by W. Eric Martin I worked in game stores from 1991 to 1993, and the release of Vampire: The Masquerade during that time had a huge impact on the RPG audience, with the books presenting a setting and having a look unlike anything else. Amazingly enough, Vampire: The Masquerade is still having an impact on today's game market, thanks to the release of the game's fifth edition in 2018 and ...
by W. Eric Martin Tresham at SPIEL '05. Image: Richard Breeseβ’ Game designer Francis Tresham passed away on October 23, 2019, just as SPIEL '19 was about to open. I had mentioned his passing on air during our livestream, but not in this space, and I'm finally correcting that deficiency.You can measure the influence of a designer in multiple ways, and Tresham's legacy might be best represented by his influence ...
by W. Eric Martin β’ Designer Uwe Rosenberg used to have fairly consistent partners for his work: AMIGO for Bohnanza titles, Lookout for big-box games, and Feuerland for even bigger games.Yet Rosenberg has been creating so many games that he's been branching out to other publishers, publishers that launch their existence with his creations, such as Edition Spielwiese in 2016 with Cottage Garden (as well as his Nova Luna at ...
by W. Eric Martin Since BGG.CON 2019 is taking place on Nov. 20-24, I won't be trekking across the Pacific to attend the next Tokyo Game Market on Nov. 23-24, 2019. Even so, I can highlight a few titles that will be featured at TGM and that might show up in licensed versions or at retail outlets closer to you in the months to come.β’ Let's start with Remember Our ...
by W. Eric Martin β’ Restoration Games has unveiled the next title in the Unmatched game series it's been releasing in co-operation with Mondo Games β Unmatched: Cobble & Fog, with this being a two- or four-player game from designers Rob Daviau, JR Honeycutt, Justin D. Jacobson, and Chris Leder due out in Q2 2020. As for what's inside the box:Unmatched: Cobble & Fog features four new characters for the ...
by W. Eric Martin Game publisher Days of Wonder is working together with mega-giant online retailer Amazon to get more people playing Ticket to Ride and Ticket to Ride: Europe.How? By introducing Alexa skills that will both teach these games to new players and serve as an opponent for players both old and new. These skills are now available in English and French for those in the United States, the ...
by W. Eric Martin β’ At BGG.CON 2019, Rio Grande Games will be selling new releases Butterfly, Queenz, and The Way of the Bear, while demoing upcoming titles Nevada City, Monster Baby Rescue, Underwater Cities: New Discoveries, and the just announced Musical Chairs from Kelly North Adams. Here's an overview of that latter title, which is due out at the end of February 2020:Musical Chairs is a whimsical card game ...
by W. Eric Martin β’ Okay, stepping aside from my SPIEL '19 coverage (with lots of notes and pics still to process), let's check out a few 2020 releases that publishers have announced, such as the intriguing-sounding Inner Compass, a March 2020 release from Asger Harding Granerud and Daniel Skjold Pedersen that AEG will demo at both BGG.CON 2019 and PAXU 2019. An overview of what's going on:In Inner Compass, ...
by Yves Tourigny Cupcake Empire was designed by Al Leduc and Yves Tourigny. Al is currently visiting his mother in the Yukon, so I have been tasked with writing this diary. It was supposed to be a dialogue between Al and I, so I'll be writing both our parts.Al: I'm very happy with the result and will henceforth let Yves write all my designer diaries, whether we co-designed the game ...
by W. Eric Martin For a change of pace this week, I'm presenting a side of the convention experience that happens only after it's over: Getting all of those (potentially) great games home.Okay, yes, you might be figuring out your luggage space while the con is underway, pushing your clothes aside to drop a box or two in the suitcase and compute what will likely still fit: "Hmm, one KOSMOS, ...
by W. Eric Martin β’ In the category of "you just can't keep a classic game down", Steve Jackson Games has acquired the rights for Tom Jolly's Wiz-War.In Wiz-War, the player wizards move through a maze, trying to steal treasure from one another or just kill opponents. The game has had multiple editions since its debut in 1983, mostly recently in a Fantasy Flight Games edition from 2012. This new ...
by W. Eric Martin At SPIEL '19, I spoke with Magali Moreno for an overview of titles coming in 2020 from Matagot, Kolossal Games, and Grail Games, all of which have the same owner: Arnaud Charpentier, who also owns Surfin' Meeple. Most of these descriptions are brief, but consider them bread crumbs for future announcements.β’ Let's start with Matagot, which will release a new version of Fabrice Besson's Giants under ...
by W. Eric Martin French publisher Studio H launched its debut titles at SPIEL '19 with (a small number of) Tony Boydell's strategy game Alubari and the card game Oriflamme from Adrien Hesling and Axel Hesling. (I've placed the review copies that I received of these titles in the BGG Library so that we'll have at least one copy of each available for attendees. Please treat them well!)During the fair, ...
by W. Eric Martin At SPIEL '19, the BoardGameGeek team ran a livestream for more than forty hours over five days in which we featured a new game every five to ten minutes courtesy of that game's designer or a publisher representative or, in a couple of cases, me.We've now chopped that livestream into bits and started posting those videos on the BGG Express YouTube channel, with 24 videos to ...
by W. Eric Martin With SPIEL '19 in the past β but with plenty of images and notes still to be uploaded and posted β I've now released convention previews for both BGG.CON 2019 (taking place Nov. 20-24 in Dallas, Texas) and PAX Unplugged 2019 (being held Dec. 6-8 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania).Neither convention comes close to the size of SPIEL, but publishers at both shows will be selling new games ...
by W. Eric Martin In September 2017, I previewed Michael Kiesling's Azul ahead of its release, and in October 2018 I previewed Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra mere hours before its general release at SPIEL '18, so you might not be surprised to find me writing about Azul: Summer Pavilion β albeit now as a postview of sorts given that the game debuted from Next Move Games at SPIEL '19.I ...
by W. Eric Martin SPIEL '19 is over, and (fingers crossed) all attendees have returned home or have purposefully gone elsewhere and aren't merely stranded at airports. Con crud is underway in some percentage of attendees, and I would urge attendees of all conventions to bump fists instead of shaking hands to reduce the incidence of this annual malady.On a more positive note, let's recap some of what happened and ...
by Ian Bach Merlin's Beast Hunt is a card-and-dice game that presents a novel mechanism: the dice-card combo.My name is Ian Bach, and I am the designer of this game. In this diary, I want to share how the dice-card combo came to be and how a game about capturing dinosaurs named "DinoHunter" became Merlin's Beast Hunt. This is my first design, and by sharing the design process I hope ...
by W. Eric Martin At SPIEL '19, Polish publisher Portal Games announced a follow-up title to its highly successful Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game β Detective: Season One.This standalone game for 1-5 players due out in the second half of 2020 will feature three cases with a somewhat shorter playing time than the original game's 120-180 minute timespan. The summary:Detective: Season One is a fully co-operative, deeply immersive board ...
by W. Eric Martin β’ In March 2019, software engineer and game designer Alex Churchill, Stella Biderman of the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Austin Herrick of the University of Pennsylvania published a paper in which they claimed that the card game Magic: the Gathering is "Turing complete". The summary of that paper:Magic: The Gathering is a popular and famously complicated trading card game about magical combat. In this paper ...
I made this game.