by W. Eric Martin Let's head back to SPIEL '22 during set-up day on Wednesday, October 5, a time when you can find lots of empty booths in halls 4, 5, and 6 that invite questions to be resolved once the show opens.For example, one of the titles depicted on the Spielworxx booth is Carolingi, a design from Christoph Cantzler and Sebastian Freudenberg that will be released by Sea Cove ...
by W. Eric Martin Renegade Game Studios has had a business relationship with Hasbro since at least 2018, when it Kickstarted Jonathan Ying's Power Rangers: Heroes of the Grid, a game for which it is still releasing expansions in 2022.In 2020, Renegade expanded its partnership with Hasbro, announcing Power Rangers: Deck-Building Game (which debuted in 2021), along with role-playing and deck-building games based on the G.I. Joe, Transformers, and My ...
by W. Eric Martin SPIEL '22 opens on October 6, which means that October 5 was a frantic day for many publishers as they raced to finish their booths (if they are large publishers who started days earlier), start-and-finish their booths (if they are small publishers), receive games (for those with just-in-time delivery), and otherwise prepare for the flood of gamers who will arrive when the Messe opens in the ...
by W. Eric Martin I had planned to post video previews of a couple of other SPIEL '22 titles, but I botched the audio with no time available for a re-shoot, so here's a written overview of one of these games. —WEMWorld Exchangers from designers Smoox Chen and Romain Caterdjian and publisher EmperorS4 has a dirt simple core: In each of the game's twelve rounds, you either buy a city ...
by Gerard Ascensi 1. IntroitusIn October 2020, we finished the development of 1998 ISS — designer diary here — and we did not have any specific idea for our next game. One day, Gerard was listening to Mozart's Requiem while working. The Lacrimosa movement began and...eureka! From what he recalled from his years in Vienna, there was a story that may work for a game.The original music sheet of Mozart's ...
by W. Eric Martin Starting in the mid-2010s, Gen Con came to be a SPIEL launching pad for European publishers, with them demoing a game — or even releasing it in small quantities — ahead of the game's "official" debut at SPIEL.At Gen Con 2022, Italian publisher Horrible Guild did this for Hjalmar Hach's Evergreen, bringing a few hundred copies to sell to early adopters and give away to media ...
by Candice Harris Back in 2018 when I was dipping my toes into the modern board game pool, primarily playing lighter games such as Splendor and King of Tokyo, a little game called Great Western Trail melted my brain in the best way possible. I had to buy it. I had to figure it out. I eventually made some board game friends and we played it every week for a ...
by Morgan Dontanville The art direction for CATAN: Dawn of Humankind came as a reaction to the original game, The Settlers of the Stone Age from 2002. That older game was a daring project of its own era packed with art and history that perfectly captured the techniques of its time.When we revamped the game design, we knew we needed to make it equally contemporary in artistic direction. We wanted ...
by Candice Harris On September 30, 2022, BoardGameGeek officially joined — well, re-joined — the board game podcast club with an all-new BoardGameGeek podcast, featuring fortnightly casual conversations with passionate gamers who geek out about board games, the mechanisms behind them, and the people who create them. I'll host the BoardGameGeek podcast with a variety of folks from the BGG Team, in addition to other special guest board game enthusiasts ...
by Heiko Günther Most readers will probably remember how, a few years ago, a new game smashed all the records and constantly dominated the news*. Peak Oil had hit the scene like the landslide of boardgaming goodness that it is. It's not necessary to repeat any of that crazy hype here as you probably know all about it anyway, and really, we don't have nearly enough space.In light of this ...
by W. Eric Martin In 2018, Grail Games released Reiner Knizia's Yellow & Yangtze, a sister game to Knizia's classic Tigris & Euphrates that retained the same principle of gameplay — maintain balance in your growth — while changing the setting and many elements of gameplay.That game is now off the market, but Polish publisher PHALANX is bringing it back to print as HUANG.Front coverAs far as I understand based ...
by Shadi Torbey From the Skies...In Aerion's designer diary, I explained how I stumbled upon deck management largely by chance: I was looking to create a dice game in which you'd need to gather resources (cards) by rolling appropriate dice combinations, but with no free re-rolls to improve your result. Instead, you would pay for re-rolls by discarding the very resources you were trying to acquire with your rolls.To avoid ...
by Randy Reiman "Just one more trick..."That's what I convinced myself as I took flight in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 during the summer of 2001. My best bud Gary had bested me in every competitive mode the video game offered. If I could nail just one last 360 Benihana over the Carlsbad Gap, my combo would take him down. I didn't even finish the thought before we both watched ...
by W. Eric Martin To celebrate ten years of Steffen Benndorf's Qwixx, German publisher Nürnberger-Spielkarten-Verlag is releasing Qwixx: 10 Jahre Limited-Edition, a special edition of the game that includes the Qwixx base game, as well as the Bonus and Gemixxt expansions and the components needed for the Qwixx Longo standalone game. All of the boards are erasable, and the game includes dry-erase markers.NSV notes that this edition will consist of ...
by W. Eric Martin SPIEL '22 opens on October 6, and Stephen Cordell and I have been racing to put the finishing touches on BGG's SPIEL '22 Preview, although such things are never finished as much as done. At a certain point, updates no longer make sense, with that point being the end of this week, or perhaps the moment I step on the airplane to Germany, or perhaps once ...
by Mal Rempen The Inciting IncidentIn August 2017 I launched the Kickstarter campaign for Itchy Feet: The Travel Game, a card game based on my web comic, fully believing that to be the beginning and end of my flirtation with the world of tabletop games. I figured if I were lucky, I'd raise $15k, break even, have a neat bit of merch for the comic's followers, and that would be ...
by Dave Chircop This post includes two diaries: one from David Chircop, the designer of Hamlet: The Village Building Game, and one from Johnathan Harrington, the game's developer. The goal here is to give two different perspectives and approaches towards a design.Throughout the post, we have scattered in photographs of prototypes of Hamlet in a somewhat chronological order, so that you can see how everything changed as the game grew ...
by Candice Harris Gen Con 2022 was filled with teasers for me. I was equally, if not more, excited to get sneak peeks of SPIEL ‘22 releases as I was to check out new Gen Con releases. I especially couldn’t wait to get to Devir’s booth to get a glimpse of Lacrimosa, a Mozart-themed game that I heard just enough about to know that I wanted to play it. Devir ...
by W. Eric Martin German publisher Clemens Gerhards releases a few high-quality, all-wood games each year, and its newly announced games have now joined more than 1,060 others on BGG's SPIEL '22 Preview.• WaldMeister is the newest game from Andreas Kuhnekath-Häbler, who also designed Kulami, Micro Robots, and Rukuni, which will always be "the game I played in Florence with my son because we were too tired to do anything ...
by Thomas Jansen Hi! My name is Thomas Jansen, designer of Eleven. Together with Ignacy Trzewiczek and his development team at Portal Games, we have worked on Eleven for a very long time. We hope you will enjoy it as much as we did designing it.How It All StartedBack in 2016, I decided to design a football manager board game. I was on a holiday. I sat down at the ...
I made this game.