when you first open the box. Is there anything better than that first moment, when you start a new campaign game, and you are greeted by the large red “STOP!” sign warning you to not open the presents inside too early?

“Oh, man, that’s heavy,” someone said when they picked up the box for Regicide: Legacy. “What’s inside that thing?”

Campaign games offer such a thrill of discovery. Even I had to admit that opening the Regicide Legacy box was quite a surprise; for the uninitiated, the base game of Regicide is a simple deck of cards. Yes, the deck is a very cool, well-illustrated set of cards…still, it’s a deck of cards, in both simplicity and weight. (The simplicity melts away when you lose for the 20th time in a row.)

Picking up the Regicide Legacy box—just lifting it up!—got my mind rolling on what sorts of secrets were inside. The box cover features characters in silhouette; are there minis in there? Poker chips? 12 separate decks of cards for the 12 “challenging missions” described in the BGG listing?

Over the course of the next few weeks, I’m excited to see what treasures are inside. Additional games that have campaign and legacy elements have arrived after Gen Con, such as Buried Memories, which features one-off plays augmented by unlockables hidden in sealed envelopes.

Hmm…am I suddenly back into campaign games?



I like the idea of campaign/legacy games quite a bit. In fact, during COVID, I spent a lot of time seeking out campaign experiences while I was locked down and looking for something to build on during quieter gaming times at home.

But even before COVID, the only consistent struggle I have faced during my 40+ year tabletop career appears when I try to line up a new campaign. That’s because of the people.

Locking in a group to play the exact same game a few times can be a disaster. Playing the same game 10-12 times? From a logistics perspective, this is a nightmare. Aligning the stars using a Doodle poll to confirm availability? Frightening.

But when I have been able to marry the bodies to a consistent schedule, some of these play experiences have been incredible.

My plays of Pandemic: Legacy Season 1 became my definitive campaign experience. The highs, the lows, the thrills of discovering something new in the next chapter of that game became requirement viewing. For years, we had one of the character cards on our refrigerator, a reminder of memories past. Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated came very close to taking the top of the mountain for me, and somehow we had a group of four players who completed the entire game across just a few gaming sessions. The surprises were great, but the extension of the core game across a funny story became a model I consistently sought out.

Charterstone also fit the bill, as a game that lived on my kitchen table for a few nights while we worked through all the fun unlocks that box provided. Freelancers: A Crossroads Game was so funny my kids quoted some of the app’s dialogue from time to time. More recently, we did the first five chapters of Little Alchemists, and I was thrilled to find the kids so engaged across the total experience. Even though we didn’t see everything in the box, seeing the majority was still a nice surprise.

Like many others, I did a three-game arc of…Arcs: The Blighted Reach, another exceptional campaign experience that took note of how hard it is to get people to play the same game a bunch of times. So, the design of that campaign includes just three sessions, so across two game nights I joined two members of my review crew to take it down. Like those other successful campaign experiences, The Blighted Reach created real memories at the table, things that I still laugh about today.

Beyond these seminal moments, the last few years of playing campaign games have often ended badly. In fact, I find nothing less satisfying than getting a commitment from a group, then learning the (initial) rules for the game and setting up the scheduling for the next few weeks of a new campaign game.

You get the first play session in, maybe a second…then, “it” happens.

“Justin, listen…I just got staffed on a new project in Tuscaloosa,” they’ll say, with texts peppered with sad face emoji. (I’m not an emoji guy.) “Go ahead and swap me out for ____: Legacy, cause I don’t wanna hold you guys back.”

A second of your four-person group suddenly gets flaky, less reliable than she’s always been. “My friend Sally’s in town this Tuesday; I can’t make it for ____: Legacy this week. But I know the game is a ‘swap in, swap out’ situation, so you guys will be fine without me. I’ll be back next week, promise!” One week turns into four, and you now remember that Sally’s the one who bails on you for other activities all the time, making you quietly question Sally’s place in your life.

Earlier this year, the team at Horrible Guild offered me a review copy of The Queen’s Dilemma, a campaign game I badly wanted to try. But I knew it would be a challenge to get a group together in Chicago around the time that I wanted to table it: late spring even, right around the time that gamers start ghosting me for more pleasurable activities, like…summer, nice weather, beach vacations, and the annual summer gaming snooze before things pick back up after Gen Con.

There weren’t tears in my eyes, but I knew it was the right move to pass the offer to another reviewer. “I’m sure someone else has a group,” I said, and I’m still interested in seeing the game for myself. But that takes a lot of planning, and human beings are tricky.



Here’s why I love campaign and legacy games again now: I have at least one standing group in place. That group is my family.

At Gen Con, I picked up those games above with abandon. “Are you sure you’ve got a group for this?” the publishers would say.

“Yep,” I said. “My son will play anything, and now all these games fit for him and the other folks at home. I’m good.”

We did nine of the 15 chapters of Encyclopedia of Monsters in about a week. Mountain Goats: Legacy was originally a three-chapter plan…the day before this article was posted, we finished the sixth of ten chapters. Regicide Legacy is kicking up plays this week. Enchanted Ivy hit the table as soon as I got back from Gen Con; a solo-only campaign is an easy win for me, and I did the first three plays in about 80 minutes. Forbidden Legacy’s first play was completed the day before this article went up. Mini Rogue’s campaign attempt already took place. Codenames: Critical Role Adventures will hit the table in October, along with Buried Memories.

Even though it is not technically a campaign game, I’ve already gotten a handshake agreement with a partner for this fall’s plays of Kingdom Come: Deliverance. (I’m even brushing up on the video game to get ready.) I’m told Cozy Stickerville is something I would enjoy. I’ll try to convince the publishers of Stonesaga that I’m the right man for the job.

I’m aggressively hunting campaign and legacy games that will fit both at home and with hobbyists in my play groups. At home, we are always looking for ways to keep kids off of tablets. If a game is both fun AND gives us a chance to keep them coming back to a good story, we are in. My wife picked up a copy of Mindware’s Ziggurat last year, and across a six-chapter campaign, we dove headfirst into another adventure.

Experiences like this are why I love coming back to this game format again and again. Publishers: keep ‘em coming!

by Justin Bell

After a recent business trip, I returned home and made a few updates in my home office before shutting down the laptops. I walked out of my office and took a peek to my right, into the game closet.

My closet is a small nook with an actual door (I don’t want visitors to necessarily see the depths of my obsession) that includes the hookups for a washing machine, tile floors, and just enough shelf space to hold my collection. It’s also the room where I keep the two halves of my Game Topper game table and the Costco folding table it lives on top of when I host game nights.

Between a smaller shelf facing the entryway and a larger set of shelves to the right, I’ve got space for a mix of about 200 games, depending on box size. But space is getting tight. If you ask my wife, space is already pretty tight. I only keep about 10% of the review copies I get each year and I already have a sizable personal collection, so we are almost completely in “one in, one out” territory.

It is time to make hard decisions. Only the cream of the crop is going to stick around when I’m done with the current purge.



I have visited friends who own game collections that number in the hundreds. I have a couple friends with collections that exceed a thousand titles. I have an industry connection who has north of two thousand games. I’m sure someone will respond to this article with thoughts on why they will never part with a single member of their three or four THOUSAND game collection.

Many of you are collectors, an impressive hobby in and of itself. I know many people buy games with the express goal of never playing most of their games, adding boxes purely to have them live on their shelves. Sadly, they never hear the voices coming from the boxes.

“Please, play me!” the box seems to be saying. “I thought you bought me to love me.”

“In a way, I did,” you say. “I bought you to love you, but only to look at you, to admire you from afar. No one will ever shuffle your cards, or manipulate your components, or unfurl your board. No, handsome $82 board game product, you will remain here, on shelf 134 of my room-wide Kallax, for eternity.”

“But, I was made for play! I was produced in a factory far from here to be appreciated by the players, on a table! This shelf will not do!”

“Quiet down, handsome $82 board game product,” you reply. “The decision is final. My shelves are a museum, and I look forward to seeing your smiling side box art staring back at me when I walk past you on the way to the kitchen.”

At my house, I only possess games for the purposes of semi-regular play. When those games are not getting enough play, I move them out. It’s strictly business. Some people have a library of hundreds of books that collect dust; others, a liquor cabinet full of spirits that never get consumed. To each their own.

My collection is reaching a breaking point. I used to believe that I needed to own no more than 52 games, because I play games often enough to get at least one of my own games tabled every week. Reviewing games has changed that calculus, because now most of my game nights are either review game nights, family game days, play con events, or instances where I enjoy the collections of others. Thankfully, there is a lot of crossover for the latter, so when someone wants to table a game that I also own, I nod in approval…I’d love to play your copy of Orléans, because I haven’t played my copy all year.

This has helped me focus on the current exercise. I want to winnow these 200 games (technically, 205 games, per the BGG link to my collection) down to about a hundred this year. That mix will mean about 50 family/party games and about 50 hobby games. That means the games in the Maybe Pile are going to go soon, and I’ll be a little pushier to ensure those get played quickly.

The games that I think I love enough to keep, but don’t ever suggest tabling, have to go, too. If it’s a game that is out of this world, truly the cream of the crop, best in class for its respective category, it stays.

If I love the game, and anyone else I know also loves it and plans to keep their copy, my copy is a goner. If a game is not on the personal Mount Rushmore of a category, that game is gonna hit the streets. For example, I count on five specific titles to keep me happy on the nights I vote for party games: Wavelength, Just One, Codenames, Caution Signs, and Decrypto. Those games are more than enough. But what about Belratti? OK, alright, fine…I can make room for six.

The auction game section is full up: Stockpile: Epic Edition, Amun-Re, The Princes of Florence, Container, and Railway Boom. For Sale will stay because I want to have a quick auction game option. Auction/bidding mechanics are all over the place at my house, in many forms, including in titles like Coimbra and all of the train games.

The Lacerda collection previously held as many as ten slots in the collection, and now it is down to seven. No purging needed there; the current selection is tight. Sitting in the same zip code as the Lacerda games lies Carnegie, my #2 game of 2022. I think Carnegie is genius, but even writing this paragraph gives me pause: I haven’t put Carnegie on a table in more than two years.

I’ve played Carnegie a few times on Board Game Arena, a place where I KNOW I will play it more than I will play my physical copy at home. That means Carnegie and its expansion are getting moved to the donation pile. This hurts my soul, but I know it’s the right move. While I love the beauty of that board and the satisfying nature of play, it doesn’t come out enough to justify its space in my collection even a moment longer.



Maybe that’s it, then. It’s not only the fact that a game has to be the cream of the crop. It has to draw enough attention that I NEED to play a physical version of it at least once or twice a year.

That made the purge exercise even easier.

Valeria: Card Kingdoms? Exceptional, and my favorite of the “roll dice, get stuff” genre. And, a goner, because I haven’t felt the emotional connection to table it in a couple years now. Ayar: Children of the Sun? A personal top-10 pick from 2025…and, a game that I have not played since I wrapped up my review plays, so it is getting moved into the donation pile. Illiterati? Love it. But word games don’t surface as often in my house any more, so 1973’s Montage will be the only title I need to fit the word game/association bill for the time being. That means it is time to find a new home for Illiterati.

The exercise continued deep into the night I began drafting this article.

Huge fan of The Red Cathedral. But its expansion, Contractors? It was a mixed bag in my play groups, and I haven’t integrated the expansion content in the plays it has gotten since. So, the expansion has to go. The Mombasa redux, Skymines? A blast. The card system is something I still admire. I just haven’t admired it enough to put Skymines back on the table, and every time I go back to re-read the rules, I find myself more enamored with something else that I want to table instead. Love the game, love those storage tuckboxes, love that the game got a retheme. But Skymines is moving out.

For years, I screamed to the masses that designer Martin Wallace’s most underrated design was the skirmish game Wildlands. I still think the game is badly underrated. Those feelings haven’t helped me push the game to the table more, so it’s a goner too.

Magnate: The First City? Love it. It’s hard to find a legitimately fun city builder that plays in about an hour, even at the full player count. But the box is a behemoth, and more importantly, a friend in my local playgroups is never getting rid of his copy. If I can play his, I don’t need mine. The third shelf actually thanked me when I moved the Magnate box off the shelf.

“Thanks,” Shelf Three said. (I think I heard its voice, but that may have been the cocktail I had earlier that evening.) “I wouldn’t mind some card games living on top of me for the next few months. My back is killing me.”

All in, I pulled 33 games off the shelves. I took a moment to stare at the now-former members of my collection because I wanted to be sure. Am I really going to move these games out? It felt like the right decision, but I wanted to give the games one last chance to tell me that I am wrong.

Sometimes, there’s the pull of sunk cost. A couple of these games cost a pretty penny at the time, and maybe I don’t want to see them go just yet. In other cases, a portion of a game is something I love even if the complete package is an up-and-down affair. For example, maybe one game mechanic really sings to me, such as the rondels of Sabika, the real-time play of Wildstyle, and the engine-building magic of Raising Robots. But in each of these cases, I haven’t really made eye contact with these boxes in at least a year.

After piling all the purged games back in my office, I walked back into my game closet to stare at the remaining games one more time. Is each one a game I can really see myself trying to push the table if I get to pick something for an upcoming game night?

One by one, I revalidated my feelings. I still have some work to do, to clear some more space. But for now, the collection is all cream. Now I just have to clear more time to play my favorites.

by Justin Bell

Every week, usually on Monday afternoons, someone in our Wednesday night game group starts a new round of messages to set up that week’s game schedule.

Someone agrees to host; sometimes, it’s the guy whose partner is out of town and can’t travel anywhere unless they host (those kids will get you!). Sometimes, a person has a game they want to get to the table that is too large to transport easily, a big piece of chicken with a hundred minis, a massive board, a 400-piece poker chip set.

In other cases, we need someone with a house or apartment big enough to host; when we have just 5-6 players, everyone in the group has space. But from time to time, a 10+ person group needs a place to go, and not everyone has the table space to take on 3-4 tables at the same time.

Once that process is locked up, we get into the real business of the week: the board game horse trading. Everyone has something they would like to get to the table, and subtly nudging the group is just as powerful as using a word avalanche sledgehammer to get commitments.

One table is always a non-negotiable: whoever hosts gets to put out whatever they want on “Table One”, as it is known in the thread. “Guys, it’s my birthday this week, so I’m gonna put _____ on Table One, so I’m looking for people to join me. The rest of you: play whatever you want.”

Sometimes, even the host pick becomes a warzone. When the host of our night two weeks ago threw out Obsession as his game of choice, just as many people raised their hand to say yes as did those who vehemently tried to argue that Obsession is a different beast depending on player count. After a steady back-and-forth, the host relented, and got The Castles of Mad King Ludwig out instead. (The poor guy couldn’t even get the first-choice game he wanted to the table on his birthday!!!)

When you are excited about something, you’re expecting everyone else to be excited about it, too.

Until they are not.



Last week, I got in line early.

I didn’t want to host, but I did have that all-too-familiar train game itch. (Everyone gets this itch, right?) I gently lobbed two options into the thread: Landmarks of the Lost Atlas—the new expansion for Railways of the Lost Atlas, which I picked up a few weeks ago—and Railway Boom, one of my top 10 picks from 2025.

I was happy to table either one. (Yes, train game purists: Railway Boom is more auction game than train game. Railway Boom doesn’t have diesels, “double O” city locations, certificate limits, or private companies. But there are nominal routes built on a map, train cards, station tokens, and operating costs. Most importantly, there’s a train illustrated on the box cover. Train game.)

The hosts had their eyes on Águeda: City of Umbrellas (a title sitting squarely on the hosts’ Maybe Pile), so Águeda was reserved for the first play on Table One. I waited to see how many other people might want to play one of the train games on Table Two.

I was excited. Everyone knows how great these games are, right? The responses should begin piling up in the next few minutes…and now all I need to figure out is the poker chip situation and we’ll be all set.

But that’s not what happened. One guy threw me a curveball, knowing that I can be persuaded if we stay roughly adjacent to the family of games I tossed into the ring.

“Could I sway you towards 1889 or 1894 instead?” he offered. (This, from the other consistent train game regular in our group, the one who brings Age of Steam to every game night like I used to do with Brass: Lancashire a couple years ago.)

I do love Shikoku 1889 (the Grand Trunk Games update of 1889: History of Shikoku Railways is gorgeous and a weeknight train game) and I badly want to try 1894 (the words “dynamic” and “brutal” show up a lot in the game’s BGG comments area). But my mind was made up: I want to table Landmarks of the Lost Atlas, with Railway Boom being a reliably excellent route-building auction game as my backup plan.

“Nope, not this week,” I responded to Mr. Age of Steam. “But in future weeks, absolutely.”

My confidence was still high. Any minute now, other players will kneel at the altar of the choo choo.

“Any minute now” turned into the rest of the day. No one else threw any titles into the chat, but Mr. Age of Steam made it clear that my message did make it out. Do I need to find new friends if I can’t get some buy-in on train game time this week?

The mind games carried into the next day. I’m not pushy, so I didn’t send out a reminder—”ahem, guys, who’s with me on the choo choo situation?”—but I considered it.

No one bit. I was so excited to get a train game to the table…why aren’t you?



Wednesday night rolled around, and I arrived at the host’s house with Landmarks of the Lost Atlas and the base game in tow. No one else had a burning desire to get anything else to the table, so Landmarks made its way to Table Two after all.

That was great, and I had a great time playing. We had a train game rookie with us for a four-player game that included Mr. Age of Steam. A short teach, a long setup (we used a pre-built map for the “Short” game), and a surprise bankruptcy meant that we got the thrill of adventure, the agony of defeat, and the commentary from everyone on what they did and didn’t like all packaged up into a two-hour gaming event.

As it turned out, no one was as excited as I was…and, I can live with that. I think using everyone else’s passion and energy as a gauge is usually a mistake; at almost every sitting, even for a game that is brand new to all players, someone at the table is significantly more excited for the play than others.

It’s usually easy to get me to agree to play a game that someone else is really fired up to get to the table. I may or may not buy in during the play; it’s your game, or it’s the “hot” game, or it’s a game that another reviewer has to work through in the course of their travels, so they are obligated to play it. (As a reviewer myself, those can sometimes be the toughest nights.)

I try my best to match the excitement others have for a game if possible, at least as long as the game remains fun and competitive. That’s where the passion can really fall off quickly. A runaway leader saps a game of its chance to shine. Rules complexity—or, worse, a poorly-written rulebook—throws people off the scent of what the designers imagined when they put the game together. Even a single frustrated player can make life tough on everyone; at times, I am that player. That has made it easier to imagine the moment when a play experience derails.

Fortunately, none of that happened during our play of Landmarks of the Lost Atlas. And now, my choo choo cup has been refilled; I am excited to pay it forward and join up for someone else’s big night soon. Just a couple weeks before, we had a person that desperately wanted to get Lisboa to the table; happy to oblige. A night full of party and/or trick-taking games? It’s your night, partner.

I know how excited you are. I’ll try my best to get fired up, too!

by Justin Bell

Hell of a Deal was hot the entire four days of Gen Con a few weeks ago. It was so hot that the game’s publisher, Smirk & Dagger, sold out almost immediately on the show’s first day. This was doubly impressive because the game wasn’t tracking as high on BGG’s own Gen Con preview.

The booth was so jammed each time I walked by, it looked like the publisher’s owner and “Chief Instigator,” Curt Covert, had offered guests actual cash winnings to stand around the booth’s demo tables. (What say you, Curt?)

Hell of a Deal stayed so hot throughout the show that Covert sent members of his team to an offsite warehouse (do we even need to guess where this faraway warehouse was?) on the second day of Gen Con to retrieve more product…and then, that second drop of games sold out on the show’s third day.

When you’re hot, you’re hot!

Many, many hundreds of people bought a game about poker—to the tune of its $75 MSRP—in a year where I thought poker wasn’t nearly as hot as it had been in years past. Hell of a Deal was the classic example of a “con” game, a convention title that served as a winner both because of its gameplay and because of the walk-up business it offered. Poker is such an increasingly familiar product to both hobby and non-hobby gamers alike.



Last week, while I was prepping both this article and my upcoming review of Hell of a Deal over at Meeple Mountain, I fired up the Xbox to play Balatro, the poker-with-powers rogue-like video game that gets love from time to time when I’m not working through other rogue-likes such as Brotato, Dead Cells (the video game, not the board game), and Slay the Spire (again, the video game, not the board game).

I don’t play poker in real life, but I do enjoy a quick game of Balatro. Or four games of Balatro. Often, I look up, realize that I wanted to do “a quick game of Balatro”, then discover that it is 1:47 AM on a school night.

I think this is part of the allure of poker-themed board/card games right now, even if the sample size is relatively small: the hook and the gameplay loop are very, very simple to grasp. I was really surprised—borderline shocked—by the number of crowds I saw standing near the Hell of a Deal demo tables all Gen Con weekend long, full of observers who didn’t seem like they had any interest in lining up to actually try the game.

Certainly, many of those observers bought Hell of a Deal…games don’t buy themselves (yet). However, those observers seemed very interested in simply watching other players work together to play poker.

I pulled some numbers from the interwebs. The World Series of Poker’s 2026 main event ended a few weeks ago, with a kid from Spokane, Washington netting $10,000,000 for a first-place finish. That’s cool, but I was more intrigued by some of the WSOP viewing numbers…378 MILLION impressions on socials, with players in this year’s tourney hailing from more than a hundred different countries. More than 70 countries registered a total north of 300 million views of the tournament; I still have dozens of friends in the US who watch poker on TV.

Like many of you, I played the KOSMOS release The Gang when it was released a couple years ago. I was enthralled by the chance to play cooperative poker with friends in my gaming groups. I don’t gamble, so poker in a safe space was music to my ears, and The Gang’s hook of silently influencing the table with those star-laden hint chips kept us coming back over and over again.

A couple years prior to that, I reviewed the Gamelyn release Tiny Epic Western. It had a nice mix of cowboy-themed worker placement and poker-style hand management, and for a guy who wasn’t a Texas hold ‘em player, Tiny Epic Western has a nice array of training wheels to guide peasants like me who don’t play poker at all.

I played the heck out of Ace of Spades last year—and again, earlier this year, when the Ace of Spades expansion Call of the Zombie arrived on my doorstep—and found that I might have an addiction to solo poker attack games, regardless of platform.

(Uhh, no…I certainly have not played Ace of Spades on Board Game Arena a dozen times…or, eh, maybe more. Ha, it’s hard to keep track, but it’s encouraging to see that I’m not the only one to enjoy the sweet, sweet taste of just one more run.)



Which brings us back to Hell of a Deal.

Between a demo play, a surprisingly easy-to-administer solo play, and a four-player game with the folks from my review group, I can see why Hell of a Deal was both a fun “con” game and a keeper outside of the convention environment. I didn’t think I needed more poker-themed board games than the titles I named above, but Hell of a Deal challenged that notion immediately.

Co-op poker clearly sings to me, if The Gang is any indication. But a game like Hell of a Deal that encourages cheating? Like, you need to cheat to win, and the cheating is built into the game’s design because you have to outcheat a cheater?

Count me in.

Designer Cameron Reid and the team at Smirk & Dagger have come up with a nice formula here. First, players love bling, so while Hell of a Deal could have probably been just fine with cardboard player mats and plastic tokens, Reid & Co. knew this wouldn’t fly with players. So, neoprene is everywhere. Poker chips? Certainly. And it’s great that those chips can be shoved into a betting area on each player’s personal board (whoops, personal neoprene mat!!), and the chips have the appropriate amount of heft.

Tarot-sized boss cards are a nice touch, with silly boss names like Dedly Aloor and Nick Hauss waiting to torment the players. There are powerful favor cards and equally distressing curse cards to add variety and challenge. Players can swap hand cards with other players or grab cards from the discard pile to make average hands sexier…all with the aim of cheating just enough to play a hand better than the current round’s boss character.

Hell of a Deal is a poker game, evolved from some of the other poker-themed board games I’ve tried before. It leans into poker’s growing global footprint by catering to both seasoned poker players and folks who have never played poker before. I was encouraged by my Gen Con demo, a four-player table that included three people who know poker and one who never plays. The co-op elements made the “newb” comfortable in a way that other games may not have, making it fun to watch their reactions to the proceedings and their general appreciation for the game.

Here was the wild part: looking around to see the number of people who stood around during our nearly hour-long demo to simply watch us play poker. People who were curious because it was poker on the table, a game that has become so approachable that people around the world continue to casually watch poker online or on TV.

Trick-taking games have exploded in the last few years; according to a search I ran here on BGG, there are about 3,200 games that feature trick-taking as a mechanic…and more than 800 of those were released in just the last three years. I wonder if poker will catch fire in a similar way, where we find ourselves drowning in an avalanche of other poker-themed titles.

I won’t go all-in on that idea just yet, though. It’s clear that poker is hot!

by Justin Bell

A few weeks ago, my wife sent me a link to an article on Slate titled “Have We Been Playing Monopoly Wrong All Along?” written by Luke Winkie. It was a great read, in part because there are references not only to BGG but also some of the legend behind what makes Monopoly the devil for so many players and why the game’s house rules have set in so deeply since the dawn of time (or 1935, whichever you think is older in board game terms).

The article also serves as a great read for anyone who has defended Monopoly for years. A bit like Catan, Scotland Yard, and The Game of Life, Monopoly is a game I am almost always willing to play in a landscape where most friends and family members swear that some games aren’t nearly as good as their legacy suggests they should be. I will happily play any of those games—as a point of reference, I will play any game once—but, whenever I tell someone that, they swear that there are millions and billions of games better than those archaic reminders of yesteryear.

Got it. The difference for me hits at home, because my nine-year-old really will play anything.



“Daddy, do you want to play Monopoly?”

“Sure, buddy” I said. “I’ll play Monopoly.”

My son is the main pusher of family games in the Bell compound, and he will play both brand new titles as well as the oldest games we have in the house. He is also the purveyor of almost everything “old” that we do regularly: he listens to clean versions of rap songs from the 80s and 90s, he has a Nintendo Entertainment System (yes, an NES, albeit the NES Mini) set up in our kitchen, and he likes the 1981 adventure flick Raiders of the Lost Ark almost as much as I do.

His normal go-to game is Pay Day, another game that BGG enthusiasts regularly murder because of its archaic “roll to move” mechanics and randomness tied to event cards, here represented by pieces of mail. (This is the beauty of games from the 1970s: if you never went to your physical mailbox, you never got any bills. Ahh, the good ol’ days!)

My wife is usually the person who gets tapped on the shoulder for Monopoly, and I’m the one who gets tapped for Pay Day. However, I hadn’t played Monopoly since we bought a new copy of the game earlier this year. (We have Monopoly Deal, and we have Monopoly on a couple of our video game systems, but the physical copy of Monopoly was a welcome addition.)

We placed the Monopoly board in the center of our basement gaming table and got to work on the setup. Laid out all the property cards; he selected the Battleship token, while I went with my standard, the Racecar. While every player has a backup choice—mine in the Thimble, although I can be talked into the Wheelbarrow for the right price—the Racecar is the piece I always chose growing up, so it brings all the memories back in a rush.

Although I am typically adamant that I will only use poker chips to substitute for cardboard chits or paper money with modern games, I almost always use the paper money for Monopoly. Yes, I know: the paper money slows games down immensely. But I like the rush of childhood memories that come with my plays of both Monopoly and The Game of Life as a kid, particularly the moment when I used the main board to serve as a tuckbox for each flavor of bill along my side of the table.

You remember this, right? Your $1 bills tucked under the far left edge of your side of the board, then your $5 bills, then the $10s, $20s, $50s, $100s (“hundos”), and $500s.

I always insisted on being the banker as a kid…so, it’s been a thrill to pass along that responsibility to my son, who now insists on being the banker for this and every other game where someone is responsible for handing out cash. He’ll even serve in this capacity if he is not playing the game, because he loves fanning out those bills to every player in sight.

After we each took $1,500 in starting capital, he rolled the dice and we were off.



The article on Slate highlighted a lot of the things that players hate about Monopoly. The thing that has always struck me about these complaints is the fact that most people do not play Monopoly correctly.

When it is played the right way, Monopoly is almost comically fast, and it’s a lot better than a 4.4 average rating would suggest. (I’ve played a half-dozen new releases this year alone that are leagues worse than Monopoly.)

A sidebar: one of my favorite tabletop videos ever went up only a year or so ago. It was the Watch It Played video Rodney Smith and Rich Sommer put up regarding the game UNO. No, UNO is not a new game that really requires a teach video…but it IS a game that people almost always play incorrectly.

I’m shocked at how many times I have played UNO with friends and had to correct them about the rules. Yes, the first discard established during setup affects the game’s first player. Yes, a player only has to draw one card if they can’t play something from their hand. No, a player doesn’t get to play a card after getting hit with a Draw Four card.

Most people just assume that UNO is over when a player wins a hand. I can’t ever get people to play UNO like a game of Rummikub—officially, UNO winners score points based on what everyone else still has in their hands, then play to a predetermined scoring threshold—so I don’t ever fight that one, but that’s how the game was drawn up.

I’m a rules guy, so it was fun to be able to find someone that took the time to emphasize how UNO should be played. The same should be true for Monopoly…so when we taught our nine-year-old how to play Monopoly, we taught him how to play the right way.

No, there’s no money from Community Chest fee cards going into the center of the board. No, you don’t move on your third doubles roll in a row…you go directly to jail. The big one: whether you choose to buy a property or not is important, because if you don’t buy it, it gets auctioned to the highest bidder right then and there. And that’s an important, game-changing element of Monopoly that I was taught incorrectly during my first few plays as a kid. Auctioning off every property makes the game so much shorter and so much more interesting, strategically.

That also means deals, baby. And my son likes to deal.

“So, I see that you have Virginia Avenue and I have St. Charles Place…when someone gets States Avenue, we are gonna have to make a deal, Daddy.”

At one point, I was low on cash. My son, seeing blood in the water, made an offer. “Can I make a donation to you?” [No; donations are not allowed in Monopoly, even as you watch a family member burning.] “If not, how about we make a deal where you can buy $100 from me for a dollar and one of your other properties?”

“I see that you only have about $60 right now, so I’m going to auction Pennsylvania Avenue for $61. I want to see if you will mortgage another property!!”

My son found himself in jail four times in the game’s first 30 minutes. I got a monopoly of the red properties, so between that and a deal I had made earlier to acquire both of the cheap brown locations had me feeling good about my chances. Sure, he already had two of the four railroads, but his other holdings were crap and he was low on funds…I liked my chances.

Then, on back-to-back turns following his release from prison jail, he was able to buy B&O Railroad and Short Line thanks to the good fortune of doubles and an exact landing…giving him all four railroad properties. I didn’t like this development, in part because I remember how the Chance and Community Chest decks have cards which move players directly to railroad spaces. And there was trouble on every edge of the board now…a couple wrong moves might lead to immediate disaster.

My son kept dodging my properties, and save for the occasional $6 rent I was collecting from him when he landed on Oriental Avenue, my funds were on life support. Then, the killshot: one of those dreaded Community Chest cards bit me in the rear, moving me past Go and onto Reading Railroad. It also required the active player to pay double rent if the property was already owned. That meant I was suddenly out $400, when I had zero cash and a portfolio of properties that had a half-dozen mortgaged properties.

I mortgaged more properties; good night, New York Avenue, and good luck, Atlantic Avenue. I was down to the red properties, the brown properties, and Electric Company…all my other holdings were mortgaged.

My son continued to find ways to dance safely through my real estate, and I kept finding disaster. Luxury Tax? Obviously. Landing there on my run to reach Go unscathed ended badly. I passed Go only to land on Reading Railroad again, handing my income directly to the waiting paws of a nine-year-old terrorist. As I considered my options, I knew I was out of options…meaning I was forced to admit defeat, as my son already had north of $1600 and I had no cash and no hope.

Total playtime: 55 minutes. There was action, there was drama, there was romance (I felt the love when I landed on Indiana Avenue, allowing me the chance to lock up the red properties), there was horror, there was tragedy.

My son and I shook hands; every game, win or lose, must end with a handshake. Despite the loss, I reveled in the high that was getting Monopoly to the table.

I’ll play Monopoly any time. When you play it correctly, there’s a lot to like.

by Justin Bell

I’m a deal hunter.

In part, this is because I have a somewhat limited amount of discretionary spend. I like to joke that “the kids ate all my money”, but this is somewhat aligned with reality…I’m surprised how often I realize that kids cost a LOT more than my imaginary New Parent Handbook told me they would cost. (I still cringe each time I think about how many times I had to buy new shoes for those kids when they were just a few years old. Clothing a child is an expensive endeavor.)

Board games are a leisure item, so beyond the review copies I receive from publishers, I don’t really buy many additional games for myself. I try to cover games that I think would interest me, but for the other half of the year, I like to pick up titles where I don’t have any background on what those games are all about. Coming in fresh is exciting, and offers real opportunity to make a discovery outside my normal swim lanes.

When I do buy new games, I ask a lot of questions before dropping any amount of cash. You can’t blame a guy who enjoys doing the research before making a financial commitment, regardless of the size of that commitment. Does one or more of my groups already have the same game? Am I really going to get enough plays to make this purchase worth it? I’m a reviewer, but I still have a pool of my own media sources who I trust when it comes to their gaming tastes…I always check my sources first.

While I did score the best deal I’ve ever found at a game convention this year—La Granja: Deluxe Master Set for just $45 at Board&Dice’s Gen Con booth, a deal I still can’t believe—I am usually the complete opposite of an impulse buyer. At least, that’s what I tell myself before I go to a show or a brick-and-mortar hobby shop.

Because when I am walking the aisles of a show or a store then spot a deal, I’m all over it…especially when a game is priced to move.



I recently came back from a weeklong trip to Rochester, NY to spend time with family. Part of the reason for that trip was to bury my father, who passed away earlier this summer. A week is a long time, and in between funeral activities, my wife and I still had to find time to entertain the kids and offer a layer of “everything’s gonna be alright” by taking them to Seabreeze, a local theme park, as well as the excellent Strong National Museum of Play downtown.

One day, I decided to take the wife and kids to a local game store near our hotel called Millennium Games. I hadn’t been to Millennium before; usually, my time in Rochester gets eaten up with family activities, holiday naps, and runs to enjoy the local delicacies of places ranging from Pittsford Dairy (the black-and-white) to Wegmans (donuts) to Nick Tahou Hots (the garbage plate). But if I’m in town for a week, I need my board game fix…I always try to eyeball games on shelves if I can fit it in.

I don’t shop at physical stores of any kind—games or not—much any more; online retailers just make it easier for me, and sometimes you can find some filthy deals for games online. But I like strolling the aisles when I do get the chance to go shopping. As a man of a certain age, a leisurely stroll brings calm. And if a store has a sale or used games section, I make a beeline for that section first.

Millennium Games is a veritable gold mine when it comes to used games. It’s actually a pretty sweet location whether you are there to shop for used games or not, with a massive retail area and dedicated play space (there must be room for at least a hundred players, maybe much more) and a wide mix of both hobby tabletop offerings as well as all the fixins any gamer would need, be it TCG/CCG products, RPG goodies, toys, wargaming, card games, or your garden variety board game. Save for maybe the lack of a dedicated 18xx area (hint hint), I think Millennium Games is the only board game store I have ever been to that I really would say has it all, no matter what kind of gamer you are.

The used game area was so large that it was spread across a couple of carts near the front of the store, a nook to the right of the register area, and then spread slowly across a number of additional shelves that border the northwestern outer ring of the retail space.

“Leave me,” I told my family. “Daddy’s gonna need to dig into the crates to find himself some deals!”

My wife, confused by the movie-style voice I had just taken on mixed with my sudden use of that voice in the third person, took the kids to another part of the store. Meanwhile, I got to work.



When I mine a store’s used games area, I look at every single box. Price is important, for the reasons I highlighted earlier. But for me, value is king.

It would be ideal to find games that come in at a price point that is significantly lower than buying something new. Despite my love for a beautifully blinged-out product, the reality is that I’m digging deep in the crates to find a game that will bring me joy for at least a few plays, or a game that I have heard good things about but haven’t tried myself.

On rare occasions, I buy (or math trade for) a game that has left my collection; silly me, I should have never let so-and-so out of my life. (Titles like Lorenzo il Magnifico have gone through that journey; my old copy of La Granja was also like that, before it was replaced by the deluxe edition recently.)

Another big thing with used games: acquiring hard-to-find titles that someone else decided to part with. This is why I love going over every single box in the used games area, especially the older games that people move out of their collection. These days, you’re probably not finding vintage wares tucked onto the bottom shelf at a place like Millennium; savvy investors have gone to the BGG GeekMarket to sell games like that for top dollar, and I don’t blame them. If you’ve got something magical that only got a single print run, and people are fighting for ways to find original copies, I’ll respect you more if you hawk that puppy to the open market.

When I go to a used game store, I’m looking for games that were special to me—or, could become special for me!—and I see something in a title that others didn’t. One man’s trash, so the saying goes. I am always shocked to see games that received nothing more than maybe a single play—in some cases, no plays at all!—and now find themselves in the bargain bin of a local hobby shop.

I scanned every box at Millenium that day, and after going over everything, I did a second pass. That’s when I saw it: a 1995 Avalon Hill edition of the Sid Sackson classic Acquire. For years, I knew I needed to have a copy of the game in my collection…not the many Acquire-adjacent games I have played over the years that use its main mechanics in other, sometimes creative ways. I wanted the OG.

Now, this wasn’t the OG edition; no sensible adult is letting the 1960s-era 3M version of Acquire out of their sight, let alone their collection. But the cover art, the aging box and components, the double-sided one-page “rulebook” (!!!)...it was a match made in heaven.

I flipped the box over to find the used price tag. Ten dollars. Ten dollars for a classic, and when it comes off my shelf once or twice a year, it will create memories just by hitting the table: olden-time paper money (I’m normally a poker chip man, unless money creates the kinds of memories only paper money can), shares in one of seven different companies with hotel brand names like “Festival”, “Continental”, or “Imperial”, and special power tokens that look like bingo chits from an era long gone.

I bought other games that day, but Acquire was the find. I strolled up to the counter like I was a big shot, the king of the castle, to see if the person behind the counter would share in the joy of the find like I did.

Nope. “That’ll be $35 for everything,” he said. The associate was friendly, but very much in the “there’s other customers in line, pal” way a store associate can be friendly.

All good. Millennium made sure that my copy of Acquire was priced to move, so I obliged. I’m already looking forward to my next trip to Rochester…and next time, I won’t bring the kids with me!!

by Justin Bell

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

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

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

Usually, that someone is me.



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

Talk about turning that frown upside down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Justin Bell

I learned a lot by watching Rodney Smith this weekend.

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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



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

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

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



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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That includes the players.



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

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

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

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

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

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

by Justin Bell

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

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

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

This is why I am so excited for Gen Con.



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Justin Bell

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Justin Bell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Justin Bell

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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



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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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