BGG News

New Game Round-up: Donning the Mask of the Pharaoh, Investigating Arkham Noir, and Exploring Cosmogenesis

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/671…ask-pharaoh-investigating

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3104778_t.png]• In April 2017, I wrote about

the Hasbro Gaming Crate, a quarterly release from Hasbro

that would contain three party or family-themed games (depending on which you choose) for $50. My write-up included this line: Hasbro Chairman and CEO Brian Goldner referred to the Hasbro Gaming Crate as "profitable experimentation" since those who buy the Crates are encouraged to give feedback on the titles, which might then make it into general distribution depending on the results.

Given the recent emphasis by Hasbro on viral video-inspired releases such as Pie Face

, Egged On

, Flip Challenge

, and Speak Out

, I didn't expect much, but some details on the first two crates

have now been released, and some of the items are completely unexpected. To begin with, the main title of the Family Crate is an English-language version of Takashi Hamada

and Kenji Shimojima

's Mask of Anubis

, which debuted in 2016 from GIFT10INDUSTRY

before being brought to SPIEL 2016 by Japon Brand

. This new version is renamed Mask of the Pharaoh

and will reach subscribers in August 2017.

For those not familiar with the game, here's a short description:

Mask of Anubis is a mixture of "VR (virtual reality)" and a board game, with a free application included that converts your smartphone into VR goggles!

The purpose of the game is for players to cooperate to create a map of the maze. On a turn, one player lands on one point of the maze and gets a 360º view of the maze by wearing VR goggles with a smartphone inserted. This player explains to the team members what they see and their teammates attempt to use this description to create part of the map of the maze.

Each player gets one minute to explain what they see, then the play passes to the next player (who will be presented a different view of the maze). Repeat this seven times, then players win the game if the complete map is connected from the entrance to the goal correctly!

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2835306_t.jpg]Another title in the Family Crate is Leo Colovini

's Leo Goes the Barber

, this being an English-only version of the Kinderspiel des Jahres title that ABACUSSPIELE released in 2016. The third title is Tricky Wishes, which sounds from the description like a repackaged version of Chris Castagnetto

's 3 Wishes

from Strawberry Studio

: "To win this card game, players will need to find three kinds of wishes: one Superpower, one Gift, and one World Harmony. Players can take turns swapping, shuffling, and peeking at card wishes to collect the highest-scoring set." Amazing to see these three titles that originally appeared from publishers in Japan, Germany, and Romania be aimed at mainstream gamers this way!

As for the Party Crate, well, that one appears to be more typical as it contains Speak Out: Joe Santagato

(with Joe Santagato apparently being a YouTube celebrity of some sort), Box of Rocks

(this being a new edition of the Joe

and Dave Herbert

design released by Haywire Group

in 2016), and Judgmental

, which sounds familiar in a Who Would Win

kind of way:

Historical figures, fictional characters, and celebrities go head-to-head in this crazy "judgmental" tournament-style game. Choose a contender but keep it a secret, then have fun arguing who should win ridiculous contests before passing judgement! Get your contender all the way to the final round to win!

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3575260_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3078318_t.jpg]• Spanish publisher Ludonova

has unveiled a pair of titles that it will feature at SPIEL 2017 in October. At first glance, Yves Tourigny

's Cosmogenesis

sounds and looks somewhat like Exoplanets

from Przemysław Świerczyński, but the complete rules are available for download on BGG for those who want to go beyond this overview:

In a game of Cosmogenesis, each player creates their own planet system, starting from a star and an asteroid belt. To do this, they use the elements available on the different sections of the central board. In each round, players obtain one element from each of the four sections over four turns and with these elements players form planets and moons. These then collide with each other, causing them to increase in size, develop rings, form atmospheres, and of course create life. Players do all of this in order to fulfill their own objectives, which like the rest of the elements of the game, are obtained from the central board; at the end of the game, these provide the victory points that determine the overall winner.

• The other Ludonova title is also an Yves Tourigny design, this being the solitaire card game Arkham Noir

— more specifically, Arkham Noir — Case File 1: The Witch Cult Murders

, which bears this description:

Walpurgis Night, May’s Eve, is always a nightmare in witch-haunted Arkham. There are bad doings, and a child or two frequently goes missing. This year, Miskatonic University students engaged in occult studies have been turning up dead. Arkham Police, in deference to your unusual expertise, have asked for your help to get to the root of the matter. Time is of the essence because after Walpurgis Night, the trail will grow cold and the culprits will retreat to the shadows until the next Witches' Sabbat, when the next cycle of deaths will begin.

As private investigator Howard Lovecraft, you will investigate events based on the stories "The Dreams in the Witch House" (1933), "The Thing on the Doorstep" (1933), and "The Unnamable" (1923).

Arkham Noir is inspired by the interconnected stories of H. P. Lovecraft and other authors, re-imagined as noir detective stories. Each case stands alone. Gameplay consists of adding cards to open cases, creating lines of investigation in an effort to solve them. The ultimate goal is to score five "puzzle" clue cards in order to piece together the big picture before running out of time or mental stability. Each newly shuffled deck is the start of a unique challenge, with adjustable difficulty levels to accommodate all level of players.

Game Preview: Sentient, or Dieing to Assemble Awesome AIs

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/671…dieing-assemble-awesome-a

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3496086_t.jpg] Renegade Game Studios

had advance copies of a number of upcoming releases at the 2017 Origins Game Fair — Flip Ships

, The Fox in the Forest

, and the game I'm talking about today, J. Alex Kevern

's Sentient

.

As I note in the video below, Sentient

feels like one-third of a Stefan Feld game. It features a solid drafting and dice-manipulation system, with each player drafting four AI cards each round, with each card being placed between two dice on your individual player board. The values of those dice determine whether you score points for the card, but the cards themselves often change those values unless you spend one of your handful of assistants not to make that change.

As you use agents to draft cards, you're also trying to use those agents to gain control of investors that will (possibly) give you extra points at the end of the game. Can you combine the right investors with the right AI, while also triggering all of the AI to score? Sometimes things just fall into place for you — the perfect AI triggering massive points while you simultaneously sway just the right investors — but that's the beauty of the future. You never know exactly what will happen...

New Game Round-up: Campaign for The Grizzled, Lay Palace Tiles in Azul, and Speak English in Kashgar

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/671…grizzled-lay-palace-tiles

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1707560_t.jpg]• Australian publisher Grail Games

has announced that it will release an English-language version of Gerhard Hecht

's Kashgar: Händler der Seidenstraße

in Q1 2018 under the name Kashgar: Merchants of the Spice Road

. Kashgar

was first released in 2013 by KOSMOS in a German edition, and while the game received a fair amount of praise, the cards contain a lot of German text, so folks in other countries decided to wait for a release of the game in their language — after which no one else released the game. *sad trombone*

Now Grail Games is stepping up to the plate, licensing a game that one might have expected to appear in English from Thames & Kosmos, the U.S. branch of KOSMOS, but representatives of T&K have told me (in the past and not related to this announcement) that they have a huge number of titles available to them in the KOSMOS catalog, and they can't possibly do everything. As for the gameplay in Kashgar

, here's an overview:

Kashgar is a deck-building game in which players build three, "open" decks at the same time. The card at the front of each deck (or caravan) determines which actions are currently available for the players. Cards let you acquire spices or mules, make deliveries for points, or acquire new cards for your caravans.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3184278_t.png]• CMON Limited

was already publisher of the English-language version of The Grizzled

from Fabien Riffaud

and Juan Rodriguez

, but in late June 2017 it bought all rights to the game from original publisher Sweet Games

.

So what's next for the World War I game? The Grizzled: Armistice Edition

, which includes a campaign mechanism to give "more structure to the story of friends surviving World War I", to quote from CMON Limited's press release. I tweeted a pic of this game's prototype in February 2017 after meeting Riffaud and Rodriquez at the Festival International des Jeux, but apparently I forgot to also mention this item in this space until now. Oops.

The press release describes The Grizzled: Armistice Edition

as an expansion, but Riffaud and Rodriquez had told me this would be a standalone game, something that essentially starts with everyone meeting at training camps, then learning how to rely on one another to survive all the travails of war. The game is still under development, of course, so things might have changed from that earlier description. They also mentioned that this would be the final Grizzled

title since original artist Tignous died in the Charlie Hebdo shooting in 2015, the year that the original game debuted, and no more art from him exists for the game.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3634863_t.png]• At SPIEL 2017, Plan B Games

will release its second title following Century: Spice Road

, a tile-laying game from Michael Kiesling

titled Azul

. According to Plan B's Mike Young, "It's a fantastic follow-up to Century

(light, easy to learn, and addictively fun!) and helps confirm Plan B's line." Here's a short description:

Introduced by the Moors, azulejos (originally white and blue ceramic tiles) were fully embraced by the Portuguese when their king Manuel I, on a visit to the Alhambra palace in Southern Spain, was mesmerized by the stunning beauty of the Moorish decorative tiles. The king, awestruck by the interior beauty of the Alhambra, immediately ordered that his own palace in Portugal be decorated with similar wall tiles. As a tile-laying artist, Azul brings you to embellish the walls of the Royal Palace of Evora.

In the game, players take turns drafting colored tiles from suppliers to their player board. Later in the round, players score points based on how they've placed their tiles to decorate the palace. Extra points are scored for specific patterns and completing sets; wasted supplies harm the player's score. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins.

• In 2018, Alderac Entertainment Group

plans to release a second Smash Up

expansion that contains factions submitted by and voted upon by fans of the game — but to do that, AEG first needs to receive your submissions, so they invite you to submit faction ideas

for "Oops, You Did It Again!"

before the end of July 2017. Voting on these nominees will open August 1, 2017.

• At San Diego Comic Con, which runs July 20-23, 2017, Renegade Game Studios will debut Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Card Game

, a Keith Baker deck-building design that features artwork by Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O'Malley

. What's more, copies at that show — which are limited to fifty per day on Thursday, Friday and Saturday — feature a convention exclusive variant cover. After all, what's a San Diego Comic Con release with some exclusive element?

Game Preview: Codenames Duet, or Searching for Agents in All the Right Places

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/671…et-or-searching-agents-al

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3596681_t.jpg]We've already published two preview videos about Codenames Duet

: one from the 2017 GAMA Trade Show

when the game was still being developed, and another from the 2017 Origins Game Fair

when the design was pretty much complete and just waiting to be sent to production before the game's debut at Gen Con 2017 in August. Thus, I thought I'd avoid creating another video about the game and instead write something up.

Vlaada Chvátil

's Codenames

is only two years old, but the game already feels like an established classic, something that will be with us for decades. The game design is so minimal — teams take turns trying to identify their hidden secret agents, which are known only by their visible codenames — that its framework can be filled with almost any content, and the gameplay itself will still work just fine; designer Bruno Faidutti, for example, has noted

that he's played the game with people guessing rubber ducks, empty beer bottles, board game boxes, novels, Dixit

cards, Cards Against Humanity

cards, Unusual Suspects

cards, and actual people. Multiple versions of Codenames

exist or have been announced, and many more are sure to come in the years ahead.

Codenames Duet

already functions as another version of Codenames

. The box contains two hundred new double-sided word cards, so even if you ignored the new way to play the game, you'd have four hundred new words to use when playing Codenames

. (You're on your own when it comes to acquiring rubber ducks as publisher Czech Games Edition

doesn't sell them!) These words are a bit more out there than in the original game, with "Joan of Arc" and "Hercules" showing up amongst more common words like "soup" and "hose". I've spoken with CGE's Josh Githens at multiple conventions this year — including at PAX East, where we played a still-in-development Codenames Duet

— and he said that they tried to assemble a mix of words in which some serve as hubs (with tons of potential connections) while others have a smaller range of connections.

In practice, some of those more limited words can still be guessed the old-fashioned way: creative clue-giving combined with the process of elimination. In one game, my partner gave the clue "queen - 2", and it was easy to guess "King Arthur" as one of the two words matching "queen", but I scanned fruitlessly for its partner — until I suddenly realized that she probably meant "Joan of Arc", simply because this card was the only one in play with the name of a female human. Success! (After the game, she confirmed that line of thinking. Joan of Arc wasn't a queen, but that clue would likely get me to that card, and in the end that's all that matters.)

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3610535_t.png] Codenames Duet

differs from Codenames

in that this new game is fully cooperative instead of being played with competing teams. You lay out 25 word cards in a 5x5 grid like normal, but you place a double-sided code card (one side shown at left) between the two players. I see the nine agents (shown in green) that I want my partner to guess and three assassins that I want my partner to avoid (in black). Either player can give the first clue, then players alternate after that, trying to identify all fifteen agents within nine turns.

The tricky part is that my partner's side of the card also shows nine agents and three assassins, and of those three assassins, one of them is an assassin on my side of the code card, one of them is an innocent bystander (shown in tan), and one of them is an agent. This last one is a double agent, I suppose, since I'm trying to get my partner to guess this card, yet if I choose the card on my turn, we lose the game.

Thus, Codenames Duet

often puts you in a bind. You know that at some point you'll need to correctly identify one of the three assassins you see as an agent — but which one? The cool part about this bind is that once you do guess the right assassin, you know that the other two assassins shouldn't ever be guessed since they're worthless to you. Your partner doesn't know that you know this since you're not supposed to share info, but you can feel satisfied internally and leave it at that.

You each have nine agents depicted on your side of the code card, but three of those agents are shared; each of us knows those three agents, but we don't know that we both know. This (unwitting) sharing of information gives you another chance to interact in subtle ways. Your partner gives a clue that might work for a few different cards, but one of them is an agent on your side, so that gives you an incentive to choose it — although one of those agents is

an assassin, so hmm...

Another challenging aspect of Codenames Duet

is that you want to track guesses and information in a way that records who did what. We place the agents and bystanders on the cards so that they face the person who guessed them. If someone is facing me, that means I discovered their identity on my partner's side of the code card; my partner, however, knows nothing about their identity on my

side of the code card. Is this revealed agent also an agent on my side? I know it is, which means I have one fewer agent to clue, but that's my info, not theirs. The person I see as a bystander might actually be an agent that they have to guess.

I've played more than twenty games so far on four-fifths of a copy that Czech Games Edition gave me after the 2017 Origins Game Fair. One strong difference from the original game is that Codenames Duet

is a lot quieter. When playing Codenames

, teams trying to guess words tend to discuss things openly, which gives information to both cluegivers as well as the other team, but in Codenames Duet

you know information that the other player doesn't, so you can't say, "Well, it can't be 'scarecrow' because that's an assassin on my side and I've already guessed the 'fog' assassin." You just sit and stare and eventually guess.

And sometimes you die. In Codenames

when a team guesses the assassin, the other team breaks out in huzzahs and cheers; in Codenames Duet

, you both slump in the chair, defeated. If Codenames

were Star Wars

, with two factions facing off against one another with one sure to win in the end, Codenames Duet

is Rogue One

, with the two of you in a race against time, often cowering on the beach as the world blows up around you.

Then you flip over the word cards and try again.

Crowdfunding Round-up: Legendary Ascended Cats of the Serengeti Realms: Thy Will Be Done

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/672…ary-ascended-cats-serenge

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3636690_t.png]• White Wizard Games

debuted in 2013 with Star Realms

, and it's been making small, addictive, quick-playing card games ever since. Now it's launched a new standalone expansion for that game line — Star Realms: Frontiers

— that allows for play with up to four players at once, along with eight

expansions that can be used with this new release, the original Star Realms

, or Star Realms: Colony Wars

.

Six of these new expansions — The Alignment

, The Alliance

, The Coalition

, The Pact

, The Union

, and The Unity

— are command decks that include a custom twelve-card starting deck that uses cards from two of the four factions so that you can take on the role of a legendary commander. The final two expansions are another command deck ( The Lost Fleet

) and a multi-faction expansion pack ( Stellar Allies

), both of which are sort of Kickstarter exclusive, although excess stock will be available at conventions and they'll be reprinted later with different art. So many realms in which to star! ( KS link

)

• Svavar Björgvinsson's Ancient Aliens: Creators of Civilizations

from Gamia Games

gamifies Erich von Däniken's theories of aliens from the stars shaping the future of mankind on Earth — and now you get to be one of those alien races. Funqqqwick!, as they might say. Each player has their own power and deck of cards, and you're trying to advance humans enough that they can build monuments to your awesomeness. ( KS link

)

• Each round in Legendary Creatures

, from Eduardo Baraf, Christopher Hamm and Pencil First Games

, players draw four creatures from their individual decks, send one on an expedition, then use the other three in one of the realms on the game board to generate resources, cast spells, and more. ( KS link

) BGG recorded an overview of the game with Baraf when it was titled "Fantastic Creatures":

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3187849_t.png]• Seth Jaffee

's Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done

is the latest "deluxified" title from Tasty Minstrel Games

, this being a Kickstarted version of a game that includes fancy metal bits and fancy wood pieces and fancy gold trim on the box and other fancy things in a fancified format. As for the game, you are not crusading in the Middle East, but rather running an order of Templar knights and trying to train troops and construct buildings to gain influence. ( KS link

)

• Steve Jackson Games

is running a short KS campaign for Munchkin Special Delivery

, which might instead be called Munchkin Warehouse 23 Clearance

as this mystery box contains "a core Munchkin game, a combination of expansions and/or boosters, and cool accessories and swag". ( KS link

)

• Action News: The Game of Television News

from John Teasdale and Justin Robert Young is a set-collection game in which you assemble news stories from different cards, possibly using sources on the original story in new ways to provide further commentary. ( KS link

)

• Firelight: The Questing Card Game

from HobbyHorse Games is a card-based tabletop role-playing game that allows 2-4 players to "tell complete, five-act stories with only five minutes of set-up time", according to the publisher, and its introductory nature made it seem like something appropriate for a round-up like this on BGG. ( KS link

)

• Nemo Rathwald's Overworld

from Magic Meeple Games

is self-described as "heavily inspired by the 16-bit era of role-playing and adventure video games of the 1990s". Players place double-sided tiles to create the world, with land not able to touch water except for coast spaces, and as empty spaces are create, players compete to occupy them with dungeon doors. In the end, whoever has doors that are the farthest apart wins. ( KS link

)

• Action Cats!

is a storytelling game from Keith Baker and Twogether Studios

that's "made with 100% crowdsourced cats". Thankfully the game itself is not made from processed cats, but rather it contains crowdsourced images of cats, with players in the game being presented with one of these images, then challenged to create a story about it from cards in their hand, after which a judge determines which story is best. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3550768_t.png]• Rogue Marechal's Serengeti: A Race for Life

from GCT Studios

is a head-to-head deck-building competition to save life in the African savannah, with players needing to manage their resources and threats to wildlife to gain majority control of the land. ( KS link

)

• Spookre

(think Euchre

) from David Sheppard and Twitch Factory is a trick-taking game with players trying to grab ghosts from the graveyard, and when any played ghost has the same aura as the target ghost, then their abilities trigger. ( KS link

)

• The Stonebound Saga

, previously known as Land of Zion

, has funded on its third go on Kickstarter, showing the value of persistence, branding, marketing, and who knows what else. Maybe it doesn't show the value of anything; I should let others worry about such things. In any case, this game by Eric Bittermann and Sky Kingdom Games

has each player control and train three characters on their way through a valley to a final battle against an alien force. ( KS link

)

• Ascended Kings

from Jason M. Allen, Dylan Pierpont, and Incarnate Games

is another KS reboot, with the 2-4 players in this game fighting one another again and again, even after death, to gain four bloodstones, then attempt to claim the Omega Stone. ( KS link

)

• Still another second run feature on KS is Illuminatus

from Nick Crones and Dark Mushroom Games

, with this title seeming like a 1980s-style game in which 2-6 players go after one another with all the conspiracies they can muster in order to complete their hidden agendas first. ( KS link

)

Editor's note: Please don't post links to other Kickstarter projects in the comments section. Write to me via the email address in the header, and I'll consider them for inclusion in a future crowdfunding round-up. Thanks! —WEM

Kingdomino Wins 2017 Spiel des Jahres; EXIT: The Game Escapes With Kennerspiel

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/672…l-des-jahres-exit-game-es

by W. Eric Martin Nearly two months after announcing its nominees

, the jury for the Spiel des Jahres

— Germany's annual game of the year award, which is the game industry's largest prize as it typically leads to additional sales of hundreds of thousands of copies — has proclaimed Kingdomino

from Bruno Cathala

this year's winner, beating out Magic Maze

and Wettlauf nach El Dorado

. Kingdomino

is published by Blue Orange Games

, with Pegasus Spiele

being the German licensee.

Minutes before announcing the Spiel des Jahres winner, the jury gave the 2017 Kennerspiel des Jahres — an award aimed at enthusiasts who already have some familiarity with modern games — to EXIT: The Game

, specifically the first three titles in this series: The Abandoned Cabin

, The Pharaoh's Tomb

, and The Secret Lab

. These titles were all designed by Inka

and Markus Brand

and published by KOSMOS

, and three more titles in the EXIT

series have already been released in Germany, with even more on the way. The other two nominees for KedJ were Raiders of the North Sea

and Terraforming Mars

.

The Kinderspiel des Jahres —the children's game of the year in Germany — had been awarded on June 19, with Brian Gomez' penguin-flicking game Ice Cool

, published by Brain Games, taking home the prize over Captain Silver

and The Mysterious Forest

.

Game Preview: Vegas Dice Game, or Looking to Score at the Tables (and Shelves)

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/672…ame-or-looking-score-tabl

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1261796_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3638382_t.jpg] Rüdiger Dorn

's dice game Vegas

was a departure for the alea

line when the game was released in 2012. A pure dice game? That rates only a 1 on alea's difficulty scale? What's happened to our beloved alea?!

Yet Vegas

is tremendously entertaining. This game about gambling actually feels like gambling because you're placing stakes on casinos in the form of dice that you roll, and sometimes you increase your stakes (by adding more dice to the casino later) and sometimes you lose your wager, ending up with nothing but broken dreams while an opponent brings home the jackpot. You're not in control of what happens because you can place dice only in one of the casinos that you roll — and when you do so, you must place all the dice of a single number — and you must place at least one die each turn. Turn by turn your die resources are allocated until it's the end of a round and you're hoping against hope to roll the one number you need with your lone remaining die in order to break a tie in that casino and go from bupkis to a huge payout. The odds are against you, but it could still happen!

Vegas

went on to be nominated for the Spiel des Jahres, Germany's game of the year award — after which it was renamed Las Vegas

— but it lost out that year to Kingdom Builder

. In 2014, Dorn and alea released Las Vegas Boulevard

, an expansion that consists of several individual modules that can mix up gameplay in multiple ways, from larger bills to more players to large dice that count as two normal dice to a new seventh casino that works differently from all the others.

Now Vegas

is being repackaged again, this time as Vegas Dice Game

, with this new version being available from Ravensburger

solely through the Target retail chain in the U.S. A game buyer from Target contacted me a while ago about taking an early look at this game and several others that will start appearing in stores and online at the end of July 2017, and I said sure for two reasons. First, I want to preview games in this space, and here was an opportunity to do so — although I initially had no idea what I might be previewing. Roll those dice and see what turns up! Second, I want to help more gamers discover BoardGameGeek, and having previews of games that will appear solely at Target might lead them to discover BGG when searching for more information. We'll see whether that actually happens in the months ahead.

Seeing Vegas Dice Game

as one of the titles headed to Target shelves makes sense to me. I've brought Vegas

to picnics and gatherings of "regular" people — you know what I mean, people who play games but aren't obsessed by them — and they took to Vegas

immediately. The game takes at most a minute to learn, and it plays in game space that's familiar to most people. After all, more than 75 million people visit U.S. casinos each year

, and they're all comfortable with rolling dice and trying to work the odds in their favor. Heck, most of us do that every day of our lives — just without rolling actual dice.

We played the game over burgers and chips and sodas and beer, players coming and going throughout the evening with new people picking up the game immediately by watching others. That's a gaming success — but whether it will translate directly from the store shelf is another matter. I worked in a game store in the early 1990s, and I learned over and over again that you can put a game out for display on a table and sell dozens of times more than you can from a game sitting on a shelf.

In any case, here's a video overview of Vegas Dice Game

for those who haven't already played the game or those who want to see what this new version looks like:

New Game Round-up: Drafting Garfield's Monsters, Reissuing Clowdus' Small Boxes, and Importing European Dojos

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/672…arfields-monsters-reissui

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3639331_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3639455_t.jpg]• To encourage retail stores to sign up for CMON Play

and hold gaming events for its titles, CMON Limited

has put together two new "game night" kits that each contain exclusive material for the games featured. The Zombicide: Black Plague

game night kit, which becomes available on July 28, 2017, contains a three-part mini-campaign called "Nightmares", 14 figures and ID cards of a new hero named "Bruce" (?!), and 26 custom dice. The Blood Rage

game night kit, due out September 29, 2017, includes upgraded Clan, Age, and Valhalla game boards, first player horn tokens, and plastic clan tokens that replace the card tokens in the base game. Retailers are free to distribute these materials as they choose.

• In addition to these titles, CMON Limited plans to release a new edition of Roberto Pestrin's Dojo Kun

, which first appeared in 2015 from Italian publisher Yemaia. In this game, due out Q3 2017, players manage a personal dojo and train their athletes to prepare for combat with those from competing dojos.

• Along the same lines and also in Q3 2017, CMON Limited will release a new edition of Max Valembois's Meeple War

, which French publisher Blue Cocker Games released in 2016.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3639433_t.png]• In 2017, Spanish publisher Meridiano 6

plans to release Bedouin

from Fernando Chavarria

and Judit Hurtado

, with the action in this game apparently taking place on some alternate Earth:

The discovery of the Z10 gas put the planet's spotlight on all the corporations of Earth. The treasure that hides under the sand changed the peaceful lives of the bedouin tribes that inhabited the planet. Used to the hard life of the desert, these tribes soon became the most valuable allies in the gas-extraction business. You are the new leader of your tribe and must guide your people to find the gas wells and to build extraction ducts that will reshape the landscape forever. Use your people wisely to control the most strategic places on the map and keep an eye on the movements of rival tribes. Don't forget that the powerful and greedy corporations of Earth pull the strings in the shadows and are capable of helping you...or making your tribe disappear between the dunes.

Bedouin is a strategic game whose main mechanisms are area control and hand management. There is a high interaction between players as they collect the tokens of the gas fields that their tribe controls; these tokens are worth different amounts of victory points, and their value can be modified by different actions during the game. The modular construction of the desert guarantees that you will not find two games the same. Every action counts under the burning sun of the bedouin's planet!

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3639957_t.jpg]• Carnival of Monsters

is a new card-drafting game from Richard Garfield

and (unexpectedly) German publisher AMIGO Spiel

. Here's an overview of the setting and gameplay:

Carnival of Monsters is a card-drafting game in which players collect sets of land cards that allow them to capture and display strange and exotic creatures, hire talented staff to help run their enterprise, and pursue their own secret goals.

Okay, not much to go on for now, but I got a chance to play a round at the 2017 Origins Game Fair, and it was intriguing to know that this design is coming from AMIGO, which typically publishes quick-playing games with few rules. In the game, you need to manage your money in order to pay for new land cards of various types, with these land cards then supporting various creatures that give you points or powers in various ways. You see what everyone else drafts each turn (assuming that they play the card instead of holding on to it), which gives you information for future turns since you're all drafting from packs of cards that are passed among one another each turn

What's especially odd about this project is that AMIGO Spiel is taking Carnival of Monsters

to Kickstarter before the end of 2017, with the goal of funding additional art for the game. The more funding the project receives, the more individual pieces of art will be used for the landscapes and creatures, with a different artist handling each environment.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3639304_t.png]

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2827514_t.jpg]• Kolossal Games

is a new U.S. publisher launched in 2017 with Travis R. Chance, formerly of Action Phase Games and Indie Boards & Cards, in charge of finding and developing titles. At least I think that's what Chance is doing. We spoke with him briefly about the founding of the new company at the 2017 Origins Game Fair, and I've included that video below.

What I do know about Kolossal Games is that the company has hired John Clowdus

of Small Box Games

to be a contract designer. To quote from Clowdus' announcement of the deal:

Kolossal Games now owns all of Small Box Games' back catalog of games. This is amazing news for me, and for you as a Small Box Games fan. But what does all of this actually mean?

Kolossal Games will likely be releasing some of my previous designs under a broader release, with updated and upgraded components, themes, graphics, and rules. This is extremely exciting, and I can't wait to see what Kolossal does with some of my designs. Small Box Games, as a company and publisher, will continue to exist, with a focus on card-only games.

Additionally, I will be designing bigger games for possible publication through Kolossal, something I couldn't have reasonably done through SBG — but I will also continue designing card only games as well.

Game Preview: How Does Your Garden Grow?, or Cursing Raccoons While Praying for Carrots

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/673…ur-garden-grow-or-cursing

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3639980_t.jpg]Yesterday I previewed

Rüdiger Dorn's Vegas Dice Game

, one of nearly two dozen games that will appear exclusively at Target when that U.S. retail chain refreshes its game section at the end of July 2017. Today I'm looking at a far more typical mainstream release, one aimed at the youngest of players and one that exemplifies the constant challenge of getting people to enjoy playing games.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

is from designer Gina Manola

and U.S. publisher Mudpuppy

, which previously had produced only public domain titles such as dominoes, bingo, and chess. This design features all the tropes that one might expect of a game aimed at four-year-olds: bright colors, call-outs to educational benefits ("Color Matching", "Strategy"), and an oddly-shaped box complete with a handle. As for the gameplay, here's an overview:

In How Does Your Garden Grow?, players want to tend to their garden, avoid pests that will eat their crops, and plant one of each of the six fruits and vegetables in the game. Whoever does this first wins.

To start the game, each player draws six seeds from the seed pouch at random and places them on front of the six slots on their 3D game board. On a turn, a player draws and reveals the top card. If it's a fruit or veggie and they have the matching colored seed, they can place this card in their game board in the slot next to the seed. If they lack this colored seed, they can swap one of their seeds with a seed drawn at random from the bag; if this now matches the card, they can plant it; otherwise they must discard the card.

Players might also draw a "Pick it!" card that allows them to steal a card from another player's garden, a "Pest" card that eats one card in your garden, or a "Helper" card that allows you to draw two cards, after which you play both.

Players continue taking turns until one of them has all six fruits and veggies in their garden, winning the game instantly.

All that seems straightforward enough, but the rules don't reveal that one important detail — needing all six fruits and veggies to win — until the final line when previously the object of the game was stated as follows: "[P]lant 6 fruits/veggies in your garden row. The first player to complete his/her garden is the winner!" The rules aren't long, but even in this game for kids I played twice (with a four-year-old and eight-year-old) before re-reading the rules and discovering that one detail I had missed earlier. Even in a game for children with almost no rules, the rules were initially unclear because the winning condition was stated two different ways. Sigh.

In our first games, we played until someone placed six cards in their garden, then called it. The four-year-old had fun with each revelation of his cards (and with winning the first game), while the eight-year-old was filled only with sighs. (A two-year-old observing the game had fun stealing seeds from the bag and playing with them on the remaining game board.)

Once I discovered the correct rules, I coerced the eight-year-old into playing again in order to check whether that color restriction would bog down play. What if you drew two tomatoes to match the two red seeds on your board? Would you then need to cycle through cards until you finally drew a pest so that you could discard one of them, then keep cycling until you drew the missing color? In two games, neither of us had this issue as drawing new seeds from the bag is optional, and both of us drew until we had all six colors, then stopped drawing and just let the deck do its thing.

As you can tell from the description, there's not much to the game itself. You shuffle the deck, then (for the most part) things happen without you having a say in anything. The extra complication of needing a rainbow of produce might cause games to go longer than they would if you needed only to fill your board, and you'll need to judge the patience of your young audience to see whether the complication is worth the trouble. As a designer of kids' games recently told me, sometimes you don't worry about the rules, but just put the components on the table and see what happens...

Designer Diary: Sherlook, or Not Sherlock — Spot the Difference!

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/626…r-not-sherlock-spot-diffe

by Silvano Sorrentino

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3332271_t.jpg] Almost

Everything started back in 2013, at the end of October, soon after the yearly SPIEL game fair in Essen, Germany. I was chatting about Dobble

's great success with Roberto Corbelli, CEO of dV Giochi

. Dobble

has many perks: It's extremely easy to explain; it quickly allows the players to check who won a given round; it's unpredictable due to the random combination of cards in play; and it can be played by many players at once. I, too, wanted to write something as accessible as that, so I started working on several ideas, trying to focus on graphic elements as one of the main components of the game mechanisms.

I recall the eureka moment: I had loads of colored pieces of paper and cards, looking for a use, scattered about on my extremely messy desk, and I stopped to look at two identical cards. What if they had not been totally identical?

Did someone already come up with a game in which the player must spot slight differences between two illustrations? It's a rhetorical question: Of course they did. This is a well-known game, in Italy as well as abroad, appearing on countless game magazines, including extremely popular ones such as La Settimana Enigmistica

, which has run it weekly for decades.

It would have been interesting to have a never-ending "Find the Differences" game in which one could always find a given number of differences between two randomly selected cards. In a couple of days, I had found a technical solution to this effect, one that I will discuss later. There still was another Dobble

characteristic that I wanted to reproduce: The way in which one could instantly find out who had won a hand. A game in which the players must spot differences was not ideal for this because the control phase would have been too slow. I decided to base the game on the count (or the estimate) of the number of existing differences.

The first draft of the idea was called "Almost". Drawing is not my forte, so I decided to create a prototype with pixel art. I found apt images from my favorite TV series, Doctor Who

, on http://pixelblock.tumblr.com

and prepared a prototype deck of cards of "Almost: Doctor Who" (with my best regards to BBC solicitors!) to show would-be publishers that the game could easily be adapted to any license.

The game was based on an extremely simple idea: Picking two random cards, there are N differences between them. Try looking for them here:

Turning the cards, you discover the position and the number of these differences:

The rules of this first prototype were minimal: The players would look at the two cards, and one of them could stop the round in any moment, giving their estimate. A player, for example, could say "Almost 3!", stating that they thought there are approximately three differences between the images. If the player was exactly right, they could take two cards. If they were almost right, e.g., the estimate was one less than the real answer, they could take only 1 card. If they were wrong, i.e., in any other case, they had to give one card to the player on the left and one card to the player on the right. The game would continue until the deck was exhausted, after which the player with the most cards won.

The first round of playtesting was… well, a disaster. The starting idea was good, but its realization — glossing over the issue of "placeholder" graphics — left a lot to be desired. The main flaws were:

:d10-1: The round cards were too small, which made it difficult to spot the differences.

:d10-2: The player with the cards in front of them had an unfair advantage against those on the other side of the table.

:d10-3: Each round of the game lasted either too long (waiting for someone to talk) or too little (when players with few points tried to answer randomly, having little or nothing to lose).

:d10-4: The cards, even with all their little differences, looked "all the same", making for a repetitive and boring game after a while.

Crime Scene

During the 2013 Christmas holidays, I thought the game over, with its pros and cons. I became increasingly convinced that the basic idea had to be developed better and that all the various issues could be solved. I also realized that if the game were to be proposed to a publisher, its strong focus on illustration demanded the help of an artist.

Luckily, I knew an excellent illustrator: cartoonist Benny Gemma

, whom I had already worked with for the production of both my Globetrotter

game and a series of illustrated mysteries for a renown puzzle magazine, a relationship that had lasted every week for over an year. The protagonist of these mysteries was the brilliant Inspector Crosby, one of our original creations. It must have been for this reason that, reasoning with Benny, I came up with a theme that seemed perfect.

The images of the game had to depict a scene of crime, seen from above. In the middle of the scene, a chalk outline of the corpse, with several objects scattered around it, the result of a messy fight. Benny has a humorous style, and the scene would have never looked gory.

The cards would have been bigger and more detailed, about the size of a photograph; we could have added many funny or quirky items; the blank corpse in the middle added a bit of space to the image, so that it no longer looked like a random assortment of objects. What's more, now that the scene was shown from above, there would be no impression of being on the wrong side of the card if you were sitting on the other side of the table.

For a couple of months, between working commitments and other duties, Benny and I worked together to create a set of forty cards; this seemed like the ideal number to have enough variety while allowing us to play on the differences. On the back of each card, one could find up to five differences. Thus, in this version of the game, there were between one and ten differences between two random cards.

The work was really easy because it was based on a non-trivial scheme in which I indicated the changes to make on each card for each box of the grid. "What's this grid?", you might ask. It is the basis of the mechanism that makes the game work, together with the "template" card. In order to explain it, let's create two cards for a hypothetical "Almost BoardGameGeek".

Let's start creating a grid. The cards are really small in this example, so a 3x3 grid will suffice.

Let's then design the "template card": It must have drawings on about half the boxes of the grid, with drawings being allowed to occupy more than one box. Starting from this card, we can design other cards by adding, subtracting, or modifying objects.

Example:

:d10-1: The template card.

:d10-2: We added

the chess king and subtracted

the die.

:d10-3: We modified

the meeple (turning it upside down), modified

the diamond sign (turning it into a heart sign and moving it), and added

a Go stone.

As we create new cards, the differences among these and the template are shown on the boxes of a common grid. The modifications to the new cards must be made on different boxes:

The result is the creation of the first two cards of the BGG edition of the game:

On the back of these cards we have something like this:

The back shows at a glance the total number of differences between these two cards (a number equal to the total number of green circles — five in this case) and their location. Note the little trick: We have effectively shown the differences between these two cards while we actually marked the differences between each card and the template.

Coming back to our story, I now had a prototype with forty richly illustrated cards. During the development, however, the new "crime" theme had inspired me to come up with another improvement on the first prototype. Instead of interrupting a round as soon as a player gives their estimate of the number of differences, now there are ten evidence markers in play, numbered 1 to 10.

Each player can take one at any time, and once they have, they cannot change their mind. Points are awarded to those who guessed correctly, or (if no guess was right) to those who came closest, whether high or low.

In addition, in order to add variety, I added a special die whose faces showed the position in which the cards should have been tiled for the current round:

* Lined up next to one another (like the "Find the Differences" puzzles)

* Placed opposite one another

* Tiled by the short side

* Thrown randomly on the table (!)

With these materials and a score track, the new prototype looked good in its box. The old title, "Almost", wasn't representative of the game anymore, so I renamed it "Crime Scene". I then started to print, cut, and pack the cards and the various game pieces. The best opportunity to show the game would be at SPIEL in October 2014. I had appointments with some publishers that might be interested in producing it, not knowing that a disturbing surprise and a great stroke of luck were just around the corner.

Blinkspector

As usual, the months leading to SPIEL flew away fast. Time reserved for game developing was never enough, curtailed as it was by day-job deadlines and hard-earned vacation time. I was trying to test "Crime Scene" thoroughly with various friends and with members of Finibus Terrae

, a game association and shop in my town.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3488248_t.jpg]It was then that a friend gave me a piece of news that made me groan: BGG's " Gone Cardboard

" had featured a game by Christophe Boelinger

called Difference

, coming out for Gigamic

. The game seemed to have something in common with mine. Worse still, the game was a new edition of a design from 2010 published by Z-Man Games called What's Missing

. During the creation process, I had looked on BGG for games similar to mine, but I had focussed on obvious keywords such as "spot", "difference", "appears", and others.

I... ehm... had completely missed What's Missing

!

Boelinger's game and mine definitely had an idea in common: In Difference

, choosing two cards at random, one can find differences between them. In that game, the differences are always exactly two. It was therefore clear that the author had started, like I had, from a template card, then designed other cards with only one difference in each of them. The players of the game had to find, as quickly as they could, the two differences between the card on the table and the card they have in hand.

For a bit, the news discouraged me. The two games seemed too similar. Then, all things considered, I realized that they shared only one common idea, namely trying to answer this question: How do you create a "Find the Differences" game that can be played indefinitely?

From there, Boelinger and I diverged in our approaches. His is a pure "difference game" based on spotting and reporting the differences, while mine is more similar to an "auction game". It's not necessary to list the exact differences between the two cards as long as one gives an estimate of their number. In my opinion, this fact was the basis of having an original game, even compared to the classic "Find the Differences".

Armed with this conviction, I did what professional courtesy dictated: I wrote to Boelinger, explaining the genesis of my game and sending him the rules. He very politely replied that the two games could coexist peacefully, but he urged me to seek a second opinion from Gigamic. The publisher quickly answered my query, giving me a cordial and encouraging reply. They had compared the rules of the two games and judged that the only similarity (the "Find the Differences" core idea) was actually in the public domain. For the rest, they had found Difference

and "Crime Scene" to be profoundly distinct.

Isn't it ironic that we spent time looking for differences in two "Find the Differences" games? Anyway, that's why Christophe Boelinger and Gigamic are thanked in the manual.

I was back in the saddle, but before I could fully concentrate on SPIEL in October, there was another fair fast approaching. It was much (much!) smaller, but just as important as far as I was concerned. September 2014 would have seen the third edition of BGeek

, the comic and game fair of my city Bari, located in the Puglia region in southern Italy. The main guest of the game section was Spartaco Albertarelli

, the author of games like Kaleidos

, Coyote

, Magnifico

, and several official variants of the classic Risk!

( S.P.Q.Risiko!

, FutuRisiko!

, Risiko! Master

, etc.). Spartaco had worked extensively with Editrice Giochi, the publisher that had introduced in Italy classics like Clue

and Dungeons & Dragons

, and it had been just a little over a year since he had founded his publishing house, KaleidosGames

.

Spartaco's timetable at BGeek

was rather busy, with several meetings on different themes. In one of them, he discussed the synergy between board games and video games. On that occasion, Spartaco talked about some of the issues of a video game adaptation of his iconic Kaleidos

game, which is based on the careful observation of rather rich and elaborate images. One of the problems was to create a wide variety of different images, featuring objects shown in perspective, while avoiding "collisions" of said objects. As Spartaco talked, I thought a possible solution couldn't differ too much from the "grid" I had used with "Crime Scene", and I told him I could show it to him.

So, the next day, bringing Spartaco back to the hotel, we played a couple of rounds of "Crime Scene" and... boom! He immediately liked the game so much that he considered the possibility of publishing it under his KaleidosGames label, which until then had released only games designed by him. I told him that I would have loved the arrangement, but I was already going to show the game to other publishers. Spartaco wished me luck, saying he expected me to sign a contract when still at SPIEL.

Ever since I've met him, that's the only prediction he made that turned out wrong. Everyone liked the game in Essen, but for various reasons no deal got through. The last rejection came a few months after the end of the fair. Strangely, I felt relieved; my hands weren't tied anymore, and I could go back to work with KaleidosGames.

The protagonists of the game were now police inspectors who are glancing at a picture, so I decided to change the title to "Blinkspector". Spartaco reluctantly accepted the change. To be fair, nobody really liked it, not even me… but for the moment it stuck.

C.S.EYE

Due to various real life contingencies, it took a whole year to see any further progress. I met Spartaco again during SPIEL 2015 and, together, we reasoned on how to produce the game. The outlined production team was nothing short of phenomenal, with Chiara Vercesi

and Paolo Vallerga

to focus on graphics and visual design of the game. Chiara started to draw the final version of the cards from the prototype design (a necessary step, given the structure of the game), while Paolo took care of the rest: cover, game pieces, rule booklet, etc.

Spartaco really disliked one of the rules of "Blinkspector": If a player guessed the correct number of differences, they were the only one who scored points that round. Running the game with six players and counting on having only ten rounds in the whole game, this rule was frustrating for those who couldn't get any points for several rounds, despite begin close to the correct answer. As editor (and publisher), Spartaco asked me to sort out this problem. I was also to remove the die from the game as it caused too much unpredictable randomness.

I once heard Reiner Knizia giving really good advice to game designers: "If you have two problems, try to find one solution that works for both." With three days of relaxation in a wellness center in Salento, I managed to find that kind of solution.

The new rules of the game stated that three medals — worth 1, 2 and 3 points — would be up for grabs in each round, and the 3-point medal (drawn at random) would show how the cards should be displayed during that round, giving the same variation previously obtained with the use of the die. With this method, we could control how many rounds of each type there were — we decided upon two of each of the five possible layouts — making sure that the right amount of variety was achieved in every game.

The new scoring system assigned:

* A red medal (1 point) to the player who guessed closest to the right answer, but was higher.

* A yellow medal (2 points) to the player who guessed closest to the right answer, but was lower.

* A green medal (3 points) and any unassigned red or yellow medal to the player who guessed correctly.

This system, while simple, had a number of positive effects on the game. You may have noticed, for example, that those who approach the right answer but are too high earn fewer points than those who approach it from below; this happens because if between two cards there are, say, six differences, one thing that might happen is that a player sees four or five differences and gambles on there being a few more and taking the 7 or a higher number. In this case, it is obvious that at a certain point we just guessed. If we came close to the truth, we are good, but we do not deserve a hefty prize.

The correct answer earning the unassigned medals was a nice idea that came to Spartaco while talking on the phone. This gives a bigger prize to those who win the rounds in which the solution is at the extremes (i.e., 1, 2, 9 or 10 differences), which are the most difficult to guess right. Furthermore, this solution made giving the exact estimate more desirable, granting up to 5 points (3 + 2) to the correct player. At the same time, the rules discouraged random answers, allowing for a more tense game.

The most attentive investigators among you have noticed that the tokens had now acquired a yellow hat with an unmistakable shape. The reason was obvious: the name "Blinkspector" didn't win any sympathy from anyone, and we all decided that a catchier name was needed. Staff brainstorming led to several suggestions:

• C.S.EYE

: Nice pun, unfortunately lost on non-Anglophones

• Photocop

: Again, a nice play on words between photo, cop and photocopy, due to any given card being almost identical to the others

• Police Line, Do Not Cross

: Obviously too long, but it would have been nice to have a box with this title on a yellow ribbon running through its entire length

• Luminol

: Sounds good, but it is actually not too relevant to the game

• And finally... Sherlook

!

Sherlook

I must say that I am really proud of coming up with this title, being a great fan of the Sherlock

BBC series (just as much as I am of Doctor Who

... remember the origins of the game?). The play on words, suggesting a detective who looks — it is SherLOOK

, in case you missed it! — immediately won everyone's heart. The final graphic design of the game started from this new and definitive title. Chiara Vercesi drew some sketches of the cover, each better than the previous one. I'll show you only four of my favorites below.

All of the mock covers were evocative, but in the end we decided to choose the one "displaying" the game better, the one with the two pictures on which the detective is working. Starting from that idea, Paolo Vallerga cast one his spells and pulled out this cover and this logo, hitting the bull's eye, as far as I'm concerned.

The work on the graphics of the game would deserve its own little diary, penned by the three talented illustrators (Benny, Chiara and Paolo) but lacking that, I invite you to look for the many little classy touches that Paul hid in his illustrations. For example, can you find the five references to Sherlock Holmes hidden in the logo of the game?

This story is almost over, even if the actual making and final playtesting took another year, and we didn't manage to complete it on time for SPIEL 2016. The game will be out very soon, anyway, and I want to salute those of you who have endured this long article with one last little secret.

As you may recall, the playtest of "Almost" had been a disastrous affair, and one of the flaws of the original prototype was that the images were too similar, soon boring the players. How did we solve this problem in Sherlook

, which contains forty cards that look "almost" identical? Benny and I had the idea of placing many small inside jokes on the cards in order to keep the viewer's attention up and to entertain those who wanted to try to find them.

As an example, take a look at a snippet from these two cards. The first image shows a stain of blood, but... are we sure it actually is blood? The second image, apart from removing the nose profile from the silhouette of the victim, shows a fallen bottle of red wine. No blood spilled in this game then!

Actually, a careful examination of all the cards in the game may suggest to you that there is not even a real victim! And who knows, perhaps, as you play, you will notice that there are:

:d10-1: Multiple references to a renowned board game

:d10-2: A single reference to another board game that's extremely famous in Italy

:d10-3: An artistic, surrealistic reference

:d10-4: A veiled allusion to a 1988 videogame

:d10-5: An acknowledgement to a great football team

:d10-6: A bad joke that risked being censored

:d10-7: A belated cure

:d10-8: A play on words for musicians

:d10-9: The initial of the main suspect

:d10-0: And, last but not least, a quote from Doctor Who, to go full circle and go back to "Almost"

I wanted to write these designer's notes mainly to thank all of those who contributed to help Sherlook

see the light. A game such as this one, in which graphics and game design are so closely entwined, just couldn't be produced without the help of Benny Gemma, Paolo Vallerga, and Chiara Vercesi. I would like to give them my full appreciation, and to thank all of those who had fun playing with me and beating me almost every time (after initially saying, "All right, we'll play, but you know all of the cards… you'll win for sure!").

The story of the design of this game has been a long one, and if I didn't risk boring you, I could add many more anecdotes to the ones I shared here, but now there's no time. There's a case to solve, and two pictures of the crime scene with revealing details. Take your pipe and hat, Sherlook

: The game is afoot!

Silvano Sorrentino

P.S. Thanks to Simon Mas for the translation into far better English than mine!

New Game Round-up: Produce Cloth in Florence, Chase Rabbits in the Field, and Roll Dice in Hexes

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/673…oth-florence-chase-rabbit

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3647383_t.jpg]• Gen Con is the next big convention in the offing, with SPIEL following two months after that, but in many ways the conventions have an increasing amount of overlap, with designers and publishers (and therefore games) showing up at both conventions. Even when games aren't publicly available at both shows, though, one convention can still feed into the next. Case in point: Developer Uli Blennemann with ADC Blackfire Entertainment GMBH

will be on hand at Gen Con 2017, so he's going to present an overview of Fabio Lopiano

's Calimala

on camera in the BGG booth ahead of the game's debut at SPIEL 2017. (In general, we demo only released games at Gen Con, but I'm making an exception in this case.) Until then, here's a rundown of the setting and gameplay:

The "Arte di Calimala" — the guild of cloth finishers and merchants in foreign cloth — was one of the greater guilds of Florence, who arrogated to themselves the civic power of the Republic of Florence during the Late Middle Ages. The woolen cloth trade was the engine that drove the city’s economy and the members of the Calimala were the elite of Florence.

Throughout its long history, the Arte di Calimala supervised the execution of artistic and architectural works. Most Florentine guilds performed such activities, but the Calimala distinguished itself from other guilds through the number and prestige of the projects and the sites administered, including the construction and decoration of some of the major churches of the city.

Players of Calimala are cloth merchants in medieval Florence, with a number of trusted employees that they assign to various streets within the city to carry out actions. (Each street connects two places where particular actions can be taken.) While taking these actions, players produce and deliver cloth and contribute to the construction and decoration of various buildings across the city. Employees stay on their assigned places for a while, carrying out their actions whenever the street is activated, and eventually are promoted into the city council, triggering a scoring phase.

Depending on the number of players, each player has a number of action discs. In turn order, they can put one on a space between two actions, performing both actions and activating all other discs on the same space. When the fourth disc is placed on an action space, the lowest one is promoted to the city council, which triggers a scoring. After the last action disc is placed or the last scoring phase in the council is triggered, the game ends. The positions of the action spaces and sequence of scoring phases vary from game to game, making each game very different. Secret scoring objectives and action cards add uncertainty.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3648594_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3648586_t.jpg]• Mayfair Games

has announced two titles for release in September 2017, with one of them being an English-language edition of a game that first appeared in Finland in 2015. Run Bunny Run

from Kees Meis

and Dennis Merkx

pits one rabbit against a pack of wolves, with the latter trying to catch the former, and the former trying to make it home in one piece. Gameplay is akin to Wings of War

as the wolves lay down cards on their turn that show where they must play a card on the next turn, giving the bunny a chance to move in response to their intentions.

The other Mayfair title is Food Chain

from Kevin G. Nunn

, with each player having a set of critter cards — worms, birds, cats, dogs, and fleas — and with players laying down cards simultaneously to try to eat opponents while not being consumed themselves. Nunn dropped by the BGG booth at the 2017 Origins Game Fair to present an overview of the game:

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2636415_t.png]• Belgian publisher Flatlined Games

will Kickstart a new edition of Mark Gerrits

' SteamRollers

in late August 2017. Flatlined originally released SteamRollers

in a hand-assembled edition of two hundred copies in 2015, and now this dice-based, network-building game will be available once again — sort of. In a newsletter about the state of the business and the game market at large, Flatlined's Eric Hanuise explained that he's looking for a different way to release games:

A new business model is required for me to stay in operation in this changing market. Manufacturing games, placing them at a distributor warehouse and relying on them to do sales and solicitations requires a sizeable amount of cash on hand to start with, and is a very risky proposition. It also requires marketing and promotion efforts at a scale well beyond my reach. With the current quantity of new releases each week, no distributor can effectively promote each of my games to their retailer clients. Even them must make choices to face this flood of releases. But then what with the games that are not picked for the spotlight? Is the publisher expected to just write them off and have them destroyed? This is of course unsustainable, and more like playing the lottery than actually managing a business.

Thus, Hanuise plans to Kickstart games, selling directly to both gamers and retailers that want to carry the titles in their shops, then only if demand still warrants it, reprint the game for conventional distribution outlets. With that plan in mind, for a period of twelve months SteamRollers

will be available solely via the Kickstarter campaign, from stores that back that campaign or buy directly from Flatlined, or from Flatlined itself at conventions. Writes Hanuise, "This should make SteamRollers

a sought-after game, while avoiding some of the darker effects of current exclusive propositions such as overpriced resales. The one-year period should allow us to establish SteamRollers

as a game worthy of a wider audience for distributors or foreign language partners."

• Oh, and here's another tease at Gen Con 2017 for a game due out at SPIEL 2017, this time from Pandasaurus Games

, with this tweet actually being a tease before the announcement. This game will be available for demo at Gen Con, and I can't wait to try it out...

Game Preview: Bob Ross: Art of Chill Game, or Happy Painting in the Almighty Mountains

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/674…-chill-game-or-happy-pain

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3652437_t.jpg]Nostalgia is a powerful force.

Weeks after the end of the 2017 Origins Game Fair, I'm still uploading the game overview videos we shot there, but a funny thing I've noticed is that the videos for games based on some kind of IP —for example, Big Trouble in Little China: The Game

or Planet of the Apes

— have three to ten times as many views as "regular" non-IP games. This shouldn't come as a surprise to me, yet it did. Perhaps in my old age I'm forgetting what I've already learned.

Cue me receiving a review copy of Bob Ross: Art of Chill Game

, a design from Prospero Hall

and Big G Creative

that will be available exclusively at the Target retail chain in the U.S. starting in October 2017. The game arrived while I was traveling, and my wife texted me a pic of the game along with the sole comment: "WTF?" I played with a friend who immediately texted the cover to his wife as he knew that she would be ecstatic about its existence. I played with someone else who had just started watching his show The Joy of Painting

through some streaming service.

Bob Ross probably isn't someone you think about on a daily basis — or ever, really — but give people the chance to play a game associated with him, and more people than you think will be more excited than they'd be to play some other non-Bob Ross painting game.

As far as I recall from my meager experience with the show, all the elements you might expect from The Joy of Painting

are present in the game: you paint, Bob says amusing things, you paint some more, and you drink and eat snacks while doing so. As for the gameplay, you can watch the video below or read this description:

If you want to paint with Bob Ross, you need to be chill, so whoever reaches maximum chill first in Bob Ross: Art of Chill Game wins.

In the game, each player starts with three art supplies cards, with each card showing one of seven paints and one of four tools. (Some cards are jokers that serve as any color, but no tool.) Take one of the large double-sided painting cards, place it on the easel, and place Bob on the first space on the painting track.

On a turn, the active player rolls the die and either draws an art supplies card, plays a paint to their palette, receives an extra action for the turn (four total), or both draws a "Chill" card and advances Bob on the painting track. Chill cards give all players a bonus, set up conditions that could give players extra points, and more.

The player then takes three actions. Actions include drawing an art supplies cards, discarding two matching cards to claim the matching technique card (which is worth 2 points and 1 bonus point when used), sweep the art supplies card row, place a paint on their palette, wash half their palette, or complete a section of a painting. To take this latter action, the player needs to have all of the paint needed for one of the painting's three sections on their palette with no unneeded colors mixed in! The player scores points equal to the number of paints used, bonus points if they're the first or second to paint this, and additional points if they've painted this feature before Bob (i.e., did you paint this before the Bob figure reaches this space on the painting track.

When someone has completed all three features on a painting or Bob has reached the end of the painting track, this work is complete! Remove it from the easel, and start a new painting. Players continue to take turns until someone reaches a maximum chill of 30 points, at which point they win the game instantly.

Two Robotech Board Games Prepare for Launch in 2018

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/674…games-prepare-launch-2018

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3651693_t.png] Strange Machine Games

was founded in 2011 as a publisher of role-playing games and print-on-demand items, launching with the crowdfunded

RPG Age Past

.

Today at San Diego Comic Con, SMG announced that in partnership with Harmony Gold, it will release two Robotech

board games in 2018. On the smaller side is the dice-based Robotech: Ace Pilot

from SMG's Jeff Mechlinski

, a 2-4 player game that bears this short description:

The Zentraedi are attacking! Quick, grab the nearest crew member and destroy the enemy. Using luck and skill, you can become the SDF-1's ace pilot.

Robotech: Ace Pilot is a small area, fast-playing, competitive dice-based game. The game takes minutes to learn and can be played almost anywhere. Your favorite Robotech heroes help you destroy the Zentraedi Threat!

The other game is a much larger design, a cooperative game for 1-6 players that's also from Mechlinski titled Robotech: Attack on the SDF-1

In Robotech: Attack on the SDF-1, you play heroic characters of the venerable Super Dimension Fortress One, also known as the SDF-1. Players are thrown on a chaotic path as alien forces, known as the Zentraedi, attack without warning. You must defend the SDF-1 against continuous waves of Zentraedi attacks, unexpected disasters, and treachery. As a hero, you are forced to battle vicious enemies, repair damage, and manage resources. Tough decisions and sacrifices are required for you to reach home safely.

If the Heroes can keep the SDF-1 from being captured by the Zentraedi and make it to the end of the Scenario, they win. Beware as there are many ways to lose, and the Zentraedi will not give up...

SMG will be demoing both titles at Gen Con 2017 in the Indie Game Developer Network booth (#2437), so check them out during that show or watch for more details from those who have.

Friese Facilitates Fast Forward Franchise Featuring Flee, Fear & Fortress

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/674…orward-franchise-featurin

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3652028_t.jpg]If I've learned one thing about designer Friedemann Friese

, who publishes his designs under the 2F-Spiele

label in Germany, it's that he loves to experiment with game design simply to see what's possible. You can see this experimental nature in a GeekList he created to detail the origins of some of his games

(a list unfortunately not updated since 2011). Foppen

came about from thinking about trick-taking games and the notion of someone losing their ability to play each round. Fische Fluppen Frikadellen

was born from the notion of having people play multiple games at the same time on different tables. A children's flip book in which you assemble a creature with mismatched head, body, and feet provided inspiration for what became 504

, which meshes rule segments from different types of games into a single game.

In 2016, he released Fabled Fruit

, which functions akin to a legacy game in that new elements are added to play over successive games, with players saving their place after each game — using a bookmark, as it were — in order to start with the "right" set of cards next time. You have lots of individual games which last only twenty minutes that collectively form the larger game of Fabled Fruit

, which Friese dubbed an example of a "Fable Game" — that is, a game that changes over multiple playings, but one that you can reset at any time in order to start over with a different group or just explore again.

Now for 2017, he's gone even farther with the Fable Game system, introducing three new titles that will debut at SPIEL 2017 in October under the label " Fast Forward

". These games are all Fable Games in that they start with an ordered deck of cards, with which you'll play multiple games — saving your position when you stop should you want to start in the same place next time, while also having the option of starting over from scratch — but beyond that, Friese has embedded the rules within the deck itself. You read nothing prior to play other than perhaps an instructional card that tells you not to shuffle the deck. You place the deck on the table, read the top card, and begin.

Fast Forward title #1 is FEAR

, which is for 2-5 players and plays in 15 minutes. The description on the BGG page is brief: "Do you fear ghosts? Or are you confronting the danger and scaring your opponents? FEAR

is a fast-paced and straightforward hand management game of tension-filled ghost chasing."

Thankfully I played the game in prototype form, so I can fill in a few more details. (Please note that all of the games described in this post might have changed since I played them.) Your goal in FEAR

is twofold:

1: Don't make the total of cards in the middle go over a certain number because if you do, you lose the game.

2: If you didn't lose, have the highest total of cards in your hand because then you win!

On a turn (at least initially), you either draw a card from the deck or play a card to the center of the table. If you have three cards in hand, then you must play something. Gameplay is super simple, and the turns fly by. When someone loses, their cards are removed from play, then all of the other cards are shuffled and placed on top of the deck. Thus, you shrink the deck by a few cards each game, which means you'll start digging into new cards as each game progresses — and as you dig, you discover new cards with different numbers and (more importantly) new rules! When you uncover a rule, you read the card, set it aside, and the rule immediately takes effect, both for the current game and any subsequent games — until that rule is replaced, as might be the case.

I don't want to detail any rules, partly because I don't want to spoil the fun and partly because I played the game three months ago and might misremember things. If you've played games — and you probably have — then you can likely imagine what some of those rules (and numbers and effects) might be.

I played FEAR

twelve times in a row at a convention with designer Joe Huber and 2F-Spiele's Henning Kröpke, and I loved every minute of it. I already dig playing short games multiple times in succession to see how gameplay evolves as players learn how to play better and how to react to opponents, but now the game was changing as well. It was like rearranging the furniture in a room that spontaneously changed in size, then grew new windows. And if I recall correctly, Kröpke said that after you finished the deck, you could keep all the existing rules in play, shuffle only the number cards, then play the game that way.

Ta-dah! A new way of learning how to play a game, something perhaps akin to placing a video game in a console, then mashing buttons to figure out what you're doing on the fly. I've often said that the need to learn rules is the biggest obstacle to people playing games. You, that person out there reading BGG, are probably comfortable reading rulebooks and teaching others how to play a game, but much of the general public hates doing that, which is why retreads of old games continue to dominate mainstream retail shelves year after year. People want to grab something they're pretty sure they already know how to play, so they grab a spinoff, figure out what's new this time, then start playing. FEAR

and the other Fast Forward title try to short-circuit that nervousness about learning rules by giving them to you one card at a time.

Whether that nature of these games is transmitted clearly on the box — and therefore to potential players — is unclear at this time, but that's my hope. Why? Because I want more people to play games. Why? Many reasons, but mostly because it increases the odds of me finding others to join me in a game.

FORTRESS

is title #2 in the Fast Forward series, and this 15-minute game for 2-4 players is "about taking risks and out-witting and bluffing your friends to become the dominate ruler of the kingdom", and (initially) you become dominant by possessing the lone fortress.

Each game, you build a hand of cards, and (if I recall correctly) on a turn you either draw a card or attempt to claim the fortress by playing one or more cards onto the table. If no one owns the fortress, then it's yours and those cards represent your strength; if you're attempting to take it away from someone else, they look at your cards and either hand over the castle (which is occupied by your cards) or shake their head disdainfully, keeping one of your cards as their prize. You've now gained information about what's in the fortress, but can you make use of that info before the round ends?

As with FEAR

, some cards are removed from play each game in FORTRESS

, which therefore introduces new cards and new rules, which again I'll leave you to guess. You can probably guess the obvious first twist, but what next? I played FORTRESS

a few times before being stopped by dinner plans, and the game is partly about reading others (a skill that eludes me) and partly about the luck of the draw and partly about throwing yourself at targets because that's the only way to score in the end. Take chances! Take action!

FLEE

differs from the first two Fast Forward titles in that it's cooperative (for 1-4 players) and it bears a listed playing time of 75-90. This is not the time needed for a single game as those take only 5-15 minutes (based on my experience), but perhaps for the entire experience to come to a satisfactory conclusion. Here's the short description:

"Quickly, we must flee!", you tell your companions. "THE MONSTER is almost upon us! Look to all sides for help as you never know where it will be!" Can your team survive long enough to finish all chapters of this exciting story?

FLEE is a cooperative game of escaping for ambitious puzzle solvers.

I played FLEE

in less than ideal conditions, with Friedemann walking into a convention at far-too-late in the morning and asking whether I wanted to play a game. Instead of going to sleep as I should have, I gathered a couple of other people and we played. We lost, so we played again, then we lost — over and over again. Either we weren't thinking clearly, or the lateness was hitting us hard; I'm still not sure which is correct.

In FLEE

, someone gets a monster card when you start going through the rules, then players take turns drawing cards and doing things and if the active player has the monster in front of them, then you all lose. Initially the choices are straightforward. I can play this card to make someone skip their turn, so clearly that's Paul with the monster card — but things quickly start getting tricky, with cards that move things and reverse turn order and much more, with all of you continually trying to figure how to keep that monster out of the spotlight. The description mentions multiple chapters in the game, but we never made it past chapter 1, so I can restart this game anew once it becomes available in October 2017. How fortunate!

Game Preview: The Chameleon, or Hiding in Plain Sight, Sometimes Terribly So

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/674…-hiding-plain-sight-somet

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3552344_t.png]In recent years, a number of hobby titles have made their way into mainstream markets, whether directly through distribution deals as with Catan

, Ticket to Ride

, and Pandemic

or indirectly through a licensing deal or some kind of exclusivity arrangement. In 2016, for example, the U.S. retail chain Target released Codenames: Deep Undercover

(based on Codenames

) and Machi Koro: Bright Lights, Big City

(based on Machi Koro

), with both of the original games appearing on Target shelves as well. In mid-July 2017, I wrote about

the Hasbro Family Gaming Crate, the first example of which will contain versions of games that originated in Germany ( Leo Goes to the Barber

), Romania ( Three Wishes

), and Japan ( Mask of Anubis

).

One of the titles that has won the mainstream lottery in 2017 is The Chameleon

, with this new version of Rikki Tahta

's self-published game Gooseberry

from UK publisher Big Potato

being destined to appear exclusively in Target (and at conventions) for the time being.

This party game falls into the "clueless player" genre, something that includes A Fake Artist Goes to New York

and Spyfall

. All players but one know what they're trying to do, and Clueless Joe needs to tag along and fake it 'til he makes it. (God, it's like being back in high school again.) In The Chameleon

, everyone but the chameleon knows the secret word or phrase from among the sixteen listed on the topic card, and everyone — including the chameleon — needs to think of a single word to say related to this word or phrase. After everyone is ready, you blurt out the words one after another, then vote on who the chameleon might be.

If you fail to guess the chameleon, this player wins the game; if you guess the chameleon, but this player identifies the correct word or phrase on the topic card, they still win! Thus, you need to be sneaky when choosing your word, selecting something that those in the know will recognize as being legit while leaving the chameleon dumbfounded.

Doing this is sometimes trickier than you might think! How do you reveal that you know the secret word "economics" from among a list of school subjects without blurting out something obvious like "money" or "budgeting"? I've had two play sessions on a review copy in which we just played over and over again — not keeping score, which is optional in the game — and all too often the chameleon knew what we were talking about. You have to do your part not to get called out as the chameleon (because then the team loses), but you also can't be open. Tricky!

One other issue with the game is that sometimes players look at the wrong word or phrase on the topic card, so they make up a non-sensical code word. When the topic was "board games", one player thought the secret word was "chess" when it was actually " Clue

", so his clue word of "touching" threw everyone for a loop. (He was the first person to speak for the round, and he looked horrified as the rest of us gave our code words, so he then tried to give another word, which then made it obvious he wasn't the chameleon. You just have to own your mistakes in this game! No backsies!)

Another time one of the players read the number on the d8 as 1 instead of 7, despite me reading out the numbers. Oops. She ended up saying "grass" for the word "beef", but it wasn't totally off as the woman right after her said "milk" for the actual hidden word "chocolate" — and you need grass to make milk, right? It all fit together, but only by chance and some still called her out as the chameleon.

I give more examples of gameplay and this "omega player" problem in the video below:

Game Preview: Sonar, or Battleship for a Brand New Era

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/674…-battleship-brand-new-era

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3662558_t.jpg]In 2016, as part of an effort to introduce exclusive new games for its customers, the U.S. retail chain Target partnered with Days of Wonder and its owner Asmodee to produce Ticket to Ride: First Journey

, which aimed to give players as young as six something akin to a Ticket to Ride

experience. While the games share the same core — collect cards to place trains on tracks between cities — they play out quite differently, with First Journey

being a race game that ends in 10-15 minutes while Ticket to Ride

is a (relatively) more involved points game in which players have more time to deduce what others are doing and block them or can shoot for the moon by drawing tons of tickets and hoping to luck into completed routes.

For 2017, Target has another such simplification heading to its shelves, but the tricky thing is that while the rules for this new game are simplified, the gameplay itself is not. Sonar

from Roberto Fraga

, Yohan Lemonnier

, and Matagot

is a new take on their Captain Sonar

, which debuted in 2016. Both games function as a more advanced version of ye olde Battleship

, a game already known by millions. In Captain Sonar

, which can be played with teams of up to four players, you attempt to be the first to cause four points of damage to the opposing submarine; in Sonar

, which is for 2-4 players and therefore limited to teams of two, you need to damage the opposing sub only twice. Here's a rundown of Sonar

in detail:

Time for an underwater game of cat-and-mouse, with each of the two teams in '''''Sonar''''' competing to be the first to deal two points of damage to the other. Do that, and you win the game instantly.

In detail, ''Sonar'' includes four pairs of maps, and each team takes the same maps in their color. A team can be one or two players, and with two players on a team, each player takes a different role: Captain or Radio Operator. (A one--person team handles both roles.) A divider separates the teams, and each Captain marks their starting location on the map.

On a turn, the Captain calls out an action, typically moving their sub one space north, south, east, or west. When they do this, they call out a direction, mark their new location, and add one energy to their ship's register. The Radio Operator on the other team notes the movement of this sub on a plastic sheet, and through deduction and trial-and-error tries to determine exactly where the opposing sub might be on the map.

Instead of a moving, a Captain can also:

• Use sonar: Erase two energy from your register; the opposing team must reveal their row or column.
• Go silent: Erase three energy from your register; move your sub, but don't gain energy and don't tell the opponents which direction you're moving.
• Fire a torpedo: Erase four energy from your register; call out coordinates in your quadrant (e.g., F6); if the opponents are on that space, they take a point of damage.
• Surface: Announce your location to the opposing team, then erase your previous path on your map; you can't cross your own path during the game, so sometimes you need to surface in order not to box yourself in.

You can have at most four energy in reserve, so you need to manage movement and the other actions carefully so that you'll be able to fire at the opponents once you know where they are — ideally without being torpedoed in response!

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3013621_t.png]If you've played Captain Sonar

, you can recognize this game immediately; it's the same, yet not. The two boring roles — First Mate and Engineer — have been removed, which is a good idea as I'd never recommend someone learn Captain Sonar

in those roles anyway. Being Engineer is like being the dad in a group of kids who's always telling them "No": "No, you can't go play in the river." "No, you can't throw rocks at that propane tank." You're just a bummer, bringing everyone else down with what they can't do and only occasionally allowing them to do stuff that feels natural. "Okay, fine, now

you can launch a torpedo at the bad guys. Are you satisfied?!"

With Sonar

, the game is focused solely on moving and hunting. You've lost a few of the special abilities in the original game, but you've gained a trickier timing conundrum. After all, once you use sonar to gain information about the opposing team (or clarify what you already suspect), you're down at least two energy and must move at least twice to get back to full torpedo strength. Will those extra turns help you nail down exactly where the enemy is located, or will it allow them to sneak into an adjacent quadrant, thereby putting them out of range.

Sonar

has lots of little changes that make the game easier to learn (and teach!), but that doesn't mean the gameplay itself is easier. Torpedoes now require a direct hit to deal damage instead of doing two points of damage on a direct hit and one point when landing on an adjacent space. The sonar ability gives you one piece of information (out of two) instead of two (out of three); yes, one of those intel bits was a lie in Captain Sonar

, but sometimes that detail still helped you.

In the end, you have two games — Captain Sonar

and Sonar

— that seem like mirror images of one another. It's not Bizarroworld weird, mind you, but more like Earth A and Earth B versions of the same game design that was developed down different paths. I appreciate the efforts created to simplify Captain Sonar

for a more casual audience and look forward to more such experiments in the future!

Designer Diary: From Medieval Traders to Indian Zamindars to Old Western Trains, or The Long Winding Journey of Whistle Stop

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/673…raders-indian-zamindars-o

by Scott Caputo

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3472683_t.jpg]How did a game originally about medieval merchants bringing tributes to various kings become a game about Old Western trains traversing the USA, supplying goods to boom towns? It's been quite the wild ride for sure.

It all began with a crazy idea: Could I make a tile-laying pick-up-and-deliver game? I was just coming off of the publication of my tile-laying game Kachina

in 2009, so I was eager to make another tile-laying game but of a totally different type.

Tile-laying and pick-up-and-deliver? Those mechanisms seemed a bit at odds with each other. Sure, Steam

has tiles in it, but you buy the tiles you want and place them where you want. I wanted a game in which you drew random tiles and built the board as you went, playing as medieval merchants who pick up goods and pay tribute to kings as they appeared on the board. My first game name was "Tribute".

But what if no kings appeared on the played tiles? Early on I realized I wanted to have some known goals at one end of the board that all players could work toward. These were kings who wanted a lot of goods, so players needed to plan carefully to gather all of the right items. There would still be a number of lesser kings mixed in with the normal draw stack that would come out randomly, and these kings generally wanted fewer goods. You scored points with each successful tribute.

What if you needed a good that wasn't on the board yet? I realized there needed to be a trading post where players could trade one good for another — yet scarcity was a good thing. I didn't want it to be too easy to get the goods you needed, so I decided there should be two classes of goods: common and rare with rare resources half as likely to appear on the tiles. A player would have to trade two common resources to get a rare resource.

I knew I wanted "crazy" tiles, tiles with lots of twisting paths much as in games like Tsuro

and Metro

. I love mazes, and I liked the idea that even building the routes you needed with these "crazy" tiles would be a challenge. The early tiles had arrows going all different directions. Every turn, each player would draw one tile and place it on the board where they wanted. Players had to follow the arrows. Arrows went either forward or up and down; players were not allowed to move backward.

I also knew I wanted players to control not one, but multiple traders, each of which could traverse different parts of the board. Each turn after playing a tile, players could move one trader. Players would need to decide which trader to move and players' traders would block each other. I didn't want players to have to remember which resources were collected by which traders, so I decided that all collected resources are available to all of your traders. This eliminated the need for elaborate bookkeeping.

I liked the idea that players could gain extra moves and store up extra moves for future turns. I called these food tokens. Players would be limited to how much food they could spend on their turn, but they could ration out the food as they saw fit. There would be an inn where players could gain these food tokens.

So what happened when players paid tribute to a king on the far end of the board? The player's trader would come off the board and be placed on a special bonus track where the player could receive free resources and food. It was strong incentive for players to reach the end of the board and when one player got all of their traders off the board, the game would end.

Players would start the game by placing their traders along one of twenty starting spots on the far right of the board. I quickly realized that players needed more reasons to place their traders, so I added another starting column, this one in the middle of the board which players could reach in a few turns. This column would start with an inn, a trading post, a couple of kings, and a few other tiles. In this way, players had both mid-term and long term goals to consider when placing their traders.

Somewhere around this time as I was playtesting, I got feedback that the theme didn't really make any sense. If the board was a map of Europe, how were there so many kings so close to each other? My dad did some research and proposed a startling idea: What if the game were set in India and the kings were zamindars, that is, Indian aristocrats? The unusual exotic theme appealed to me, so I decided to retheme the game.

I arrived at SPIEL 2012 to promote the release of my game Völuspá

, and I brought four games to pitch to publishers, including "Zamindar", my newly rethemed "Tribute" prototype. Based on good advice from another game designer, I asked my publisher, White Goblin Games

, for help in getting contacts at companies I wanted to meet. I ended up pitching "Zamindar" to KOSMOS

, Ravensburger

, Lookout Games

, Argentum Verlag

, and White Goblin Games. Several of them wanted to play a full game, and I remember fondly playing "Zamindar" in the SPIEL cafeteria while drinking a cup of tea, people walking by with plates of food, peering at the game we were playing. Both Lookout and White Goblin Games expressed interest, and I went home pleased that I had placed both copies of "Zamindar" with publishers.

After SPIEL, I got the most feedback from Lookout as they were definitely playing the game and seemed to enjoy it. They told me they were bringing the prototype to Nürnburg, where they would play all of the best prototypes to decide which games to publish. I was excited my game was in such serious consideration, but soon enough Lookout let me know they were passing on my game. From their perspective, there wasn't enough going on in the game, and the dominant strategy was to always go for the end goals as quickly as possible. White Goblin Games went dormant for a while, so both publication leads ended.

This led to the first round of soul-searching for the game. How good was this game? Could I really overcome Lookout's feedback? I got to work. First, I decided that there should be more incentive for players to make tributes to the zamindars in the middle of the board. Each of the eight "lesser" zamindars would have a unique crest. When you made a tribute to one of these zamindars, you received their crest. The player who collected the most crests would earn a large number of points, and players in second and third place would receive points as well.

Then I brainstormed a ton of new ideas for other types of tiles that could be in the game. Originally, I thought these extra tiles might be an expansion idea, but I realized the base game needed these new tiles. I came up with the stables tile that could give players a horse token, which was like a food token, except players could skip over other players or go backwards. I came up with the elephant tile that could give players an elephant token, a way to earn extra points for making tributes. There was also the Royal Court, where players could turn in their crests for points. Needless to say, the gameplay transformed with all of these new mechanisms.

I attended Protospiel San Jose in April 2014, showing off my newly revised "Zamindar" along with other games. I caught the eye of Victory Point Games

, to whom I showed the design, but they had some concerns about the game length. The game ended once one player got all of their traders off the board. This variable ending condition could lead to longer games — sometimes over ninety minutes — and it certainly could lead to a feeling of drag toward the end.

At Protospiel, I also ran into Ted Alspach of Bézier Games

, whom I knew from attending a local game convention year after year. I approached Ted and asked him whether he wanted to see my game. About a month later, I showed the game to Ted and Toni at Kublacon. I remember the session well. We played on the top floor of the hotel, a room with lots of windows filling the room with mid-day sun. Toward the end, Seth Jaffee walked by. He quickly picked up how the game worked and started making suggestions to Ted and Toni about "you can do this and this and then go there…" Within a few weeks, I heard from Ted that he wanted to sign the game, and I felt like it might be finally be done.

I quickly realized how wrong I was. First came an intense period of changes. Ted assumed the role of developer for the game. As Ted likes to say, I had a created a train game; I just didn't know it yet. I was open to the new theme of Old Western trains, so I set about thinking of new names and metaphors for all of the game components: Player would control trains, not traders. They'd use coal to move, not food. They'd deliver to towns, not zamindars. They collected stock, not crests. They gained whistles, not horses. They found gold instead of elephants. They brought their stock to the stock market, not their crests to the royal court. It all fit together pretty well.

Next came development on the tiles. The arrows had to go. I had a feeling the arrows were too busy. First, Ted tried long rectangular tiles, but that still seemed overwhelming to players, so he suggested hex tiles.

This reduced the number of paths per tile from 8 to 6. I was worried this might limit mobility and the maze-like feeling I wanted, but this change ended up working fine. I still got to have some pretty crazy twisty paths even on the hex tiles. Also, Ted added blank tiles (i.e., tiles with no stops on them) which turned out to be really useful in letting players move their trains further down the board.

In the prototype, players got a free move, then could spend coal to make two extra moves, but Ted didn't like the two types of movement in the game. Instead, he proposed that players receive two coal on every turn to do their normal moves as well. Players also got to start with three whistles, so they could avoid getting blocked by other players.

In order to address the game length issue, I first suggested that once the board was completely filled with tiles, there would be a maximum of five more turns. This involved giving the start player a special marker that they would need to flip over, after which they would keep track of the final five turns. This was an improvement over the old ending condition, but it involved too much bookkeeping for the start player and felt less streamlined.

Ted suggested the game should take a set number of turns, and he thought the supply of coal could work as the timer. A trail of piles of coal tokens signaled which turn the game was on. On each turn, players took all of the coal off one pile. The working title was "Western Steam", and it seemed to really be coming together.

I had to go to London for a business trip in January 2015, so I brought "Western Steam" to a Meetup event by the London On Board

group and they seemed to really enjoy it. Drinking a pint of beer and eating a hearty plate of fish and chips while playing the game in the quaint upstairs of a pub, I felt like the game development might finally be done.

Ted decided to do a blind playtest of "Western Steam" with a group of gamers at Yahoo in March 2015. I posed as another playtester, but I was in charge of explaining the rules. I was hopeful, but my hopes were quickly dashed as the other playtesters at the table completely trashed my game. Nobody enjoyed it. One said there was literally no game in the box. They struggled to say anything good about my game. Afterward, Ted said he had never experienced such a harsh playtest. Ted was still committed to the game, but he said it was up to me to make changes so that it could pass the same test again. Gulp.

Thus came the second round of soul-searching about the game — even deeper this time. Maybe I couldn't make this game work. Maybe I would fail. Though the criticism from the blind playtest hurt, I had to listen to the underlying complaints and try to address them. They seemed to boil down to 1) not enough player interaction and 2) not enough meaningful decisions.

I had some ideas of how to address the first point. Many parts of the game were too nice. If players tied for the most stocks, they shared the points. Effectively, most people could gain some points from the stocks without working too hard. Also, players started with three whistles, so they were never really blocked. Both of these parts needed to change. I changed the stock scoring so that there was a separate score for each stock type and only the top player received the points — no ties! To accomplish this, I numbered the stocks 1 through 6, and if two players tied, the player with the lower stock number would win. In this way, players needed to pay attention to which stocks other players were collecting. Also, I reduced the number of starting whistles to one to make players sweat a little more and have trouble getting around opponents.

I belong to the League of Gamemakers

, and one benefit of the League is being able to rely on the collective knowledge and expertise of its members. I met up with Teale Fristoe, a fellow Leaguer and designer of Corporate America

, in the summer of 2016, and he proposed the most important change yet. From the beginning of the design, players were forced to play a tile every turn, and that was part of what the playtesters at Yahoo didn't like. Being forced to play a tile every turn may not help you. and it slowed the game down, too. Teale suggested that players should play a tile only when they need to, as in only when their train would go down a path with no endpoint. I loved this idea. This changed everything. Players moved their trains every turn, but they played tiles only when they really wanted to go somewhere off the edge of the board. I allowed players to play multiple tiles at once so that they could potentially move a train a long distance on one turn, something that was never possible before in the game.

I went back to Ted saying I had fixed the game, but Ted wasn't so sure. He still wanted more. He wanted more ways to use resources. What if players could trade in resources to do various actions like trading? I admit I initially hated the idea. It seemed overly complex, but then it inspired a variation of his idea. What if players could hire workers who gave them a special action or ability? Once hired, these workers would stay with the player, who could use their benefit turn after turn until they were hired away by another player. That seemed fun. In my initial prototype of this idea, I had characters like the Coal Loader, who let players turn in a coal for more coal, and the Store Owner, who let them gain any token they wanted. Soon, I had twelve characters, each with interesting powers and some of them highly interactive. The Outlaw, for example, forced other players to pay the Outlaw's player to leave a town.

The addition of these workers seemed to kick the game into an even higher level of fun and strategy. Every game would have a random set of workers available. They added variety and another way for players to build their own path to victory. Ted opted to turn the workers into upgrades, and all of the powers were themed around different railroad cars, objects, or buildings.

When Ted played the new version with the new tile-laying rules and the upgrades, I could tell by the smile on his face that the game might finally be done. We did another blind playtest, this time at his house with another group of gamers. Again, I sat in and this time at the end of the playtest, everyone at the table seemed to really like the game, giving an average rating of 8. That felt good.

To give a little more praise for Ted, the first pass of the art was more realistic, featuring gritty landscapes like traditional train games, and he rightly decided it wasn't the right look for the game. Eventually, he decided on a more whimsical direction, with brighter colors and cheerful tokens. (Those whistle-shaped whistle tokens are very cute.) He also came up with the final game name: Whistle Stop

.

I'm grateful for all the help I received along the way in Whistle Stop

's six-year development. I'm glad the version I submitted to Lookout Games did not get picked up and the version I blind playtested at Yahoo did not get made. As fellow Leaguer and game designer Luke Laurie likes to say, "Good games take time." I feel like that has been true with Whistle Stop

, and I'm very proud of the final version.

Scott Caputo

Preview of BoardGameGeek's New Convention Preview Tool — Coming Soon!

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/675…w-convention-preview-tool

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2346498_t.jpg]When I joined BoardGameGeek in 2011, one of my responsibilities was to continue assembling convention previews for SPIEL, something I'd done on BoardgameNews.com since 2007. In that first year, I also created a preview for Spielwarenmesse, with Gen Con being added to the roster in 2012 and the Origins Game Fair and Tokyo Game Market in 2015. For all of these previews, the idea is to highlight new games that will be shown or sold at these conventions, both to alert those who plan to attend and to let those at home know what they might see in their local stores (or not

see given the size of many publishers).

The convention preview format on BGG was a unique creation usable solely for me to do what I needed to do — but having been assembled on the back of the GeekList infrastructure, the preview had some restrictions for both me and users because people wanted to do things with it that GeekLists were not designed to do.

Thanks to several intense weeks following the 2017 Origins Game Fair by Scott, Jordan and Dan, that situation is about to change, and the image below highlights much of what's new about our new convention preview tool:

To start, while the games in the convention preview are sorted alphabetically by publisher by default, you can also sort the games by title, by thumbs, by price, by playing time, by rating, by which were most recently added to the preview, and by priority.

Priority

is a new status created for this preview format. You can click one of the four buttons by each game to tag it for yourself

as "much have", "interested", "undecided", or "not interested". When you sort the list by priority, all the titles will be sorted in that order, with the games appearing alphabetically by title within each group. (When you sort by anything other than publisher, look for the publisher's name underneath the cover image.)

Priority also comes into play through the use of filters. Click on the " Filters

" button, and you'll see this:

So many filters! You can apply one or more filters, and the results will be spit back at you with around 25 titles visible and the rest hidden under a "Show More/Show All" link. (This is how the games are shown without filters as well. We don't automatically show all the titles so as not to kill our servers. Similarly, we're keeping the name, game description, etc. under a "more details" link.) If you highlight "much have", "interested", "undecided", then everything you've tagged as "not interested" will now be invisible for you; if you highlight only "not prioritized", then you'll see only those games you haven't yet classified.

Expansion status is noted on game listings, so you can use filters to show only standalone games should you not care to see expansions in the list. Alternatively you look at nothing but expansions should you want to prioritize all of them relatively quickly. The availability status of a game is also noted within the listing, and you can use the filter to show only those games for sale at the con or those available solely for demo.

This might have been the most common request for convention previews over the years, so I'll highlight this fact: You can use a filter to hide from view games available at a convention solely for demo.

Please clap.

You can segment out trick-taking games that include animals or nautical. You can look for games from favored publishers that support five players. You can exclude games from the preview that you already own or have preordered. What's more, by clicking on "Add To", you can interact directly with your existing game collection on BGG. Add something to your wishlist! Take it off the wishlist! Leave a comment for yourself! Change the title! (I'm not sure how changing the title interacts with things that sort by title. I'm guessing that the system will "see" the actual title instead of your placeholder, but I don't know for sure. We're still discovering things as we go along...)

If you click on the arrow underneath a game's thumb count, you'll see different sharing tools

, including a grey permalink that when visited shows only that sole title, along with a link that allows a user to see all titles on the convention preview.

Click on the arrow to the right of a publisher listing (when the preview is sorted by publisher), and you'll have a link that shows only games from that publisher. In the current (i.e., soon-to-be-old) convention preview format, each publisher had a listing, but it had no link to share and it was a pain in the butt to edit. So happy to have this option!

Once you start prioritizing titles, you'll have a line at the top of the preview that reads "You have prioritized TK titles in this GeekPreview", along with a "View My Picks" link. Click on that link, and you'll see a list solely of those titles you've prioritized, complete with your name up top:

In essence, "View My Picks" creates autofilters that leave out all "not interested" titles, presenting all the games in a thumbnail format with the "must have" titles coming first. Your username is included in the headline, along with sharing tools should you want to tell your friends what you're thinking about getting at the next con. A link at top of the header lets folks go to the full convention preview should they want to see what you're not

getting and make choices of their own.

Did I mention thumbnail format

? I did — click the buttons underneath the search box in the preview, and you can alternate between the full list and a thumbnail summary of games showing only cover images, thumbs, and your priority status. (Some people might also use this format to search for games lacking images or saddled with 3D images instead of the more aesthetically pleasing 2D images that tile like a dream and allow me to create thumbnail images for videos. Some...)

Other general notes about this preview tool:

• This tool will not replace the existing Gen Con 2017 Preview

. This new convention preview tool will go live on Wednesday, July 26 (if no issues arise in the next few hours), and I'll update both lists over the next three weeks. It's extra work for me, but many of you are already doing stuff on the existing preview, so I'm not going to abandon that.

Instead this window gives us a chance to stress test this new tool before the SPIEL 2017 Preview goes live on Monday, August 21, the day after Gen Con 2017 ends — and at that time, I'll be using only the new tool, not the old. (I'll need to move everything from my WIP SPIEL 2017 Preview, but using this new tool is quicker than what exists now, so that's a plus in the long run.)

• Currently comments cannot be placed on the game listings in the new preview tool. I believe the comments system is being worked on right now, so rather than try to mix old systems with new, we opted to launch this without comments right now. Again, it's a test to ensure the framework is in place, and we'll get a comment system in place later, possibly along with other things, with the biggest item on the wishlist being a preorder system integrated with the BGG marketplace

.

• If a game's cover image has a triangle on it, click that triangle and a video will pop up within the preview. BGG attends a lot of conventions and shoots hundreds of game overview videos each year at these shows, with many of these videos giving an early look at games that will be released in the future. This format gives us another way to highlight the material that we've created, including the preview videos that I record at home. (After the video opens, click on the square on the cover image to hide the video and make it stop.)

• In the next couple of weeks, Scott plans to add the ability to print out portions of this preview, thereby allowing you to bring a list customized to your choices to the show in question.

• Filter choices are not persistent. If you create filters, leave the page, then come back, your filters are not remembered. You can

bookmark a link to the URL that saves all of your filters. We did this so that people are not surprised to revisit the preview and discover a truncated list or something other than the full boat of what's there.

• You can subscribe to this tool, and you should receive notices when new items are added to the list. We're not sure whether you receive a notice when I update something. Subscribe and find out!

I'll update this post with a link to the new Gen Con 2017 Preview when this tool goes live (and I'll tweet it and post it on Facebook). Please use the feedback link in the bottom right corner of the tool to submit bugs, and please comment on this post with suggestions or feedback. I am super excited about this tool, and I hardly ever get excited about anything, so you can intuit that I think this is a big deal. Scott's already thinking up other ways this tool can be used, some of which he talks about in the demo video below.

Many thanks to Scott, Jordan, and Dan for making this happen!

New Game Round-up: Queendomino to Reign at SPIEL '17, and Is Friese Finished?

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/676…o-reign-spiel-17-and-frie

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3666307_t.jpg] • I've already written

about three forthcoming titles from Friedemann Friese

due out from his 2F-Spiele

at SPIEL '17 in October — FLEE

, FEAR

, and FORTRESS

— but believe it or not, he still has more in the works for release in 2017!

Finished!

is a solitaire game in which you're trying to finish your work so that you can go home. Be sure to bring the game to the office and play endlessly so that you're fired and really can go home. Victory! (Sort of.) Here's an overview of the setting and gameplay:

It is a typical day at work. Your working schedule is chaotic as always and it‘s time to focus on the task at hand. Start sorting files and do not fall asleep. If you require a jolt of caffeine or rush of sugar, there is a limited supply of coffee and a small stash of sweets to help complete your tasks and get finished!

You start Finished! with a shuffled deck of 48 cards and try to sort these cards by cycling through the draw stack during eight rounds. You may sort cards only in your "present" area, but helpful actions will let you manipulate your cards in many different ways. If you sort all cards starting from card 00:01 up to card 00:48, you win the game! If this is too easy for you, the game offers four difficulty levels.

I played Finished!

once in prototype form and can provide a bit more detail, while noting that the design might have changed in the meantime. You're kind of reliving the same day over and over again, Groundhog Day

-style, but to make it stop you must sort all the cards in the deck into their proper order. You're presented with a few cards at a time in your "'present' area", while other cards lie in the "past" and still others might lie in the "future". Some of the card actions allow you to manipulate time (as it were) to move cards into different zones, and you can rearrange the order of cards only in the present, if I remember correctly. You can draw additional cards and hide things, spending candy all the while and possibly getting more to keep you working on a sugar high and therefore able to do more things than you might otherwise.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3666296_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3668676_t.jpg]• The other two titles coming from 2F-Spiele (and its publishing partners such as Stronghold Games

) are expansions. Fabled Fruit: The Lime Expansion

adds twenty new locations to the game, along with gambling tokens and "the mysterious camouflage coat". How did this game not have limes in it already? And how I did I miss that omission in 2016?!

Power Grid: Fabled Expansion

spreads Friese's Fable Game system to Power Grid

and Power Grid deluxe

, with players getting two presorted Fable Decks that allow them to play campaigns of three consecutive games on any of the base game maps. In each game, players reveal Fable Cards as their conditions are met, and these cards add new rules to the gameplay.

• Two other SPIEL '17 releases that have been recently revealed come from the European branch of Blue Orange

, with one of them coming from the Danish design team of Asger Harding Granerud

and Daniel Skjold Pedersen

, with Panic Mansion

seemingly pitting 2-4 players against a three-dimensional mansion stand-in. To explain:

The mansion up the hill has always had a reputation…of being cursed. After dark, villagers keep seeing strange things moving behind the windows as the house seems to be "tilting" and "rocking". It is said that the only way to break the mansion's curse would be to gather in one specific room some of the ghoulish ghosts, wandering eyes, slithering snakes, crawling spiders, and other objects that have been inhabiting its dusty walls. Will you be the first to break the curse…and flee the mansion?

To win Panic Mansion, you must be the first to complete five challenges by gently tilting and shaking the box to place the correct objects into one room, following the information on the cards.

• The other Blue Orange title has been mentioned a few times in passing. Having won the 2017 Spiel des Jahres award with Kingdomino

, for October 2017 designer Bruno Cathala

will release Queendomino

, which serves as both a standalone game and an expansion. Some details:

Build up the most prestigious kingdom by claiming wheat fields, forests, lakes, grazing grounds, marshes, and mountains. Your knights will bring you riches in the form of coins — and if you make sure to expand the towns on your lands, you will make new buildings appear, giving you opportunities for new strategies. You may win the Queen's favors ... but always be aware of the dragon!

Queendomino is a game completely independent from Kingdomino, while offering a choice of more complex challenges. Two to four players can play Queendomino independently, but also in connection with Kingdomino, allowing for games with 7x7 grids for four players, or for up to six players if you stick to 5x5 grids.

Designer Diary: Yogi, or The Game Formerly Unknown as In A Bind

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/675…ame-formerly-unknown-bind

by Behrooz Shahriari

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3484957_t.jpg] Yogi

is a game due to be published by Gigamic

, and their page for the game

suggests it'll be launched on September 1, 2017. I hear

there will be early copies at Gen Con, though.

As you may have inferred already, given that this is a "Designer Diary", I had a part to play in its creation.

I think it's super-hyper-mega-awesome! But I'm biased.

For most people, this is a new game. I saw photos of early demos at Dice Tower Con. I wish I could have been there as it looked as if folks were enjoying it!

However, the game is almost identical to In A Bind

, originally released on August 1, 2015.

If this were a designer diary for In A Bind

, I would be celebrating its reincarnation. I could call this the end as I'm no longer selling it.

But everyone who bought a copy will hopefully enjoy it for many years to come.

Maybe there is no end to the story.

The game was essentially finished by Forrest Bower of " Bower's Gaming Corner

". He was the one reviewer who had a fast enough turnaround for me to get it reviewed before my original Kickstarter

finished.

The game was all about simple instructions, one on each card:

—"Left hand above left elbow."

—"Two hands touching."

—"Hand on a knee."

—"Finger touching mouth."

You needed to obey all your instructions simultaneously, not even stopping when you have to draw a card.

This game involves the hardest draw step you will ever encounter.

People often end up drawing cards using their mouths, elbows, or even feet.

My original rules focused on the "sadistic mode", that is, handing out cards to challenge your opponents. Bower encouraged me to embrace the simplicity even further: Just draw a card and do what it says.

He was right. The game is all about the physical challenge, testing your flexibility, stamina, and determination. Though the "slow and sadistic" rules added something by allowing the decision of who to pick on, the default rules are now simply:

• Draw a card (whenever it's your turn)

• Read it aloud (so everyone can hear)

• Do what it says (and if you ever stop, you lose)

This is how I always introduce people to the game now, and even the "Final Ultimate Last Ever In A Bind World Championship" was played using these rules.

I wasn't very organised with my first Kickstarter. I honestly half-expected the silly video I'd made to go viral and was almost scared of the potential logistics. Suffice to say it didn't.

I started the KS before it was ready and used a 58-day campaign as a deadline for getting it all organized. Of course I'd investigated the printing and shipping costs, but there was no marketing to speak of — just a budget of about £8 to cover the postage and single prototype that I sent to Forrest. On day 56 I was about 2/3 of the way to my target. I was sure it was going to fail.

Thankfully, a few folk convinced me to just keep trying.

I love performance.

I love to sing a song and get the crowd singing along.

I love to dance and enthrall and have folks look at me for a moment.

Maybe it's some sort of need for validation. Maybe it's some sort of egotism to think that others should WANT to look at me, at my performances, my creations.

Maybe all creative people are fragile egotistical creatures in search of validation.

Or maybe that's true of other humans as well.

Is there more than a semantic difference between a "sense of purpose" and "validation"? Is it purely that the latter must come from outwith?

Maybe the strong minds continue to create for the innate joy, like Bill Watterson, who retired from Calvin & Hobbes

fame and is now painting things that most of the world will never see.

The strong might create a game that 1% of people will love, knowing that they've brought joy to a few individuals.

The weaker minds seek to go mass-market, reveling in the constant attention and occasional adoration.

Are many who strive for a mass-market title simply in need of more validation from outside?

When the game was first played in 2013, it was very different. (This predates all the pictures above.)

There was exactly one card that had anything to do with your physical position and it "merely" asked you to stand up. Each card was a tangle of points to accrue, card-stealing, and an instruction complicated enough to confuse any non-gamer.

I'll call it a mess. A hot steaming mess.

Of course, there were some ideas worth pursuing.

The second prototype was all about the physical nature of what could be done around the table. Cards challenged players to hop around the table, spin around, do sit-ups, make a noise for as long as possible...

I'll call this the first major change, the pure focus on silliness.

The overly complicated nature remained, however. Challenges would maybe award the winner some cards, award points, or steal cards from losers. Cards in your hand meant survival. More cards in your discard pile meant more chance of winning.

The second major change happened, focusing purely on physicality and synergy.

I had always thought of the cards as either "Sorceries" or "Enchantments", to use MtG

terminology. (I believe that a large portion of games, including the final In A Bind

/ Yogi

could be played using the rules of Magic

and some unprintable cards.)

As the "enchantments" ("binds") combined to become exponentially harder, it was clear that this was a richer vein of design than the standalone cards, which were — by contrast — fairly similar each time they were played.

You could play cards on yourself, or you could play cards on others. If anyone failed, the game would simply end. Playing cards on yourself was a push-your-luck element; if you weren't the one who failed, you wanted to have the most difficult cards on yourself; you wanted to push yourself to your limits.

I had been working on the game for only a few months, but by Dragonmeet

(a UK-based convention in December) the rules were almost exactly that of "sadistic mode".

I wasn't working so had plenty of time to iterate, iterate, iterate. First, every card became equal (1 pt. each) and then points were removed and it became a game of player elimination and survival once I realized that folks were happy to sit back and enjoy the silly positions of other folks.

Constant lesson: Not everyone is like me. Not everyone wants to be the center of attention.

When my 2014 Kickstarter was half-done, Gary invited me to run an event in the new pub he was managing events for. There were twelve folks at the start of the afternoon, with more joining in as the evening went on. Musical performance followed games followed music followed games.

By the end, around twenty people had been laughing and smiling and were brought together thanks to the silliness of the game.

Running events like this isn't the most efficient marketing method, but it is, frankly, the whole reason I make games. I see people having fun. Fun because of me. Both my ego and desire for validation are briefly satisfied.

I like to think that everyone at the event had a great time. They all wanted a copy for themselves.

It wasn't enough of a crowd to satisfy the scale of an online campaign.

On the final weekend of the Kickstarter, I offered everyone an expansion in addition to the basic deck. It made little difference.

In retrospect, lack of awareness was my problem, not a perceived lack of value. When I then told Liz and Miquette that I might throw in the towel, they were aghast.

After some strong encouragement, I spent half a day messaging FB friend after FB friend. If they liked the game, please buy a copy. If they didn't, please share it.

It was because of those friends agreeing to back me, agreeing to share it to thousands of others, that fifty new folks helped me reach my funding goal.

Lesson: Don't be afraid to tell people online about what you're doing.

If I wanted to properly thank everyone, I'd need another few thousand words. The key instigators, though, are:

• Ben Neumann

, who encouraged me to make a game as silly as I wanted to.

• Rob Harris

, who set up Playtest UK.

• Danish Frank

, who created a game that inspired my initial effort.

• Gokce Balkan

, who helped me with all my videos and helped me keep the faith.

• Elizabeth Chu

, who first invited a bunch of folk to my Edinburgh event and then encouraged me to keep going.

• Miquette Brietenbach

for similar emotional support.

• Dave Cousins

, who showed the game to several people during SPIEL 2015.

I won't individually name everyone who playtested, which allowed me to iterate and make it a worthwhile game; everyone who formed part of my support network; everyone who played it, enjoyed it, and encouraged me to pursue my dream; everyone who helped show me what tabletop games are capable of; everyone who allowed me to film them playing it; everyone who shared the link on the last day of the Kickstarter, maybe because they just thought, "Hey, Bez is working hard and we want to support her"...

Lesson: We are all products of the people we interact with and the environments we occupy.

In early 2014, I was still taking time to explore the game. I briefly tried a spoken version, all about triggers that forced you to say words.

It became too much about the memory and mental workout. Trying to contort — and watching others do so — is somehow funnier than hearing others make silly noises, and remembering to do so yourself.

With the number of threads complaining about trackable hidden information, I know I'm not the only one who isn't particularly keen on memory as a test.

It's important to have moments of minor achievement and revelations in a game.

In a strategic game, finally working out a path of options that will lead to an extra 20 points is a real "Aha!" moment.

In Rhino Hero

, being able to place the walls and ceiling when it already looks unsteady is a sense of achievement.

Similarly, Yogi

/ In A Bind

makes you feel like you've achieved something when you manage to draw card despite your entanglement.

By contrast, the verbal version that was simply about remembering an increasing number of tasks to do each turn didn't have any of those minor victories — only a sad sense of disappointment at yourself.

And that's not fun. Probably needless to say.

Most people say to do 90%+ of your art before launching a KS. Across three campaigns for games, I've had 0%, 6%, and then 0% of the final artwork done.

As you might be realizing, I struggle with motivation. Without external pressure, I'd get very little done.

It simply didn't seem worthwhile to spend hundreds of hours on artwork that might never be used. I could (truthfully) state that the campaign allowed me to improve the artwork. The more extreme exaggeration was a result of backer feedback.

I would draw and draw different versions, knowing none of them would be final. I was safe.

But then I had to muscle on and do the final art, knowing it would never be perfect.

"Perfection is the enemy of great, let alone good or done."

I did buckle under pressure and spent a month doing essentially nothing. If I hadn't already taken money from hundreds of people (and felt an obligation to fulfill), I would have probably never finished the game.

So I guess the Kickstarter worked as a source of external motivation.

In the end, I delivered two months late, at the end of May/start of June in 2015. Of course, I wanted to try to sell to shops but out of respect for backers, I decided on a launch date of August 1.

And so it was that — many phone calls later — I had sent it to shops and spent August 1 demoing to folks at Leisure Games.

The next month or so was a lovely time of going around the country from shop to shop, usually managing to earn back my travel money and a little extra.

There's a certain degree of anxiety about people backing. One close friend, who helped me escape a criminal record after being found guilty of possession of scissors (I was doing a charity haircut), still hadn't played the game when I saw her a few months ago. I want to make something that will actually get played and bring people fun, not something that they buy out of any sense of obligation only to have it sit on a shelf.

Maybe that's unrealistic given today's acquisition-led society. I have far too many games I've still not played and I don't consider myself a collector. We buy objects because of what they represent. Most were bought in the hope of facilitating an experience that I might never find time for.

Time is the real resource that can never be replenished — unless you consider health improvements a form of "earning time".

And yet I hope that folks will spend time with my games, prioritizing them above other shared experiences that might be available in the world. In a world where you might prioritize learning a language, maybe some other knowledge, exploration, musical improvisation, fitness improvement, or a million forms of entertainment, it is gratifying to have folks spend time with something I made, and then describe it as...

qwertymartin wrote:

KAndrw wrote:

using your brain while laughing til a little bit of wee comes out.

I hope {Bez} uses this as a publicity quote

When I think back to the development of the rules over the initial three months, I think how inefficient my iteration was compared to my process now.

Things I have learned:

• Test the extremes.

Maybe it will work and you will be surprised. If not, you know better how far to go.

• Don't hold onto complexity.

In fact, don't needlessly hold onto anything.

• Marketing is more important to the initial success of a game than its quality.

Some games market themselves well. I'm very lucky that Yogi

/ In A Bind

is one of these.

A strategic game will exercise your mind and test your ability to plan ahead, calculate probabilities, and negotiate the web of other players' desires so that you can block them.

Dexterity games and party games could be considered tests of physical/social prowess, but some games are far more focused on providing entertainment than testing any ability.

I used to be quite competitive when playing Twister

. Unless you play with blocking, full contact, or some slippery fluids, it does become all about endurance and can be a bit dull with two skilled players.

If I really wanted to test everyone's physical ability, having one player draw the cards and everyone else do everything would be a better way to do it. No luck. Equal challenge. The winner is clearly the best.

But the variance does make it more engaging, exciting, and entertaining.

Simply testing an ability is not intrinsically fun.

When the game's framework was set, I set to work on working out all the possible "binds". Ideally, they should all be possible simultaneously — a fact that I eventually checked by laying out the cards, trying to do them all and tweaking them until I could actually do all at once.

For the upper body, there are very few additional positional restrictions that could be made. In a sense, it is difficult to add new cards to the core deck.

There are plenty of cards that merely need to be touching part of your body, and there are a few more locations these could go.

The game never stops evolving. After printing, and a few hundred games (mainly at conventions and various shops), I realized that one card always took people a little longer to process, mentally: "Right hand right of right elbow".

There's probably no simpler way to phrase that instruction, yet it's just quite incongruous.

When Gigamic was about to reprint the game and needed a replacement, it actually got as far as the art before I realized I had overlooked a very simple instruction I could also add: "Right hand above left hand".

And that's the story of how Yogi

is slightly better than In A Bind

, in terms of its mechanisms.

The expansion deck

, a promised gift to Kickstarter backers, had to have the wild cards. I loved the wild cards. They were born when I was cycling back from work.

After a day of professionally preparing food, I showed a prototype to a few co-workers in the pub. Two said that I should make a sexualized version so that they could play with their boyfriends.

Cycling home, I knew that I wasn't interested in making something that was so explicit. Frankly, most games intended for initiating sexual contact/conversation tend to be very heteronormative and unimaginative.

However, the wild cards were born from this thought process — the ideas given in the pub had literally been "one finger touching... uh

" and "this card in... oh!

". Why not literally let players fill in those blanks themselves? In the right environment, such a card could become X-rated.

However, I've seen so many wonderful uses of the wild cards that I'd never have expected. People start involving the table, the floor, shoes, paintings, food...

Once, someone tasked an opponent with putting "this card in... that person's shoe". We were in a game cafe, so everyone was somewhat friendly. However, the player had to call over the non-player, explain the situation, and ask them to please put the card in their shoe — which they did, after making it clear that they'd call in a favor during a future game.

I also remember one player calling out "this card in... between me and you". They then proceeded to move around the other player, forcing them to use the card as a shield.

The wild cards were chosen by making cards that could:

• Be used to recreate an existing card (in case the caller had no imagination)

• Inspire a few different ideas for most people

Some wild cards were originally more freeform, but restrictions (and a longer phrase before the "blank") helped provide a framework, helping avoid the dreaded delay when someone has no idea what to say.

In a Bind

with all the wild cards mixed in, slow and sadistic, is my favorite way to play. It's innocent, creative fun.

Unless you want it to not be, of course. That's entirely your prerogative.

The other expansion ideas — the actions, spoken phrases, and communal actions — were chosen for their entertainment value and simplicity of interpretation.

I expected people to just add a few of whatever they liked. I expected people to play with the communal actions only if playing with more than a certain number.

Instead, people tend to slowly mix everything in.

It's important to learn not just how people will play the game once it's on the table, but also how people decide what subset of the game to put onto the table.

I think that players are far more likely to just deal out everything with a casual/party game than with, say, Viticulture

or even Carcassonne

.

I think that if Yogi

wanted an expansion, I'd like to spend a few months re-examining it and ensuring it could just be all shuffled in without too much rules complication.

Back in December 2013, I'd decided to publish the game myself, using Kickstarter. It was only a card game, so the goal would be low. Logistics should be easy. I wanted to learn.

Frankly, I had no interest in approaching publishers and investing energy in persuading them to accept my idea. That sounded (and still sounds) a lot more tiring.

When approached during the Kickstarter by several companies, I said no. These were companies that I respected that could have sold many thousands more than I did! Yet the reward of learning how to do it myself, perhaps even gaining connections to eventually sell it in larger stores myself, seemed far more appealing than a bit of money.

I also had just lost my job, so time was available to me.

In the end, it was an expensive meal bought for me that persuaded me to sell the game if the price was right. I was told that the rewards of the game could be far more than I had ever earned from any of my menial jobs. As such, it'd allow me to make enough money to do whatever I wanted (which would probably be working on other games without worrying about money quite as much).

I believe that with the right marketing this might sell orders of magnitude more, and that's why I eventually signed with Gigamic.

Hey, I told you I was egotistical.

The game was taken to SPIEL 2015 and sold by North and South Games

. Dave

was kind enough to show the game to a few companies even whilst I was running the Kickstarter for In A Bind Jr

.

Having two major companies (the smaller of which was, of course, Gigamic) offer me written contracts, with good advance payments on royalties, and being in a position to have to turn down an even larger company, was beyond anything I dared dream of.

In a Bind Jr

was a simple adaptation based on a perceived need, a mash-up of the original game and some expansions, with references to left, right or individual fingers removed. A few cards were repeated, and the game was mainly tested with my young nieces to make sure it was all playable.

Lettershapes were designed to be more similar to the way they're first taught and I paid a little extra so that I could have color illustrations.

Having already gone through the process, it was slightly easier to illustrate another 55 cards. However, I had another spell (not as long thankfully) around the turn of the year when I simply couldn't do much.

Lesson: I think I need to take a lot more time off in the winter.

In A Bind Jr

was delivered to backers in June 2016 and — again wanting to give them some period of exclusivity — I realized that August 1 was a practical release date.

BezDay was born.

In 2016, I sent out small PnP rewards to previous KS backers, ran a KS for cheap original art, uploaded a PnP game for everyone to play, fulfilled art requests, and organized a small gathering.

In 2017, if you want something drawn, tweet the words "#BezDay #artrequest @stuffbybez" and then use the remaining characters to tell me what you'd like me to draw.

If you live in London, you could come to Loading Bar on Tuesday, August 1 or Leisure Games on Wednesday, August 2. There will be special games and prizes.

If you sign up to my mailing list, you'll get a free PnP version of my next game.

If you have a copy of Wibbell++

, you'll find many more games to play with by the end of the week.

But that's a separate story.

In the end, I'm glad I printed it myself initially. If nothing else, it gave me a platform and a learning experience so that I could work on future things.

It helped me understand what's involved in publishing on a small scale. It allowed me to go to conventions and watch people having fun with my things.

Honestly, the conventions are the highlight.

I was volunteering at UK Games Expo 2017. I had volunteered there for several years before I became a trader, and I wanted to volunteer one last time whilst I had nothing to sell.

I have changed. The convention has changed. My relationship with other people has changed.

Whilst the convention's growth has almost nothing to do with me, and many relationships are purely down to visiting one event every year, much of the change is because of In A Bind

.

I feel it has opened doors for me. As I was walking around, being an ambassador and checking that everyone was having a good time, I was greeted by a few distributors and publishers. I was able to run an event to celebrate the reincarnation of the game and — though it was only announced the evening beforehand — I still had twelve people laughing and having fun.

I was congratulated by "Shut Up and Sit Down". The whole industry is fairly small; I'm sure I could have said hello to these people regardless. But being able to consider them my peers, thinking that I somehow managed to stumble into being someone who made a game that is quite fun if you like that sort of thing...

I don't feel like I've "made it", but I'm infinitely closer than I was four years ago.

It's been a lot of fun so far (and a lot of stress, anxiety, neuroses...). I'm now just keeping my fingers crossed for Yogi

, working on future things but even Yogi

itself will have no end.

If it does well, there will be a second edition. There will be expansions. There should be events.

I love the events.

After all, if a thousand people buy it but never play it, is it a good game? If ten people play it and love it, is it a good game?

Again, it's all about the sense of purpose, managing to bring some joy into the world, getting some validation as a result.

I heard about Curses!

after the game was on Kickstarter. I think that Yogi

is different by virtue of the physical synergy of the "curses".

I have heard a few folk being surprised that this game didn't yet exist. It wasn't a flash of inspiration. It was a slow process of stripping out the unnecessary parts of an overcomplicated prototype until I found the most engaging parts.

Gigamic took their time with the title. It was meant to be out at SPIEL 2016, but instead all they had to show were some pieces of artwork that they had rejected. They were still on the lookout for an artist.

Whilst I'm biased towards my initial drawings, Simon Caruso

has done wonderful work. I was especially impressed with the diversity. Without any input/request from me, they included my likeness and — though I was initially worried about representation given the first few pieces of art Simon did — my request for diverse representation was certainly listened to.

I don't know of other games that feature a transgender woman shaving her neck, and I think that's something we should see more of.

Having spoken with Simon on Facebook after the fact, it seems that I needn't have been worried about this aspect at all.

The card quality is fantastic, and since getting the PVC cards, I've had the opportunity to play in a hot tub and a swimming pool.

The game is definitely different. I'm not sure if it's better or worse, but the fact that there is the opportunity is fantastic.

Richard Garfield

speaks highly of IELLO

's treatment of King of Tokyo

, saying that they added so much he didn't imagine and improved it massively.

With Gigamic providing the budget for PVC cards and plastic card holders, I feel the same about this game.

I can only hope that everyone else will agree with my biased opinion on its quality.

The game continues to grow and evolve.

Immediately after SPIEL 2016, I spent two days developing and illustrating a giant (A4 sized) deck for an event at Airecon. A team-based version, it featured such cards as "foot on a wall", "two knees above deck" and "three hands touching".

The amount of fun that the giant deck has brought has more than vindicated the time and money spent on it.

I have some tarot-sized cards purely for further exploration of expansion ideas.

The second English-language printing might have a couple of extra words added, "right hand above elbow" becoming "right hand above right elbow".

Nothing is ever perfect, but we can edge ever closer to our ideals.

As long as a game is continuing to be printed, we can't say that the act of creation has finished: noting people's desires and requests, discounting those (like the idea of removing/swapping binds) that are at odds with the rest of the game, and drawing some conclusions as to how to make it even better, whether by means of an expansion, new edition, or an entirely standalone remaking.

It all started with Danish Frank. He made a prototype, named "Unfair", which prompted me to make my own silly non-strategic game.

Or maybe it started with Fluxx

, which had probably inspired him. "Unfair" was similar, but had one single card that would instantly end the game, as well as a rule that the game would end if the deck ran out. Most points in your personal discard pile wins.

Playtest UK was the thing that facilitated our meeting; it allowed me to get a prototype on the table once a month and even if the game was terrible, that was perfectly okay. We were all designers, learning together.

Ian Smith's group — primordial games — was my introduction into modern board games. That led me to seek more groups out, letting me find Playtest UK when I moved south to London.

Originally, I thought I'd be making videogames. Only after several years of making Flash games did boardspace.net and BoardGameGeek help me find a group to play more sociable games with, rekindling the joy that I had years ago, playing Saturn Bomberman

around a single TV screen, after games of football.

My first memory is of a Spectrum loading screen.

Maybe there is no "start" to the story.

Designer Diary: Sidereal Confluence, or A Trade Empires By Any Other Name

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/676…onfluence-or-trade-empire

by TauCeti Deichmann

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3476762_t.png] Introduction

Sidereal Confluence: Trading and Negotiation in the Elysian Quadrant

is an oddly-named trading and negotiation game. Chris Cieslik wrote an extremely flattering description of how it plays for its BGG page. More on him later. My friend Doug Hoover describes it as "a competitive game where the player who cooperates the best wins", "the single best trading game", and other unabashed compliments that make me uncomfortable to hear. More on Doug shortly.

In a nutshell, it's a trading game that allows extremely open and flexible deal making. It is also quite asymmetric what with all of the weird aliens; I like aliens. This is the story behind that game.

Inspiration

Like many stories, this one starts with a game of Advanced Civilization

.

I was a sophomore in college and ACiv

had been out for a decade, which gives a sense of its staying power. For those unfamiliar with it, ACiv

is an eight-hour, 3-8 player trading game with a disaster management game wrapped around it and a huge heaping of history wrapped around that

.

Having played it, I was a little disappointed that I hadn't designed it and soon set to rectify this lack. I wanted my own eight-hour, 3-8 player trading game, this time wrapped with aliens. I created "Trade Empires" and, well, it crashed and burned in the way that first prototypes almost always do — but between the slow start and the ending that locked up, the middle was actually quite fun, so I made a second version.

Some players play ACiv

like a careful negotiation game. They seek to make the majority of the profits from each trade and avoid trading for disasters. We've found that the best strategy is to maximize the number

of trades. This gives everyone

much greater profits — so much so that we've had to implement house rules to prevent the game from crashing when the leaders purchase every civilization card one turn before the end of the game.

That's what I wanted to capture, not what most players saw in ACiv

— a game of civilizations and risky deals — but what Doug and I saw: A game of free and open trade, unimaginable wealth, and unbounded potential.

When I first set out to design "Trade Empires" (which would someday become Sidereal Confluence

), it was a game created for Doug and me. We both liked huge, long games, so it was designed to be eight hours long and support nine players. Doug hates randomness, so where ACiv

(and most trading games) used card draws to generate resources, I had converters that produced the same things every turn. This meant that there was no good way to hide one's resources — but that didn't matter since this was going to be a game about open trading, not haggling from a position of ignorance.


A Decade

The original "Trade Empires" looks nothing

like the modern version of Sidereal Confluence

. We had a huge, sprawling board. There were combat ships; gunboat diplomacy warped trade in many games. Colonization was more about opening access to trade with other players than improving one's economy. Most technologies had strange rules effects: Cloaking hid ships while Unbreakable Code hid resources, Time Travel and Massive System-Wide Assault Strategy opened up alternate victory conditions, Hyperspace Jump Facilities and Hyperspace Bubble Sharing altered movement rules.

I had all nine species, and they each played very differently. The Faderan started in the center of the map. The Kjasjavikalimm had their military. The Kt'Zr'Kt'Rtl used nullspace drives to fly strange paths around the board, colonizing and striking from impossible angles. The Eni Et provided additional hand limit — a bank to store resources between turns. The Zeth ran a protection racket. The Unity could choose which resources they produced each turn. The Im'dril nomads flew their huge fleets about, trading with whoever they were near.

For ten years, "Trade Empires" was played every few months at RPI's Games Club. Generations of students came and went. With each play, I would tweak one thing or another, refining the balance. My goal was always to make the game more fun for my friends and me; I never thought that it could be made into something publishable someday. After all, it was eight hours long.

During one of these plays, Doug did something I had never seen before in any game. He was playing the Eni Et. They were known to be weak. The fair market price to buy access to their bank was somewhere between the value of a small and a large resource, but with no way to make change, they either lost business by overcharging or lost profits by undercharging. Doug solved this problem by bringing in a bag of plastic coins and floating a currency so that he could make change. He used a whiteboard to track the value of each resource from turn to turn. Since he always honored his currency, Doug managed to get all but one of the players to accept it. In the end, Doug didn't win, but he did get the highest score for the Eni Et to date.

That left me thinking: This was a game that could support something as outlandish as a player floating a currency during play. I wanted to share this not just with my friends, but with everyone. But how could I deal with the insane length of the game?


Reimagining

If there were two ways to do something, I tried all three.

Two hours. If I could bring the game down to two hours, it would be marketable.

To shrink the game, I'd need to tear things out. I started with the board.

The board did a number of things that I didn't want to lose. It created topology for combat and colonization, and it was necessary for several of the species-specific rules. Kt'Zr'Kt'Rtl nullspace movement was important, but so was the idea that the Faderan were centrally located and the Nomads could move around the board trading with different people at different times.

Inspired by 7 Wonders

, I decided to use seating position as a placeholder for map position. Military and Nomad fleets moved around the board from one seat to the next. Colonies pointed some number of seats right or left to open a trade link. The Kt'Zr'Kt'Rtl had an easier time trading with people who were farther

from them, and their fleets moved 2-3 seats at a time, but not one. I tore out the old multi-step combat system and introduced a single-step combat system that was more flavorful and involved custom dice.

The game took four hours to play, far too long to show publishers. Still, when I got an invite to Alan Moon's Gathering of Friends, I brought a copy along to show anyone who was curious.


The Gathering

I'm an introvert. Introducing myself to new people makes me extremely uncomfortable. Convincing people I don't know that they should look at a game I've designed makes me want to crawl into a corner and hide. The Gathering is a very

large crowd, and at the time I knew almost no one there.

About halfway through the Gathering, I worked up enough courage to set up my game on a table and wait until someone wandered by and expressed interest. Kristin Matherly was that someone. She saw potential in my game, and in turn introduced it to her friend Jacob Davenport. By the time Jacob could play, Kristin was busy, so Doug, Jacob, and I sat down for a three-player game. Jacob played the banking Eni Et and Doug played the militant Kjasjavikalimm. Around turn three, the following exchange happened:

Doug: "Jacob, I'm going to capture one of your colonies."

Jacob: "No, you aren't."

Doug: "I have this huge navy, of course I can."

Jacob: "No, if you do that, I'll never let you have access to my bank."

Doug: "Ah, I think I've misspoken. I'm going to rent one of your colonies. I'll conquer it so that we are close enough to trade with each other, and I'll give you its resource output for the rest of the game in return."

That was the moment when Jacob realized that this was no ordinary trading game, but something that would support arbitrarily intricate deals. He happily charged a small fee to accept Doug's offer, and soon created increasingly clever trades that danced with the rules. Suffice it to say, Jacob won that game and nearly every game since then.

Kristin and Jacob are part of a gaming and playtesting group in Maryland. Much of that group was at the Gathering, and they spent most of the rest of the week playing "Trade Empires" with Doug and me. In the end, I gave them my prototype copy so that they could continue playing.


Spielbany

A few months after the Gathering, I had an invite to Spielbany, a local Albany, NY game design and playtesting group. I introduced them to "Trade Empires" to get their opinions. We didn't make it all the way through the first game. The combat system was too complex, there were graphic design and balance problems, and the game was still nearly four hours long.

So, back to the drawing board. I replaced the combat system with the simplest one I could think of: a single closed-fisted bid between the two belligerents (similar to how Dune

does it). I removed the last vestiges of position; players now used "attack factories" to initiate combat instead of moving fleets, and everyone could trade with each other the moment the game started. Since the Faderan couldn't be centrally located, I gave them a deck of random Relic Worlds so they'd still have interesting flavor, focusing more on their history as an ancient race than their position on a map.

Since having your colony be conquered wasn't fun, I added rules to allow colonies to produce one last time as they are conquered. The quick influx of resources would reduce the sting of losing a world.

Every few months, I'd show up at Spielbany with a new version. Their feedback remained invaluable throughout the process of developing what became Sidereal Confluence

.

Cthonian

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Life is messy, so it took a few months for Jacob to pick up the game again. When he did, it triggered an immediate flurry of emails, talking about the game's design philosophy and bouncing ideas back and forth.

Jacob's recommendations involved grander changes than I had experimented with before. Remove combat entirely; it's just not fun for the loser. Expand the bid system to include research teams; new players were being overwhelmed by the sheer number of possible technologies to invent: a short bid track would help their focus. Put every converter on a card and have them flip over when certain technologies were invented; this would reduce the table-space the game needed since some technologies would flip cards instead of playing them. That last idea had vast potential, but I should explain City Worlds first:

City Worlds represented the species industrializing their colonies. They allowed each species to develop their economy in a unique direction and were worth victory points. Previously, they had been represented by putting a small card over the colony or with their own card that cost the colony to put into play.

With the idea of card flipping to represent upgrading an economic sector, I now had a much better solution. To represent a City World, I could have one of the player's starting cards flip by spending resources and consuming a colony, producing a victory point as a byproduct. Something which had previously required a half-page of rules and its own step in the turn order became a minor variant of a more general rule without losing any of its impact.

This is the magnitude of refinements that Jacob's advice inspired.

But these changes were also scary. They meant losing combat and the last remnants of position. It felt like I was losing too many of the hooks that supported interesting trades. The exchange between Jacob and Doug where the Kjasjavikalimm rented a world could take place only in a game in which colonies were traded through combat and players could make deals with each other only if their colonies made contact. Would these changes be worth the loss of intricacy?

Pegasid planet — A "hot jupiter"; a gas giant
close to its star and inflated from the heat.

Cthonian planet — The solid core of a gas giant
after its atmosphere has been stripped off
due to being too close to its star.I didn't know, and my friends were skeptical, so I forked the project. The old combat and position version was named "Pegasid", and the new stripped down version became "Cthonian".

Cthonian's changes were so drastic that some of the species had to change focus. The Kjasjavikalimm's core strength couldn't be military in a game without war, so they became empire builders with an insatiable need for colonies. I tore out the concept of hand limit (which restricted the number of resources a player could hold between turns), so the Eni Et banks had to become entirely about the interest they offered. To make that work without having the Eni Et focus inward, I needed to keep them from using their powerful interest converters themselves, trading them only to others. Previously, the Zeth needed protection from other players attacking their colonies in retribution to theft. In several different versions of the game they had a "cross-colonizing" ability that allowed them to hide behind someone else's planets. Now, without combat, the Zeth could colonize normally (saving rules complexity). Their "cross-colonization" morphed into "Envoys", a means to spread around vulnerability while offering enough resources to the victim that it'd be worth it for the other players to bid for the opportunity to be more vulnerable to the Zeth.

In the middle of Cthonian, I accidentally designed an RPG in the
"Trade Empires"/Sidereal Confluence setting. I used it to flesh out
the culture of each of the species, which was good for naming
and illustrating the cards. On the other hand, it meant that I am
now overly-attached to the game's setting — never a good thing.Ultimately, there were some failed experiments. I tried converters that could run multiple times in a turn, which was too complex and made the balance equations dangerously finicky. At the behest of Spielbany, I tried several different ways to turn leftover resources at the end of the game into victory points. The first were technologies that added additional end-game scoring once invented, then a card that could be filled with resources at the end of the game to grant just a few points. Much later, I would settle on the simplest option: Leftover resources became points at a poor rate.

Cthonian streamlined play, simplified away numerous special-case rules, and in the end managed to shorten the game to 2.5 hours. In the end, "Cthonian" was so successful that I didn't bother updating the "Pegasid" branch at all. "Cthonian" was

"Trade Empires".


Seven Resources

A year had passed since the previous Gathering of Friends, so it was time for me to bring the newest version to show Jacob's crowd. He brought his own version, with his own experiments. We played a few games, and Jacob told me something that I really

didn't want to hear: The game had too many types of resources. Reduce it from ten to seven, and it would become much tighter. Unfortunately, re-balancing the game after such a huge overhaul would take over a week of full-time work. Every single converter would need to be changed, and I'd need to re-do the balance equations almost from scratch. Worse, there was no way to be sure that reducing the number of resources was a good idea until I could test a fully-balanced version of the seven resource game. Either leave the game as it was, or spend those weeks in the hope that I wasn't wasting my time with a design dead-end.

I listen when my playtesters tell me that I need to change something, especially those playtesters that have repeatedly demonstrated a deep understanding of the game.

The game has always been balanced for three players. The box says
4-9 because the three-player game is extremely cutthroat.Two of the nine species (Unity and Yengii) consume all resources equally; that leaves seven species that don't. The combination of seven resources and seven species that need them has some interesting properties. There's an arrangement in which each species consumes three of seven resources, each resource is consumed by three of seven species, and any pair of species overlaps consumption at exactly one resource. This fixes a problem with the three-player game: extreme resource imbalance between the species. If, in a three-player game, one species had no competition for any of their resources, they'd win; a species in which every resource was competed over would lose. But with this new dynamic, I could ensure that each species had exactly the same amount of competition as the others, especially in low-player count games where this was the biggest problem. Some resources would be over-produced, others over-consumed, but everyone in the game would feel the impact equally, keeping the game balanced.

The new spreadsheet accounted for things that I hadn't bothered to model before, such as how frequently a player was expected to be able to run a converter. Better equations allowed me to balance the technology costs over time much more precisely, giving me better control over the game's arc of development and its steadily escalating emotional impact.

When balancing asymmetric games, there's something often overlooked: the effect of two factions on each other's balance. The Kjasjavikalimm have an insatiable demand for colonies; the Kt'Zr'Kt'Rtl can supply cheap nullspace colonies. This is a synergy that makes the two species stronger when they're in the same game, and weaker otherwise. When I switched to seven resources, I also changed the costs of everything. Now, both the Kt' and the Kjas would use yellow (power) resources for their expansion; they can cooperate by trading colonies but must compete for the resources needed to play and use them. This resolves the synergy.

While I was making the seven core resources, I also introduced Unity wild resources. Previously they produced whatever they wanted, but now their resources stayed wild even after trading other players. Wild resources became much more valuable, allowing me to further focus their economy toward ludicrous flexibility and away from actual productivity.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3672337_t.jpg]
By this point, I had been working on the game full time for months.
I took a week long break to create a two-player wargame in the
"what-if" scenario where the Faderan don't start the Confluence and
the Kt'Zr'Kt'Rtl and Kjasjavikalimm fight over dominance of the
galaxy. This is where the fleet art for the Im'dril came from.

Finally, I shortened the game by removing the first four-and-a-half turns! Every player now starts with a pile of resources, representing what they could have produced over that time. This avoids new players making a mistake on their first or second turn and costing themselves the game before they have a chance to understand what they are doing. It also — finally — brought the game down to a little over two hours.

After a flurry of refinement and tweaking, the game was finally ready for publication.


The Extra Year

For those unfamiliar with tabletop game publishing, it's a slow process. Publishers are inundated with far too many games, so it takes forever to review all of them. From their perspective, I'm an unproven first-time game designer, so there's no reason to fast-track my game. Suffice it to say that the first round of talking to publishers didn't result in any interest in the game, so a year later I tried again with WizKids

and Asmadi Games

. In the meantime, I found myself with an extra year of development on a game that I considered to be complete.

This extra time lead to a number of major refinements, the biggest of which was the phase order. Previously, the phase order was Trade-Bid-Research-Economy-(Zeth Steal). Players would trade for resources to run their economy, but also to invent technologies, and they'd trade for ships to bid with. Then, they'd bid for the research team of the technology they wanted to invent, pay for it, and get the benefits during the economy phase. This had some unfortunate consequences. Players could collect all the resources to invent something, then fail the bid for the research team, wasting that turn's efforts — or a player could prepare to run a converter someone else was about to invent, only to have them decide not to invent it at the last moment.

Chris Cieslik from Asmadi Games very much enjoyed "Trade Empires". He wasn't part of my first round of publishers, but he got a prototype copy and sent me useful feedback anyway. His big recommendation was to change the phase order to Bid-Trade-Economy-(Zeth Steal) and combine technology Research into the Trade phase. This let me streamline numerous timing rules. More importantly, players didn't need to plan for anything that wasn't physically in front of them. If a player didn't win a bid for a research team, they could always get a different one and trade for the resources to invent that. No longer would a player's turn be wasted by a bad bid.

Spielbany discovered a problem with this order when it comes to teaching the game. New players would need to start the game in the Bid Phase. In order to bid well, they'd need to understand the full consequences of everything they were bidding on (colonies and research teams), and that meant understanding every rule of the game and their full implications before starting the first turn. Most players couldn't hold that all in their head without having seen the game be played, so new player's initial bids could be bad enough to put them in an untenable position for the rest of the game.

I fixed that by simulating the first turn's bid. Instead of starting with a Bid Phase, players would start with random colonies and research teams and with fewer ships, as if they had just finished a Bid Phase. Certainly, that randomness meant that some players might have a research team or colony they didn't particularly like, but they could always trade it with someone else. Since the first Bid Phase was simulated, I rotated the turn boundary up one phase, making the phase order Trade-Economy-Bid-(Zeth Steal). Now, the game would start immediately in the Trade Phase, and all the players needed to understand was how their economies worked and that they'd need ships to bid later. By the time the players reached the first real Bid Phase, they had a good sense of the entire game loop and could safely judge the value of the things on which they were bidding. It did mean that the last turn of the game was abbreviated; there's no reason to bid at the end of the game, so that's skipped. But a shorter last turn means a shorter game, so that's not really a bad thing.

This extra year included a slew of minor refinements: balance tweaks to the Unity and Eni Et, plus lots of graphical improvements. To streamline thinking about the game, I added text under each converter telling the player how valuable it is to run, and the lower-right corner of each card now showed the benefits gained from flipping that card. A "donation good" box was added to the player aid to make it more obvious which resources needed to be traded or given away.

Finally, I finished the "doodles", the line art hidden in the background of each card illustrating the technology, culture, or economic sector that card represented.


Publishing

The second attempt to get a publisher was much more successful. Chris Cieslik was interested, but wanted to see how well the game did in practice. He gave me a table in his room at Gen Con 2016, and I ran demonstrations constantly for three days.

The responses far exceeded either of our expectations. They included quotes like "this is the best thing at Gen Con this year", with people coming back to play multiple times and bringing their friends.

After that, both Chris and Zev Shlasinger from WizKids wanted to publish the game. I ended up going with WizKids as they have a larger distribution, but I truly wish that I could have accepted both offers.

The actual publication process didn't involve much in the way of game design; the game was a year beyond finished and had achieved a level of polish that I simply couldn't improve. The only major change was the name. Zev correctly pointed out that "Trade Empires" was uninteresting (aside from several existing games having the same name). I heartily agreed; I'd been trying to come up with a better name for years with no luck. We sat down and brainstormed something that (a) sounded interesting, (b) got the science-fiction and cooperative competition feels across, and (c) felt like something the Faderan would actually name the setting. Sidereal Confluence

is certainly a weird name, but it makes internet searches easy.

The actual process of developing a game for printing is involved, but most of the work was done by people other than me. Unfortunately I used CorelDRAW to do all of my design work, which is incompatible with the Adobe industry standards, so the graphic designer had to create everything from scratch. Added to that, there's no standard form factor in any of the cards, so most of the techniques to reduce the graphic designer's workload simply don't apply to Sidereal Confluence

. That is something I'm going to have to fix before I get another game published...

We expected the illustrations to have more problems. I had an overly-fleshed out setting (from the RPG I had put together two years earlier) with perhaps too much thought into what the aliens looked and behaved like. For each species, I ended up giving the artist three to four pages of sample art and descriptions, and I found examples of texture and color. To my amazement, Nakarin Sukontakorn managed to capture them perfectly in his first try.

From there, things have moved beyond me. The game was manufactured in China (I helped with color proofs during the Gathering in 2017), demonstrated at the 2017 Origins Game Fair (I very much enjoyed showing it off), and should be on the market within a week of this writing.

I don't know what the next chapter of this story will be. Maybe I'll finish that two-player wargame in the dark version of the Sidereal

setting. All I need to do is refine the design so that it's not eight hours long...

TauCeti Deichmann

For Late 2017, AMIGO Spiel Prepares Greed, Druids, Beans, Fish, and More Fish

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/677…epares-greed-druids-beans

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3676988_t.jpg]German publisher AMIGO Spiel

has unveiled its line-up for the second half of 2017, and as you might expect if you are familiar with the company, many of the new titles are pocket-sized card games, such as Gier

from Alexander Pfister

, a 2-5 player game in which you must steal cards from others in order to win. An overview:

In Gier ("Greed"), players steal cards from one another to build their own collection, and once you start clawing at others' goods, it's hard to stop — but whoever wants too much will go home empty-handed.

At the start of player, each player takes one crook card and seven number cards, with the number cards being dealt face down from the deck. Players will build up a personal collection turn by turn, with these collected cards being face up.

On a player's turn, they play a card from their hand into their collection, then they're allowed to go on a card raid. They choose an opponent, then draw a card from their hand and place it face up on the table. They can stop and keep that card, or they can draw again from the same player; if two stolen cards have the same number, then the player's turn ends, and the cards return to the victim's hands. If the active player has drawn a crook (and stopped voluntarily), they can take a card of their choice from the opponent's collection.

Some cards have a special action on them that takes effect as soon as they're drawn from someone's hand, such as looking at an opponent's hand or placing cards from the deck into a collection.

Whoever first collects six cards of the same value wins!

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3676999_t.jpg]• The trick-taking card game Druids

comes from the design team of Günter Burkhardt

and Wolfgang A. Lehmann

, previously responsible for the delightful trick-taking game Potato Man

. AMIGO bills Druids

as the fifth title in its Wizard

-series of games, a series that seems connected mostly by art from Franz Vohwinkel in addition to their shared use of trick-taking. As in Potato Man

, players in Druids

need to keep an eye on which colored cards have been played during a round:

Knowledge is power, but with power must come control. In Druids, the novices of the Stonehenge Academy must collect experience points in various knowledge domains, but you don't want knowledge from just any domain because if you enter a domain not intended for you, then you lose all knowledge previously gained that round.

In more detail, each player is dealt a hand of cards, with the deck containing cards in five colors, numbered 1-12 in each color. Players then play a trick-taking game, and whoever wins a trick must place the cards sorted by domain (color) in front of themselves; if they receive multiple cards of a color in the same trick, the lowest-valued card must be placed on top. The tricks continue until either all cards have been played or one player collects cards in all five colors. In this latter case, that player receives negative points for what they've collected while everyone else scores positively for their topmost card in each color. (If all the cards have been played, then all players score.) Whoever has the most points after five complete rounds wins!

In addition to the regular cards, Druids contains special cards that allow a player to avoid an unwanted trick or remove cards of one color from a player's holdings.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3677015_t.jpg]• The components and game board in Haim Shafir

's Memo Dice

give off a Liar's Dice

vibe, but the two games actually have nothing in common once you get past the exterior. Here's how this game works:

Memo Dice demands the full attention of players right from the start because they must remember which die faces have been hidden underneath the colorful cups.

The game includes nine six-sided dice that show 54 images across their faces with the sides being colored black, blue, or red. The starting player for the round rolls a die, gives everyone a chance to memorize the topmost face, then covers it with a die cup that matches the color of the face. The next player then rolls a die, and so on. As soon as no die cup remains that matches the face of the current die, the current player covers this die with the gold die cup, ending the round.

This player then has the first chance to guess the first die in the line. If correct, the player scores 1 point, then guesses the next die; if wrong, the next player gets to guess. Whoever guesses the die under the gold die cup scores 2 points. Players play multiple rounds until someone reaches a total of 20 points, winning the game.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3677056_t.jpg]• Reiner Knizia

's Schollen Rollen

is a press-your-luck dice game for 2-6 players that is possibly already in the database under another name as Dr. K has designed many such games in the past, but I looked various titles over and didn't spot anything that matches exactly, so here goes:

In Schollen Rollen ("Stolen Rolls"), players take turns rolling dice to capture different colored fish from a central pool in their net, with yellow fish being worth 1 point and red fish 5.

On a turn, the player rolls the dice, then may collect a fish for each die rolled. Special effects on the die faces may augment what happens, with the player possibly doubling (or quadrupling or even octupling!) how many fish they collect, perhaps stealing fish from an opponent's net, or locking the dice from being re-rolled. After each roll, the player may choose to end their turn and keep their catch, or re-roll the available dice in an attempt to catch more. However, if you roll and don't catch anything, all the fish escape your net and your turn ends.

Once all the fish have been caught, the game ends and whoever has the most points wins!

• Other titles coming from AMIGO Spiel in the latter half of 2017 include German editions (or new

German editions) of previously released games:

— Paaranoia

: This new German edition of Pairs

from James Ernest

and Paul Peterson

includes the original game as well as four other games that can be played with the same deck, a deck that contains one 1, two 2s, etc. up to ten 10s.

— Sam Bukas Bande

: This is a German edition of Tomohiro Enoki

's Dungeon Busters

, a game in which 3-5 players attempt to take down monsters by pooling their strength. Unfortunately those who play the same number get removed from play, possibly foiling the attack and punishing the person who played a low number and therefore didn't help much toward victory.

— Schöne Sch#!?e

: Thorsten Gimmler

's No Thanks!

receives a new German title to replace the Geschenkt

of old.

— Ladybohn: Manche mögen's heiss!

("Some like it hot!"): On its ten-year anniversary, this standalone edition of Ladybohn

from Uwe Rosenberg

gets a new cover and no other apparent changes.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3677176_t.jpg]• The final title in this round-up is another reprint, but of an obscure Alex Randolph

game that was released in 1993. Here's an overview of Tief im Riff

, which is for 2-6 players, ages five and up:

In Tief im Riff ("Deep in the Reef"), players work cooperatively as fish swimming through a coral reef to turn over 28 sea animal tiles placed around the game board. The fish start in one location, then travel through a series of paths — following the arrows as they move — to reach openings in the reef.

On a player's turn, they roll a die, then choose one of the four fish and move it along paths a number of spaces equal to the number rolled. After they finish moving, if they're on a space all by themselves, they can reveal a tile that has only one bubble on it. If they share a space with other fish, they can reveal a tile with as many bubbles as the number of fish on that space. Thus, players need to keep their school from wandering too far apart as they travel through the reef.

If the players manage to reveal all 28 tiles before all four fish have swum out of the reef, then they win!

The interesting thing about this new edition is that the original game from Herder Spiele was titled Der Rattenfänger von Hameln

— literally "The Ratcatcher from Hamelin", although the English title on the box is The Pied Piper of Hamlin

. This game differs from the new one in two ways. First, in Tief im Riff

you can reveal certain tiles only if you gather enough fish in a clearing, whereas in Der Rattenfänger von Hameln

you placed fifty tokens on the side of the board and you removed a number of tokens from the pile equal to the number of player pieces in the space where you stopped moving.

Second, the tokens in Der Rattenfänger von Hameln

represented kidnapped children

, so if you failed to win the game, some number of children would never go free. How's that for a burden on young players?

New Game Round-up: Students Make Calls in Zendo and Bricks Make Walls in Amun-Re While Night Falls in Dominion: Nocturne

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/677…ake-calls-zendo-and-brick

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3678087_t.jpg]• U.S. publisher Looney Labs

has been working on a new version of Kory Heath

's well-loved and long out of print Zendo

, and now the company has finally spilled the beans on the new edition. What's more, it's already going into production, with a mold for the pieces having been approved and the finished item expected to appear on retail shelves in late 2017 or early 2018.

Wait, a mold? Doesn't Zendo

use the familiar pyramid pieces that you can now find in abundance in Pyramid Arcade

and other Looney releases? Yes and no — the pyramids are one of three shapes of pieces to be included in Zendo

, with the other two being a rectangular prism and a triangular prism.

What is Zendo

anyway? A tool for teaching the scientific method

, according to designer Nick Bentley, in addition to being a game in its own right. One player, the Master, creates a rule, then presents all of the Students with one arrangement of pieces that follows this rule and another arrangement that doesn't. The Students must create arrangements of their own, which the Master then labels as following the rule or not. If a Student attempts to guess the rule, the Master can build a counterexample that demonstrates why that guessed rule is not correct or congratulate the Student on winning.

I believe that Looney Labs will be demoing this new version of Zendo

at Gen Con 50 in late August 2017. The publisher is also asking interested parties to complete a survey about this new version of Zendo

should you care to share your opinion.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3677538_t.jpg]• Donald X. Vaccarino

and Rio Grande Games

have sprung another addition to the Dominion

empire on gamers: Dominion: Nocturne

, which RGG expects to release in October 2017. As usual, Donald X. kills it on the exposition:

You've always been a night person; lately you've even considered becoming a vampire. There are a lot of advantages: you don't age; you don't have to see yourself in mirrors anymore; if someone asks you to do something, you can just turn into a bat, and then say, sorry, I'm a bat. There are probably some downsides though. You always think of the statue in the town square that came to life and now works as the tavern barmaid. The pedestal came to life, too, so she has to hop around. The village blacksmith turns into a wolf whenever there's a full moon; when there's a crescent moon, he turns into a chihuahua. That's how this stuff goes sometimes. Still, when you breathe in the night air, you feel ready for anything.

Dominion: Nocturne, the 11th expansion to Dominion, has 500 cards, with 33 new Kingdom cards. There are Night cards, which are played after the Buy phase; Heirlooms that replace starting Coppers; Fate and Doom cards that give out Boons and Hexes; and a variety of extra cards that other cards can provide.

• At SPIEL '17 in October, French publisher Super Meeple

— which released a new version of Reiner Knizia

's Amun-Re

in 2016 — will debut Amun-Re: The Card Game

, about which I know nothing more than these facts for now. Look, a picture!

• Other pictures of forthcoming releases include these shots of Pioneers

, an Emanuele Ornella

title coming from Queen Games

at SPIEL '17 about which I also know nothing:

• And there's this beauty shot of another Queen Games title for SPIEL '17: Merlin

, designed by Stefan Feld

and Michael Rieneck

:

Designer Diary: Head of Mousehold, or Winning in Third

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/674…ousehold-or-winning-third

by Adam Wyse

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3601706_t.jpg]Sometimes a game just comes together. Sometimes from the very first germ of an idea, it's all there, just waiting for you to make it. That's how it was with Head of Mousehold

.

This is a game that changed very little over the course of its development compared to some of my other designs. I feel that hearing how mechanisms changed over time is really only interesting to people who have played it — which at this time is very very few of you out there. I hope that will change soon, but for now that's the case. The story of this game, though, and how it came to be made is an interesting and a personal one for me.

Starting Out — January 2014

My name is Adam Wyse

, and I'm a board game designer from Calgary, Canada. I started designing games in January 2014. My first game was not any good, but it was the spark that ignited the fire. I started work on Masque of the Red Death

in mid-2014 (coming soon from IDW Games!) and a game about stand-up comedy that autumn, so Head of Mousehold

was my fourth design.

An Idea! — December 2014

I can't fully explain this design process without going into a few personal details. That winter I was preparing some big plans. I had been dating my girlfriend Chelsea for about two years, and I already knew that she was the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. I was planning on surprising her with a proposal at Christmas. Chelsea and I live in Calgary, but she grew up in Cranbrook where her parents still live, about a four-hour drive away. She goes home every Christmas to spend a week and a half relaxing and enjoying some much needed family time. I decided that I would fly to Cranbrook on Christmas morning and propose unexpectedly on her parents' doorstep when she answered the door.

All that said, it went perfectly and she said yes! And as a result, now I had a relaxing week to look forward to of great food, movies, hot tubs, and beautiful mountain scenery. But my relaxing didn't last long — I was struck by an idea the next day, and I had to get it out of my head, like… now!

As I mentioned at the start, the idea came together quickly. I wanted to design a game all about coming in second place. It's one thing to want to win a trick by having the best card, but isn't it interesting to try to come in second? When everyone is trying to do the same, this should get quite tough.

The theme came naturally: "The second mouse gets the cheese", right? So there are five colors of mice, and each round the colors are ordered randomly from fastest to slowest. I figured that each family should have two mice of each color in their deck.

Players would send out mice to mousetraps to bring home cheese; the fastest one would get snapped by the mousetrap and the second fastest could grab the cheese. But I wanted something to change up this formula in certain situations, so I thought up the "squeaker" mouse, and each family of ten mice has five of them. When a squeaker gets snapped by the mousetrap he squeaks, the cat hears him, and comes in and eats the second fastest mouse! Thus, when a squeaker dies, the third mouse gets the cheese.

The mousetraps should each have different amounts of cheese — and you shouldn't have your whole family of mice from which to pick so that the decision space isn't too overwhelming. What if each round you sent out only three mice, but this was done simultaneously along with everyone else once you saw how "fast" each color of mouse was.

Oh, and then what if everyone got to see which colors of mice you'd chosen to send out? They'd know what you had to send, but not where you'd send them and in which order — that would be good. During the round, you take turns playing cards to mousetraps one by one. I knew there had to be information trickling out as the round went on to make the deduction and second-guessing element more interesting — how about every second card at a mousetrap must be played face up?

Whew. All these ideas were there from the start in concept, but now I really needed to make this thing and see whether it worked.

Since I had flown out to Cranbrook I didn't have a car, I didn't have any prototyping supplies, and most stores were closed for the holidays. I immediately put in an Amazon order for blank playing cards — rush shipping to my future in-laws' house! And I begged for a ride into town to the dollar store to try to gather what I needed: a sharpie, stickers in five colors, some kind of colored pawns, and little beads I could use for cheese bits.

The day the blank cards arrived I spent eight straight hours with stickers and sharpies at the kitchen table making my mouse cards. I can imagine a fast-forward time lapse like on TV with family milling around me, having breakfast, then lunch, chatting, cleaning, reading magazines, listening to music — all while I sat there sticking stickers onto the corners of cards and drawing mousetraps like a crazed kindergartener in art class. But after eight hours, I was done!

I immediately wrangled my two future sister-in-laws into a game and just like I had hoped, the game worked! There was only one serious change from the core game: My original thought was that each round one player would secretly distribute a certain amount of cheese to each mousetrap. I thought it would be interesting if one player knew which trap had the most and other players had to try to follow that player's lead to figure out which mousetrap was more desirable. It quickly became clear that the interesting deduction was not in cheese placement, but in the play of your mouse cards. There was enough solid game there that eventually cheese tokens were drawn from a pile and actually placed face up on each mousetrap.

Playtesting Playtesting Playtesting and GAC – January 2015

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic685516_t.jpg]I didn't want to overdo it pushing family to test a brand new game, so that playtest was the only one I did until I got back from holidays, though of course I kept thinking about the game and revising in my head. By the time I got home and brought the game out to my local design group for its second playtest, I had made up a set of "Day Event" cards that would slightly change up the rules each round.

I have to stop for a second and mention how great my design group is. I'm a member of the Calgary chapter of the Game Artisans of Canada

. The GAC is an amazing and supportive group, full of many designers whose games I'm sure you've played; the games and names are far too many to list. The group communicates online, does inter-chapter playtesting, is a valuable resource for contract advice and publisher information, and is full of experience in the industry. The weekly testing and iteration that happens in each chapter of GAC is what polishes all the games coming out of this group.

I'm proud to have brilliant local designers like Paul Saxberg, Gavan Brown, Orin Bishop, Joe McDaid, Tom Sarsons, Matt Tolman, John Gibson, Glen Dresser, and Gord Hamilton to meet with regularly and playtest.

Head of Mousehold

went through a barrage of playtests week after week. Event cards changed and cheese values/counts changed as things went along, but the core was strong and remained intact.

Making It Prettier — April 2015

Early on I knew the look of the game needed to improve if I were to get a better read on how the deduction elements were working. An ugly prototype is all well and good at first, but eventually a lack of good iconography and colors can become a hindrance to how well a player can take in the information they need to make proper decisions. Luckily I had three wonderful and talented artist friends (Chelsea, Jason, and Joanne) that answered my call on Facebook for five simple line drawings of mice that matched some kind of theme.

I wanted each family to have a cool theme and matching apparel and look. I got back some amazing space mice, ninja mice, cowboy mice, and farm mice!

And because I had more time than sense apparently, I decided to upgrade the pawns I was using for mouse tokens into little clay-molded oven-baked ones. And since I was ordering a little silicone mouse mold, I might as well order a cheese one at the same time and make my cheese tokens out of yellow clay! They looked great but after a few weeks of use and being carted around, they were breaking far more often than I would like.

I couldn't find any mouse meeples of the right colors online, so I decided to get a bunch of black ones and paint them myself!

Since I was happy with the gameplay and the look of the cards, and the quality of the components was improving, I decided to enter some contests with Head of Mousehold

.

Contests — May 2015

The game was shortlisted in the Ciutat de Granollers (a contest in Spain) in early 2015, but due to some baffling issues with Spanish customs the prototype didn't make it into the country. Customs required a payment of over $200 of the contest organizers in order to release the package, so they rightly declined and had the package returned to me. Weird.

Next, in May, I entered the Plateau d'Or in Quebec City and was chosen as a finalist! Having never been to Quebec, I decided to take a trip out there to see the sights and present my game. But first, remember how I was talking about how amazing the Game Artisans of Canada are? Even though I took French from grades 7 through 12, I was not confident enough to translate my own cards or rulebook. I asked for help from French-speaking GAC members, and Yves Tourigny graciously translated my game for me. It wasn't a requirement of the contest, but I wanted to be able to play with and teach convention-goers even if they didn't speak English! I am incredibly grateful because my conversational French is even worse than my written French, but I did manage to teach and play the game with people who I couldn't really communicate with otherwise. Even though I did not win the award, it was a fantastic trip and an awesome experience!

Pitching and Publishers — June 2015

In June 2015, friend and fellow GAC member Paul Saxberg was taking a trip down to Florida for Dice Tower Con, and he graciously offered to show Head of Mousehold

to publishers while he was there. I was thrilled! He put the game through the designer/publisher speed dating event and got significant interest from two publishers, one of which he sent the prototype home with. This first publisher was extremely confident they would publish the game, but after a few months they ultimately just barely ended up passing on it.

In their comments they wondered whether the game could go to five players, so I took that suggestion and added a fifth family to the game. With five players, I started finding that the amount of information players needed to consider was becoming too much. An analysis-paralysis prone player tended to take a long time on their turn because there was so much available information out there with five players: five mousetraps and fifteen mouse meeples on the table.

I decided to try a new idea to help fix the problem. Instead of having the mousetraps in the middle of the table, each player would have a mousetrap in front of them. You could play mice only to your own mousetrap, the one on your left, and the one on your right. This cut down on the number of factors a player had to consider and got the game length feeling right again in a five-player game.

So I got my prototype back from the first publisher and decided to contact the other one that had been interested. They still wanted to try out the game, so I sent a copy off to publisher #2. After a month or two, I heard word back that while they found the game very interesting, they were looking for something heavier for their line.

At this point it was late 2015 and Head of Mousehold

had been rejected twice — but I wasn't deterred. I believed in the game, and I knew it would find the right home as long as I kept looking. I kept playtesting, playing at conventions, and even making a digital version of the game that could be played on Tabletopia.

SaltCon — March 2016

So that's where things were at for a few months, but 2016 was a big year for me in game design.

When I was first starting out, I went with the idea that game design contests would get me noticed. The judges are often publishers, and for a new designer with few contacts, having a portal directly to people who matter in the industry seemed like a great opportunity. I continued with that line of thinking and entered one of my other games, "Cypher", into the Ion Award put on by SaltCon in Utah. After being chosen as a finalist, I decided to go to Utah and attend the convention. "Cypher" won the 2016 Ion Award for best light game, and Mayday Games ended up signing it (and another of my games, "Poetry Slam") shortly after the convention! The Ion Award publicity was what got me noticed by FoxMind

.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic898751_t.jpg]Right around when I was finalizing the "Cypher" contract with Mayday, I got an email from JC at FoxMind, who I had never met before. He had seen the award win and watched my five-minute video for "Cypher" and was very interested in the game. I had to tell him that the game was already spoken for, but I had another game that I felt perfectly fit with FoxMind's line: Head of Mousehold

! I sent him my pitch video and sell sheet for the game, and he requested that I send a prototype to their office in Montreal. I was thrilled, but also warned him that I would be going to my first big U.S. convention in June (Origins), and that while normally I'd not show the game around while he was evaluating it, I would have to in this case. It's a long and costly trip from Calgary, and I couldn't not show the game when I have so few opportunities to meet publishers in person.

Origins — June 2016

So I was off to Columbus for the Origins Game Fair in June 2016! It was an incredibly fun and successful trip. I met lots of new designers and publishers and did a lot of pitching of my various games. My first pitch of the convention was on the Wednesday when the place opened, and it went great. That publisher was especially interested in Head of Mousehold

and "LepreContractors", and wanted to take a copy of each back for evaluation. Nice! Just a few hours later, I get a rushed-sounding email from JC at FoxMind basically saying "We played Head of Mousehold

and really enjoyed it! We need another play or two to make some big decisions for the coming year… please don't give it away to someone else just yet!"

That was a tough one for me. I'm a fairly new designer to the scene, and I have a very big company who I just pitched to who is interested — but at the same time FoxMind seems very impressed with the game and I know it would turn out beautiful in their care… but what if I stop showing the game and then FoxMind ends up passing on it like two other companies had before??

I decided to stop showing the game immediately and hold it for FoxMind — and I was so glad I did! This has been the first game FoxMind has signed without actually meeting the designer in person, so I'm extremely grateful that JC and David took a chance signing a new designer like me. It has been a pleasure working with JC on development and seeing the beautiful art as it comes out. Small aspects of gameplay have been improved here and there, and the rulebook has been streamlined into something I'm very proud of.

I'll be attending Gen Con 2017 to be there for the release of the game. It will be my first game to be released, and I am so excited to start seeing people enjoying it!

Thanks for taking the time to read these ramblings. I hope you have fun with Head of Mousehold

!

Adam Wyse

Latin American New Game Round-up: Thirsty Mages, Bustling Beaches and Exploding Potatoes

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/654…ound-thirsty-mages-bustli

by Hilko Drude As my previous round-up

was received somewhat well, here's the promised sequel:

[Editor's note: Hilko submitted this article in mid-May 2017, and somehow I have neglected to publish it until now. My apologies to him — and you — for the delay! —WEM]

Argentina

The third "Geek Out!" Festival was celebrated in Buenos Aires in early May 2017, and from what I read, it seems to have been great. Anyone who has ever organized a con like this will probably know that 2,400 people the third time around is a huge success, especially when they are the first in their country trying something like this. I assume that many people who were there are looking forward to the 2018 event already.

For the second time, the King Alfonso Award

was handed out. The winner was Conejos en el Huerto

("Rabbits in the Orchard") by Luis Fernando Marcantoni

, published by Ruibal Hermanos S.A.

Congratulations! At the same time, the game also won "Best overall presentation". (Gotta love the letter "J" in the title. Congratulations to artist Celeste Barone

as well.) I am curious whether we will hear from the rabbits outside of Argentina in the future. Co-finalist Mutant Crops

has an upcoming English edition already.

In the small print run category, the winner was Star Warships

by Gabriel Isaac Jalil

. Again: Congratulations.

A candidate for next year's award scheduled for release in July is Magos & Tabernas

("Mages & Taverns") by Adrián Novell. Three thirsty mages enter a pub which has only one beer left. Unsurprisingly, fireballs start flying. Players are working their way towards said beer by removing obstacles in the way. Why can't there be a good brewing spell instead?

This isn't final artwork, but taken from this thread

.

Brazil

Brazil seems to have the largest gaming and publishing scene in Latin America by far – that's not too surprising, I guess. I have a feeling that I am still just scratching at the surface, but I am planning to explore more of it and am always happy to discover new things.

Still rather new on the board game scene is publisher Redbox

from Rio de Janeiro. After a couple of fairly successful RPG publications, they started localizing foreign publications and are publishing four Brazilian games in 2017:

In the short economic card game Tsukiji

by Leandro Pires

, you are a fish trader and try to manipulate the Tokyo fish market prices in a way that lets you earn more money than the other traders.

Labyrinx

by Daniel Braga

and Thiago Matos

just completed its crowdfunding campaign

. As the name suggests, you move through a labyrinth. The labyrinth is created from cards during the game, and you have to make sure to remember your way home as there is a "fog of war" mechanism that obscures most of the labyrinth. While you are trying to remember which way was out, you collect treasure, dodge traps, and mess with the other players.

Micropolis

by Rodrigo Rego

is a tile-laying game with rhombic tiles. All players try to expand a city by adding houses, parks, factories, and so on. When placing certain special buildings into the city, you can add influence markers on them. The goal is to be the first player to place all your influence in the city.

Copacabana

is also by Rodrigo Rego. At the beginning of the 20th century, players transform the sleepy beach into the mixture of glamour and chaos it is known as today. Achieve this by placing tiles and getting into the most valuable streets to build the most valuable buildings.

In April 2017 I had mentioned Space Cantina

by Fel Barros

and Warny Marçano

. Fel Barros now works for CMON Limited

, which in the first half of 2017 released a new edition of Gekido: Bot Battles

, a game that he designed together with Romulo Marques

and that was first published in 2014. With the new edition, this should become a lot more available outside Brazil. Gekido

is a dice roller in which robots smash each other in an arena.

Pablo

by Marcos Mayora

is one of those rather unusual games, it seems. There are 140 cards with words and categories (in various difficulty levels). Some you hold in your hand, some are on the table. One player starts to sing any song and tries to insert as many words or categories from their cards as possible, for which they get points according to the difficulty. When someone else has a card which might fit the current song, they can start to sing along and push in their own words. You can also throw tomatoes (in the form of cardboard counters) if someone sings wrongly. For an impression of how such a game works, you can see it in Portuguese below. ( Jump to 6:17

for the Pablo

demonstration):

Pablo

is published by Mandala Jogos

, and there are promo packs for different musical styles. It was named after a Brazilian music show of the 1980s

and sounds like one of those games that gets you kicked out of your apartment if you play it too often.

Colombia

Colombian publisher Azahar Juegos

released the well-noticed game Xanadú

in 2012, with Quined Games

re-releasing it three years later. Now there are two new games by Azahar:

FocusX

by Guillermo Solano

is a card game in which you try to find matching characteristics between three cards. (There are animal categories, numbers and colors.) You can play it by speed or more quietly, and according to the publisher, it is suitable for players aged five and up.

Hot-Pota-toH!

is from Xanadú

designer Javier Velásquez

. A stack of cards makes the rounds, and you either have to draw a card from this stack or play a card. While doing this, you try to get certain cards and avoid drawing the exploding potato. While this description might sound similar to Exploding Kittens

, Hot-Pota-toH!

has no player elimination; instead a round ends when someone explodes and everyone else then counts their points. Therefore there is a motivation to either take a risk and draw cards, or sacrifice expensive cards to avoid losing everything.

Designer Diary: Custom Heroes, or Tricky Climbing and Crafting

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/678…oes-or-tricky-climbing-an

by John Clair

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3592167_t.png]For many players, the core game of Custom Heroes

will be familiar. This is a climbing (or ladder-climbing) trick game, and there are many versions of this type of game; "President" was what my friends and I called our version growing up, and this used just a standard deck of cards. Before I was deep into the gaming hobby or had discovered that many climbing game variants already existed, I thought it would be nifty to make a game like "President", but with a "cool and different twist". As a novice designer, I tried unsuccessfully to pitch the game to publishers. The game, while fun, lacked a good hook or attribute that made it stand out from what I came to learn was a very crowded design space.

In 2013, I started working on a game that used what Alderac Entertainment Group

is now calling the "Card Crafting System": Cards are in sleeves, and at the start of the game or during play one or more semi-transparent cards are sleeved with the cards; essentially, multiple layered parts are turned into a single card held together by a card-sleeve. The key here is that a card can be "crafted" with new powers and modifiers, while still functioning like a card, i.e., it can be shuffled, dealt, drawn, played, discarded, re-dealt, etc. and still retain all modifications.

My original card-crafting game design was Edge of Darkness

, a medium-weight, Euro-ish game that AEG licensed back in 2015. That game is now in the layout phase of production. I followed up that design with Mystic Vale

, a light deck-building game released by AEG in 2016, then continued exploring the enormous amount of design space that the card-crafting system opened up.

It occurred to me that a relatively simple endeavor, yet potentially quite interesting, would be a merger of card crafting and climbing tricks. Take a classic game like Asshole

with a symmetric deck of numbered cards, and add the ability to modify cards as they are played — the key being that all modifications on cards are retained such that the deck of cards dealt out in the second, third, and fourth hands will be increasingly different from what was dealt in the first hand. This idea didn't make for an exceptionally unique design like I sought to create with Edge of Darkness

, but it did make for a pretty radical twist to the established climbing trick game system.

I wanted to keep the game approachable and fast-paced, so the variety of modifications players could apply to cards were kept simple, things like increasing or decreasing the value of a card, or turning a card into a wild or a trump. I experimented with more complex effects, like permanent abilities that players would keep from round to round, but the AEG guys felt this slowed the pace of the game and took the spotlight off the card crafting.

For the strategy-inclined gamer, a key difference in Custom Heroes

from other climbing trick games is the addition of resource management. Before each hand, players each draw a number of "card advancements": transparent cards that you can sleeve onto cards to modify them with a plus, minus, or text effects. Whenever you want, you may elect to sleeve an advancement onto a card in your hand and permanently modify that card. At the end of each hand, any advancements you didn't sleeve will still be available for the next hand; any advancements you did sleeve stay on the card, which is then randomly dealt for the next hand.

Wise use of advancements is usually the difference between winning or losing a hand. Conversely, ineffectual use of advancements means you are squandering resources that could have helped in future hands. Therefore, your decisions aren't just about doing the best in this hand, but about maximizing the power of your resources over multiple hands. Rather than blow all your resources for first place this hand, maybe settle for second place and fewer victory points (VP), but an advantaged position going into the next hand.

The card crafting also drives other major differences from more traditional climbing trick games. Numbers often start clumping, for example. In the first few hands, having four-of-a-kind is a big play. By the last couple of hands, you may see seven- or eight-of-a-kind, and your four-of-a-kind is no longer the powerful play it once was. Also, the power-numbers in the deck shift; 10s start the game as the highest numbers, but by the end of the game you might see three 12s beaten by three 16s. These and other dynamics make for a climbing trick game with a fresh feel, and in my experience, many shout-out-loud moments.

The scoring system I went back and forth on for a while. It was important to have a scoring system that both kept the game length reasonable and kept all players in the running. I tried several different things, but ultimately ended up with a "win threshold" concept. Points are awarded for doing better each hand (e.g., the first person to play all their cards gets 5VP, the next player gets 3VP, etc.). To win the game, a player must get to 10 or more points, then get first place in a subsequent hand.

What this means is that even if you are trailing 12 to 0, if you get first place in a hand, you deny other players the ability to win the game and you force another hand. Eventually either someone has won or all players have 10 or more points, which leads to a final winner-take-all hand. This almost did what I wanted it to. Most games would end in the fourth, fifth, or sixth hand, which worked great. However, some games would push into seventh or even eighth hands — and by that point, the deck would start reaching a threshold where there were too many advancements on the cards; the game would slow down and overstay its welcome. I wanted to cap the length at six hands, but that meant that if you were too far behind going into the fifth or sixth hand, you were effectively eliminated.

At this point we had a game we really liked with one hiccup that affected maybe 10% of games. AEG CEO John Zinser and I hung out for a whole evening, brainstorming and playing. A lot of ideas were discussed, but when we hit on the right idea we knew it at once. Six hands would be the maximum number of regular hands. If at the end of the sixth hand, no player had yet won by conventional means, there would be a two-player championship hand in which the player with the most points and the player who won the sixth hand would face off head-to-head. This meant points were still crucial, but even if you were way behind, you still had a chance of stealing a shot at the title. Therefore, in the sixth hand all players have a chance, though the players with the most VP still have a better chance.

Hope that sounds interesting! I've certainly had fun with this little design. Happy gaming!

John D. Clair

New Game Round-up: After Centuries, A Golem Emerges Through the Desert

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/679…uries-golem-emerges-throu

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3684761_t.png]• With Gen Con 50 opening in just over a week, publishers are flooding out game announcements — or teasers of game announcements — ahead of that show. Plan B Games

, for example, has revealed

that it will sell Emerson Matsuuchi

's Century: Golem Edition

at that show, with the first fifty people who show up at the Plan B Games booth on Thursday and say, "I came for the golems!" getting a copy for free. (Everyone who says, "I came for the golems!" after that will receive only a funny look and a request for $40.)

Mike Young from Plan B Games has stated

that currently this edition is planned as a one-off, so don't expect to see all three titles of the Century

trilogy in this golem-filled universe. (At Spielwarenmesse in early 2017, Plan B's Sophie Gravel had told me that all the artwork for the golem edition of what was originally

Caravan

had been completed, which makes this edition relatively easy to produce. Creating all new artwork for two additional games would be another matter.) Plan B Games has also stated that Century: Golem Edition

and a matching playmat for the game would be sold only via its webstore and at conventions.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3684362_t.png]• In March 2016, Fantasy Flight Games announced

the debut of Windrider Games

, an internal studio that would publish non-FFG-style games to which FFG held the rights. Windrider Games released new versions of Ra

and Citadels

in 2016, then FFG owner Asmodee bought Z-Man Games

and Windrider Games became redundant since the Z-Man Games brand has been around for more than a decade and already publishes titles similar to those released by Windrider.

Thus, it should not be a surprise that when a reprint of Reiner Knizia

's Through the Desert

was (finally!) announced

after being out of print for years, the announcement came from Z-Man Games, which has adopted the "Euro Classics" brand from FFG and Windrider.

Through the Desert

is an exceptional game, one in which 2-5 players take turns placing two camels on the board to extend their caravans, with caravan lines never crossing and with lines of the same color never even touching since no one would be able to tell who owns which camels. You want to claim watering holes, reach oases, and create a camel fence to claim land for yourself. This new version of Through the Desert

has a double-sided game board with the Niger River running across the Sahara on the new side; players naturally want to cross the river to claim water, but there isn't room for everyone. New gameplay variants are also included in this version.

As for a release date, Z-Man Games writes only "arriving soon", so perhaps this game will show up at Gen Con without announcement, just as FFG's new version of the "Euro Classic" Samurai

(also from Knizia) did at Gen Con 2015.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3506961_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3667552_t.jpg]• Days of Wonder

will have copies of Alan R. Moon

's Ticket to Ride: Germany

on sale at Gen Con 50 ahead of the game's scheduled U.S. release date of September 2017. (BGG will have Moon in its booth on Friday, Aug. 18 at 17:45 EDT (GMT-4) to chat about game design on camera. I plan to publish our Gen Con 50 broadcast schedule on Wed., Aug. 9 since it's now mostly complete.)

Days of Wonder will also have copies of Five Tribes: Whims of the Sultan

and Quadropolis: Public Services

for sale.

• Vice Games

will have published copies of Bruno Faidutti

's Kamasutra

, which was previously available only as a print-and-play game. In the game, teammates reproduce positions in the Kama Sutra while trying to pop a balloon placed between themselves. I don't expect to see this game demoed much during exhibit hall hours, but in the evening...absolutely. Vice Games will be located in the back of the Japanime Games booth, presumably behind a black velvet curtain.

• In late July 2017, I shared this teaser image from Pandasaurus Games

, an image related to a game due out at SPIEL '17 that will be demoed at Gen Con 50:

That game is named Coaster Park

, with Scott Almes

being the designer and Kwanchai Moriya and Peter Wocken supplying the art and graphic design. The only description we have right now is that " Coaster Park

is a board game", but if you look at the image and put two and two together, you might guess that in the game you'll put two and two together.

Fantasy Flight Games Welcomes Fallout in 2017

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/679…mes-welcomes-fallout-2017

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3686972_t.png]U.S. publisher Fantasy Flight Games

loves to unveil surprises prior to Gen Con, the largest board game convention in the U.S., and it's unleashed a doozy in the form of Fallout

, a "post-nuclear adventure board game" based on the popular video game series from Bethesda Game Studios

, specifically Fallout 3

and Fallout 4

and their downloadable expansions. Here's a short description of this design from Andrew Fisher

and Nathan Hajek

:

Fallout is a post-nuclear adventure board game for one to four players. Based on the hit video game series by Bethesda, each Fallout scenario is inspired by a familiar story from the franchise. Survivors begin the game on the edge of an unexplored landscape, uncertain of what awaits them in this unfamiliar world. With just one objective to guide them from the very beginning, each player must explore the hidden map, fight ferocious enemies, and build the skills of their survivor as they attempt to complete challenging quests and balance feuding factions within the game.

As they advance their survivors' stories, players come across new quests and individual targets, leading them to gain influence. Who comes out ahead depends on how keenly and aggressively each player ventures through the game; however, if a single faction is pushed to power too quickly, the wasteland will be taken for their own, and the survivors conquered along with it.

The game announcement

from FFG has more details on the set-up and how gameplay unfolds in this 120-180 minute game. You start the game with a single Influence card and will likely acquire more during play, with these Influence cards providing points based on how you meet the goals listed on them or how well one in-game faction does against the other one. Each scenario has two factions, representing the opposing poles of "Security" and "Freedom", and while you're mostly functioning on your own, you probably want to align yourself with other players and one of these factions to have a larger impact on the game.

Each scenario has distinctive landmarks — e.g., The Capital Wasteland, The Pitt, The Commonwealth, and Far Harbor — but otherwise the map is variable, with players exploring the terrain and (ideally) avoiding radiation to uncover equipment and do whatever it is they want to do to gain influence.

FFG lists a release date of Q4 2017 for Fallout

, but perhaps the game will be on a few demo tables at Gen Con to give attendees a first-hand taste of how the game plays out.

(Note that this is the second Fallout

title due for release this year as in April 2017 UK publisher Modiphius Entertainment announced

the Nov. 2017 release of Fallout: Wasteland Warfare

, a minis-heavy design from James Sheahan. Modiphius has confirmed that title as being available for demos during Gen Con 50, so perhaps we'll have head-to-head Fallout

fever to see which games best survives the fire and fury of fans.)

Designer Diary: Scratch That 13 Days Itch in 13 Minutes, or How Far Can We Push It?

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/678…3-days-itch-13-minutes-or

by Daniel Skjold Pedersen

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3544548_t.jpg] 13 Minutes: The Cuban Missile Crisis

is a two-player microgame with tough decisions released in early 2017 by Ultra PRO

and Jolly Roger Games

.

When the big brother to 13 Minutes

— 13 Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis

— was released in 2016, Asger and I wrote a 13-chapter long designer diary

. In that spirit, this piece will be 13 short, almost anecdotal stories of what 13 Minutes

is and how it came to be.

1. What is 13 Minutes?

The 13-second pitch is that 13 Minutes

is Love Letter

meets 13 Days

.

2. No, really, what is 13 Minutes?

The slightly longer story is that it is a two-player microgame set at the height of the Cold War during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. In the game, you want to flex your superpower muscle and dominate battlegrounds, but — and there is a but — if you push your agenda too far you may trigger nuclear war, so be careful.

And did I say that you play only five cards per game, so each decision matters a lot?

3. Sitting by a pool

When 13 Days

was funded on Kickstarter back in July 2015, I was vacationing in Italy. I celebrated by the poolside, but not with a glass of red wine as you would expect. In my hand I had 13 blank cards and 13 red and blue cubes and a pen.

Half an hour later, I had figured out how to translate the 13 Days

experience into a microgame setting and sketched the basic cards for the first prototype of 13 Minutes

.

4. Why 13 Minutes?

The idea of making a microgame version of a political card-driven game had been buzzing in the heads of both Asger

and I for some time back then. We like to push game genres into new territories. 13 Days

did just that as a 45-minute distillation of some of the nail-biting and tense moments from epic political games like Twilight Struggle

.

13 Minutes

is pushing that genre quite a bit more. We wanted to see whether it would float.

5. Brinkmanship

Stakes are high in 13 Minutes

, which is no different from in 13 Days

. The game is all about brinkmanship. It is a balancing act of cunning play and a tug-of-war of brute force.

You want to dominate battlegrounds to gain prestige, but each time you add influence to a battleground, you draw that card closer to your side of the table. Doing so is great because at the end of the game cards on your side will be all yours if no one dominates — but then again it is not great at all because all cards have a colored DEFCON symbol. If you end the game with three of the same color, you have triggered nuclear war and lost the game.

6. First origin

I use my notes app on the phone all the time, and a lot of that is for game-related stuff. For me it is a useful tool to get thoughts out of my head, but coincidentally it also allows me to track the first note I have for 13 Minutes

. It goes:

13 Days with only 13 cards (and cubes). 5 US, 5 USSR and 3 neutral.
Played cards become battlegrounds.
Command: Add influence — move card closer to your zone. Remove influence — move card away from your zone.
Suspense: Endgame reveal — you may trigger nuclear war!

And then some more stuff that didn't end up in the game.

7. Why so obsessed with the number 13?

As any designer can tell you, working under constraints often brings creativity. We set up constraints for ourselves all the time. Sometimes arbitrary ones (e.g., what if you couldn't talk?), but most often from experience (e.g., is that rule necessary?) or production concerns (e.g., we need to limit the components to one deck of cards).

With 13 Minutes

, the framework was integral to the core idea. How could a microgame in the world of 13 Days

ever have anything other than 13 cards as well as 13 cubes for each player?

8. Building a political world map

The "map" in 13 Minutes

is an abstraction, but an important one that serves two main purposes.

First, it underlines the global nature of the crisis. In the beginning there is only Cuba — one battleground on the table. As you play cards and take actions, those cards become new battlegrounds. Though Cuba is still the most important battleground (as it's worth double prestige points), you learn that your resources are limited and will have to pick your fights with care.

9. A living DEFCON track

Second, the "map" is an evolving DEFCON track. Controlling cards left and right is not a problem until you consider the implications.

You are walking a tightrope. Too strong actions in one area may tip you over and be the final push to nuclear war.

10. How Cuba was born

Looking at the game now, one would think that the Cuba card — the sole face-down card — was introduced to the game by flipping a card to hide information. Actually, what happened was the reverse.

In the beginning, all cards were played face down to hide their DEFCON color. It was sort of a memory game inside the game that was totally unnecessary. Losses due to nuclear war would come at a higher rate in those early playtests, and players did not appreciate the lack of control. The obvious solution was to play cards face up, and thus Cuba was born to retain some uncertainty.

11. The devil is in the detail

What I am most proud about in the game are two details that enhance the core experience of brinkmanship.

I) The player who dominates the most military (orange) DEFCON cards at the end of the game gains 1 extra prestige. It is a little reward worth going for — but the deck contains one extra orange card, so the odds of going broke on DEFCON is considerably higher. Value and risk go hand in hand.

II) The Cuba battleground awards you 2 prestige, making it another reward you should fight for — but then Cuba will likely go into your sphere of influence and push you to play a more cautious game. Here again, value and risk go hand in hand.

12. So did we push it too far?

The first reviews suggest no. This is both pleasing and upsetting:

• Pleasing obviously because we want to make games for an audience that is larger than two.

• Upsetting because a part of me wanted to cross over that threshold. At least all this has sparked a new project that used to be a standing joke with us: 13 Seconds

.

13. How to play

Are you tired of reading rulebooks? Dan King, also known as the Game Boy Geek, has done a most excellent "Rules School" video

. I point all new players towards his instructions.

Have fun with the game!

Daniel Skjold Pedersen

Game Preview: Photosynthesis, or The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Tree

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/679…is-or-unbearable-lightnes

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3364832_t.jpg]In January 2017, I received the cover for Photosynthesis

from the European branch of Blue Orange Games

while preparing for the Spielwarenmesse fair and was stunned: "Whoa, this thing is fire!"

At Spielwarenmesse 2017, designer Hjalmar Hach

gave me a runthrough of the game (video here

), but a brief runthrough doesn't give you a good feeling of how the game actually plays out. You can understand the gist of things — collect light with your trees in order to plant and grow new trees, eventually harvesting them for points — without understanding how mean

this game can be. It's the most pacific mean game I've played in years. Everything about the graphic design is inviting and joyous, yet you're all meant to embody cruel nature, block everyone else from the light, and see them shrivel to nothing in the forest while you reign as the oakest with the mostest.

That's the hope anyway. Sometimes, of course, you're the one doing the shriveling, especially since you can block yourself as easily as others. In some ways, though, you have to block yourself, just as you block yourself in your regular non-tree life as a human, taking on more responsibility than you should or agreeing to a project that you know you'll regret or just wanting to do more than you'll ever have the time for (which is a common refrain in the Martin household come convention time).

If you're going to be at Gen Con 50, you can check out Photosynthesis

yourself at the Blue Orange Games

booth. I hear that they're offering a discount for those who cosplay as an sycamore, but that might have been something I made up right now.

Designer's Diary: Slide Blast, or A Blast into the Designing World!

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/678…st-or-blast-designing-wor

by Evan Song

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3311106_t.jpg]The first time I worked on Slide Blast

was when I was designing game projects that were called "games for beginners". These projects were created specifically for people who didn't have experience with board games. To create them, I started by looking at classic games and worked on adapting some of the mechanisms. I really wanted to do a tile-laying game, but I realized that unfortunately a lot of these games were already on the market.

I sought the help of fellow designer Samgoo Seo

who was very interested in the project. He came up with a simple game design of tile placement with hexagonal tiles on which he had traced some roads. The game at this stage was too simple, so we didn't have any big expectations — but we liked the game play, so we started the project with this concept in mind.

We went around board game stores and the BGG website to look out for similar games and took care to point out what issues those types of games had. Our prototype version was too easy to play, and it was hard for us to make it stand out. We tried to add more elements with many tests done over several weeks. There were several tiles which had to be changed and we made lots of scoring adjustments.

The next step was to find the right theme for the game to improve the player's immersions and fun. Among several concepts, we chose two themes: one was roller coasters, the other was waterpark slides. We were more inclined to choose the roller coaster theme at first — I'm a big fan of Rollercoaster Tycoon

! — but we finally decided the waterparks were better as there are not a lot of games with that theme!

At this stage, we were feeling confident with the game's development. Alas, we hit a wall that we had not thought of during our first playtests: "What happens if two players collide?" We realized that player collisions were going to be a considerable problem, and we did not find a solution to fix the issue right away. The game then fell down in my priority list and development stopped for a while.

During another playtest, as we were confronted with the issue once again, a friend of mine came up with an idea: "What if one player goes underwater to avoid the collision?" This made me think that players could possibly jump from one tile to another as a way to avoid the problem. The right solution came alive with the "lifeguard" tile that can be used by players to jump from one place to another in the waterpark. Not only did it make the game more balanced, but the theme was improved as well! I couldn't wait to show this game to publishers!

When I showed the game to Kevin Kim of Mandoo Games

, he liked it very much and we were ready to get the game developed towards the final product!

During development, Kevin asked us to add more elements to the game to make it unique. However, we liked our easy set of rules and didn't want to make the game too complex. At this point, we added the big attraction tiles, which are the equivalent of connecting three tiles at the same time. These tiles gave playtesters the impression that they had something more powerful in hand. The artwork could also benefit from bigger tiles to make spectacular attractions! Kevin also suggested we add a tunnel tile similar to the lifeguard tile as this element added uniqueness to the design of the game.

Mandoo then contracted Christophe Swal, a French illustrator, to do the artwork for a great result in the end!

As we were getting near the end of the development, playtesters giving us feedback encouraged us to add a strategic element to the game. We carefully thought of a way to satisfy both families and gamers, and we added the bonus token rule: Each time a player helps another player extend their slide, the original player can take a bonus token that is added to their final score!

That's the story that led us to SPIEL in 2016 with more than one hundred copies sold on the second day — and we are just getting started with the game now being available in North America with FoxMind

! I would like to thank my co-designer Samgoo, Kevin Kim of Mandoo Games, and Longshore for their support on this project.

Hope you enjoy the game!

Evan Song

Designer Diary: Ex Libris, or Books, Brains and Building Things

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/680…or-books-brains-and-build

by Adam P. McIver

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3578008_t.png] OH, HI BGG!

I'm Adam P. McIver

. You may know me from the art/graphic design work I've done on the smattering of games flashing in my GIF-y little avatar over there on the left, or you may remember my slick little microgame Coin Age

, which won a Golden Geek award a while back, or you may have no idea who I am at all, which is totally fine, obviously. No worries, I get it. There's a lot to keep up with these days, it's hard to stay on top of it all. It's way more important to know your next-door neighbor's name than some guy on the internet. Make connections! Build community!

Anywho, you may be asking how I went from designing a microgame that is essentially a single card to creating Ex Libris

, a hotly anticipated Gen Con 2017 release with over 150 cards? Well, it certainly wasn't as easy as just adding 149 or so cards, let me tell you. Turns out I actually had to design a COMPLETELY different game!

Just Another Idea in a Notebook

I, like so many other game designers, keep a lot of notebooks. Over the years I've filled probably a dozen or so notebooks with board game ideas, sketches of components, development notes, and more. A common bit of wisdom you hear from game designers is to get your idea into prototype form and on the table as early as possible. This is one of many areas in which I'm not terribly wise. I tend to keep game ideas in my notebook for a long time, making more and more notes, tweaks, sketches, and more sketches. Ex Libris

began in the same way, with a few scribbles and notes to outline an idea.

I love games where you're visibly building something in front of you as you play, games like Best Treehouse Ever

, Caverna: The Cave Farmers

, Legacy: The Testament of Duke de Crecy

, Suburbia

, Sapiens

, etc., games where the placement of the components result in your own little creation by the end of the game. Being a bit of a bibliophile, I realized that one of the most aesthetically pleasing things to me is a well-curated, substantial bookshelf filled with hardcover books and old leather-bound tomes. And graphic novels. I'll be honest, about half of my library consists of comics. I decided to design a game about building libraries. And not just any libraries — fantasy libraries

.

Why fantasy? Because I really enjoy when something potentially mundane and dry is paired with a magical setting. I prefer Caverna

to Agricola

, for instance. I bought into Thunderstone

instead of Dominion

. I'd likely rather play Dungeon Petz

than a pet-raising game set in reality...

Actually, a realistic pet shop strategy game sounds pretty cool to me, now that I think about it. Lemme make a note in my notebook real quick...

Oh, yeah, fantasy libraries

. With that seed in mind, I began brainstorming the game's connective tissues: fleshing out a basic theme, identifying the experience I wanted the players to have, and working out the game mechanisms that would tie it all together. From the sketches pictured above (and a few other pages of less visually-interesting notes), I let the concept guide me. I narrowed down to six categories of books that would exist in a fantasy world, then imagined what sort of rules would govern the quality of a bookshelf.

Before long, I broke outside of my notebook, created a slew of book cards, and started to play with them. I quickly realized that I didn't want the game to be solely driven by card-drafting since so many games have already done that well, so I expanded the scope and added worker placement to the mix. The action spaces represented locations where players would gain cards and manipulate their bookshelves. Taking it a step further, I included mechanisms that would vary the available locations so that each round would feel and play differently from the one before it. It all began to come together into something promising, and I'll admit I was very excited!

The Slog of Solo Playtests

A bit more honesty for y'all: I am not good

at solo playtests. Having to keep track of the unique objectives of each imaginary opponent, simulating decisions without basing them on information that I know, but my fictitious fellow players aren't supposed to know, but also knowing what they know, but they don't REALLY know it, because they're just a figment, after all...

It may come as no surprise at this point in this rambling designer diary that I have ADD. Solo playtesting is a struggle for me. I ran through the earliest iterations of Ex Libris

several times by myself, making changes and tweaks in between tries, but each time felt more like work than fun to me. My largest takeaway was, "It's a shame I wasted so much time on this." I placed it in my prototype closet, in the "maybe come back to these some day" pile. I lost a few nights of sleep turning over and over in my head just what had gone wrong and how I could fix it. Did I mention I also suffer from insomnia? I've got a really fun physiology!

(Don't run away just yet — a mid-post turnaround is just about to happen, I promise!)

Getting Encouraged by Encouragement

Fast forward a short while to pre-Unpub 6 preparations. Unpub is one of my absolute favorite conventions of the entire year. For anyone who is unaware of it, Unpub

is a convention that exclusively showcases unpublished games. It's the best. Trust me. I was packing up an armload of other prototypes when Kerry asked me, "Are you taking that library game you've been tinkering with?" As an explanation of why I wasn't planning to, I began to describe the gameplay a little bit. This led to teaching her how to play, which led to breaking it out to play a sample round, which led to playing an entire game. And another one. And another one.

Now, Kerry has played a LOT

of my prototypes in varying degrees of polish. She's a great sport. I can usually work out pretty quickly when she is suffering through a crummy experience and when she thinks I am onto something. Her demeanor was unlike anything she had exhibited after previous playtests. "This was fun

. You have

to take this. At least play it with Alex ( J. Alex Kevern

) and Chris ( Chris Bryan

) and see what they think, but I really like it."

Here's the strange part: I really liked it, too! The experience was much closer to what I had intended in the first place, and I was able to connect with the gameplay and strategy much better when it was being bounced off a non-fictitious opponent. Turns out that board games tend to work better when you play them with other people! Who would've guessed?

My takeaway was to accept that solo-playtesting just isn't my forte. I have an incredible amount of respect for anyone who is able to do it, but recognizing your own limitations is an important step, I think. With Kerry's encouragement, I decided I would take Ex Libris

with me after all.

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The first day of Unpub (and every day, really) was a whirlwind. So many fun prototypes and great people. Seriously, go to Unpub. All day, Ex Libris

buzzed in the back of my head, scratching at my brain. I had registered my other games in the event program, but Ex Libris

sat in my bag, nagging me to be played. Before I knew it, the day was over and our little crew was headed back to the hotel room to crash. At some point on our walk through the streets of Baltimore, I asked whether Alex and Chris would be up for trying Ex Libris

before bed, and they obliged.

These were (and are) two of my very good friends, but I went into that playtest with a fair amount of nerves. Teaching any game late at night to worn-out convention goers can be a really rough situation, and both of these guys were beat from a day of playtesting. We pulled a table between the beds of our hotel room, put on our pajamas, and took a crack at it.

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In my opinion, observing your playtesters during gameplay is nearly as important as their responses and opinions afterward. If you're observant, you can pick up on the experience they're having. After a round or two of play, I started to notice everyone waking up a bit. I began to catch sly smiles and nodding glances between my opponents. Kerry (who is one of the world's best sleepers) was sitting up straight and poring over the cards in her hand. As we neared the end of the game, everyone cared about who might win.

It was a hit. I can't remember their exact feedback (my night-brain was too tapped to remember to make notes), but Alex and Chris both made it very clear to me that I had created something special. That I should be proud. That Ex Libris

was good

.

I slept like a baby. No insomnia for the happy game designer.

A Playtest Leads To a Pitch

The day after our late-night library session, Unpub continued as normal. Alex had the table directly behind mine and had an early pitch with Renegade Game Studios

for what would end up becoming Sentient

. They had shown immediate interest and left his table smiling and energized (which makes sense as I loved Sentient

two turns into my first playtest). After congratulating him and talking a little shop, Alex said, "Oh, hey, I also told them they should definitely check out Ex Libris

today if they had time."

Within a whirlwind few hours of exchanging phone numbers and coordinating plans, Scott Gaeta and Sara Erickson from Renegade were at my table, and I was nervously fumbling my way through a rules explanation. Playing the game was a blur. Again, I don't remember much from the playtest, other than a few questions were asked and I air-balled a few bad jokes. They were friendly and seemed like they enjoyed themselves, and before I knew it, we had shaken hands and they were gone.

I wasn't really sure how the whole thing went (or how it all happened, really). Publishers often play their interest close to the chest, which I appreciate. There's no point in getting a game designer's hopes up if you can avoid it. By the end of the day, though, Scott and Sara had swung back around my table to ask whether they could take a copy of my prototype home with them. So that's a good thing, right? Right?

Streamlining, Signing, and Special Assistants

After Unpub, I immediately put together another Ex Libris

prototype — as I had given Renegade my only copy, whoops — kept playtesting with more and more people, and began streamlining. I took note of which locations were used the most, which were most often ignored, and which seemed cool, but weren't enticing enough or didn't work exactly as intended. Locations were axed and added, nerfed and nitpicked. It was (and still is) vitally important to shelve book cards in Ex Libris

, but only a few of the early locations allowed you to do so. The number of cards in a player's hand occasionally slimmed to frustratingly few toward the end of the game. I needed more ways to get cards and more opportunities to shelve them.

The further I developed the game, the more fun I was having with it. It was scratching an itch that no other game in my collection could get to. I've heard game designers say, "Design the game you want to play", and I found myself always wanting to play it. Feedback from playtesters was clear and consistent. They were all having fun, and I was feeling great.

Then one evening as I was wrapping up work, I received an email from Scott Gaeta letting me know that they had been playing Ex Libris

with their groups back home, that everyone had really been enjoying it, and that they wanted to offer me a publishing contract. I was ecstatic and let the whole world know via social media as soon as possible. You know, as you do.

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Working with Renegade was a treat from the start, surprising no one who is familiar with Scott and Sara. The process was very collaborative, and they were receptive to letting me explore new ideas. The first of which was the addition of special assistants.

To add further replayability to the game, each player would now have one worker with a unique ability attached to the meeple itself. Thematically, I wanted to tie those abilities to intriguing settings for the libraries. The Fire Imp comes from a volcanic library, for instance. The Gelatinous Cube hails from a dungeon library, of course. I feel like these variable player powers really put the game over the top. Each one adds a nice wrinkle and gives you the opportunity to explore different play styles from game to game. Luckily, Scott and Sara agreed, and special assistants became officially official during a meeting at Gen Con 2016.

During the meeting, Sara pointed out a funny book title I had scribbled on one of the cards.

I responded, "Yeah, it'd be cool if every book had a unique title."

"Do you think you'd be able to come up with a title for every book?" she asked.

"Yeah, I think I probably could." I replied, not really thinking it all the way through.

A Battery of Book Titles

There are 152 book cards

in Ex Libris

. Across those 152 cards, there are 510 individual books

. I got to work throwing all the wordplay and cleverness at the problem I could muster, but I quickly realized that it would be far more difficult than brainstorming a list of funny titles. Those titles had to correspond to the game's six categories, which needed to be equally represented in the deck. And since alphabetical order is important when you're shelving cards, the arrangement of this list of 510 book titles could potentially throw the balance between the categories off, even if they were all equally represented. If the majority of the "Monster Manual" titles clumped together alphabetically, they'd be less likely to be drawn than a category that was dispersed evenly across the entire list.

I'd inadvertently given myself a gigantic

logic problem to solve. Luckily I love myself a challenging puzzle! Using a combination of multiple spreadsheets, spare cubes and discs, hundreds of squiggly lines, and the kind of free time you have when your significant other is in Vancouver for fourteen days on business, I somehow cracked it.

I'm extremely proud of the result. My hope is that players will discover new books every time they play, and that you'll have plenty to read and laugh at when your AP-prone friend's turn is taking way too long.

Enter the Artwork

When the time came to begin production, Scott ran a list of potential illustrators by me, and I jumped at the chance to work with Jacqui Davis

. Before long, the oddball world I had imagined for this game was being brought to life by her amazing talent. She populated the locations with a diverse cast of charming townsfolk and captured the perfect mood.

And then there were the books. Jacqui's artwork came together so perfectly with the iconography I created and the typography I used for the book titles that I couldn't be happier.

The View From Here

I'm writing this the week before Ex Libris

debuts at Gen Con 50 in Indianapolis. This has been such an incredible journey that it's a little overwhelming to approach the end — even moreso considering that if it weren't for my wife and friends, it may never have left the closet. I'm hoping it will connect with an audience that will love it and share it with their friends and family. There's a fair amount of buzz building behind the game, and I'm beyond excited that it is so highly anticipated.

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Designer Diary: Wasteland Express Delivery Service, or Roaming Across a Post-Apocalyptic World and Trying Not to Die

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/678…-express-delivery-service

by Matt Riddle

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3612509_t.png]" Wasteland Express Delivery Service

includes an emergent narrative story that takes place interactively over the course of eight games. Alternatively, players can dive in with a randomly generated scenario that will play out over the course of a single story-driven game session for infinite replay possibilities."

Plus, in case it wasn't totally clear there are a bunch of SWEET minis. Like super, awesome ones where you can actually load the goods right in the back. IN THE BACK. Even the goods are minis because why the heck not.

Hi! This is Matt Riddle

. I am generally no one of consequence, but I am kicking off this 4,000+ word designer diary because I am one of the three designers. Buckle up.

Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates? Morons. At least compared to the sheer talent, will, and stunning good looks of the designers assembled to create Wasteland Express Delivery Service

( WEDS

), the new hotness coming soon from Pandasauraus Games

. Ridbackmour? Gilbackddle? Pinchmouridle? Manbearpig? Whichever celebrity name you prefer for the trio of Jon Gilmour

, Ben Pinchback

, and Matt Riddle and wherever you intend to get it tattooed on your body doesn't matter so long as you do not forget to check out this game.

At some point nearly five years ago, Ben and I started kicking around the idea of doing a train game. We played a lot of Steam

, but we wanted to actually pick up and deliver goods, not just build routes. At the time, we had just seen Fleet

released to moderate success, so we were totally prepared to take on Martin Wallace

and a top 100 game and make it better — also, not really, as Steam

and WEDS

have almost zero in common beyond the BGG mechanism classification. Still inspiration is just that, inspiration. Ben is the designer notebook guy. He sketches and doodles and jots down ideas. One of those ideas was octagons with different movement patterns that left squares in the middle that could be cities. As it turns out, not completely original since Keythedral

did it ten years earlier among others, but it was very underutilized. Let me turn it over to Ben to discuss some of the initial design.

Ben

Before I get to that, I want to talk about Jon. I'll never forget the day I first met Jon Gilmour. It was a great day for him. Not so much because he met me, but rather because it was Thursday of Gen Con 2014 and well over a hundred people were wrapping around the Plaid Hat Games

booth and down the aisle waiting in line to buy his new game, Dead of Winter

. And by down the aisle, I mean so many people that it was blocking the entrance to some other pretty major publishers' booths.

(Matt: Like Queen Games

, their booth was completely surrounded. How were gamers going to rush to grab Cubo

or Orcs Orcs Orcs

…)

The Plaid Hat crew was king at this moment. So Matt says to me, "Hey let's see if Jon's around. I want to say hi." I of course had no clue they had ever talked but apparently they had. This is why I keep Matt around, mind you. Sure, he can design games, but he's also not afraid to make friends with absolutely everyone.

So we walk up to Jon and he's sporting quite a grin. He was just standing there soaking it all in. My first thought was, someday I want this feeling he is having right now. We talked some and I walked away telling Matt how genuinely nice I thought Jon seemed and Matt told me that Jon actually lived only about four hours from us. Huh.

Matt did his thing and within a month or so, we were Skyping with Jon and talking about working on something together, which quickly led to day trips and all day Panera sessions with Jon. Matt does what Matt does — but what Matt doesn't do is sit around on his couch sketching shapes while thinking, "You know the octagon is a very under-represented shape in board game maps today. And wow, when you put octagons together, you get squares left in the voids. How is this not a thing everywhere already!?"

(Jon: Even before I laid my hands on it and did awesome Jon Gilmour theme integration and play experience game design magic, this was already one of the best pick-up-and-delivers I had ever played. Okay, this was actually Matt again, but Jon really said that on multiple podcasts and such.)

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1247682_t.jpg]Back in 2011, Matt and I were prepping for our first ever game design, Fleet

, to Kickstart in the spring, and we were already neck deep in a handful of other designs. The bug had bitten us badly, and there wasn't a spare moment when I wasn't thinking about games themselves or, more likely, game design. So as mentioned above, the simple act of randomly sketching shapes on a notepad while watching TV led me down a pretty serious rabbit trail. A 4×4 map of octagons as terrain with cities/outposts/strongholds being the square voids and the edges was a very quick progression for me that night.

By the time I showed this to Matt probably a week later, I had already decided that we were going to do a pick-up-and-deliver train game using this set-up. My paradigm for train games in 2011 was mostly Age of Steam

/ Steam

, and I thought a game in which you actually hump the goods across the board physically seemed like a novel idea.

It turns out this form of goods pick-up and delivery was actually commonplace, but the board wasn't. As I researched it, I did find some games using octs and squares, but not as many as I thought I might. This map with different octs being different terrain, using squares as cities, and the system of moving around these shapes was there on the couch in 2011 and it's still the backbone of Wasteland Express Delivery Service

five years later. It's really cool to see an idea like that come to fruition and better yet to realize you never could have done it right on your own. What I was going to do with this system is a thousand times lamer than what came out of working with Matt, Jon, and the eventual greater creative team Pandasaurus assembled.

The other gameplay element that developed over the next five years that would survive countless thematic changes and mechanical iterations was this idea we had of a player action mat.

If you can remember ever counting to ten a thousand times over and over during two hours of Tikal

(a game that I love,by the way), then you can understand the desire to come up with an action selection game in which the game held your hand a little bit more and guided you to the actions you could do and even kept track of them.

Eventually Matt and I came up with the idea that each player has an action mat that lists the actions available to them and has boxes next to these actions for activation with action cubes. Each player has the same amount of action cubes to spend over a series of rounds, and the cool thing we found quickly was that this action cube allocation allowed us to not only present the available actions to the player, but also to limit the amount of times players can take a certain action in a certain timeframe organically because the action cubes do not clear and refresh until they're all spent.

One other thing we loved about this system was that it kept the game moving and the downtime was small because a player's turn is to play one cube to their mat and take that action. Turns then become very quick, and the game hums around the table: Move, Buy a good, Attack, Take a job, Deliver, Visit a shop, etc. Now mind you, I could have never imagined the levels of awesomeness our little player mats would be taken to after we met Jon. Safe to say when we met Jon, we had a very solid system that worked well mechanically, but it was far from awesome. Really, really far from awesome as it would turn out.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2948140_t.jpg]Side note: Jon has a rule when talking about design direction. The rule is, "Which one is more fun?" That's it. It seems simple, but so often we aren't wired to think this way. We're so worried about balance and all these other things that we miss out on something as important as, "Which one is more fun?" And the coolest thing is balance came even after choosing fun time after time. The lesson here is that you can balance later; make it fun first.

Mechanically there's the backbone. The octagon and square terrain/cities/outposts works amazingly well for trucking around goods, fighting, and performing missions. The player mats/action cube system has given players a nice and easy way to maneuver through our world. What we've done with this system is add an absolute mountain of special missions to accomplish. The three main factions in the game each have unique decks that give agendas to push, tasks to complete, and possible crazies to join your truck riding shotgun. But for a huge thematic game, the turns seem shockingly simple, and that's probably the thing I'm the most proud of from the mechanical side. Often I feel like I'm playing an RPG questing-style video game on the tabletop. The game mechanisms literally get out of the way and let people focus on the adventure at hand.

Matt

ZZZZZZZ... Oh, hi! Did Ben just write 2k words on a shape? Exciting stuff. That wall of text is why I have to write all the rulebooks, or if the publisher will spring for it, pay someone awesome like Dustin Schwartz to write them. Writing rules suuuuuuucks.

As designers, Ben and I are pretty quick to proto and even quicker to cut and run on a game if it's a fail bomb. If a proto sucks or is meh or is even just pretty good, we broom it and move on to something else. We do not hack at games endlessly that aren't working. We have plenty of ideas worth pursuing, so why try to polish a turd? WEDS

was the exception — not that is was a turd, but that we would shelve it but never fully quit on it. We knew that in the bones of this sprawling pick up and deliver was a great game.

As I mentioned in passing above, WEDS

had so many implementations: train game, soul gathering, regular Vikings, then for the longest time… SPACE VIKINGS! (You have to say it with a 1980s rock screech or the ol' 1980s toy commercial announcer guy voice: SPACE VIKINGS!!!!) I mean, it SEEMED like a really good idea with two awesome things mashed together. When we decided on space vikings as the official theme, I even wrote up the following opening story:

As the 9th century dawned on the Baltic Sea, the Viking Era was in full swing. Viking expansion was rampant and, in the way of the forefathers, the great Viking chieftains of the age were increasing their territories and holdings through hard work, pillaging, trading…and more pillaging! Well, most of the chieftains, that is. Clan Forkbeard did not have a chieftain. It had five. Sort of. Each one was more worthless than the last. Things had been going so well for so long that the five sons Forkbeard had been born with the proverbial amber spön in their mouths. The brothers took from the great Baltic Sea with no regard, no respect, and certainly no tribute. This behavior angered Aegir, the god of the sea. After a score of years with naught a monument built nor an offering left, Aegir had enough. Watching Clan Forkbeard move from island to island in the great Scandinavian archipelago with indifference, leaving destruction and waste in their wake, Aegir decided it was time to teach them a lesson. In his righteous indignation, he would restore the glory of his magnificent Baltic Sea and banish Clan Forkbeard…TO SPACE! Space Vikings!

Clan Forkbeard must restore their honor and earn Aegir's favor if they are ever to return to the only home they have ever known. Spread across a small but habitable system of planets deep in Ridback Galaxy, the brave and suddenly motivated Vikings have rallied their clan and are conquering the solar system the only way they know how — as Space Vikings!

Ya, that was a thing. At one point it even had a Quantum Leap

joke about trying to get home and righting what once went wrong, dunno where that went. All that to say we had shelved the game but never stopped thinking about it.

Fast forward in time and I am tweeting away looking for anyone willing to print and test a print-and-play of our then-upcoming card game Eggs and Empires

. Lo and behold, I get a DM from Jon Gilmour. Now understand this was pre- DoW

, so he was just Jon Gilmour, not JON F@#$ING GILMOUR. Hell, thanks to Fleet

Ben and I were considerably more "famous" at the time. (Famous in the context of an incredibly small and obscure corner of the internet…so not famous, but whatever the equivalent is for a couple of tier 3 hobby game designers.) Jon plays E&E

and likes it. He and I chat a bit, find out we are pseudo local, and become Twitter friends, eventually leading to this collaboration.

As we turned Space Vikings into WEDS

, so much stayed the "same": the player mats, the movement, the action system, and the economy. I am proud of the economy. It is not ground-breaking, but it is clever and works very well. Initially it was a very linear chart-y looking thing.

But the idea that the good in demand would set the price has persisted. We did a lot of work to make it simple and non-maintanence-y. I acutally think it was friend of the team, dicehateme himself Chris Kirkman

who first suggested the wheel layout that we ultimately ended up with.

Another area we spent a lot of time on was the combat. We went down some major rabbit holes working on different combat systems that were sometimes clever, sometimes fun, sometimes neither. The more we did this, the more we decided it wasn't helping the game. We knew we were designing in the "mid-atlantic" or "Eurotrash" space, and the folks that play those big, sprawling thematic games are completely cool with a full page of conditional combat rules. We tried some systems that we came up with and a few we borrowed, but WEDS

is a Euro pick-up-and-deliver at its core, and they just did not feel right. The closest my Eurogamer heart comes to enjoying combat is the displacement system in Hansa Teutonica

. The other end of the spectrum is the simple yet effective X-Wing

— roll X dice vs Y dice and hope you win! I think we ended up at a simple yet effective middle ground. It was what worked. We have notes for a few combat variances we are going to try in the inevitable expansion.

The biggest change of all that came through the development with Jon and Pandasaurus was getting rid of victory points. In every iteration pre- WEDS

, you would play for two hours, roll some dice, have fun…then count to sixty-something. Again, I LOVE counting victory points. LOVE IT. As a designer, I love the granularity you can put into a game giving out points here, points over there, MOAR POINTS IS MOAR BETTER.

But for WEDS

, it didn't make sense and it was NOT thematic. As we spent months working on making WEDS

as thematic as possible, the points continually got in the way. Another buddy of ours from The Geek All-Stars

podcast, Dan Patriss, had played an early version at Unpub 5 and mentioned in passing we should consider a Twilight Imperium

-style system of goals. He is my boy, but I totally blew him off. Fast forward to a Panera Bread in Lansing, MI and Jon, Ben, and I are having that exact conversation, so we did it, and Priority First Class Contracts were born. That change, more than anything else, changed the feel and elevated the gameplay to what it is now.

Jon

First, I want to say that, while we joke about me coming on board and "fixing" WEDS

, that is not something I can take credit for. When I first played the game (when it was "Space Vikings"), I was a bit leery about what I could bring to the project. I don't really have great self-confidence, and to think of how I could possibly come on and make this project better, was a bit overwhelming. I took some time to digest it, think about it, and come up with some proposals for Matt and Ben.

I feel that one of my strengths is knowing what I like in a game and trying to further enhance that, so that is what I focused on. How could I help them make the things that were already great in this game better? The biggest was really theme. Some gamers feel that theme doesn't matter. There are great debates between designers about theme-first vs. mechanism-first design. My philosophy is Experience First. I ask myself what experience I want the players to have, and how I can best evoke those emotions.

When I played "Space Vikings", I tried to ask myself what other themes would fit and what kind of experience did I feel the game was already evoking, then I spent time trying to bring that experience further to life. I feel that when I came to Matt and Ben with a rework of the game, it was really only about 15% different. I cut some things, I swapped some things around, and I put a new coat of paint on it — but the heart was there, beating in this gritty post-apocalyptic shell.

Next, I want to talk about collaboration. It's something I love to do. I really think I work best when I'm not in a vacuum. Matt and Ben are not collaborators. They are much more of a symbiosis. They operate as a single unit, and it's amazing to be a part of it. They eat math and crap out great Eurogames unlike anyone else I've ever seen.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2957895_t.jpg]So when we started talking, it was easy to form a new rhythm with them. When I first got married, my father-in-law told me about the concept of an "emotional bank". In a relationship, you deposit into the emotional bank, and sometimes you withdraw, but you want to build a bigger and bigger positive balance. I feel like that is the key to good collaboration as well. I apply this concept to everything I do, so working with Matt and Ben was no different. Some days we would go back and forth on things we were passionate about. Some days I would win them over with my cries of "MOAR FUN", and on other days they would drop math bombs unrelentingly. In the end, we were all passionate about the game, so it helped us all stay invested in building a really good emotional bank account, and I feel like the game shows that love.

Finally, I want to talk about failure. Every game sucks at some point. If you don't feel like your game sucks, you are not being honest with yourself. I am a huge proponent of the "fail faster" school of design, and luckily Matt and Ben are fans as well. While hanging at Panera, we would mark on, tear up, and change things with abandon. You have to be willing to try new things with your designs and explore them. Your prototype doesn't need to look pretty. Don't be afraid to mark it up, scribble on it, and try things that dont make you comfortable.

(Matt here again. We are going to let Nathan chime in here. He and his wife Molly are Pandasaurus Games

. They are the ones that decided to go all in on WEDS

and make it awesome. They rule.)

Nathan

This, I suppose, is the part where Molly and I (Pandasaurus Games) enter the picture. I was goofing off at my desk back when I still had a day job and saw a Twitter post from either Matt or Ben — it doesn't matter which one as they are a single legal entity — asking who wants to sign their new co-design with Jon Gilmour about delivering goods in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. I replied yes, thinking it was a total lark and figuring that some way-cooler-than-me publisher would get the game.

Then I got a message back from one of Ben and Matt asking whether I was heading to Unpub that weekend. I was in fact not

heading to Unpub at all, but was probably heading to Brooklyn to have brunch and watch a bad movie with our friends, so I did what any smart person would do and lied. Of course I was going to Unpub! Plans were cancelled, hotels were booked, and a rental car was procured. Molly, our dogs and I then proceeded to drive through the start of a blizzard from Manhattan to Baltimore.

When we got there, the first thing we did was grab Matt, Ben and Jon and a table outside the main hall where they gave us a five-minute elevator pitch of what was at the time called "Wasteland Truckers". (It would keep this name until about six weeks before we announced the game.) We were absolutely floored by the mechanisms and systems of interaction that were being described. Upgrading your vehicle, delivering goods, taking on jobs for factions — we knew all of those systems would present interesting choices for the players. At the time, the game still had a score track attached to it, but the plan was already in place to move them to the contracts.

Molly and I did not play the game there, but we would get our first hands-on with the game a few weeks later when we got a prototype copy of the game. We were already about 70% sold on the concept, but we obviously had to make sure the game was fun and balanced and all of the things that actually matter for a game to be a good game. About ten turns into our first game, we stopped and looked at each other and our grins were clear what we were both thinking: We were playing something super special.

As a publisher, you see a ton of prototypes, and many of them are good. A very few of them make you want to play the game again right away. Very, very, very few of them feel immersive or thematic when they are white foam core with chicken scratch on them. This one did.

From there we knew we needed to throw the right artwork behind the game. One of my favorite comics from about fifteen years ago was a book called DMZ

that was put out by DC's Vertigo imprint and had fantastic edgy artwork. I started out looking for art in that style and wound up getting put in touch with the actual artist from DMZ

, Riccardo Burchielli

, who was available and excited to work on the board game. Cue cartwheels at Panda HQ. This would be the formation for the rest of the graphic design. We wanted everything in the game to feel cobbled together from the leftover remnants of the world from before. Jason Kingsley

nailed that exact aesthetic. We then turned towards making sure the graphic design was clear and easy to read, which meant multiple print-and-play iterations being playtested for absolute clarity and smoothness of the play experience.

It was at this moment we realized we had a real problem on our hands. Set up and tear down of Wasteland Express

was taking far too long — like 30-40 minutes. I have games in my collection that I love that have really long set-up times, and I know they never hit the table. I asked the design team what could be done about this. Jon put me in touch with Noah Adleman at Gametrayz, and the rest is, as they say, history. Noah came up with the most insane insert solution I have ever seen for a game — not just something used for storage or quick set-up, but also trays that you actually use during the game that label different cardboard chits for easy location. Set-up is down to about 5-8 minutes now, and the experience is vastly improved for it.

I feel really weird being the guy ending this, but I will say that I think the job of a designer is to see the statue in the block of granite. The publisher's job is to smooth out the rough edges and make sure the statue gets placed somewhere for it to be seen. I hope that the miniatures and the graphic design and the Trayz do justice to what is, I think, our best published game to date.

New Game Round-up: Gen Con 50 Edition — Clank! In! Space!, Stuffed Fables, Sid Meier's Civilization: A New Dawn, and Twilight Imperium (Fourth Edition)

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/681…-edition-clank-space-stuf

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3697987_t.png]• Lots of game announcements have been coming forth in the week prior to Gen Con 50. Well, no more than normal actually, but the games being revealed (1) tend to be of higher profile and (2) are being demoed or sold at the convention that opens Thursday, August 17, so they're jumping into the spotlight.

The newest contender for the stage is Clank! In! Space!

, a standalone game that uses the same game system as in Paul Dennen

's Clank! A Deck-Building Adventure

, one of the hits of Gen Con 2016, but with player now trying to escape an alien spaceship instead of an underground dungeon. Makes sense to me — space is a vacuum, so noise wouldn't travel there and you could clankity-clank-clank all you want, but put yourself on a spaceship with, say, a xenomorph-type of thing, and you now have a gaming recipe. Here's the setting of this new title from publisher Renegade Game Studios

:

The evil Lord Eradikus has all but conquered the galaxy and is now on a victory lap across the sector in his flagship, Eradikus Prime. He may rule with an iron grip, but his most prized artifacts are about to slip through his cyborg claws. You and your fellow thieves have challenged each other to sneak aboard his ship, hack your way into its command module, and steal from him.

Along the way, you'll recruit allies and snatch up extra loot. But one false step and — Clank! Careless noise draws the attention of Lord Eradikus. Hacking into his command module and stealing his artifacts increases his rage. You'd better hope your friends are louder than you are if you want to make it to an escape pod and get out alive...

Beyond that, we have only a couple of images to share, but soon we'll see a lot more of the game because Renegade is selling "a limited number of copies" of Clank! In! Space!

at Gen Con 50, with the game due to hit retail stores in Q4 2017.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3697028_t.jpg]• A competitor for the spotlight is Stuffed Fables

, a new design from Mice and Mystics

' Jerry Hawthorne

and publisher Plaid Hat Games

. This title will be available for demo games at Gen Con 50, with a release due to happen before the end of 2017. Here's an overview of the game from the publisher:

Stuffed Fables is an unusual adventure game in which players take on the roles of brave stuffies seeking to save the child they love from a scheming, evil mastermind. Make daring melee attacks, leap across conveyor belts, or even steer a racing wagon down a peril-filled hill. The game delivers a thrilling narrative driven by player choices. Players explore a world of wonder and danger, unlocking curious discoveries. The chapters of Stuffed Fables explore the many milestones of a child's life, creating a memorable tale ideal for families, as well as groups of adults who haven't forgotten their childlike sense of wonder.

Stuffed Fables is the first "StoryBoard Game", a new product line from Plaid Hat Games in which all of the action takes place in the unique storybook — a book that acts as your rules reference, story guide, and game board, all in one! Each adventure in the game takes place over several pages of the immersive StoryBook. The book opens flat onto the table to reveal a colorful map or other illustration central to playing the game, with choices, story, and special rules on the opposite page.

On their turn, a player draws five dice from the bag. The colors of the dice drawn determine the types of actions and options available to the player. White dice can re-stuff stuffies injured in battle. Red dice perform melee attacks while green dice perform ranged attacks. Yellow dice search while blue dice are used for special actions and purple dice can be used as any color. Most dice can always find a strategic use, including moving, using items, or contributing to group tasks. Players can store dice for later, combine dice for stronger actions, or use them one-at-a-time for multiple activations. As turns go by, black dice are also drawn, and after enough appear, minions emerge or attack, and the dice bag is reset!

Players can encourage each other by sharing dice or their precious stuffing. In addition to fighting minions, each page of the storybook offers numerous points of interest, charming characters to interact or trade with, as well as many unusual challenges. And each page is but one chapter that folds into a branching, overarching story with a multitude of items and a special discovery deck full of surprises.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3696669_t.png]• The day before that was announced, Fantasy Flight Games

unveiled Sid Meier's Civilization: A New Dawn

, a design by James Kniffen

for 2-4 players that bears a 60-120 minute playing time — which is half the length of FFG's 2010 title Sid Meier's Civilization: The Board Game

, which was from designer Kevin Wilson. Here's a summary of this Q4 2017 release, with far more details in the FFG announcement of the game

:

Sid Meier's Civilization: A New Dawn is a strategy board game in which two to four players act as the rulers of history's most memorable empires. Over the course of the game, players will expand their domains, gain new technologies, and build many of humanity's greatest wonders. In the end, one nation will rise above all others to leave its indelible mark upon history.

This new game presents players with an undiscovered country to conquer, built from beautifully illustrated map tiles. These would-be conquerors construct and populate the map with barbarians, natural resources, and city-states, then formulate their plans for how they will shape this world to their vision. Their exact goals, however, change with each game. Agendas are detailed on victory cards, three of which are drawn during set up. Players race to become the first to accomplish one agenda on each of these victory cards, spreading throughout the world and ensuring their civilization’s place as the greatest world power.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3690827_t.png]• The weekend prior to that saw the announcement of Christian T. Petersen

and Fantasy Flight Games' Twilight Imperium (Fourth Edition)

, which is scheduled for a Q4 2017 release, but which (as it turns out) will be for sale at Gen Con 50. Surprise!

The game remains much the same as TI3, which was released in 2005, but with various changes that are summarized halfway down the FFG product page

. Here's an overview of the game:

Twilight Imperium (Fourth Edition) is a game of galactic conquest in which three to six players take on the role of one of seventeen factions vying for galactic domination through military might, political maneuvering, and economic bargaining. Every faction offers a completely different play experience, from the wormhole-hopping Ghosts of Creuss to the Emirates of Hacan, masters of trade and economics. These seventeen races are offered many paths to victory, but only one may sit upon the throne of Mecatol Rex as the new masters of the galaxy.

No two games of Twilight Imperium are ever identical. At the start of each galactic age, the game a board is uniquely and strategically constructed using 51 galaxy tiles that feature everything from lush new planets and supernovas to asteroid fields and gravity rifts. Players are dealt a hand of these tiles and take turns creating the galaxy around Mecatol Rex, the capital planet seated in the center of the board. An ion storm may block your race from progressing through the galaxy while a fortuitously placed gravity rift may protect you from your closest foes. The galaxy is yours to both craft and dominate.

A round of Twilight Imperium begins with players selecting one of eight strategy cards that both determine player order and give their owner a unique strategic action for that round. These may do anything from providing additional command tokens to allowing a player to control trade throughout the galaxy. After these roles are selected, players take turns moving their fleets from system to system, claiming new planets for their empire, and engaging in warfare and trade with other factions. At the end of a turn, players gather in a grand council to pass new laws and agendas, shaking up the game in unpredictable ways.

After every player has passed their turn, players move up the victory track by checking to see whether they have completed any objectives throughout the turn and scoring them. Objectives are determined by setting up ten public objective cards at the start of each game, then gradually revealing them with every round. Every player also chooses between two random secret objectives at the start of the game, providing victory points achievable only by the holder of that objective. These objectives can be anything from researching new technologies to taking your neighbor's home system. At the end of every turn, a player can claim one public objective and one secret objective. As play continues, more of these objectives are revealed and more secret objectives are dealt out, giving players dynamically changing goals throughout the game. Play continues until a player reaches ten victory points.

SPIEL '17 Preview Now Live

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/68303/spiel-17-preview-now-live

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1068166_t.png]BoardGameGeek's SPIEL '17 Preview

is now live! For those who didn't immediately leave to go look at it, a few notes about the preview:

• Currently the SPIEL '17 Preview has "only" 168 titles on it. Only. That's it.

I sent out requests for information to publishers on July 31, and in the subsequent three weeks I added some

of the info I received to this preview, but not nearly as much as I had hoped to do. Work on the Gen Con 2017 Preview

was the usual throw-everything-at-the-wall-at-the- late-minute experience, the internet in the Gen Con hotel was terrible, and I didn't complete nearly as many Gen Con previews as I had wanted to. Cue this convention's laments

. I still have designer diaries in the queue that I had hoped/planned to publish prior to Gen Con, for example, and I apologize to those designers. You'll be hearing from me with new publication dates.

• If you are a publisher who has sent me your SPIEL '17 list, I probably have your info in my inbox. If not, it's in a folder for such things. I'll get to it. You're welcome to poke me should you care to do so.

• As I noted in my preview of the new convention preview tool

, comments currently don't work. You can thumb game listings, add private notes, and tag games with a personal priority status, but you can't comment publicly on the listing itself. I'm not sure when we might have comments on the preview as I'm not the tech guy doing such things.

• Users have suggested listing the game designer above the fold, adding different printing options, and doing other things with the preview format. We have read those suggestions, and we'll figure out what we want to do over the next two months prior to SPIEL '17. I want to find some way to indicate the languages included with a particular version of a game, for example, with links to rules being a dream addition. We'll see.

As noted above, the past few weeks have been consumed with Gen Con prep, so I'm running with what I have available to me right now — especially since I promised to publish the SPIEL '17 Preview on Monday, August 21 — rather than waiting until some unknown day in the future. Act now! If needed, update later! I'm trying to do more of that, both in work and in life, and so far so good.

That's it for now. Go have a look SPIEL '17 Preview, subscribe for future additions to the list, and don't burn your eyes out staring at the sun!

Ticket to Ride Invites You to Paint Tracks in France and Claim Land in the Old West

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/683…aint-tracks-france-and-cl

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3707326_t.jpg]Many publishers had surprise game announcements at Gen Con 50, with one of those announcements being the revelation of Ticket to Ride Map Collection: Volume 6 – France & Old West

from designer Alan R. Moon

and publisher Days of Wonder

.

I had scheduled an interview with Moon in the BGG booth, but my understanding was that we would discuss the Ticket to Ride

family, game design in general, and whatever else came to mind. Moon doesn't appear at many game conventions, so this was an interview I was looking forward to — and in the end we filmed a game overview as we did with dozens of other guests. Ah, well, Moon is still a great person to have on camera as you're never sure where the conversation might lead.

We haven't processed that video yet (or the 200-ish others that we recorded over four days), so let's go with a text description for now:

Ticket to Ride Map Collection: Volume 6 – France & Old West includes a double-sided game board that features France on one side and the western half of the United States on the other.

In the France

half of this expansion, 2-5 players collect train cards and claim routes in order to complete tickets in hand, but most of the tracks on the board aren't colored! Each time that you draw cards, you must take a colored tile that's 2-5 train cars long and place that tile on an empty track bed. Once you've done this, any player can claim that route by discarding the appropriately colored cards from hand, as in any other Ticket to Ride game. (Single-length routes are already colored, and the map contains a number of gray-colored ferry routes.)

Multiple track beds on the game board overlap, and once a tile has placed on the board, any track beds crossed by this tile are off-limits and nothing can be built on them. At the end of the game, players score their tickets, with bonuses being awarded for longest continuous route and most tickets completed.

In the Old West

half of the expansion, 2-6 players start the game by choosing (in reverse player order) a starting location for one of their three city pieces. The first route that a player claims must have this city as one of the route's two endpoints, and each subsequent route claimed must connect to that player's existing network.

After claiming a route, a player can place one of their remaining cities on either end of that route by discarding a matching pair of train cards. Only one city marker can be in each city. Whenever a player builds a route that connects to a city owned by another player, the owner of the city claims the points for the route, not the player placing the trains. If both endpoints of the route have cities, then the owner of each city scores these points. Whoever completes the most tickets in this expansion scores 15 bonus points.

As a variant, you can play Old West

with Alvin the Alien. No player can start the game in Roswell, and the first player who builds a route into Roswell scores 10 points, then places the Alvin marker in any city that they control. The next player to connect to this city scores 10 points, then moves Alvin as before. Whoever controls Alvin at the end of the game scores 10 bonus points.

In addition to the interview, I had scheduled a playing session with Moon on Saturday to check out the new expansion, and I wanted to see France in action to discover what it's like when you must first paint the tracks prior to claiming them. You start this board with eight train cards in hand so that you have some idea of which tile colors might be good to place in the early turns. In a first playing, of course, you have no idea which cities might be choke points, so it's all about claiming a few routes, then seeing what happens from there.

Within the first few turns, you could already get a sense of what might come. I placed a four-length white route out of a city that someone else had built into as I hadn't seen her picking up any white cards while I had a few already in hand. I then placed a five-length white route connected to that. I needed only one of those routes, and now I felt secure about getting at least one of them. What's more, the game includes only one four- and five-length tile of each color, so those white tiles were locked on the board until someone claimed those routes.

Later, someone placed a two-length black tile in a spot that I might need to get to Belgium, so I claimed it ahead of him, forcing him to spin the wheels for another turn until he could claim it. If we were being mean (and weren't so focused on learning the new board), someone else could have dropped a two-length non-black tile on the other track bed, further delaying his plans should he not have the needed train cards in hand.

You could imagine the game being a lot more competitive once you became familiar with the tickets and board. Switzerland and Italy all require tiles to be laid before you can build into them, so perhaps you could hog a color of train cards, then lay tiles of that color into the country — assuming you don't actually need those tiles elsewhere, of course. You must place a tile each time you draw cards, so even when you're not planning to claim anything in the next couple of turns, you're locking in new elements of the board that affect everyone, especially with the crossing track beds as you can convert what would have been a 15-point play in a single turn into something that requires two or three turns to complete with fewer points gained. Again, it's all about knowing the tickets and being able to read the holders of those tickets.

In the end, Moon beat the three of us, although only twelve points separated all four players. I drew tickets on the final turn as I had no train cards in hand, losing 7 points in the process; a swing in the other direction would have won me the game, but not knowing the tickets I have no idea whether I could have even scored at all!

Ticket to Ride Map Collection: Volume 6 – France & Old West

, which retails for $45/€40, debuts at SPIEL '17 in October, with the game reaching European game stores that same month; the title should be available in North America by mid-November 2017.

Ticket to Ride Invites You to Paint Tracks in France and Claim Land in the Old West

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/683…aint-tracks-france-and-cl

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3707326_t.jpg]Many publishers had surprise game announcements at Gen Con 50, with one of those announcements being the revelation of Ticket to Ride Map Collection: Volume 6 – France & Old West

from designer Alan R. Moon

and publisher Days of Wonder

.

I had scheduled an interview with Moon in the BGG booth, but my understanding was that we would discuss the Ticket to Ride

family, game design in general, and whatever else came to mind. Moon doesn't appear at many game conventions, so this was an interview I was looking forward to — and in the end we filmed a game overview as we did with dozens of other guests. Ah, well, Moon is still a great person to have on camera as you're never sure where the conversation might lead.

We haven't processed that video yet (or the 200-ish others that we recorded over four days), so let's go with a text description for now:

Ticket to Ride Map Collection: Volume 6 – France & Old West includes a double-sided game board that features France on one side and the western half of the United States on the other.

In the France

half of this expansion, 2-5 players collect train cards and claim routes in order to complete tickets in hand, but most of the tracks on the board aren't colored! Each time that you draw cards, you must take a colored tile that's 2-5 train cars long and place that tile on an empty track bed. Once you've done this, any player can claim that route by discarding the appropriately colored cards from hand, as in any other Ticket to Ride game. (Single-length routes are already colored, and the map contains a number of gray-colored ferry routes.)

Multiple track beds on the game board overlap, and once a tile has placed on the board, any track beds crossed by this tile are off-limits and nothing can be built on them. At the end of the game, players score their tickets, with bonuses being awarded for longest continuous route and most tickets completed.

In the Old West

half of the expansion, 2-6 players start the game by choosing (in reverse player order) a starting location for one of their three city pieces. The first route that a player claims must have this city as one of the route's two endpoints, and each subsequent route claimed must connect to that player's existing network.

After claiming a route, a player can place one of their remaining cities on either end of that route by discarding a matching pair of train cards. Only one city marker can be in each city. Whenever a player builds a route that connects to a city owned by another player, the owner of the city claims the points for the route, not the player placing the trains. If both endpoints of the route have cities, then the owner of each city scores these points. Whoever completes the most tickets in this expansion scores 15 bonus points.

As a variant, you can play Old West

with Alvin the Alien. No player can start the game in Roswell, and the first player who builds a route into Roswell scores 10 points, then places the Alvin marker in any city that they control. The next player to connect to this city scores 10 points, then moves Alvin as before. Whoever controls Alvin at the end of the game scores 10 bonus points.

In addition to the interview, I had scheduled a playing session with Moon on Saturday to check out the new expansion, and I wanted to see France in action to discover what it's like when you must first paint the tracks prior to claiming them. You start this board with eight train cards in hand so that you have some idea of which tile colors might be good to place in the early turns. In a first playing, of course, you have no idea which cities might be choke points, so it's all about claiming a few routes, then seeing what happens from there.

Within the first few turns, you could already get a sense of what might come. I placed a four-length white route out of a city that someone else had built into as I hadn't seen her picking up any white cards while I had a few already in hand. I then placed a five-length white route connected to that. I needed only one of those routes, and now I felt secure about getting at least one of them. What's more, the game includes only one four- and five-length tile of each color, so those white tiles were locked on the board until someone claimed those routes.

Later, someone placed a two-length black tile in a spot that I might need to get to Belgium, so I claimed it ahead of him, forcing him to spin the wheels for another turn until he could claim it. If we were being mean (and weren't so focused on learning the new board), someone else could have dropped a two-length non-black tile on the other track bed, further delaying his plans should he not have the needed train cards in hand.

You could imagine the game being a lot more competitive once you became familiar with the tickets and board. Switzerland and Italy all require tiles to be laid before you can build into them, so perhaps you could hog a color of train cards, then lay tiles of that color into the country — assuming you don't actually need those tiles elsewhere, of course. You must place a tile each time you draw cards, so even when you're not planning to claim anything in the next couple of turns, you're locking in new elements of the board that affect everyone, especially with the crossing track beds as you can convert what would have been a 15-point play in a single turn into something that requires two or three turns to complete with fewer points gained. Again, it's all about knowing the tickets and being able to read the holders of those tickets.

In the end, Moon beat the three of us, although only twelve points separated all four players. I drew tickets on the final turn as I had no train cards in hand, losing 7 points in the process; a swing in the other direction would have won me the game, but not knowing the tickets I have no idea whether I could have even scored at all!

Ticket to Ride Map Collection: Volume 6 – France & Old West

, which retails for $45/€40, debuts at SPIEL '17 in October, with the game reaching European game stores that same month; the title should be available in North America by mid-November 2017.

New Game Round-up: Treats from Renegade, Beasts from Bézier, and Glorious Feats from Ninja Division

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/684…egade-beasts-bezier-and-g

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3710496_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3710495_t.png]• After a wildly successful Gen Con (not to mention a fine 2017 overall), U.S. publisher Renegade Game Studios

is going to close out the year as one closes out a meal — with dessert! Specifically, Renegade has announced two titles — Sundae Split

by Nate Bivins

, and Pie Town: Spies, Lies, and Apple Pies

by newcomer Daniel Fremgen — with both due out in November 2017. Here's a brief rundown of the two games:

In Sundae Split, players try to build the best ice cream sundae from the ingredients at hand. Get just the right mix of toppings and flavors, but avoid the vegetables! At the end, each sundae is scored and the player who made the best sundae wins the game.

In more detail, one player splits ingredients into piles, and the other players take turns choosing one. As the splitter, you get the last pile. You have to be clever and a little sneaky to get the ingredients you want. Collect the best mix of toppings and flavors to make the most valuable ice cream sundae and win the game!

Welcome to Pie Town, a community built on apples and butter. Business here is no cake walk, so manage your operation well and keep your secret recipe secret.

Pie Town: Spies, Lies, and Apple Pies is a worker-dice placement game with hidden information. You need to manage your constantly changing workforce to harvest, bake, and sell pies while deducing other players' secret recipes! Now is your chance to become the best pie shop in town!

Ice cream vs. pie! Seems like a sales challenge in the offing, not to mention an opportunity for booth treats at end-of-the-year conventions...

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3710572_t.jpg]• Home of the werewolf Bézier Games

is presenting a different take on the were-genre with Jeremie Kletzkine

's Werebeasts

, a game due out in February 2018 in which you (gasp) bid for creatures, not take on their role while slapping your leg to keep others from figuring out who you are. An overview:

You are a key player in the lucrative but dangerous business of collecting werebeasts. Armed with only your good looks and several cans of indescribably tasty werechow, you must bid for the werebeasts you need — and also for the ones you don't in hopes of throwing your opponents off track.

Your fellow collectors in Werebeasts are also collecting certain creatures that have the most value to them. If you can hide your intentions long enough, you'll be rewarded. If you can make it to the end of the game without getting caught, you just might win.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2919389_t.jpg]• Ninja Division

has signed a deal

with Games Workshop

to publish a card game based on GW's Warhammer Fantasy

world, with John Cadice

and David Freeman

being the designers in charge of Doomseeker

, which is due out in Q2 2018:

In the card game Doomseeker, players take on the role of a mighty dwarf slayer. Each player's character is sworn by the slayer's oath to seek a glorious death in battle for a crime committed or stain on that dwarf's honor. The slayers eschew worldly pursuits, dye their beards and hair in fierce and fiery reds and oranges, tattoo their ruddy flesh, take up their weapons, and wander the old world seeking their doom battling monsters and enemies of their race.

The Doomseeker card game pits players against one another to see who can die the most glorious death! Press your luck and challenge the denizens and monsters of the Old World, with each victory bringing you more glory, and ultimately your death can be met at the hands of a truly worthy foe!

New Game Round-up: Wheel Through Noria, Arrange Leaves in Indian Summer, and Dance with The Bottle Imp

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/684…ough-noria-arrange-leaves

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3706909_t.jpg]• Following last week's busyness at Gen Con 50, I've been racing through my inbox to update our SPIEL '17 Preview

, which debuted on Monday, Aug. 21 with 168 listings and which now features 256(!) listings — with me making only the slightest dent in my inbox. Sheesh!

The three latest entries in the SPIEL '17 Preview come from Edition Spielwiese

, which debuted at SPIEL '16 with Uwe Rosenberg

's Cottage Garden

. For SPIEL '17, the publisher has a new puzzle-y game from Rosenberg — Indian Summer

— which it dubs the the second part of Rosenberg's "puzzle trilogy". Here's how the publisher sets the mood:

Before winter makes its appearance, a particularly warm fall bathes the forest in a golden shimmer. During the Indian Summer, New England blossoms one last time. Treetops are ablaze with countless colors — a living rainbow, from green to orange to red. Slowly the first leaves are starting to fall. Meanwhile, our steps and the diligent squirrels rustle the colorful foliage.

On our walks through the woods, we discover all kinds of little treasures; we collect berries, nuts, mushrooms and feathers. We pause for a moment to watch the shy inhabitants of the forest before we set off towards home once again. There, a good book and a hot tea are already awaiting.

Indian Summer is firmly geared towards experienced players. At the heart of the game are puzzle tiles with holes that are placed on individual forest boards to cover up treasures. When players get their hands on these, they gain more options and an edge over their opponents. All that counts in the end is to be the first to cover your forest floor completely with leaves.

I've already covered the pirate-based memory game Memoarrr!

in this BGG News post

, so that leaves Noria

, the debut title from Sophia Wagner

, who won an author stipend from the Spiel des Jahres jury

in 2015. Michael Menzel and Klemens Franz provide the art for this title, which can be summarized as follows:

A new era is looming on the horizon. The future of Noria is right in front of you, and you must guide your flourishing trading empire into prosperity. Discover flying islands, buy ships, and build factories. Invest in prestigious projects, and secure their success by passing on secret knowledge to politicians. For even above the clouds, there is still room for improvement...

At the center of Noria is an innovative mechanism called "wheel building". Each player has an action wheel consisting of three rings, with slots for a number of different action discs. Over the course of the game, players try to obtain new discs and manipulate the rings of the wheel to optimize their action selection. Additionally, to ensure their investments bear fruit, they also need to bribe politicians with knowledge.

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3711656_t.jpg]• Other recent additions to the SPIEL '17 Preview include a new edition of Günter Cornett'

s wonderful card game The Bottle Imp

from Finnish publisher Lautapelit.fi

.

In this 2-4 player trick-taking game that is ideally a three-player-only game, everyone wants to grab the bottle for some of the time as you score more points that way. The bottle "price" starts at 19, and all cards with a value lower than this are trump — but when you win a trick this way, the price of the bottle drops to this new value. Should you still hold the bottle at the end of the round, you lose points instead of gaining them, so you need to find a way to force someone else to buy the bottle. The Bottle Imp

is a great game, and it's good to see the title returning to market.

• Lautapelit.fi will also have a new edition of Emanuelle Ornella's Byzanz

, which first appeared in 2008 from AMIGO, as well as expansions for two 2016 titles: Flamme Rouge: Peloton

, which allows for play with up to six players, and Dokmus: Return of Erefel

, which adds a new guardian to play as well as new game boards.

Rosenberg Heads North, Riverboat Heads South, and Lookout Games Heads to SPIEL '17

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/685…erboat-heads-south-and-lo

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: https://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3715111_t.png]• Rumors of an Uwe Rosenberg

game set in Norway have been around for a couple of years, and now Lookout Spiele

has officially announced Nusfjord

as a SPIEL '17 release in October, with Mayfair Games

releasing the game in English at about the same time, according to Lookout (which is owned by Mayfair). Here's a rundown of the game's setting and how it works:

Nusfjord is a tranquil fishing village in the Lofoten archipelago in northern Norway. Fifty years ago, business was blooming when the codfish would come for spawning. Today, Nusfjord is more of a museum than a village, with less than a hundred people living there. Imagine how beautiful this place must be given that you must pay a fee to even look at the houses. Cruise ships used to pass by this long and now mostly abandoned island world.

In the time period in which the game Nusfjord is set, things looked quite different. Sailing ships dominate the fjord. The rocks around Nusfjord are covered in trees. As the owner of a major fishing company in Nusfjord on the Lofoten archipelago, your goal is to develop the harbor and the surrounding landscape, and to succeed you must enlarge your fleet, clear the forest, erect new buildings, and satisfy the local elders. Others do this as well, of course, so the competition is steep.

As with Agricola and Ora et Labora, Nusfjord has a worker placement mechanism, with each player starting with three workers that they place on a central board to trigger certain actions. Whether a player wants to clear a forest on their own board, buy a new cutter, or construct a building, they must place a worker on the appropriate space — which is possible only if room is available for this worker. Money is scarce, and one of the quicker and easier ways to get it is to place shares of your own company on the market. This risky action could be worthwhile because if you succeed in buying these shares yourself, you have usually won money and not suffered any disadvantages; however, if an opponent acquires these shares, then you must allow them to benefit from your hard-earned catches at sea. The village elders might want their own share of your catch as well, especially if you've visited them to take certain actions in the village, so if you don't take care, your catch could end up entirely in the hands of others and your camp will be empty.

• Nusfjord

is just one of many new titles that Lookout will release at SPIEL '17. Alexander Pfister

's Oh My Goods!: Escape to Canyon Brook

is the second expansion for Oh My Goods!

and it continues the storyline started in the first expansion, Longsdale in Revolt

.

• The Agricola: Artifex Deck

contains 120 cards for the revised edition of Agricola

that debuted in 2016, with half the cards being occupations and half minor improvements. As for the deluxe, all-in-one-box anniversary edition of Agricola

that has been mentioned in passing, Lookout's Hanno Girke says

that item is still in the works, but:

We absolutely underestimated the timeframe that Mr. Klemens Franz needs to create the amount of new artwork for all the new cards.

Agricola always has been and will remain a modular system. Depending on the players' needs they can add between nothing and everything.

The current specs for the Deluxe Revised edition list several 168 card decks plus major expansions like i]Farmers of the Moor[/i, plus several goodies that were available only as a promo or only in German so far.

Some of the decks probably will be released in upcoming years.

Plus some kind of sorting trays, deck holders and whatever we'll come up with. Be assured that we're reading all the BGG threads on the deluxe edition, and we might have a first mock-up to showcase at SPIEL 17.

No promises. We won't rush the project, and we won't rush Klemens.

• Another small box item coming from Lookout is Bummelbahn

, a German edition of Seth Jaffee

and Dan Keltner

's Isle of Trains

, which first appeared in 2014 from Dice Hate Me Games.

• Isle of Skye: Journeyman

expands the 2016 Kennerspiel des Jahres winner from Andreas Pelikan

and Alexander Pfister with new player boards that track "your progress in terms of strength, prosperity and popularity", with new scoring tiles that reflect these traits and a journeyman pawn that travels the islands to activate tiles.

• Finally, Lookout will have a larger game from Michael Kiesling

titled Riverboat

that plays in about 90 minutes for 2-4 players. This description is rather high-level, but it gives you some idea of what's going on in the game:

Riverboat posits each player as the owner of a 19th century farm on the bank of the Mississippi River. You need to organize your workers to ensure that the fields are ordered according to their type and harvested when ready so that the goods can be shipped to New Orleans.

In more detail, the game lasts four rounds, and at the start of each round players draft phase cards until they're all distributed. The phases then take place in numerical order, with the player who chose a phase being the first one to act. In the first phase, players place their workers in the fields, with each player having the same distribution of colored field tiles, but a different random placement for each player. In phase two, players organize their crops, trying to group like types together, with some fields requiring two or three workers. In phase three, players harvest crops and load riverboats, with a dock needing to be filled with all the goods of a single type before it can be loaded. In phase four, the boats are launched and players can take special actions, with additional victory points possibly coming in phase five.