Board games have grown into a rather substantial global business, with established publishers selling games around the world and new releases reaching audiences far beyond your friendly local game store. Yet, behind the scenes, you find an industry that is made up of small companies, independent designers, and project-specific contractors. The industry has grown, but its businesses and careers have not necessarily become more secure. In this article, I want to look at this in more detail.

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Beyond the bustling streets of Baghdad lie ancient landscapes, winding waterways, and a night sky filled with shining stars. A cartographer prepares for the journey, gathering supplies and equipment before setting out to explore the world beyond the city walls. Each discovery adds to a growing body of knowledge, but the journey requires careful planning. Resources must be managed, observations recorded, and findings brought back to the House of Wisdom. The challenge lies not simply in discovering new things, but in deciding which discoveries deserve attention and how best to put them to use. These cartographers were known as the Wayfarers of the South Tigris by S J Macdonald and Shem Phillips from Garphill Games with art by Mihajlo Dimitrievski.

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A board game designer can spend years refining a game. They know the game inside out and understand every rule intimately. Yet, when you open a game for the first time, you don't have access to their knowledge. Players have to learn how a game works all by themselves. A game design can be sound, yet it's still difficult to learn and teach. A clear rulebook certainly helps, but often it all begins with the design itself. Following on from my article about dealing with complexity as a board game designer, this article looks at how a good design can help with a game's teach.

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At Basgiath War College, ambition is as dangerous as the skies. You face trials where strength alone will not secure your place among the dragon riders. Allies matter, but so does knowing when to press an advantage and when to hold back. Every challenge tests your nerve, every decision risks your standing, and every rival is a potential threat. You must seize opportunities, outmanoeuvre your opponents, and prove you have what it takes to lead. The stakes could hardly be higher, for you are no ordinary cadet. You are part of the Fourth Wing: Rise of the Wingleader by Dexter Stevens from Goliath Games.

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There comes a time when you look at the rules for a new board game, when it suddenly stops feeling exciting and starts feeling intimidating. The rules are too long and convoluted, the main game board is cluttered, and every mechanism seems to have another exception. Complexity itself can be very appealing when it creates meaningful choices and rewards repeated play. However, complexity is also a kind of burden for the people playing the game. More complexity means more time to learn a game, more effort to remember everything, and more focus when playing it. In this article, I use episode 364 of Ludology as my starting point for examining where complexity adds interest to a game and where it simply makes it unnecessarily hard to play.

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The early morning air is filled with birdsong. Colourful feathers catch the first rays of sunlight, while movement in the undergrowth reveals birds searching for food, possibly for the early worm. As a patient observer, you see a world of remarkable diversity, where every bird adds something unique to the landscape. Your trusty guide helps you identify every bird you see and every song you hear. It's like having a Wingspan Pocket by Elizabeth Hargrave from Stonemaier Games, with art by Ana Maria Martinez Jaramillo and Natalia Rojas.

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A board game can feel very different depending on what surface it is played on. Cards slide differently across different surfaces, dice make different noises, and even picking up a small wooden token can become either effortless or frustratingly fiddly. A kitchen or dining room table has been doing the job perfectly well for generations, but a soft, printed mat can make the same game feel rather more special. Neoprene has become increasingly common, bringing cushioning, durability and a little sense of luxury to the table. Yet a gaming mat's life begins long before it reaches your table, and it may not end until a long time after we stop using it. So in this article, I want to look at neoprene's environmental cost across its full lifecycle.

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The mountain was bare in places, green in others, but it was slowly filling with life. Small plants pushed through the soil, adventurously spreading across the lower slopes before taller growth began reaching upwards. Every new plant was different. While some thrived in sun, others lived in dappled shade. Rebuilding the mountain fauna was never going to be easy, but it was time to Reforest by Sébastien Bernier-Wong from Firestarter Games with art by Janine van Fram.

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Board games that represent real historical events face a problem that fiction can largely avoid. The designer can't start with a blank page. Players are going to expect that the game somehow mirrors what actually happened in the past. Yet, a board game can't faithfully reproduce an entire historical period. The designer has to select and simplify, turning the subject into rules and mechanisms. A historical board game can't ever be completely accurate. The question really is how designers decide which parts of reality belong in the game, which can be abstracted, and which should be left out. In this article, I look at this question from the perspectives of five designers, each with a different answer to the problem.

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The rails started in Moscow, carrying workers and materials towards St Petersburg on one line and to Kiev on the other. A third railway was the most ambitious project, pushing across the vastness of Siberia, with its countless obstacles before the track would eventually reach Vladivostok. Building these tracks was a monumental undertaking, demanding workers, materials, money and, above all, patience. Progress was slow at first, but then it gathered momentum. We were building the Russian Railroads by Helmut Ohley and Leonhard "Lonny" Orgler from Hans im Glück with art by Martin Hoffmann and Claus Stephan.

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As we all know, there are a good number of board games that haven't aged well, if I may put it like that. In the past, games happily made colonialism their central setting and gameplay, gave women little or no place in their worlds, or treated cultures through the eyes of the oppressor. Yet, these games remain in people's collections and come back to the table. In this article, rather than asking whether we should still play these problematic games, I explore why we don't just choose different games from the large swathe of new releases.

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Three 7s have just landed on the table, worth a potential 21 points - if they survive, that is. Their owner already looks like the victory is in the bag. Yet, they're a bit too sure of themselves. Of course, somebody plays three 6s and wipes their 7s off the table and their smile off their face. Yet, the 6s are also short-lived and replaced by a triple 5. So it continues until someone lands a safe triple 1. Suddenly, everyone's supposedly enormous scores have vanished. Yet, three 1s are only 3 points. That wasn't enough. It was time to Go Big by Antony Proietti from Sinister Fish Games with art by Archie Edwards.

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Waiting for your turn is very common in board games. One person has all the fun while everyone else just watches. Too much waiting is often described as a flaw in game design, particularly when players have nothing useful to do and gradually lose interest in what's happening. Modern board games tend to avoid downtime, yet waiting isn't necessarily wasted time. Sometimes it gives us something to think about, sometimes it leaves us with nothing to do, and sometimes it gives us something that a game cannot provide on its own: a chance to talk.

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The morning rush is already gathering. Passengers wait patiently at the stop, each with somewhere to be, while your little bus rolls into position. You have room for ten, perhaps eleven if you are feeling optimistic, although optimism has consequences when every seat matters. A group of passengers heads for the tennis courts, another bunch has somewhere else to go, and the temptation to wait for one more traveller is almost irresistible. Sometimes patience pays handsomely. Sometimes the bus simply gets fuller. Yet, for you as the driver, it's always the same: Bus & Stop by Saashi from Saashi & Saashi with art by Takako Takarai.

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Art is often something we look at, listen to or watch, while board games are discussed in terms of entertainment, strategy and social interaction. Yet, board games are created through imagination, skill and deliberate choices. Board game designers can shape emotions, represent ideas and create systems that shape how players experience a perspective. Of course, the artwork in a board game is art in the traditional sense, but that is not what I want to explore in this article. Instead, I want to look at how board games themselves, their mechanisms and systems, function as a form of artistic expression in their own right.

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The morning begins with the sound of servants moving furniture. The dining room needs preparing, invitations need sending, and someone has decided that the garden requires attention before our guests arrive. Money is finally coming into the estate again, although there never seems to be quite enough of it. Reputation is returning too, slowly, helped along by carefully chosen gatherings and the right people at the right tables. Somewhere between arranging another lavish afternoon and wondering whether we can afford the room needed to host it, I realise that running a country estate is an Obsession by Dan Hallagan from Kayenta Games with art by Dan Hallagan.

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When I play a board game with my friends, I know that they have the same intention: to win. Yet, they actually all want quite different things. One friend is happiest when they find a strategy that works and keeps working. Another wants to take a game apart until they understand the most efficient route to victory. I want to win too, but as a reviewer, I am usually more interested in understanding what a game is trying to do, how its mechanisms produce an experience and how the people around the table respond. Listening to episode 673 of the 99% Invisible podcast, I found that C. Thi Nguyen, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Utah and author of the book "The Score", has really well described these differing expectations of wanting to win a board game.

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Bus headquarters was busy. We were still trying to figure out the best route to pick up passengers and deliver them to their destinations. The job was made harder because our competitors were vying for the same customers. We were the only two bus operators to serve this town, and we both wanted to be the best. We were also both making up the route as we went along. All I could do was tell my team: Let's Make a Bus Route: The Dice Game by Saashi from Saashi & Saashi with art by Takako Takarai.

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Trick-taking games have been around for centuries, and they continue to inspire new designs. Everyone has their own idea of what makes for a great trick-taking game, but mine was shaped by growing up in Germany playing Skat and, especially, Doppelkopf. Those games use mechanisms that still appear in modern games, yet designers keep finding new ways to create new twists on them. So in this article, I want to look at the trick-taking mechanisms I find most interesting, why they work, and how modern trick-takers have changed them while keeping the characteristics that make the genre so long-lasting.

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The forest seems to close behind you with every step. Pine needles soften your footsteps, branches catch at your clothes, and the trail you followed an hour ago has somehow disappeared. You have been searching for the lake all morning, following fragments of an old story about something that lives beyond the trees. The deeper you go, the quieter the forest becomes. Then the trees thin, revealing dark water between their trunks. Something moves beneath the surface. You stop at the water's edge as a shape slowly rises from the lake, ancient and impossible. You finally discover what you came looking for: Korpi by Antti Kukkonen from Hiirosoft.

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