BGG News

Crowdfunding Round-up: Ancient Games with Modern Funding

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/534…ient-games-modern-funding

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2975977_t.jpg]• For star power in a crowdfunded game this week, let's start with Tak

, an abstract strategy game that novelist Patrick Rothfuss introduced as an ancient design in the book The Wise Man's Fear

and which James Ernest of Cheapass Games

has now transformed into an actual "ancient" game — that is, a game that feels like it could have been around forever given that you use three simple types of pieces on a board that measures anywhere from 3x3 to 8x8 with the goal of creating a path that connects opposite edges of the board. I'm reminded of Daniel Solis' Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge

from 2011 and suitably impressed that such things can still be created. ( KS link

)

• I suppose an argument could have been made for placing Steamforged Games

' Dark Souls: The Board Game

in the top spot given that it is a miniatures game based on the extremely popular Dark Souls

videogame series that has collected nearly $2 million in funding within a couple of days, but we don't have a flat front cover image of the game in the database, so no can do. I hope that blow to their crowdfunding efforts won't be too harsh. Also, I keep thinking the name is Dead Souls

and am curious to see how they've adapted the Nikolai Gogol novel. That college education is only getting in my way at this point... ( KS link

)

• Another game that actually is novel-based and blowing up on KS is The Dresden Files Cooperative Card Game

from Eric B. Vogel and Evil Hat Productions

. We met with Vogel at the GAMA Trade Show in March 2016 and recorded this overview of what the game is like, what you might expect from the design in the future, and how many times Vogel read the books to pull out everything that he wanted from them.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2692549_t.jpg]• Todd Sanders' Aether Captains

from MAGE Company

is back on KS for another flight, and this time the steampunky sky pirate battle game has more than doubled its slightly lowered goal. When at first you don't succeed, fly, fly again. ( KS link

)

• If steampunk isn't your thing, you can step up to 20th century dieselpunk in André Schillo's Xibalba

from Voodoo Games

and raid opponents in a fight for resources in order to raid an ark from an intergalactic civilization. At least I think that's what you're doing — whatever it is, though, you'll have fantastic hair and cleavage when doing it. ( KS link

)

• Diesel-powered fists are also on display in Battle for Sularia: Blood, Profit, and Glory

, an expansion for the BoS base game from Jesse Bergman, John Kimmel, and Punch-It Entertainment

that adds new mercenary allies to the game with three new ability keywords that are (despite the promise of the title) not blood, profit, and glory. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2989673_t.jpg]• Designer Stefan Risthaus

of OSTIA Spiele

is back with another minigame along the lines of 2015's Visby

. In Tallinn

, named after the Estonian capital, each player has the same set of ten cards, with each card having two actions on it. All players simultaneously reveal a card — with their thumb on the half of the card they want to use — then they stack it on the other cards they've played, with scoring occurring both between rounds and at the end of the game. ( Spieleschmiede link

)

• Exposed

from designers Brian Henk and Clayton Skancke and publisher Overworld Games

has you trying to steal wallets from passengers aboard a cruise ship while not being revealed as a thief in the process. ( KS link

)

• Draft card, create inventions, and win bonus points for alliteration in David J. Clarke's Great Scott!

from Sinister Fish Games

. All approve alliteration! ( KS link

)

• The cover of Bucks, Bullets and Flowers

— a game from Cristian Mungherli and Apokalypse Inc

in which you use mobsters to try to rule 1920s Chicago — is glorious, but apparently other people don't think it's $57K worth of glorious. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2652835_t.jpg]• At the halfway point in this long c.f. post, we'll hit the ancient world once again with Eliot Hochberg's ILIOS: The Battle of Troy

, which was released by Playford Games

in 2015 as part of the Ancient Conflict Treasure Chest

. In this game, players take turns placing tiles with arrows onto a board that measures anywhere from 4x4 to 10x10. You claim ownership of the tiles being pointed at by your newly placed tile, and if you surround or fence off tiles, you claim the tiles themselves as points. ( KS link

)

• War of a very different sort takes place in Warfighter: The WWII Tactical Combat Card Game

from Dan Verssen and his DVG

, with 1-6 players working together to complete World War II squad-level combat missions. ( KS link

)

• Stepping back even further in time we come to Hold the Line: The American Revolution

, a project from Worthington Games

and PSC Games

that combines two prior Worthington games — Clash for a Continent

and Hold the Line

, both from Matt Burchfield, Grant Wylie, and Mike Wylie — along with eighteen new scenarios, two hundred miniatures, and a separate expansion for The French & Indian War

. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2989997_t.jpg]• Stonemaier Games

is avoiding the c.f. route for its Token Treasury, a three-set collection of fancy resin and metal tokens that can replace the prosaic wood and cardboard bits in the games on your shelves. Instead the publisher is taking money from people directly on the basis that it's producing a minimum of 1,500 sets no matter what and the contents of those sets won't change no matter how many people back it. Stonemaier is also reproducing the metal coins from Viticulture

/ Tuscany

and Scythe

should the metallic bling be more of your thing. ( Stonemaier Games link

)

• The Cthulhu portion of this crowdfunding post comes to you courtesy of Miskatonic School for Boys

, a reverse deduction game from Garrett Herdter and Fun to 11

in which players are fifth dimensional beasts who know what creature everyone else is possessing but not who they're possessing. Maybe they're born with it, maybe it's Miskatonic. ( KS link

)

• Andy Breckman's Shit Happens

— available with or without a G-rated decoy cover — from AdMagic Games

plays like a filth-covered Timeline

with you trying to place events in your row of miserable events based on how you think an event ranks on the 1-100 Misery Index. How does a lost pet compare to a ketchup bottle being stick in your butt? Now you finally answer this conundrum that has puzzled philosophers for centuries. ( KS link

)

• Bijhan Valibeigi's Time Wars: Supreme Command

bills itself as the world's first "deck stacking" game as players place each discarded or used card on the bottom of someone's deck, thereby trying to set up (or foil) combinations that allow players to set up and collapse the Timeline in a way that's most favorable to them. ( KS link

)

• Let's end where we began this week, with a minimalist abstract strategy game that seems like it could have been designed at any point in the past thousand years. King's Valley

, from Mitsuo Yamamoto and his own Logy Games

, presents players with five pieces each on a 5x5 board, with each piece moving as far as it can in any direction, stopping only when it hits another piece or the edges of the playing area. Your goal is to land your king piece in the central square before your opponent does this first. As with Yamamoto's earlier KS project for e-SOLO-e

, many designs of board and pieces are available because he apparently creates everything by hand. ( 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

New Game Round-up: Rise from Amino Acids in Bios: Genesis, Flick Others to Death in Catacombs and Castles, & Prepare to Save Andor

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/534…-acids-bios-genesis-flick

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2982166_t.jpg]• Phil Eklund

's Bios: Genesis

from Sierra Madre Games

has been listed in the BGG database since the start of 2012, but only now does the game have a release date attached to it — October 2016 — along with a final cover that succinctly summarizes the nature of gameplay and drives the point home with the "Molecular Arms Race" tagline. Here's an overview:

One to four players start as organic compounds shortly after Earth's formation, represented by up to three Biont tokens. The Amino Acids command Metabolism, the lipids create cells, the pigments control energy absorption and storage, and the nucleic acids control templated replication. Their goal is a double origin of life: first as Autocatalytic Life (a metabolic cycle reproducing, yet not replicating, its own constituents), and the second as Darwinian Life (an Organism using a template to replicate in an RNA world). Players can play cooperative, competitive, or solitaire.

Notes designer Phil Eklund, "This subject is the most difficult and ambitious I have ever attempted, and it has taken many years to get it to work right." With Bios: Genesis, Bios: Megafauna, and Origins: How We Became Human, Eklund takes players through almost the whole breadth and scope of life on Earth.

• Joshua Githens from Czech Games Edition

posted an image of the Codenames: Pictures

prototype on his Facebook feed recently, and with his permission I present it here. Adds Githens, "I'll have it on the ITTD steam this Saturday", i.e., Saturday, April 30, 2016, which is International TableTop Day.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2949601_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2991433_t.jpg]• U.S. publisher Elzra Corp.

plans to run a Kickstarter in 2016 for Catacombs and Castles

, a standalone game in the Catacombs

universe that pits two teams of heroes against one another. The expansion also serves as an expansion for the third edition of Catacombs

thanks to the new game board included.

• Clever or crazy? In May 2016, Steve Jackson Games

will release Munchkin: Sketch Edition

, a art-free special version of the Munchkin

base game that allows you to draw your own munchkins on the cards and make the game look exactly like you want, depending on your artistic abilities, of course...

• Level 99 Games

reports that Millennium Blades

is sold out at the publisher level. Says designer/publisher D. Brad Talton, Jr., "We do not have immediate plans for a reprint, so players who want to guarantee their copy of the game should seek it out as soon as possible." Gas on the fire, Brad, gas on the fire!

• KOSMOS

has released a teaser trailer for Die Legenden von Andor: Die letzte Hoffnung

, part three of Michael Menzel

's Legends of Andor

, which is due out in Q4 2016. Here's a short description from the publisher:

On returning from the far north, the heroes find a devastated Andor. Conquered by the Krahder from the south and their skeleton army, many Andori were enslaved and abducted by them. The heroes are the last hope for the kingdom.

Die Legenden von Andor: Die letzte Hoffnung, the last large expansion for Legends of Andor, includes a new map of the southern regions of Andor, new legends, and more.

New Game Round-up: Scott Almes Prepares Heroes of Land, Air & Sea, and Strawberry Studio Offers Three Wishes

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/535…s-prepares-heroes-land-ai

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2993345_t.png]• Scott Almes

and Gamelyn Games

have created recurrent tiny, epic waves in the game industry that swell higher and higher each year, but the newest project by this pair fits only one of those adjectives. Here's an overview of Heroes of Land, Air & Sea

, a 4X fantasy game that will head to Kickstarter in January 2017 ahead of a planned 2017 release date:

Heroes of Land, Air & Sea is a 4X-style board game with miniatures that tells the epic tale of orcs vs. humans, dwarves vs. elves, battling kingdoms, and the individuals who turn the tides of war.

Players control one of these classic factions, competing to expand their kingdom into new territory. Even the greatest kingdoms begin as small townships, therefore players begin with only a basic town hall, a couple of peons, and a single warrior. From there, players must explore the territory around them, build up their work force, fortify their army, and develop their kingdom — all through careful action selection, exploitation, war, and resource management.

As players reach milestones in the development of their kingdom, they gain access to many advantages. Peons become warriors, warriors become powerful heroes, and town halls eventually become castles. Players gain access to water, and even air, vessels and creatures. Boarding these vessels and creatures with your units allows for faster travel across the vast game board and for positioning armies for powerful attacks.

War in Heroes of Land, Air & Sea features a cost/reward system carefully detailed on tactics cards from which players must secretly choose. The availability of these tactics cards depends on the units participating in the war. It is here that players wage their wits and legacy in an attempt to exterminate one another. For as we all know, "history is written by the victors".

Heroes of Land, Air & Sea also boasts two economic systems, one being the risky acquisition and careful management of the resources (food, ore and mana), while the other is a twist on worker placement that requires the leveraging of peons to construct buildings, peons that could otherwise be exploring, expanding, exploiting, and exterminating! Finding this balance is crucial to victory!

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1239221_t.png]• Terra Nova Games

has picked up Hisashi Hayashi

's Trick of the Rails

— an 18XX

-like card game in which players collect stock certificates of railway companies and expand their networks to increase their value — for release on the U.S. market with new art and graphic design.

• Strawberry Studio

is a new publishing brand for NSKN Games

that will release microgames suitable for families and friends, and its release in August 2016 is Chris Castagnetto

's 3 Wishes

, a 3-5 minute card game in which players need to balance their wishes — by peaking at wish cards and swapping cards with opponents or the table — between super powers, benefits for the world, and selfish gifts in order for the genie to dub you the winner. No actual wishes will be fulfilled.

• The second title coming from Strawberry Studio is Crazy 5

from Dennis Kirps

and Christian Kruchten

, with this being a dice-rolling game in which you first try to collect more than five pips on three dice before rolling other dice to match the difference between five and your sum. If you can't break the five threshold, however, an opponent can possibly strip you of points depending on how well they roll.

New Game Round-up: Agricola Unwrapped, From Stars to Heroes, and a Double Dose of Adventure Time

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/535…nwrapped-stars-heroes-and

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2995818_t.png]• I'm late to the party on this announcement, but White Wizard Games

plans to launch a Kickstarter project "soon" for Hero Realms

, a fantasy-themed deck-building game that's based on their own Star Realms

game from Darwin Kastle

and Rob Dougherty

. Hero Realms

will have character-specific expansion packs and a way to play against the game in campaign mode in order to level up your character.

• Adventure Time Card Wars: Doubles Tournament

, due out June 2016 from Cryptozoic Entertainment

, is a team version of Adventure Time Card Wars

as Jake and Charlie face off against Grand Prix and Moniker with new decks and special Teamwork cards that can give you and your partner a benefit turn after turn.

• Designer MJE Hendriks

, known for Legacy: The Testament of Duke de Crecy

, is founding his own publishing house. While he's commissioned artwork for his initial release, he hasn't yet revealed details about it, mostly because he's still trying to nail down what he should name the publishing house. He invites your suggestions here

.

• After tweeting the message below, designer Antoine Bauza

noted later that Takenokids

will be a standalone game for young players, not a second expansion for Takenoko

. Adorable tiny pandas incoming!

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2995800_t.jpg]• UK publisher Backspindle Games

is printing a new multilingual version of Leonard Boyd and David Brashaw's Codinca

to debut at the UK Games Expo in June 2016, with new publishing partner Ninja Division

picking up the titles for U.S. distribution.

• Agricola

fanboi Tony Boydell received an advance production copy of Mayfair Games

' new version of Uwe Rosenberg's industry-changing game design courtesy of artist Klemens Franz, with whom Boydell has worked on his own Snowdonia

, and Boydell promptly posted many, many pictures of this new version of Agricola

on his BGG blog.

Clearly this version will need a separate listing in the database after all, despite it being the same game at heart. Frustrating! We still need to figure out a way to list such new editions in a separate but equal way, despite history showing that "separate but equal" is a terrible policy that's unworkable in the long run. Its use probably isn't comparable to a situation in which you're cataloguing items in a database, but the phrase came to mind anyway. Okay, I should probably stop now.

Stonemaier Games Founds a Village with Charterstone

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/536…unds-village-charterstone

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1403065_t.jpg]For the most part, legacy games have presented players with extreme situations — global warfare, global pandemics, the dawning of civilization, a shortage of furry costumes — but designer Jamey Stegmaier

of Stonemaier Games

is taking a different approach with a legacy design of his own, one that isn't so doomy and gloomy.

In Charterstone

— which carries a 20-60 playing time for 1-6 players — players compete to populate a village, a village that starts off with almost nothing, but which becomes larger, with more options available, in subsequent games. Here's an overview of the setting and gameplay:

The prosperous Kingdom of Greengully, ruled for centuries by the Forever King in the increasingly overpopulated capital city, has issued a decree to its citizens to colonize the vast lands beyond its borders. For those who heed the call, the king has sent thousands of scouts into the wilderness to pick the best areas and claim each one with an iconic Charterstone. It is to one such new village that you arrive with your friends and competitors, each of you hoping to create the greatest legacy for your guild.

In Charterstone, a competitive legacy village-building game, you construct buildings and populate a village shared by all players and their workers. Buildings are permanently added to the game board and become action spaces for any player to use both in the current game and during subsequent playings. Thus, you start off with simple choices and few workers in the first couple of games, but soon you have a bustling village with dozens of possible actions.

Before each game, one advancement will be revealed, unlocking a new rule, card type, or component for all subsequent games. These advancements are grouped into chronological eras but are randomized within each era, creating a unique storyline for your copy of Charterstone. Random events within each era require players to make group decisions that will later haunt or help the village.

A game of Charterstone ends when players have placed all of their workers, at which point end-game victory points (VP) are scored. The player with the most VPs wins.

A copy of Charterstone will net players a total of 24 games within a campaign, though the village you create remains functional for subsequent plays.

Stegmaier notes that Charterstone

is still under development (so perhaps that gloom will show up after all), but the game will likely have a preorder or Kickstarter campaign before the end of 2016 for release in 2017.

Links: Making a Fortune While Going Broke, Crowdfunding as Art, and the 2016 Dice Tower Award Nominees

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/536…e-going-broke-crowdfundin

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2317576_t.png]• The old joke goes: How do you make a small fortune in the game industry? Start with a large fortune, then try to publish a game. Note that this same joke is told about the wine industry, real estate, book publishing, football clubs, and any number of other businesses in which people can burn through piles of money with little to show for it, which includes every business ever — but despite the joke's chestnutty woodiness, it still contains a nugget of truth, especially when you sabotage yourself on your way to that large fortune.

On Geek & Sundry

, Ben Riggs catalogs

the fortunes of Chaosium Inc.

, which collected more than a half-million dollars on a Kickstarter project

for the seventh edition of the Call of Cthulhu

role-playing game — only to discover after the fact that the very success of that KS would lead to a disastrous outcome for the company. After all, when you lose money on each customer, runaway success only heightens those losses.

The problems started with an earlier KS for a new edition of the Call of Cthulhu

campaign Horror on the Orient Express

, which brought in ten times the $20k goal that Chaosium had established, but without covering the costs required to fulfill what was promised to backers. From the article: "The previous management only charged international backers $20 to ship a ten pound game. The actual cost of shipping was vastly higher, sometimes as much as $150 for backers in Japan. [Current Chaosium president Rick] Meints said that this Kickstarter alone likely lost Chaosium $170,000." What's more:

The Call of Cthulhu Kickstarter compounded these problems...

The magnitude of the error can be seen in a simple glance at the shipping. At the "Nictitating Nyarlathotep" level of pledge, backers would end up having eight books shipped to them. International backers had to pay a total of $355 for all their rewards plus shipping, which sounds like a lot, until you consider that's only $15 more than customers in the continental US were paying. The idea that shipping eight books to Japan would cost a mere $15 more is a madness not even Lovecraft could have conceived.

As described in the article, in June 2015 Chaosium founder Greg Stafford and Call of Cthulhu

creator Sandy Petersen took over from the former owners and preceded to shell out a bunch of their own money in order to make things right.

Bottom line: If you plan to run a crowdfunding campaign, do your homework, figure out what shipping will cost you, and account for that cost in what you charge. Don't promise the moon and a ham sandwich when you've budgeted solely for the sandwich.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic381733_t.jpg]• For another perspective on crowdfunding, Byron Collins

of Collins Epic Wargames invites you to consider " 4 Reasons Why Every Kickstarter Project Is a Work of Art

". To do this, Collins applies four statements about art to the crowdfunding projects themselves — that is, the presentation of the project, not the product itself. The statements in question:

—Art ignites emotion.

—"Good" art is well thought out.

—Any piece of art has a limited time to make an impression.

—Every piece of art invites judgment.

I've visited a lot of big name galleries — most recently The Met and The Guggenheim in NYC — and seen countless works of art by artists across many centuries in many different styles. But, I can honestly say I probably spent no more than 1 minute on each piece of art, if that... Some of these artists spent years creating whatever you're looking at for 1 minute.

The same is true with any Kickstarter project. Someone who clicks a link to your project page has no idea how much time went into that presentation, that work of art, but, they know within 30 seconds if they are interested enough to read more or watch your video.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2997557_t.png]• The Dice Tower has announced the nominees for its eponymous Dice Tower Gaming Awards

in fourteen categories, including best game from a new designer, best artwork, best game reprint, best game theming, and best small publisher. Each category has five nominees, as chosen by a jury of Dice Tower staff and prominent bloggers and reviewers, except for the "game of the year" category, which features these ten nominees: 7 Wonders: Duel

, Blood Rage

, Codenames

, Elysium

, The Gallerist

, Mysterium

, Pandemic Legacy: Season 1

, Roll for the Galaxy

, T.I.M.E Stories

, and The Voyages of Marco Polo

. The winners will be announced at the Dice Tower Convention in July 2016.

• In The New Yorker

, Siobhan Roberts profiles " The Dice You Never Knew You Needed

", i.e., the d120, which was created by Robert Fathauer and Henry Segerman of The Dice Lab

and which debuted at the 2016 Gathering for Gardner. An excerpt: "The d120 is a polyhedron, more specifically a disdyakis triacontahedron, a geometric creature first described by the French-Belgian mathematician Eugène Catalan in 1865..." Ignoring the technical name, the d120 looks like a dodecahedron that has had each face replaced with an object created by ten skinny triangles that meet at a single point. A longer excerpt from The New Yorker

article:

The die's most winning property lies in its being numerically balanced: the face numbers are spread out evenly, such that any two opposing sides sum to a hundred and twenty-one. Each of the die's sixty-two corners boasts equanimity, too. (A vertex at which ten triangles meet, for instance, sums to six hundred and five, which is ten times the average of all the numbers on the die.) All this fine-tuning was courtesy of Robert Bosch, a professor at Oberlin College who uses mathematical optimization techniques to create art. Bosch spent nearly two months running various accelerated brute-force computations (a process called integer programming), trying to get everything in sync. He almost abandoned two especially tricky vertices, which couldn't be made to coöperate, but past his deadline he made one last-ditch effort. He coded a script, let the program run, and came back a few hours later to discover that his computer had stopped. "It had either crashed or found a perfect solution," Bosch said. Lucky day, it was the latter. "It was a great feeling. And it was kind of ridiculous how good a feeling it was, because it's not practical. It's just a cool object, a beautiful object. I really love it, but it's not Earth-changing."

Crowdfunding Round-up: All's Fair in Food and War

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/536…nd-alls-fair-food-and-war

by Dustin Schwartz

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2936691_t.png]• Thunderworks Games

is adding a third title to its catalog with Blend Off!

, a real-time dice game from designer Scot Eaton. This is Scot’s first published design, but you may know him for his work creating fan expansions for both Catan

and 7 Wonders

. Well, here’s my own fan expansion idea for Blend Off!

: play the game with a theatre-size box of Runts candy, and then eat your smoothie creations as you complete them. I take no responsibility for any sugar comas induced in this way. ( KS link

)

• The original race for the galaxy occurred in the skies just over our planet during the Cold War, and that struggle is represented on the tabletop in Space Race: The Card Game

from Marek Loskot and Jan Soukal, first-time designers who also decided to navigate the frontier of self-publication. If you’re a fan of real space race history or card games where discovering synergies is the meat-and-potatoes of the gameplay, this might be the offering for you. I just have one question: does it come in a retort pouch? ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1929575_t.jpg]• Nearly three years ago, Rikki Tahta’s Coup

was funded on KS and published by Indie Boards & Cards

, and it would go on to become one of the seminal designs in the twin genres of microgames and bluffing games. Fast forward to early 2014 and the storm of excitement kicked up when images appeared online of the localized Brazilian edition published by FunBox Jogos

, reskinned with new illustrations from Weberson Santiago. Now, IB&C is bringing that reskin to their core audience in a limited edition that also incorporates expansion elements from Coup: Reformation

. ( KS link

)

• Following the trajectory of Star Realms

before it, the two-player deck-building game Helionox: The Last Sunset

is getting a standalone expansion set. This new set from Mr. B Games

and designer Taran Lewis Kratz, dubbed Helionox: Mercury Protocol

, can also be combined with the original to allow for three- and four-player games (in both competitive and co-op modes). For anyone wondering, scenarios like this are why publishers will sometimes add seemingly unnecessary subtitles to their releases; they’re future-proofing against potential confusion as they expand a product line. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2854496_t.jpg]• Artana

’s stock is on the rise thanks to lots of folks being excited about the ambitious new legacy game system in development, but their current hit Tesla vs. Edison

is no slouch either, selling out its first print run and precipitating the Powering Up!

expansion. This expansion, from designer and Artana founder Dirk Knemeyer, has an array of modules of the plug-and-play variety, including solitaire mode, an events deck, and sixth-player support. Perhaps more importantly, some of the additions are designed to make secondary strategies as viable as pouring all your energy into stock portfolios. ( KS link

)

• Creating a card game about kawaii-faced sushi is certainly a bold move, given the dominant market presence of Sushi Go!

, but that’s exactly what Vanessa Simek is doing with Sushifuda

. If you can get past the superficial similarities, though, you’ll find a different sort of gameplay. As the name implies, the game is essentially a deck of Hanafuda

cards, which can be used to play a number of traditional Japanese card games, but Sushifuda

focuses on the Sakura

variation, which is about making matches. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2990950_t.png]• What do heroes do with their time off? The answer to that question provided the thematic backdrop for Epic Resort

, released in 2014 by designer Ben Harkins through Floodgate Games

. But whoever said there ain’t no rest for the wicked? Epic Resort: Villain’s Vacation

is an expansion for the original deck-building game, and has you creating getaways for vampires, witches, and other archetypal bad guys like you’re writing a script for Hotel Transylvania 3

. Truly, catering to such a diverse clientele must be frazzling for all but the most steadfast proprietors. ( KS link

)

• Over in Valeria, nobody’s resting on their laurels, because there are quests to be undertaken! Quests of Valeria

represents Daily Magic Games

and designer Isaias Vallejo’s third foray into this fantasy world. Here, completing quests is a matter of having the right combination of citizen cards in hand, which are gained via a conveyor belt system of depreciating cost (a la Small World

). Many of these quests involve violence, so let’s hope that blades made of Valerian steel are as strong and true as their Valyrian counterparts. ( KS link

)

• Some miniatures games storm onto the KS scene, and others crawl in at the ground level, fighting for scraps left behind by the giants. The latter scenario may be an apt descriptor for Picnic Panic

, which pits players as rival ant tribes, all bent on pillaging those red-and-white-checkered pantries du jour

. Stonegate Forge

is the design and publication team behind this grid-based battle game. In keeping with the theme, the rules encourage players to offer up actual food items as stakes for the win. Turn your next picnic into the Hungerdome! ( KS link

)

• Never would have thought I’d be writing about a luxury vehicle in one of these articles, but that’s exactly what the Game Canopy is: sumptuous transportation for your cardboard wealth. The folks at Level 3B have produced a state-of-the-art product unlike anything this industry has yet seen. Innovative features and rugged construction make it the bag to end all bags (and, like Bag End, it could likely fit a hobbit). The Game Canopy carries a hefty price tag but is an heirloom-quality product. I won’t need any other game bag for the next decade. ( 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

Game Overview: ButaBabel, or Rising to the Occasion

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/537…ababel-or-rising-occasion

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2925304_t.jpg]Since I'm on my way to Japan

at the moment to cover Tokyo Game Market, I thought it appropriate to cover one of the three games that I managed to acquire from the Kobe Game Market that took place in February 2016.

ButaBabel

is a card game for 3-5 players from designer Yuo

and design circle Kocchiya

that consists of only a few rules and plays in only a few minutes. I'm fascinated by Japanese game design minimalism — not that all Japanese game designers exhibit this trait in their creations, mind you, but many do. The games feel like cotton candy in your mouth, almost disappearing as you play them — yet you know something's there, so you try them again and again, curious to find out how the thing works.

I know that a lot of people put an emphasis on playing games for fun, but I lean toward playing games to discover what designers have created. Fun is a good thing, sure, but my concept of fun and yours might not overlap, and in many cases I find fun in the exploration

of the game as an artistic object more than an activity. The possibilities of what a game can be are huge, and I love exploring them!

On the Road Again...

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/53461/road-again

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2489670_t.png]I'm headed to the Tokyo Game Market

once again, with this show taking place on May 5, 2016. I've created a GeekList preview

to highlight some of the titles that will debut at that show or be available there (while being generally unavailable anywhere else), but I regret to say that this preview isn't up to the standard set by past TGM Previews. Travel — both for work and family — has eaten into available time, so in the time that I have had, I've focused more on posting on BGG News about games that will be available to a wider audience.

I'm taking the video camera and have already contacted some individuals about recording game overviews for titles at TGM. I'll also be posting pictures from the show, but probably not while the show is underway since TGM lasts only seven hours, and you need every minute available to photograph games, talk with people, and spot all of the stuff that you never would have imagined spotting earlier.

Following TGM, I'll be on the road for an additional nine days, taking an honest-to-goodness vacation for once — mostly because (1) I'm unlikely to have Internet access and (2) my boss has promised that I'm not on assignment during this trip. Yes, I had to get that statement in writing. I'll still be scouting for games during this trip, but just for fun — not for work.

To keep things going on BGG News since I'll have limited Internet access or none at all while traveling, I've scheduled designer diaries, game overview videos, round-ups of older (yet previously uncovered) games, and a links round-up or two. If possible, I'll jump online to post about newly announced games or round up pictures from TGM, but if not, I'll see you back in this space in mid-May. Be good in the meantime, and treat your fellow players better than they treat you!

The Complaints in Spain Stay Mainly in Pandemic Iberia

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/537…ay-mainly-pandemic-iberia

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3000850_t.png]As I noted in April 2016

, Z-Man Games

plans to hold the 2016 Pandemic Survival World Championship in Barcelona, Spain, and in an entirely not coincidental turn of events, Z-Man will also release a special version of Pandemic

to coincide with that event. Here's an overview of Pandemic Iberia

, coming from designers Jesús Torres Castro

— editor of the Spanish gaming blog Jugamos Tod@s

— and original Pandemic designer Matt Leacock

:

Welcome to the Iberian Peninsula! Set in 1848, Pandemic Iberia asks you to take on the roles of nurse, railwayman, rural doctor, sailor, and more to find the cures to malaria, typhus, the yellow fever, and cholera.

From Barcelona to Lisboa, you will need to travel by carriage, by boat, or by train to help the Iberian populace. While doing so, distributing purified water and developing railways will help you slow the spread of diseases in this new version of Pandemic.

Discover a unique part of the world during a historically significant time period: the construction of the first railroad in the Iberian Peninsula during the Spring of Nations.

Z-Man Games notes that Pandemic Iberia

, due out Q4 2016, is a "Collector's Edition" and as such it "will have a one-time only print run". The publisher has also released this teaser video that highlights a few differences of this design from the original game:

Designer Diary: 13 Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis, or Blowing Up the World, One Card at a Time

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/526…ban-missile-crisis-or-blo

by Asger Sams Granerud

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2935653_t.jpg] My name is Asger Sams Granerud and with Daniel Skjold Pedersen, we are the designers of 13 Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis. We want to share the journey of our game from idea, through development, into a game that you can now get your hands on! We hope you will enjoy the read...

What You Will Experience Playing 13 Days

13 Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis

is a 45-minute game for two players highlighting USA vs. USSR during the most dangerous tipping point of the Cold War. Players take the role of either President Kennedy or Khrushchev. You have to navigate the crisis by prioritizing your superpower's influence across many different agendas. You want to push hard to gain prestige and exit the crisis as the perceived winner. But there is a catch as there always is: The harder an agenda is pushed, the closer you get to triggering global nuclear war which will lose you the game!

13 Hours: Driving Home from Essen

It was Monday, October 27, 2013, somewhere close to midnight. The massive board game fair in Essen, Germany had just finished, and the road trip back to Copenhagen was well under way. Sitting in the car were three tired aspiring game designers: me, Daniel (my co-designer) and a shared friend. Daniel also happens to be the guy who introduced me to Twilight Struggle

a few years back. Unfortunately, we rarely get to play that brilliant game due to time constraints, which is doubly a shame as the game also improves with repeated play. It is not an easy game to pick up, but it offers a rich experience when you do. Though tired after a long week of talking about little other than games, we started discussing design ideas. The prolonged drive revealed that we had both had the same basic idea: How can we imitate the core experience of

Twilight Struggle in a readily accessible package, lasting less than an hour?

The rest of the trip was used to flesh out this idea, and several design goals were locked in place before reaching Copenhagen later that night. The game had to be short and intense, with a constant threat of losing. We settled on the Cuban Missile Crisis as this was probably the highest profiled conflict of the entire Cold War. It also happened to be short and intense, which perfectly suited our narrative. We wanted to retain the constant agony of choosing between lots of lesser evils that Twilight Struggle

does so well through its card-driven dilemmas.

13 Days: Building the Game

Almost half a year passed before Daniel and I managed to sit down and design the game. It was our first ever co-design process, so lots of things had to be learned from scratch. We discovered over time that we have different skill sets and experiences, but aligned goals and preferences. If you can find a co-designer like that, I can't recommend it enough!

The following design sessions are almost a blur for me. So many things happened so quickly, and the exact chronology escapes me because most of them fell into place within a very short timespan. We wanted to work in multiples of 13 where possible, so we ended up deciding that the game should have 13 turns. Moreover there are 13 Agendas, and 39 Strategy Cards divided into 13 USA, 13 USSR, and 13 Neutral cards.

We actually ended up cutting some corners for the sake of gameplay and accessibility. The better game must win over dogmas when they collide! As a result, the 13 turns became 12 turns and a special Aftermath turn. Twelve was easier to divide into three rounds of 4, which lead to a hand size of five cards. (The fifth card isn't played but is fed into the 13th Aftermath turn.) One small thematic decision ends up having lots of unforeseen ripple effects. My experience a couple of designs later is that simply locking in a few aspects early on is a great way to get started. Assuming you are capable of killing your darlings, it is easy enough to change such dogmas at a later stage!

By this time we knew we would be using the dual nature of event cards from Twilight Struggle

(i.e., the card-driven games or CDGs). All cards would be divided into three alignments (USA, USSR and Neutral), and each card would have the option of being played either for a basic Command (value 1-3) or for a unique Event that broke the core rules in different ways. If you played an opponent's event, he could get some benefit, despite it not even being his turn. What makes this experience work so well in Twilight Struggle

is the fact that every play of a card is a dilemma. Their dual nature, and sometimes detrimental effects, means you often feel like you're doing an impossible balancing act. Often the winner ends up being the person timing card play to minimize negatives. It sounds simple but really isn't! Compared to TS

we reduced the hand size and forced all cards to be played one way or another, ensuring that this core dilemma hits you from the first card in your first hand!

The scoring mechanism is central to any game. We wanted the entire feeling to be evocative of the tension from both the Cuban Missile Crisis and Twilight Struggle

. Unfortunately we had few turns to achieve this since we also wanted a game playable in 45 minutes. This meant we couldn't rely on reshuffling the deck and having the same scoring cards surface several times as that would require too many turns to be feasible in a short game or such a small deck that it would hamper replayability. We therefore made three distinctive choices:

-----

A) Each player picks a secret Agenda for the round, creating a partial bluffing game.
-----

B) All scoring was based on pushing ahead on either Influencing specific Battlegrounds or Dominating DEFCON Tracks.
-----

C) If your DEFCON Tracks are pushed too far, you risk losing the game immediately by triggering global nuclear war.

To make matters worse, the DEFCON tracks automatically escalate each round towards an end-game crescendo, and the Command action (the bread and butter of the gameplay) further escalates DEFCON. If you make small "non-threatening" Command actions, DEFCON stays put; if you make big heavy handed actions, the DEFCON track responds with equally wild swings. This can be beneficial if you rapidly need to deflate the DEFCON tracks, but more often it will be dangerous.

Rapid Prototyping

Ahead of the first design session, we agreed that we should be playing the game by the end of the evening. This forced us to do quick and dirty prototyping, knowing full well that all we had to test was the bare bones core mechanisms. No chrome, no nothing. We used a deck of playing cards to simulate the basic Command action, drew some different locations on an A4, and started pushing cubes around. By the end of that first evening two things were clear: 1) there was a worthwhile game to pursue and 2) testing further without the tension of the events was futile.

Thus, the ambition for the next design session was created. We had to make and test different events. We deliberately made more than we needed and removed some along the way, adding others. The events added the asymmetry and dilemmas we were hoping for, and experiencing the agony involved in deciding which cards to play when was a clear indicator we were on to something. You have only twelve cards to play during the entire game, so each decision is important. By that session, we were pretty sure that this game wasn't just interesting to us, but also relevant for a larger audience waiting to scratch that Twilight Struggle

itch!

For the design interested people reading this, there are two things I really can't recommend enough:

I) Get yourself a design partner. Actually, any creative endeavor in life I've participated in benefits if you have someone you can throw ideas up against. An internet forum is a poor man's alternative as it can never be as responsive or involved as a co-designer who knows the ins-and-outs of the project as well as you do. Testing the core game also becomes much easier (assuming it isn't min. 3+ players). If you find the right person to co-operate with, I can't see any negatives to working in pairs!

II) Rapid prototyping. Try to play your game as quickly as possible. Find out whether your core idea has the spark to be interesting. Don't think about it; try it. Forget about balancing, artwork and UI. Instead try to define what you consider to be the core mechanisms, and test whether they are fun at all. Satisfaction from playing games is more psychology than mechanisms, and you have to be much more talented than I am to figure that out from the sketch board, so try it!

13 Months: Pitching and Developing the Game

Obviously that was just the game design. The development took much longer. Even though the core game hardly shifted from the design established in March 2014, the cards were continuously tweaked and the user interface was updated to make testing with outsiders more feasible. We physically kept track on each card, making marks on how often they were played for Events vs. Command as well as looking out for an opponent's willingness to play the card or delay it for the Aftermath. This proved to be immensely valuable as it allowed us to continuously monitor which cards were fine and which needed tweaking or removal. Taking notes on the physical prototype is another lesson we've brought to our later designs.

All events were tied to a historical event from the period, and short texts setting the mood were added. Card effects were aligned to fit the new event, and lots of streamlining happened.

The biggest design "problem" that pursued us throughout the project was how to handle the secret Agendas and the scoring mechanism. We've tried more than five different variants as we wanted to find a version that ensured the bluffing didn't become blind guessing. We needed enough revealed information to create informed choices, without giving away so much that it was meaningless. Some of our variants became pure guessing, others became almost full information, and naturally we wanted the sweet spot in-between.

Thankfully a fast-paced two-player game is very easy to playtest when you're co-designing. Daniel and I could easily play a game in 30 minutes or less, and we thus managed to get many tests done. Obviously we also had to find external playtesters. We brought the game to two local conventions as well as several gaming groups. Finally, members of the Nordic Game Artisans

also tested it and eventually gave it their seal of approval.

Around that time, we started preparing for Spiel 2014 and contacting publishers to set up appointments. We brought a couple of other games as well, but knew that this game would likely require a niche publisher. Hence, we targeted our pitches at a much smaller group. One of them was Jolly Roger Games

, which unfortunately wasn't attending Spiel. On the plus side, JRG's Jim Dietz wanted to review the game anyway and asked for rules and other relevant files. He consulted none other than Jason Matthews, co-designer of Twilight Struggle

, and with his glowing endorsement proceeded. We sent a copy and his testing started, but he quickly asked that we reserve the game for him to decide by year's end!

We still ended up bringing the game to Spiel and pitching it to a few select publishers, with all involved parties being informed of the current situation, just in case. Thankfully Jim was impressed by the blind testing he had been doing himself, and after some consideration ended up pushing the big red button!

Final Thoughts

Both Daniel and I are really proud of the game we've designed and developed for you. Obviously it isn't a perfect realistic simulation of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 45 minutes, but we do feel it simulates core elements of it very well. Each player has to participate in several interconnected subgames: both a poker bluffing game of trying to mask which agendas are really important to them while uncovering your opponent's and a real world chess game of applying political, military and media influence across the globe. The conflict is constantly escalating and even though you don't want to slow down, you will often find yourself backpedaling to avoid the threat of global nuclear war. Finally, the stressful choices available to each president are effectively mirrored by the dilemmas forced upon you each round in which all cards must be put to use one way or another — even the bad ones.

13 Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis

turned out exactly as hoped, providing a great introductory political conflict game. The classic fans of the genre in general, and Twilight Struggle

in particular, will find a meaty filler. Meanwhile, newcomers will find an accessible introduction as the bluffing, the luck of the draw, and a capped scoring ensures that you're never too far behind to make a comeback — and even if you fail, you can always rewrite history in another 45 minutes!

If you're interested in hearing much more about the game, read our Sidekicking blog

on BGG, which includes a series of mini-designer diaries (MDD) written while the Kickstarter

was running in 2015 that delve into the nitty-gritty details of the design process!

Thieves Join Five Tribes, and SeaFall Prepares to Set Sail

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/537…-and-seafall-prepares-set

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3001544_t.jpg]• Bruno Cathala

's Five Tribes

debuted at Gen Con 2014, then The Artisans of Naqala

expansion joined the game at Gen Con 2015.

For Gen Con 2016, publisher Days of Wonder

will debut a mini-expansion for the game — Five Tribes: The Thieves of Naqala

— with Europe seeing the release of this $6/€5 item in June 2016. Here's an overview of how these thieves get involved in the game:

Naqala is now a prosperous place. Gaining the favors of the different tribes was not easy, and your rivals have not been discouraged by your success. In fact, some tribes have now abandoned your cause and rallied to your rivals instead, and you'll soon discover that these tribes follow influential leaders that your rivals hired against you. Every man has his price, though, so perhaps you can return the favor to your rivals — should you have what it takes to recruit the thieves of Naqala.

Five Tribes: The Thieves of Naqala is a mini-expansion of six thief cards and one new djinn that introduces a new element the base game to create a real thorn in your opponents' side. The djinn is shuffled into the deck with the other djinns and protects you from the effects of thieves. One thief card is revealed at random at the start of the game, and whenever someone would buy a djinn, they can purchase the thief card for the same price as the djinn. Each thief is associated with one of the tribes, and whenever you take an action with that tribe, you can choose to activate and discard the thief. If you do, everyone else must get rid of something — two resource cards, one tile they control, even a djinn or palace — after which you get to choose to keep something from all the discarded things.

For Gen Con 2017, the Five Tribes

expansion will consist of a single word that Cathala whispers in your ear. No spoilers!

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3002143_t.png]• Plaid Hat Games

has opened preorders

for the long-awaited SeaFall

from designer Rob Daviau

, with the game to be released in 2-5 months as it's "currently being assembled by our manufacturer".

PHG notes that some copies of SeaFall

will be available at Gen Con 2016 in August, most likely ahead of the preorders being shipped, but those copies cannot be preordered and they won't include a package of metal coins that will be included with preorders and otherwise sold separately.

Links: Wizards of the Coast Gets Sued, Refugees Get Games, and Carcassonne Gets Tabled

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/534…sued-refugees-get-games-a

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic163749_t.jpg]• Four judges of Magic: The Gathering

tournaments have sued Magic

publisher Wizards of the Coast

in United States District Court as they claim that they have been employed as judges by WotC but not fairly compensated for their work. From the lawsuit ( PDF

Plaintiffs and the putative class hereby seek compensation for unpaid minimum and overtime wages, missed meal and rest breaks, failure to timely pay wages, failure to furnish timely and accurate wage statements, failure to maintain accurate payroll records, unreimbursed business expenses, for interest and penalties thereon, and for reasonable attorneys' fees and costs pursuant to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938...

Wizards of the Coast has responded

by stating that "These lawsuits are meritless." More fully:

With the exception of the Pro Tour, the World Magic Cup, and the Magic World Championship, Magic events are run by tournament organizers and local game stores who directly engage judges. But these lawsuits claim that Wizards runs all events and that the people judging those events are Wizards employees. Anyone who has played at their local store knows this simply is not true.

Magic: The Gathering is fortunate to have the greatest community in gaming. Fans choose to become judges out of a sincere love of the game and as a way to enjoy their favorite hobby. They ensure events are fair and fun, and we appreciate everything they do.

On the "Legal Solutions" blog run by Thomson Reuters, Jeremy Byellin writes

that "It's difficult to envision a scenario wherein a federal judge...somehow determines that these judges aren't

employees of Wizards of the Coast" given a 2015 Browning-Ferris Industries, Inc. (BFI) ruling

by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Writes Byellin:

Wizards undoubtedly controls the terms and conditions of the employment of these judges – even through the intermediaries of local tournament organizers – such that it would be considered an employer of Magic judges under BFI. Trying to redirect employment responsibilities onto local gaming stores simply won't work in court...

The problem for Wizards is that there is no way that judges would ever be legally considered "volunteers." There is a lot of regulatory guidance on this matter. Volunteers are those "who perform[] hours of service for a public agency for civic, charitable, or humanitarian reasons, without promise, expectation or receipt of compensation for services rendered." Neither Wizards nor its local tournament organizers are public or non-profit organizations. And judges usually expect some kind of compensation for judging at events (although it's usually in the form of Magic products).

• Kniziathons

have been a thing for a while now, including a big one in 2015

for Reiner Knizia's 30th anniversary as a published game designer, and now Ward Batty has decided to do something similar for designer Wolfgang Kramer

, with the first Kramerthon! taking place at Batty's Game-o-Rama

event in Atlanta, Georgia on May 26-30, 2016. Lots of Kramer designs will be on hand for attendees, and prizes await both the person who plays the most different Kramer titles and the person who wins the most different games.

• Voting is open for the 2016 Deutscher Spiele Preis and all gamers are welcome to submit their votes here

. You can vote for five games in the adult game category (with your #1 game receiving 5 points, your #2 game 4 points, etc.) and one game in the children's category. Whichever game receives the most points wins, with the winner being announced during Spiel 2016 in October. Voters can receive prizes based on being correct or through random draw.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2841295_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic458934_t.jpg]• Germany has accepted more than a million refugees from Syria since 2014, and while the political fallout from this immigration is still ongoing (and beyond the scope of this blog), I can mention two game-related developments. First, designer/publisher Steffen Mühlhäuser

of Steffen-Spiele

has successfully crowdfunded a games project titled FIVE!

(or Give Me FIVE!

) to the tune of €38,000, with this being a collection of five games that can be played with the two sets of included tokens, with rules in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Tigrinya (in addition to German and English). The crowdfunded games will be given away to refugees and refugee centers — not sent to backers — and the sale of a copy through the Steffen-Spiele website

funds the giving of another copy.

• For its part, AMIGO Spiel

says that in response to a growing number of requests, it has created rulesheets in Arabic

for a number of its games — such as Halli Galli

, Klack!

, and Ring L Ding

.

• In late April 2015, German publisher Hans im Glück

celebrated

a world record game of Carcassonne

in which three gamers from Sweden laid out 10,007 tiles in 25 hours. Here's a shot of the full layout, followed by a pan-and-scan video for those who prefer the eroticism of a slow reveal:

Designer Diary: FUSE, or This Diary Will Self-Destruct After 10 Thumbs

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/520…ary-will-self-destruct-af

by Kane Klenko

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2884287_t.jpg]One way that I think up new game ideas and refine game designs is to picture people playing a game and having fun. I try to picture different elements of the game and get a vague idea of what makes it fun. If I "see" something, then I get to work and figure out how to make that happen. At other times, I see something, hear something, read something, or discuss something, and I get the idea that the "something" would make a great game theme. In both of these situations I'll write that something down or store it somewhere in my memory. Sometimes I get lucky and these two parts come together to form a game. That is what happened with FUSE

.

A long time ago, I had the thought that a fun game theme would be players acting cooperatively as a bomb squad to try to defuse bombs. "That's a cool idea", I said to myself — and then I put the idea aside as I was already working on several other designs.

In May 2014 I got a picture in my head of a group playing a game. I remember that I was driving on the highway after work, heading to my son's soccer practice. The picture was basically this: Players were sitting around a table, and several dice were rolled onto the table. They then discussed who got which dice. That was it. But for some reason it triggered an immediate recollection of the bomb squad theme: "What if they are using those dice to defuse bombs?!" This got me excited, and it became more than just another idea that I would write down or forget about. I needed to make this work.

My initial thought was that each player would have a player board with a combination that would defuse the bomb. There were five columns on the board, and each was a different color with a number at the bottom.

Players would roll dice, then take one to place on their board; a green die would go in the green column, etc. The object was to get the total on the dice pips in the column to have their last digit match the number in the combination, so if the number in the column was a 3, you could have a 3 or dice that totaled 13, 23, etc. This would "unlock" that part of the combination.

The idea was easy enough to scribble together a couple of boards and give it a shot — and within two minutes I knew it didn't work. I still liked the idea of players working out who took which dice from a single die roll, but the way I had the "bomb boards" set up didn't work.

One thing I always think about when working on a game is what I want the players to feel. With this game, I wanted tension between taking what you need versus giving it up for another player with a common goal. With the dice, I was going for the idea that some dice would work for more than one player, so it wasn't always clear who should take which dice. Sometimes you would really need something, sometimes you could take anything and give your teammates what they need, and sometimes you would be stuck and not be able to take anything. The combination boards didn't work because it was either obvious what you should take or, more likely, you couldn't take anything. The boards needed work.

The other issue I could see right away was that I had no idea what the overall flow of the game was. How do you win? Do you just need to get these few dice on your board to defuse the bomb and then you're done? What if the other players aren't done? I try to think about production costs when I work on a game, so I knew that I didn't want a bunch of these boards in the game.

That first two-minute test was done on my lunch break at work, and on the drive home I thought about how to fix the problems. By the time I got home, I had an idea that I thought would work. Instead of each column needing a specific number in a specific color, they would instead need different combinations of dice that were more open ended. So instead of needing a green 3, you would instead need a green die, any color 3, and something else. To keep the board from getting cluttered, I decided to split each column off into its own card. This also solved the other problem of game flow. If each combination was its own card, then these could be individual bombs and once you defused it, you would simply draw another one. I knew this was the answer, so I spent the next two days making bomb cards with different dice combinations needed to defuse them.

The first test with this revised idea was with my wife and kids. I knew I wanted the players to be up against a timer, and that I wanted the game to be short, but I didn't know exactly how short. I figured I'd go with five minutes for our first game. I also didn't know how many cards we would be able to complete in a game, so I made thirty or forty and put them all in the first game just to see how many we could clear. The timer started and we began playing — and it worked! As soon as the five-minute timer beeped, I knew that was too short, so I reset it and said to keep playing. When it beeped again, the game length felt right. Ten minutes. It gave me the quick game that I wanted, but also gave enough time to feel like we had progressed and accomplished something, and it wasn't over too soon.

Okay, so the core of the game was set. Now I needed to figure out the rest of it, namely how you win, what happens if someone doesn't take a die, how the game is set up on the table, and whether I wanted to add anything else to the core mechanisms.

In the first couple of tests we finished around fifteen cards, and that was with us having no idea what we were doing. It also involved me thinking through the design as we played, so I figured somewhere around twenty cards was probably about right. That would be the goal: Defuse twenty bombs in ten minutes. Easy to explain and exciting. I knew I had something, so I put aside all other designs to focus on this one exclusively.

Now, what to do about dice that the players don't take? My initial idea was terrible. Any dice that weren't taken were placed onto a track that would lock those dice up. The idea was that if you ran out of dice in the bag, then you would lose the game. As the track filled up, you could return the dice to the bag, but you would be penalized by drawing a certain number of time tokens that would cost the team from 0 to 15 seconds. If players defused all twenty bombs, they would stop the timer, then subtract their "time token" time to see whether they still won. For example, if we defused all the bombs with 33 seconds still on the clock, and we had drawn 30 seconds worth of time tokens, then we would have won the game with 3 seconds to spare. I liked the idea of the tension this might create — with you running low on dice, but not wanting to risk returning them and drawing time tokens — but the execution was convoluted and clunky. I wanted this game to be streamlined and easy to learn. I needed a new idea.

I decided to simplify and lose the whole idea of the extra track. If a die wasn't taken, then it should just be rolled and something happens. The next idea, which I stuck with for a little while, was that the die was rolled and on a 1 or 2 nothing happened and the die was returned to the bag; on a 3 or 4, it was returned to the bag, but you had to draw a FUSE Token (more on those later); and on a 5 or 6, the die was removed from the game and you had to draw a FUSE token. This was much more streamlined than the old idea, but the more I played it, the more I felt like it was still too clunky. It needed to be stripped down one more time.

The final rule for the game is that any dice that are not taken are rolled, then players must return a die from their bomb cards that matches the color or number rolled. Simple, easy to remember, tension-adding — just what I was looking for.

Okay, FUSE tokens. While I wanted to keep this game simple and not move beyond the core mechanism too much, I had always pictured tokens that would be activated throughout the game. The initial idea was that some tokens were good and some were bad; sometimes you were lucky in what you flipped, and sometimes you weren't. But I'm designing a cooperative game here, so why would I want to be nice to you?! Thus, all of the tokens are bad. If you need me to help you out by giving you aid tokens, then maybe you shouldn't be defusing bombs in your spare time.

The final issue was how all of this would be displayed on the table and how the game would flow. After the first couple of tests, I made a super fancy board by taking an old manila folder and marking twenty spaces around the outside of it. Some of them had spaces for FUSE tokens, and when you defused a bomb card, you would place it on one of these spaces (numbered 1-20), then activate any FUSE token there. If you filled the board, then you won. I liked this because it kept everything contained nicely and gave players a sense of accomplishment as they filled the board.

The game stayed like this for some time, but while thinking about the theme one day I decided to reverse it, filling the board with cards during set-up and having players take the next card in order from the board as soon as they defused a bomb. This still gave players the same sense of accomplishment as they emptied the board, but it seemed to fit the theme better since you were "finding" these bombs and defusing them. This is the version of the game that I played for a long time and the one that I showed to Renegade Game Studios

— and then I changed my mind.

What if I made the game even more portable by getting rid of the board? The board doesn't actually do anything, and when watching new players play the game, sometimes they would be confused about which card to take next. What else does scrapping the board accomplish? It means we can make the game more portable, bring the price down, and make it look less intimidating to non-gamers. (Not that it was ever intimidating — I just needed a third thing to list.)

Now the game was only cards and dice — and tokens. Oh, yes, tokens. If I have only a deck of cards, how do I incorporate the FUSE tokens? I couldn't stack them in the deck...but I could turn them into cards. I really liked this idea because changing them from tokens to cards opened things up for more ideas to be added. I still wanted to keep the game simple and accessible, but with tokens becoming cards the design now had more room for different ideas and options for expansions.

Speaking of options, another later addition to the game was the point system. I had been thinking about a way to add a little more replayability and choice to the game, and the point system answered both of those issues. I decided that the set-up without the board would be the deck of cards with five face-up cards in the middle of the table, and when you finished a card, you could choose one of the face-up cards to replace it. This now gave you a choice of going for easier or harder cards. Why would you ever choose to take a more difficult card? Points. I decided to give each card a point value so that players could now not only try to win the game, but also shoot for higher scores, thus adding more choices and replayability to the game.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2744644_t.jpg]That's the story of the design. I set out to create an exciting cooperative game that could be set up, taught, and played in just a few minutes, and I believe I succeeded in every aspect.

FUSE

is exactly the game that I wanted it to be, and it came together quickly, too. I started working on it in May 2014 and was able to show it to publishers at Gen Con 2014 just a few months later. I had several publishers interested in the design, but I decided to sign the game with Renegade Game Studios. Although Renegade was a new company at the time, I was really impressed by Scott Gaeta, the founder and president. Corey Young (designer of Gravwell

) introduced us at Gen Con, and I was immediately drawn to Scott's vision for games and the industry. Working with Scott and Renegade has been great — so much so that we've announced Covert

for release in 2016 with more announcements to come in the future.

FUSE

is one of those games that makes you say, "Okay, let's do that again. I know we can win this time!" I hope you enjoy FUSE

as much as we have!

— Kane Klenko

Game Preview: Animals on Board, or Every Living Thing of All Flesh, You Shall Bring One or At Minimum Three of Every Kind into the Ark

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/537…d-or-every-living-thing-a

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2845593_t.jpg] Ralf zur Linde

and Wolfgang Sentker

's Animals on Board

is built on a cheeky premise: You and others are populating an ark with animals during the time of Noah, but due to Noah's previously agreed contracts, you are prohibited from having pairs of animals once it comes time to launch.

The game doesn't need this premise to exist as the design works well on its own, but the concept gives you a package, a framework in which to think about the game. And as eggertspiele

did with Camel Up

and its unnecessarily awesome pyramid, the publisher has used simple cardboard to provide players with well-designed bits, specifically four cardboard arks that players use to hold their animal tiles during the game. When you first open the box, you see a few punchboards floating in air and think, "That's it?!" Then you punch out and assemble everything, and suddenly you barely have room in the box to fit it all!

Designer Diary: Tetrarchia, or The Four Swords of Rome

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/514…rchia-or-four-swords-rome

by Miguel Marqués

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2835512_t.jpg] By the end of the III century BC, the Roman consul Marcus Claudius Marcellus was nicknamed "The Sword of Rome" for his exploits in the wars against the Gauls and the Carthaginians.

Five centuries later, by the end of the III century AD, the times of the old Republic are too far away and the now Roman Empire seems doomed. Enemies cross the borders, rebellion spreads over its provinces, and when an Emperor has both the courage and ability to face the threats, usurpers take his place in Rome, increasing the chaos. The Emperor Diocletian sees only one revolutionary way out: Share the divine power with trusted colleagues. In a few years he forms an Imperial College with Maximian, Constantius and Galerius, leading to the first Tetrarchy. Now the swords of Rome are four, and they are going to fall without mercy over their enemies...

This is the fascinating story that pushed me to design Tetrarchia

!

The Idea

This game was born from the overlap of several passions:

1) After playing Gardens of Mars

(from nestorgames

), I was amazed about how much can be done with so little. A board that can be rolled up, plastic discs, laser-cut meeples, some dice...and that's all. No cards, no tables, no box! Only components that are wear-proof in a format compact and light that can be taken anywhere. I fixed this component limit as an objective for my next design.

2) I am a fan of games, but most of all of history. I read a lot about military conflicts, and I play wargames. I felt like introducing the genre in nestorgames, since I think their format would be perfect for light wargames. I have several very different ideas for some wars; I only needed to pick one to start with...

3) I play solitaire often, for lack of time and/or players, and I have found that cooperative games are a fun alternative to the more traditional solitaire games. I started with Pandemic

, then Ghost Stories

, and finally Flash Point: Fire Rescue

. I love the fire-spreading mechanism of the latter; you can always be surprised because it is not deterministic at all, but following a strategy you can limit the surprises and end up controlling it. I needed a period in which threats spread in an unpredictable way.

4) My passion for Commands & Colors: Ancients

, the game I play the most, has shifted my history interests from Classical Greece to Rome. First the Republic, then the Empire...and finally the Late Empire. When I started reading about Diocletian and the Tetrarchy, I felt that all these passions fitted together!

First Steps

The random mechanism to spread revolts required two levels of threats, which I defined as Unrest

(gray disc) and Revolt

(black). I also needed two coordinates per space that would be obtained by rolling dice, which I immediately identified with Regions

and Provinces

. In order to distinguish both coordinate dice I chose a thematic solution: a Roman die and a normal one. I tried to find six regions (with Roman numerals) holding each six provinces (decimal numerals), around the central region Italia

. I had to distort the Late Roman Empire maps I found (more on that below), made a very rough sketch, and started to play!

The players would handle the four Emperors, and on their turn they would first spend action ( Imperivm

) points to fight for Rome, then roll the dice to propagate threats on the coordinates obtained. In Flash Point

there is "only" the fire-related threat; here the revolt in the provinces would be completed by Barbarian armies that would try to reach Rome. The aim of the game would be to protect the Empire borders (those of the six outer regions) before half of the provinces revolted or Rome fell.

Several items played several roles. The numbers on the provinces gave me their coordinates within the region, but by ordering them in some way they could also give me the path the Barbarian armies would follow through that region. The dice that gave me the coordinates could also give me the combat results: the Roman die for the Roman, the decimal die for the Barbarian. Making them white and black, respectively, made this function become even more explicit.

The final touch to add strategy to combat was the ideas of support (discs that add to the result of the die) and of combined attack (other Emperors/Barbarians connected to the battle multiplying the result x2). With neither tables nor complex calculations, a single roll of two dice solves battles, with a touch of uncertainty and, more importantly, the promotion of cooperation. After all, in many situations it is impossible to defeat a Barbarian army on your own, and that requires careful team planning because armies are a threat that moves from turn to turn.

The Map

The map had to be A4 size (nestorgames) and hold six regions around Italia

with six provinces each (of 15mm diameter). Therefore, the "real" maps (above) could not be used. First, I had to remove Britannia

from the Empire because its border would have been too far north and some oriental conquests that pushed that border too far east. Then I had to distort some regions: Hispania

smaller than Gallia

, push the Danube up to leave more room for Illyricvm

and Graecia

, compress the Turkish peninsula...

Once the frame had been defined (below left), I chose among the historical provinces those that were better known (as there were far more than 42), though I had to move some and make up others. The nature of the links connecting provinces was an easy issue as it was given by the geography (some are "broken" and cost twice to cross), and this is an advantage when you design real world conflicts! Finally, I had to find a border/threat for each region. For Gallia

, it allowed me to take Britannia

back to the board, but I had a problem with the Iberian peninsula...

I considered adding an exception for Hispania

and saying that region (like Italia

) had no border/threat, but it was a blow to my quest of elegance and simplicity — then history came to my rescue! It turns out that at that time they had included the most western African province, Mavretania Tingitana

(modern Morocco), into Hispania

in order to better answer to threats coming from that area. Problem solved: Africa

would end between modern Morocco and Algeria, and Hispania

had its border!

The rest was "easy": Play with the colors, textures, contrasts...up to the final touch of using the die symbols for the region/province numerals because as soon as you roll the dice, you see the province they refer to.

All in all, I am very proud of the map! If you scroll back to the top of the diary, you'll see the final map stretched to fit on top of the real one. I wanted the game to be language independent, so from the start I chose Latin names for everything, even the title! The rulebooks are available (for the moment) in English, Spanish and French.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2653727_t.jpg] The Capitals

I added a final touch of history to the map by drawing the Tetrarchic capitals. Although Rome continued to be the nominal capital of the entire Roman Empire, the Tetrarchs based themselves in other cities closer to the borders, mainly intended as headquarters for the defense of the Empire against the most immediate and menacing threats:

-----

[BGCOLOR=#FF0000]()[/BGCOLOR] Augusta Treverorum

(modern Trier) was the capital of Constantius, the western Caesar, near the strategic Rhine border (province Germania Inferior

).

-----

[BGCOLOR=#0000FF]()[/BGCOLOR] Mediolanum

(modern Milan) was the capital of Maximian, the western Augustus, in charge of Italia

and Africa

(province Cisalpina

).

-----

[BGCOLOR=#FFFF00]()[/BGCOLOR] Sirmium

(modern Sremska Mitrovica) was the capital of Galerius, the eastern Caesar, on the critical Danube border (province Pannonia Inferior

).

-----

[BGCOLOR=#00CC00]()[/BGCOLOR] Nicomedia

(modern Izmit) was the capital of Diocletian, the eastern Augustus, a base against invasion from the Balkans and Persia (province Bithynia

).

In the game they play their historical role, a base to reach the borders more rapidly and a support against revolts and Barbarian armies. And without adding specific powers to each Emperor figure, they give them a historical flavor.

The Nestorgames Edition

The design process had been extremely fast: I started drawing maps freehand in June 2015, and by September 2015 the game was ready! I was lucky enough that all the different ideas fit from the start; everything worked as I had expected or better. The couple of things that hindered the game flow were solved with the help of my brother Fernando, who has the ability to "see" through game designs. As I said, one of the precursor ideas was fitting the nestorgames format, so contacting Néstor was the natural next step.

For a moment I was tempted to try more "traditional" publishers in order to have a box, mounted map, miniatures...but very soon I realized that the game would be much better with a case, a rollable board, and meeples, my original idea. So I contacted Néstor, and (as with my BASKETmind

) he surprised me again! Very professional, respectful of the design, always fast to suggest ideas. Sometimes we forget how globalization has changed our lives: being thousands of km away, an e-mail, a picture taken with the phone, a search on google...and a new idea replaces a problem.

For the Emperors, we chose a Roman silhouette inspired by the statue of the tetrarchs above, with cylindrical helmets. As you can see, the Roman meeples look great. (I know I'm subjective...) They are cute, you can spot them very easily on the board, and they give the game a lot of character. I like them more than the Greek and Roman miniatures I had bought for the prototypes (see above, left-center)!

The printed map looks great, too. It is the first time I take a freehand drawing so far, going through a computer vector drawing (that I already had) and finally aging it with Photoshop. It is also the first game map I've seen on a mouse pad, and all the players have loved it!

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2835074_t.jpg] Fight for Rome!

I hope this diary has given you an overall view of the game, of the why behind some design choices, and also the will to try it! It has nothing to do with my first design, BASKETmind

, except for the format. The latter was exclusively two players, face to face, sports themed... Tetrarchia

can be played solitaire or with 2-4 players, is cooperative, has a historical theme, and plays in about 30 minutes. I am very happy with the result, it has become the game I play the most (alone or with others), and the nestorgames edition has exceeded all my expectations.

The set-up has four parameters that can take three values each, depending on the difficulty you wish, so you can define up to 81 different challenges! The game also includes five official variants that twist the gameplay, especially the last one — "The Great" — that moves sooner in time the historical facts that followed the Tetrarchy (the rivalries that ended it to the hands of Constantine the Great), adding a competitive aspect that hinders cooperation.

And the design process is not over. We have already an expansion that will introduce a new and redoubtable enemy ( Gothic Army

), a new obstacle ( Pirates

) to block naval movement, and a fifth colleague ( Dux

) to help the Emperors. I am even thinking of a different game for three players set 150 years later, not cooperative at all, that will use the same components, but it will take longer to develop...

Thanks for reading, and I hope some of you will enjoy the game!

Miguel Marqués

P.S. #1 For those who don't know, Constantine the Great was the son of Constantius, the "Red Emperor" in this game.

P.S. #2 You can find some strategy tips here

or here

.

Crowdfunding Round-up: Post-Apocalyptic Fundraising for Fun and Profit

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/534…pocalyptic-fundraising-fu

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2994858_t.jpg] Editor's note: Due to my travel plans, I'm writing this crowdfunding round-up far in advance of its May 8, 2016 publication date. Thus, some of the projects mentioned below might have been cancelled in the interim. If so, c'est la vie. —WEM

• Post-apocalyptic board games are all the rage, and the latest in that genre (for the next few hours at least) is Antler Games

' Saltlands

from designers András Drozdy, Gombos Gergely, and Gergely Kruppa. In the game, players use land sails with wheels to skim across the salt flats, trying to outrun — or kill — the Horde chasing them on gas-guzzling machines. ( KS link

)

(As a side note on the connectivity that can result from a Kickstarter campaign, Drozdy sent me the following note: "I was amazed when just two hours after launch, the first translator contacted us, then even more. It's great to see that these enthusiastic people offered their help to make Saltlands

available in their mother tongue." Thus, in addition to having English rules in the box and German and Hungarian rules available for download, rules will also be available in Italian, French, Finnish, Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese.)

• Bloodstone Frontier

sounds like an equally dire place to visit, but the setting is "pioneer-punk" rather than post-apocalyptic, with players of this tabletop skirmish design from Julian Glover and Soulspryte Studios

fighting over the stashes that they need to survive. ( KS link

)

• As every artist (writer, musician, etc.) knows, creating art isn't enough; you need to sell it as well, or else you won't have the funds to keep doing what you want to do. (Alternatively, find a sponsor, but that's a different game.) Mike Wokasch's Starving Artists

from Fairway 3 Games

challenges you to get the paint cubes you need to finish classic works of art, but if you bring that art to the market at the wrong time, you might find the supplies gone before you can refill your palette. ( KS link

)

• Speaking of writers, Mayday Games

' Twist of Fate

from Keith Rentz transforms Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist

into a micro card game, with players using double-sided cards to attack opponents' luck or shillings while boosting their own in the search for long-term sanctuary. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2977535_t.png]• Beau Langston's self-published Loot Quest

pretty much lays out what it's offering in the title and with the cover artwork: fantasy characters go on quests to acquire loot. ( KS link

)

• Less straightforward fantasy is present in Legends of the Mist

from Chris Peach and Kid Loves Tiger Games

, which is not about the most awesome shower in all of creation, but an otherworldly mist that transports clans to a new land, after which they proceed to beat one another up via plot tiles and dice rolls to complete objectives for the Emperor (or Empress — the description swaps genders at one point). ( KS link

)

• Another far-out world comes from John Clowdus of Small Box Games

with a pair of games — GearSeed

and SYNOD

— set in a world in which "seasons shift sporadically and the strange folk that call this world home do their best to adapt to its ever changing landscape". If anyone exhibits the doujin spirit of Tokyo Game Market, it's Clowdus, who keeps turning out small card games one after another. ( KS link

)

• Perhaps I'm underestimating the appeal of gnarly goat gums among gamers, but the cover of Clash of the Battle Goats

isn't one I'd be highlighting on my shelves. This "tactical card game of brutal goat combat" can be integrated with Gruff

, a 2015 release also from Brent Critchfield and Studio Woe

, to create exactly the right combination of mutated monster goats. ( KS link

)

• "Avoid the void" seems like sensible advice no matter what that void might be: a crevice in the roadway, a sinkhole in Florida, or the gaping maw of a battle goat. Avoid the Void

from Tim Mierzejewski and Geek Fever Games

offers a more traditional take on a void, with 3-7 players trying to avoid being sucked into black holes longer than anyone else. ( KS link

)

• Another space-based trope is present in Into the Black: A Game of Space Piracy

from James J. Campbell and the improbably named I Will Never Grow Up Gaming

, with the player pirates working together to reach the bridge of a federal starship before getting busted by those selfsame feds. ( Publisher's website

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2992100_t.jpg]• Another co-op coming down the production chute in 2016 is Virus

from Michele Quondam and his publishing house Giochix.it

, with players infiltrating a secret military lab in order to discover the antidote for Virus Q, which is transforming people and animals into hideous monsters who are naturally inside the lab trying to thwart your efforts. Virus

can also be played semi-cooperatively and competitively in case you fight for dibs over who saved humanity while rocking the government-issued skintight leather uniform. ( Giochistarter link

)

• And the co-ops continue in Bloc by Bloc: The Insurrection Game

from Rocket Lee, Tim Simons, and Out of Order Games

, with each player controlling a faction of revolutionaries who are trying to take down the authorities and occupy state districts before the military arrives and time runs out. To win, though, each faction needs to not only oust the state, but complete its secret agenda as well. ( KS link

)

• You have another chance to topple the state in Coup

. This Rikki Tahta design was first self-published in 2012, then picked up Indie Boards & Cards

and brought to a far wider audience, with versions having been released in Germany, Russia, Spain, and many other countries, including Brazil in a stylish version with art by Weberson Santiago. Now IBC has licensed the art from that Brazilian version for the release of Coup Deluxe Edition: Brazil Art

, which will include the Coup

base game and some of the elements from Coup: Reformation

. Yet another composite item to further entangle our database listings... ( KS link

)

• If overturning the government isn't your thing, you can try to run it instead in Jim McCollum's Ameritocracy

, a 2-3 player design with dual-use cards that can be played either one way as teams or actions or the other way as staff members who join teams (to activate those abilities) or claim headlines. ( KS link

)

• If nothing else catches your eye in this post, I hope you'll at least be inspired by what was also the inspiration for Xavier Faure's Guédelon: Le Jeu

from ASYNCRON games

. Since 1997, Michel Guyot — who is owner of Saint-Fargeau Castle in Saint-Fargeau, France — has been leading a construction project in nearby Treigny to build a castle using only techniques and materials available during the Middle Ages. The project has an estimated completion date of 2020 and attracts more than 300,000 visitors annually.

Guédelon: Le Jeu

is an attempt to gamify this long-term building project, with 2-4 players working cooperatively (yes, another one!) to build a castle before unforeseen events and an ever-increasing number of visitors hamstring your efforts to complete the project in time. ( 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

Designer Diary: Back to the Future and The Goonies, or The Fleeples Go to Hollywood!

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/528…e-and-goonies-or-fleeples

by Matt Riddle

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2673456_t.jpg]Hello, Ben Pinchback

here once again writing the main sections of a designer diary, while Matt Riddle

will chip in his comments in green. We all know from his mysterious absence in writing BoardGameGeek crowdfunding round-up articles as of late that Matt is clearly out of jokes, so it should be interesting to see him play this straight — and by "out of jokes", of course I mean he finally did us all a favor and ceded his throne to an actual professional writer, Dustin Schwartz of The Rules Forge

fame. Seriously, Dustin is a great writer and a rising rulebook writer/editor guru. Game makers, contact this guy and use him.

Well!! Looky, looky, here comes hooky. Finally Ben does all the writing and I can pipe in with witty repartee and insightful comments. Or balls jokes. We will see. I can either go high class or play this Louie style: "I'm gonna dip..." Oh, and a little foreshadowing since we are now two paragraphs in and haven't yet mentioned the games: This is the designer diary for Back to the Future: An Adventure Through Time

and The Goonies: Adventure Card Game

. Hence the "go to Hollywood" thing.

So if you actually have any clue who either Matt or I am, it's either because of Matt's admittedly solid run as W. Eric Martin's crowdfunding write-up nemesis or because you've played one of our previously published games, most likely Fleet

. Fleet

had a beautiful run into the BGG top 500 and has since slid a few spots outside, which actually isn't that bad because now we can appear on all of those "best games outside the top 500" lists.

It was almost certainly Fleet

. While Ben and I are poised to have a very nice 2016, if there were a pie chart of "Games of ours people have played", it would look like Pac-Man with Fleet

starring as Pac-Man and everything else the mouth.

We've had some other nice projects with Eagle-Gryphon Games such as Eggs and Empires

, Floating Market

, and Fleet Wharfside

, but safe to say not a transcendent megahit yet. So how did these two relatively new designers from suburban Detroit end up with the keys to two of the absolute cornerstones of your childhood? And what is a Fleeple?

First thing's first: A Fleeple is an absolutely terrible name coined by Dan Patriss of The Geek All-Stars

that somehow stuck because it's kind of funny. Fleet

guys + fish meeples? Either way, Ridback is just as bad and Dan is the best, so we roll with it.

Ya, I suggested "Matt Riddle Games feat. Ben P" but was shot down. Honestly, Ridback Games sucks, but we honestly do not have any better ideas.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2935763_t.jpg]How we came to work with both IDW Games

and Albino Dragon

is basically the same. Fleet

being so well received opened the doors for us. For IDW, it was a Nathan-to-Nate introduction as Nathan from Pandasaurus

knew us from Fleet

and had actually just begun working with us on another recently announced project, Wasteland Express Delivery Service

co-designed with Jon Gilmour

. How's that for a name drop? Gilmour. Jon Gilmour. Dead of Winter

. Gilmour, Jon. Worked with us. He's a great guy. That Jon Gilmour.

Where was I? We're gonna do more together, too. Us and Gilmour. From Dead of Winter

. So anyway, Nathan from Pandasaurus introduced us to Nate from IDW, who was looking for a card-based Back To The Future

engine, so we started talking. They gave us a shot to show them an idea at Gen Con, and we enthusiastically accepted. Needless to say, the meeting went well and full-on development ensued.

Like most people in their 30s, I love Back to the Future

and was SUPER excited to jump in on that one. Also, I HATE the stupid "break the internet" BS exaggeration that people use, but did you see the buzz WEDS

has gotten? Crazy. Like the art. But Back to the Future

, ya, super excited. Oh! Also, as Ben and I head down Eurotrash lane, we are working on a Sleepy Hollow

game that will have minis and characters and co-op pumpkin dude, fighting dice stuff in it. That will be with Greater Than Games/Dice Hate Me Games later in 2016. As it turns out, we have fully embraced our mid-Atlantic designs.

With Albino Dragon, it was a very similar story through a mutual friend. Once again Fleet

was the catalyst as Erik from Albino Dragon was looking to do a card-based Goonies

game and his real-life friend Scott Morris

(Tox) from Crits Happen and Firefly: Shiny Dice

had become a friend of ours through Fleet

, then through hanging out at conventions. (Free tip for designers: Go to every single convention you possibly can.) So Fleet

opened the doors for us to work with these companies that were looking for card-driven experiences for Back To The Future

and The Goonies

, but how would Matt and I approach the designs?

Carefully but with gusto. You know what I loved more than BttF

? The Goonies

. I own a DVD of The Goonies

and made my daughters watch it. I forgot how 1980s PG it was, but still totally worth it. I wanted to be a Goonie so hard when I was a kid.

The very first thing we had to talk about with each design was scope: the project scope vs. the scope of the game experience. It was obvious to us in both cases that card-based was not going to lend itself to a straight-up simulation. Neither of these games were going to be 45 lb. (20.4 kg) sprawling monsters with minis and scenario books. It wasn't our gut reaction then to try to walk players linearly through the storylines, and frankly I'm not sure I'd want to do that anyway. If I'm playing a Back To The Future

game, I know I want to fly around in the DeLorean time-traveling; I don't want to play for hours and only actually fly the dang thing two or three times. People absolutely love the characters in the movie, and they love the DeLorean, so that was set for Back to the Future

. The soul of the game was going to be using the characters in thematic ways and time-traveling in the DeLorean as much as possible.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2913950_t.jpg]For The Goonies

, the answer came to us quickly, even if we didn't want to admit it at first. This game had to be a co-op. Neither of us could imagine doing anything else but making a game in which you team up as the Goonies and run the adventure, avoiding the Fratellis and searching for One-Eyed Willy's ship and treasure. It just wouldn't sit right with us to have something like Mouth competing with Chunk to get the most treasure. It just doesn't work.

It is a not-so-secret secret that neither Ben nor I terribly enjoy co-op gaming. I like winning. I like defeating the other players, especially Ben. While we knew it had to be co-op, it was a mental hurdle to accept that. That said, I have recently begun to appreciate solo gaming and that community. I have been able to enjoy co-op gaming with my girls and parents. I was excited.

But Back to the Future

is competitive. How does that work? For us, that was an easier abstraction to make gameplay-wise. With The Goonies

, you have one of the most famous ragtag teams of all time on an epic adventure together. Goonies never say die, etc. In Back to the Future

, the team is really Marty and Doc...and the other Doc. It didn't seem that natural to form a team-up like that and have players work cooperatively. The idea that you'd use these characters to progress the story and fix the timeline seemed more in tune with the movie to us because that's what Marty's doing the entire movie series: Trying to put people in the proper situations and fix the timelines to ultimately get his life back in order. This is exactly what we have players doing, and we loved it. Just like Marty is able to position George to stand up to Biff, players will do similar things with all of the main characters from the movie.

That's where the role selection came in. Turn to turn, players can use Biff for their nefarious plans to try to hose other players. Lorraine can be selected for a clever time shift at just the right moment. Need some help flying the time machine? Doc is your Guy. Every character we used felt to us exactly how they feel in the movie. Being the best at getting everyone right where (and when) they needed to be at just the right time felt good. It feels like Doc just crashed into your trash cans shouting "Marty! We gotta go NOW!" Side note: Doc, you have a time machine. You could slow down just a tic. Maybe come back five minutes earlier and calmly explain what's going on vs. Lightning! POW! Crash! "Marty! NOW! Get in the #@%#ing car!!" I totally stole that joke from Chris Leder

btw. ( Roll For It

. Fun game. Kind of a bossy title, though. No, you

roll for it. Fool.)

Chris Leder is the best! Great dude, playtester, and designer. Character usage in both games was very important to us. We wanted to curate the player's game experience to feel like they WERE the characters. With The Goonies

, that meant picking a character and being that character throughout the game. You ARE Data. With BttF

, that wouldn't really work. No one wants to be anyone other than Marty. MAYBE Doc. No one WANTS to be George, though, or Jennifer. Well, maybe furries want to be Einstein. Either way, everyone wants to be Marty.

Back to The Goonies

: It's a co-op. How are we going to separate this from all the other co-ops? The answer is the team turn. We wanted to give players a sense of working as the Goonies, so the team gets four actions every round. Those actions are used to navigate around the locations, clear obstacles, search for treasure, avoid the Fratellis, discover the ship, etc. How the team chooses to spend these four actions is entirely up to them: One player may contribute multiple cards for multiple actions in a round, one player might hang back and save cards, two players may team up for one action. It's entirely on the team to figure out how best to manage four actions a turn amongst themselves, given that every player also has both a special gamelong ability and a one-shot power to use at the optimal time.

When we started testing this system, the coolest thing started to happen. We noticed that the alpha player syndrome — the table general, if you will — was very much reduced, if not eliminated altogether, because in a team turn every player has enough options of their own to process that you don't have time or mental capacity to micromanage everyone else.

Here's an example of this in a standard co-op: When it's Matt's turn, we all sit there and stare at Matt analyzing his hand of cards and urging him not to mess it all up for us. We hold Matt's hand for him because we have time to babysit him and make sure he doesn't end the world accidentally. In The Goonies

, with the team all taking four actions together, I'm looking at my own hand of cards, my power, my ability, and I'm lobbying for how I best think I can help the situation. Okay, there's a problem over there, I can help with this. Oh, you can do that? Great. You think I should use this power? Etc. The problem-solving immediately becomes a team engagement and everyone feels like they're helping. Even Matt. I love that after a game of The Goonies

, win or lose, you and the other members of the team really feel like you went on that adventure together.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2941990_t.jpg]

Sigh. High Road.

So the DeLorean is flown around a ton, but how did we actually handle time travel in Back to the Future

? The first thing we did was take a page from Fleet

and give the cards in the main draw deck a few different stats. One of these stats you can use a card for is the listed power (think watts, not ability). Of course it takes 1.21 gigawatts to time travel, so each card has some portion of that or maybe the entire amount to spend. Cards are discarded as needed to reach 1.21 gigawatts, after which the time machine may be moved to any of the three time periods: 1955, 1985, or 2015. Once there, cards can be played to place characters in the different time periods to try to recreate the major events from the movies with which players will be familiar.

In this game, time is money, so each character played has a time cost that must be paid for with other cards using their listed time. What's more, because of the ripple effect that comes with altering the past, characters played in the past cost greater amounts of time than those in the future. This extra ripple effect takes more time to pull off, but the effects will come back to benefit players at game's end once the effects are totaled.

The real key to all of this, though, is that players are using the familiar characters to thematically help them on this journey. Doc is your key to moving the time machine efficiently. Jennifer does appear at first to be under-utilized and just dragged around the entire time...until she comes up huge for you in a pinch! Biff. Man, I hate when you choose Biff! But of course. Should you be happy when another player is using Biff? No way! He's a pain!

Lorraine is great. You will not use her every turn, but when you do, she is important. Some people are going to not like the way Biff works, but that was the point! Biff is a jerk. He is totally the kind of guy that pushes you down and takes your lunch money. Like Ben said, we wanted to make the character powers feel like the characters. Each power gives you sense of the character.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2943976_t.png]Which characters are you the most happy with of the two games? First off, I am completely excited that we were able to get all of the memorable faces into each game. It wouldn't be much of a story if we didn't properly represent Doc, Marty, Data, or Mikey. There was a time when we weren't sure Brand was going to happen on account of contracts, etc., but alas, we got him! One of my favorites from The Goonies

is the Andi character we devised. She's really fun because she's totally thematic. One of the symbols on the cards in The Goonies

is a musical note, and for Andi those musical note cards are wild. It's a simple power, but thematically so perfect for her character. I love that things like that fell into place. In Back to the Future

, my favorite has to be Biff. He's a jerk. He's powerful. And just like in the movies, if you don't manage the Biff situation, he's going to hurt you.

Of course Ben likes Biff. I mean, I know he puts on nice face to all of you, but the jerk store called and they're running out of Ben.

Winding this thing down, I want to say that each of these games has been an absolute honor to work on, so thank you very much for checking them out. I hope you're able to give them some plays and enjoy the adventures we've designed for you using these two wonderful stories that mean so much to us all. In addition, I'd be remiss not to especially thank Chris Leder for his work on Back to the Future

and Jon Schultz for his work on The Goonies

. The games wouldn't be what they are without these two major assets. Oh, and make sure to look for Matt sometime soon on a red carpet near you. —Ben

I will be the fat dude with the beard rocking the velvet skinny-fit tux with high peak satin cuffs...or sweat pants. Thanks to everyone who read this, and please consider checking out both games. The Goonies

will be out later in 2016, and BttF

was released in April 2016. —Matt

Stronghold Games Offers a New Kraftwagen Model, Deploys The Fog of War

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/538…ew-kraftwagen-model-deplo

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3007646_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2964484_t.jpg] Stronghold Games

has now provided more details on two titles previously teased

in April 2016.

Matthias Cramer

's Kraftwagen: V6 Edition

is an updated version of his 2015 release Kraftwagen

from ADC Blackfire Entertainment that now includes a new set of tiles that feature the next technology available at

the time, the V6 engine. Kraftwagen: V6 Edition

, dubbed title #3 in Stronghold's "Great Designer Series" is due out in August 2016 and carries a $60 MSRP.

August will also see the release of The Dragon & Flagon

from Brian, Geoff, and Sydney Engelstein, with that game also having a $60 MSRP. I presented an overview of that title in a March 2016 BGG News post

.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2545515_t.png]• Geoff Engelstein

stands on his own for The Fog of War

, due out from Stronghold in September 2016. Here's an overview of that title:

The Fog of War is a two-player grand strategic game covering the European theater of World War II from 1940-1945. One player plays the Axis forces, and the other the Allies.

The game doesn't have units that move around a map; instead the game focuses on the planning and intelligence aspects of the war. Each player has a deck of cards that represent the army, navy, and other assets of their nations. A map shows the 28 land and sea provinces over which the players are battling.

You defend a province by placing cards face down on the map. If you wish to attack a province, you must plan an "Operation" to do so by creating one on your Operation Wheel. The Wheel is a unique way of forcing players to commit to operations in advance, while giving opportunities for intelligence gathering and bluffing.

An operation consists of a Province card that shows the target of the operation, plus one or more cards to conduct the attack. All of these cards are placed face down, so your opponent does not know the target of the operation, or the actual strength of the cards that are taking part.

Each turn the dial on the Operation Wheel is rotated by one position. This controls when an operation can be launched and any attack or defense bonuses that apply.

In addition to combat forces for attack or defense, you may also play Intel cards, allowing you to look at your opponent's operations and defenses.
The Fog of War

is title #4 in the "Great Designer Series", with the previously announced

JÓRVÍK

from Stefan Feld, which is due out October 2016, being title #5.

Designer Diary: ...and then, we held hands.

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/521…ry-and-then-we-held-hands

by Dave Chircop

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2717772_t.jpg] The following diary is from the perspective of designers Yannick Massa and Dave Chircop, with the author of each section signing off at the end.

The Jam

So we were asked to write a diary for the development process of ...and then, we held hands.

, and this has proved a bit difficult for us because ATWHH

wasn't developed over weeks of painstaking design and playtest sessions; it was designed, developed, and printed in 48 hours (many of which Dave and I spent in blind panic, but we'll get to that). Thus, we thought it might be a good idea to run you through a play-by-play of our experience at Global Game Jam

2014! Scared? Me too. Okay, let's go!

Friday Night

Dave and I arrive at the Institute of Digital Games at 5 p.m. full of vim and vigor. We-re not scared of our first ever game jam. After all, Dave has been into board games since he was in short pants, and I've been designing adventures for pen-and-paper roleplaying games since I was 15. Games are just what we do. With a confident wink at each other, we take our seats and wait for the presentation to begin. We sit through a few talks, waiting impatiently for the theme to be announced and inspiration to strike.

Finally, the chosen hour — 7 p.m. — arrives, and we're shown the theme that will guide the design of our game: "We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are."

Okay.

Not what we would have chosen, but we can work with this. I already have a few ideas going in my head, and I can see the hamsters working furiously in Dave's head. But first things first, we need more people for our team. Both Dave and I come from a design background with some programming and art skills thrown in between us, so we were looking to strengthen our numbers with a programmer and an artist. A cursory look around the room showed that everyone had already formed their own little teams, but we had a go at trying to poach someone, at least an artist. Alas, no dice, so we knew we were making a physical game right off the bat.

We find a quiet spot to settle down and brainstorm, and we come up with a number of fun, novel ideas that neither of us wants to work on. After a few hours of pitching ideas to each other and getting nowhere, we decided to change tack. We made our way over to a table, affectionately nicknamed "The Hoard" which holds everything we could need for making a board game prototype, picked up a bunch of graph paper, Magic

cards and meeples, and started experimenting with new mechanisms, some way to play that we don't usually see done in board games. We already knew some things at this point: Dave wanted to make a game about hand-holding; I wanted to beat the idea out of him.

Midnight rolls around and still no ideas. Despair starts to creep up on both of us. Maybe we're just not as good at this as we thought. We're players, not designers! "Have you ever actually made anything WORTH playing?" I'm screaming to myself. I look up at Dave and see panic in his eyes. I'm even considering relaxing my hand-holding veto. Everyone around us is busy working on their games, and we don't even have an idea yet — just a few half-formed mechanisms we think would be really cool, maybe. It doesn't look good.

By 4 a.m., we're ready to call it a night. Defeated, we trudge out to Dave's car, and he gives me a ride home. "I'm not sure we're cut out for this", he tells me, and I can't find it in myself to disagree. We agree that he'll come back for me at 9 a.m. and we'll give it another shot when we're a bit fresher. I fall asleep that night thinking about the ideas that we DID like: co-operation, an open hand, and a circular board.

Saturday Morning

I wake up feeling refreshed despite the short sleep. Dave picks me up, and we head to the Institute where we get right back to work. I head to the Hoard and rummage around to find the last thing I had been thinking about before I fell asleep: a piece of graph paper made out of concentric circles. I show it to Dave. I want this to be our board.

Dave hasn't been idle, though. He's drawn up a few cards with a different color on their left and right borders, and he's come up with a mechanism in which you can see only half a card at any one point but can switch. Dave calls this "Perspective" and thinks it will fit in nicely with the theme. I agree. While he's busy finishing off a prototype set of cards, I draw up a rough draft of the board.

Pretty soon, we're ready to playtest our first prototype, a game in which you color-match cards to nodes to move to the center, using each other's hands and switching perspectives when you cross over the board's main line. This first playtest shows us what we already knew inside: that this game was incredibly boring. We know we want to use the mechanisms, but the gameplay is dry, and there's no flavor. I suggest that maybe the colors could be emotions. "Spend emotions to move across a board representing a psyche", I say. "Why are two people in one psyche?", Dave replies. "I don't know, maybe they're in a relationship", I quip. We pause. We make (intense) eye contact. We know we've found something we love. It's decided.

In the meantime, noon has almost come 'round, and we need to lock in a name for our game. In a last-minute panic, Dave types in "...and then we held hands" and saves. "We'll change it later", he assures me. In any case, it's better than our original title: E-motion.

Saturday Afternoon

We break for lunch and fill up on pizza and beer. We're feeling a lot better than last night. Now we have a concrete idea of what we want to make: a cooperative game about a couple trying to fix a broken relationship. The theme seems to slip snuggly onto the mechanisms, and the gameplay felt intimate, but even so, there were a lot of problems to fix.

First, we needed to balance the board, and we got this out of the way quickly, so our playtests would reflect the gameplay we wanted. Second, we needed to fix the fact that players could move as much as they wanted, provided they had the cards they needed, and thus the Balance track was born. Third, we needed to add short term goals to the game, stepping stones to the game's final objective, and after relatively little playing around we had the Objective deck.

By 5 p.m. we had performed the first successful playtest of the barest bones of what would become the print-and-play version of ATWHH

. It's at this point we realize we're the only team at the Jam working on a board game; all the others are making digital games. This doesn't bode well for us. After all, digital games are bound to be more impressive. We don't care. We finally have clarity.

Saturday Night

It's 7 p.m., and we're running to the closest stationery store with a printer. I've only just finished designing the final board, and we want to see what it looks like on paper. Unfortunately, Dave hasn't finished the cards yet (there really were a lot), so we'll have to find another printer tomorrow. On a Sunday. In Malta. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

The board looks great. The red nodes look a bit orange, but other than that, we've got ourselves a solid board. Dave settles down to finish the cards, while I keep running a few more playtests. By 3 a.m., all the legwork is done, and we settle down to do a final playtest before calling it a night.

Six beers later, Dave drops me off at home. There's no self-doubt this time. We made something we think is great. We agree to meet at 9 a.m. again to start looking for a printer.

Sunday Morning

This is it. The Jam is scheduled to finish at 3 p.m., so we have six hours to find an open stationery store that can print and cut the cards we need. If you've never been to Malta, finding any shop open on a Sunday is no small feat. We hit up a number of stores: all closed. When we do find one that's open, it can't print to our specifications. The next one we find open has terrible print quality, compromising the polished feel we'd managed to achieve using Dave's Photoshop skills.

Finally, in a desperate last try before we settle for awful printing, we go looking for a vaguely remembered store that may or may not have been there. But lo and behold, it was there, open, and could do what we wanted — that is, all except for the cutting, for which the shop owner kindly let us use her paper-cutter and even lent us a hand to speed the process along. Thank you, kind-hearted stationery shop owner.

Sunday Afternoon

By this point it's 1 p.m., and we're taking it pretty easy. We're driving back to the Institute

at a leisurely pace, confident in the knowledge that we've finished everything. We have a printed board and two decks of printed cards, and we even found some glass beads to use as fancy tokens.

And then I realize we never wrote the rules down. I mean, we'd scribbled notes of the main points, but we'd never formalized them into a proper rulebook. Suddenly Dave's driving a lot faster. We somehow make it in time with thirty minutes to spare and I speed-write a rulebook and submit.

The Jam's over. The rest is history.

—Yannick

Inspiration

I had the crazy and annoying idea of making a game about holding hands. I still don't admit today that it was a terrible idea, mostly just to stand my ground. Yannick immediately shot me down. ...and then, we held hands.

is essentially the game I subdued Yannick into making with me so that I could still keep part of the "holding hands" idea alive.

Okay, maybe it wasn't exactly like that, but the original idea was about closing our eyes and holding hands and trying to communicate using just that, without speech. Sound familiar? Looking back, this seems to have survived in the no-talking rule, which Yannick had brought up again much later in the design process.

Much of our Friday night was spent struggling, thinking, scrapping, starting, and restarting different designs, with frequently repeated walks to the pizza place on the other side of the university, walking back with a slice.

Our second game was something that had to do with double-sided cards and the ability to be able to look at each other's hands and manipulate them, flip them over, change them, take them from each other. Sound familiar again? Well, yes, now that I think about it, part of this game survived in the final product, too, in the card-splaying "perspective change" mechanism. I never really thought about it this way, but the final product (which we actually started explicit work on only on Saturday) became a sort of conglomeration of all the previous failed concepts that we tried before.

In this photo, you can see two designers hiding their inner despair as they can't find anything that works. That night we went home disheartened, desperate, knowing we would never be game designers, thinking about our future careers as fast food (not servers — the food itself as we wanted to be burgers).

But Yannick has told us a lot more about despair in his previous post. I'm supposed to talk about inspiration! Happy thoughts, Dave, happy thoughts.

I think the moment of truth came on Saturday morning. Yannick and I had managed to catch a few hours sleep. I picked him up in the morning, and we drove there in relative silence. Maybe it was our disappointment in ourselves, or in each other. We arrived there around 9 a.m. Most other jammers had spent the night there, working on their cool ideas. We were there knowing that we would need to register an idea on the game jam website by the 11 a.m. deadline.

Simon, a fellow jammer and designer, pointed out to us he had brought some paper with grids for us to fiddle around with. Yannick went to check it out to see what there was, while I started setting up the profile for a game with no name. Yannick came back and showed me a grid printed on an A4 paper of consecutive circles. Yannick looked at me with a cheeky smile; I looked at him with a face begging "please be good news, please be good news". He sat down on the floor and started moving pieces around the grid.

"Two people, a failing relationship", he said.

My face slowly transformed to a wondrous smile. "They need to get to the center to save it", I replied.

We paused for a moment.

"Dammit, Yannick! We have the game", I said, breaking our awestruck silence.

"Really??" he said in disbelief.

"Yes, man! This is it", I assured him.

"Okay."

And then we took this photo.

It was cold.

We knew we had our game. Now it was a matter of finishing it, joining it up, and compiling the bits together to create the early version of the game you see today. The perspective change and the no-talking mechanism were inspired by previous ideas that our minds were still swimming in from the previous nights, but there are many other things that showed themselves to us and not the other way round.

Yannick and I, separately and without having told each other, were going through a difficult period in both of our relationships. This fact came about months later, but it was quite eye-opening to understand why the theme was such a resounding YES! for both of us. Mind you, the game was not designed with this in mind, but the mindset that we were in at the time appears through and through.

...and then, we held hands.

is a game about altruism, I like to think. Altruism in that you often have to look out for your partner more than you have to look out for yourself, and this works only if your partner is doing the same. If one player is looking out for only himself, then the game will crash very, very quickly. It's quite fascinating how some players, and even ourselves, fall into a problematic rut and don't realize it until only our partner can save us.

—David

Development

Development of ...and then, we held hands.

was quite a particular process, I would say. The game was already a simple, distilled concept when it came out of the proverbial game jam oven, so it was hard to simplify and distill it even further. Many of the discussions of issues we knew the game had ended up in no result. We often would find something we didn't like about the game, and three hours of discussion later realize that that's the only way we would have it. Because of the scale of the game, we also noticed that even little changes had amplified effects on the game in general, so we needed to treat the game with a certain feel of delicate trim.

The first and perhaps easiest change for us was the dropping of the extra lines in-between the nodes. The original design which we had made included connecting lines between nodes that did not allow movement. For us, back then, the board looked significantly better with them, but they had no other significant value for the game. This was the first exercise in detachment. It's interesting how often time allows you to change perspective on the game. It is good to note that the game had a significant period of time between when it was signed and when it came to be published. Interestingly, what seemed important right out of game jam began to seem less and less important as we went along. By the end, the lines were cut without remorse.

The second change we made was the fusion of the objective decks into one. In the original game, players would take turns drawing an objective so that each was associated with one of the players. When we originally designed the game, it was designed within a community that significantly valued the figurative. Initially, there was value in leaving them separate. The emotional choice, and the metaphor of allowing your partner to complete your own emotional goals, was a meaningful and grounded addition, providing quite a bit of flavor to the game.

When it came to bringing the game to the real world, though, and away from the sheltered experimental shed of game jam, these quirks became less valuable and needed a bit of ironing. A similar rule to this was one in which if you use six or more cards, even if you don't reach balance, you still get to refill your hand. This rule was there to represent a person having an emotional outpouring and the emotional replenishment and relief that often comes with letting out something you had been keeping in for a long time. Again, outside the game jam environment, this rule became redundant as it was never used or found valuable in our playtesting, so it got chopped.

But the changes were not all about reducing. We knew that the game, once players start understanding and collaborating well with each other, would become easier to solve, so we needed to add a mechanism that would add longevity and scalability to our game. I think out of all the development, this is the section that took the largest amount of time and iteration. We playtested more than five fully fledged systems of difficulty scaling for the game, but all of them were a lot more complex and didn't quite fit the rest of the game. Some required too many components, some were too fiddly, others made the game too long — until we finally managed to come up with the arguments concept that we have today.

LudiCreations

supported us throughout the testing process, but in the meantime they were working in the background to do something a lot more amazing: getting Marie Cardouat on board for the project. The publisher had quite a difficult task at hand. I had made very functional art for the PnP game that was quite iconic, so they needed to give that art a professional touch while staying true to the original feel of the game. We had a very strong trust-based relationship with the publisher. We made it clear to them what we liked and what our vision was, then we let them do their magic in the back room, and they came back to us with what you see today. There wasn't much iteration in terms of the illustration; it was more of a choir of wows and sighs.

—David

The Future

So, the future might hold some exciting things for ...and then, we held hands.

Dave and I are currently working on a new layer to the game, trying to add a real-time element — our wonderful composer Niccolo's music — to the turn-based gameplay. This has proven to be especially difficult.

Whatever mechanism we were to implement, we knew right away that it could not punish the player by, for example, having a different hindrance enter gameplay depending on which song of the soundtrack was currently playing. Since players don't have timed turn limits, they could just wait any especially hindering song out, slowing down gameplay. We needed something that affected players positively, maybe even granting shortcuts under certain circumstances.

Right now we're experimenting with the idea of giving the player opportunities to earn stackable bonuses by performing certain challenges under certain time-constrained conditions, such as while certain songs are playing. Stacking a bonus with another bonus would then give the players a spectacular advantage for a very limited time, forcing speedy play but only if the players choose to take their shot at the challenge. This leads to tricky moments when players need to empathize much more quickly, possibly making snap decisions their partner would then have to react to, with the promise of gaining advantages that will in turn allow them to finish the game in less time, effectively amping up the difficulty. Most importantly, the players have agency as to if and how they want to tackle these challenges.

It's been very important to us during this process to not add any dead weight to what we feel is already elegant, simple gameplay and also to not have any real-time mechanism that required a lot of physical additions. ...and then, we held hands.

is a small and discreet game, and we felt that whatever is required to play the add-on needs to fit in the current box and, most importantly, be inexpensive to print and distribute. To that end we've been pursuing our usual minimalistic design approach and hope to deliver something new to all the great fans of this tiny board game.

In closing, we've also often been asked if we ever plan to open up the game to more players. To these people, we say that we briefly discussed the possibility of a three-player variant using a triangular board, but we haven't really committed any time to developing the idea. Maybe after the real-time expansion!

—Yannick

New Game Round-up: Revisiting the Renaissance, and Assassinating Hitler (But Not in the Same Game)

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/539…-renaissance-and-assassin

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3009233_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2997466_t.jpg]• Sierra Madre Games

has already placed an October 2016 release date on Bios: Genesis

, as noted

on BGG News in April 2016, and now SMG has two other titles due out in time for Spiel 2016 in October, with Phil

and Matt Eklund

's Pax Renaissance

being a new version of 1996's Lords of the Renaissance

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

As a Renaissance banker, you will finance kings or republics, sponsor voyages of discovery, join secret cabals, or unleash jihads and inquisitions. Your choices determine whether Europe is elevated into the bright modern era or remains festering in dark feudalism.

In Pax Renaissance, you have two actions each turn. As in other Pax games, you can acquire cards in a market, sell them out of the game, or play them into your tableau. You can also stimulate the economy by running trade fairs and trading voyages for Oriental goods. A map of Europe with trade routes from Portugal to Crimea is included, and discovering new trade routes can radically alter the importance and wealth of empires, ten of which are in the game.

Four victories determine the future course of Western Society: Will it be towards imperialism, trade globalization, religious totalitarianism, or enlightened art and science?
Pax Pamir: Khyber Knives

from Cole Wehrle

boosts the variety of gameplay of 2015's Pax Pamir

through the addition of six Wazir cards and 54 new games cards. To quote the publisher's description:

Now players can attempt to use their political acumen to secure game-changing capabilities. Imprison your opponent's spies in your dungeon or rely on piracy in the Punjab to fund your ambitions. Battle for influence over the six regional governments or attempt to do your own dynasty building. Players have never had this many routes to dominance. The fight for a new Afghan future has just begun.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3010368_t.jpg]• For an adventurous topic being tackled in game terms, I present Philip duBarry

's Black Orchestra

, for which publisher Game Salute will be running a straight-up pre-order campaign instead of a Kickstarter. Here's an overview of the setting and gameplay, with much more detail on the BGG game page itself:

As Hitler's grasp on Germany tightens and his maniacal fervor is unmasked, men from the highest levels of the Reich begin to plot his assassination. As the clock ticks and Hitler's ambitions grow, these daring few must build their strength and prepare for the perfect moment to strike. The Gestapo hound their trail, calling these conspirators "Schwarze Kapelle", the Black Orchestra. Will this band of daring patriots save their country from utter ruin before it is too late?

Black Orchestra begins with each player choosing an historic figure involved in the conspiracy against Hitler. In this dark and dangerous pursuit, motivation is perhaps your greatest weapon. If you can stay true to your convictions in the face of overwhelming threat and inspire your comrades, then you will be able to use your special ability, attempt plots, and even become zealous (necessary for some extremely daring plots).

But every move you make may also increase the suspicion of the authorities. The Gestapo will make routine sweeps, and any players with high suspicion will be arrested and interrogated (possibly resulting in other players being arrested). If you are all arrested or if the Gestapo finds your secret papers, you lose. And the suspicion placed on each conspirator will increase the chances their plots are detected.

• Gil Hova of Formal Ferret Games

has signed on

as the U.S. publisher of Tobias Gohrbandt and Heiko Günther's Peak Oil

, with development of the game continuing ahead of a planned Kickstarter funding campaign in October 2016.

• Developer Ralph Bruhn has posted a draft cover of Stefan Feld's The Oracle of Delphi

, which is currently expected out from Hall Games and Pegasus Spiele at Spiel 2016 in October, according to

Bruhn.

"Full Distributor Support" for Privateer Press' "Free Rider Policy"

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/540…privateer-press-free-ride

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic435842_t.jpg]At the end of March 2016, Privateer Press

announced a new sales policy aimed at eliminating "free riders", the company's term for deep discount online retailers. From an ICv2 article

on the announcement:

"Over the last eleven years...online retailers with nearly no overhead and very little meaningful contact with our audience have been undermining the stability of the market by selling product at discounts well below retail value, depending solely on the efforts of our brick and mortar partners who offer services that nurture our audience and grow the market to move their product," [Privateer Press President Sherry Yeary] wrote. "This model of business is widely recognized by experts and the justice system as 'free riding.' While this can be a viable business model for many mainstream products, it is common knowledge that in our industry it's crippling and anticompetitive."

Privateer plans to create a list of retailers that it views as "free riders," which it defines as "retailers...offering Privateer Press products at an unsustainable deep discount and offer[ing] very little or nothing in the way of services" and will impose sanctions on distributors that sell to those retailers. The list will be updated by adding or deleting retailers as needed. Distributors that sell to retailers on Privateer's "free rider" list will have their shipments of Privateer product, including new releases, delayed. The new policy goes into effect on April 4 [2016].

"We do not condone the free riders' parasitic business model and elect to both continue and enhance our partnerships with those distributors that share our point of view and actively work in the best interests of the brick-and-mortar retailers," Yeary continued. "While we cannot and would not dictate to our distributor partners who they can or cannot sell to, we believe free riders are eroding the foundation of our industry and hurting our business; only with the cooperation of our distribution partners can we prevent that."

Now Privateer Press has followed up that announcement to champion "full distributor support" for this sales policy change. Here's the text of its May 11, 2016 press release:

Privateer Press Announces Full Distributor Support for Free Rider Policy

Privateer Press is pleased to announce that all of its North American distribution partners have signed Privateer's new distribution contract and agreed to support the company's new free rider policy, which seeks to discourage high-volume online retailers that do not offer meaningful services from undermining the growth and sustainability of the industry.

Privateer's free rider policy discourages the sale of products to a category of online retailers recognized as harmful to the industry. Thanks to the universal support of Privateer's North American distribution partners, the policy will help ensure that honest, hard-working retailers — including online retailers that are not in violation of the policy — will be able to compete fairly and without the predations of crippling and anticompetitive practices. In doing so, the policy also safeguards the brick-and-mortar retailers' role in providing players with access to the worldwide community of players who enjoy the friendly competition, hobby experiences, and casual and competitive organized play for which Privateer Press is a recognized industry leader.

Privateer's North American Distributors consist of ACD, Aladdin, Alliance, E-Figures, Gamus (GTS), Golden, Lion Rampant, Peachstate Hobby (PHD), Southern Hobby, and Universal.

"We greatly appreciate the support and commitment to the health of brick-and-mortar retailers shown by our North American distribution partners," said Sherry Yeary, president of Privateer Press. "Change won't happen overnight, and eliminating free rider practices will be an ongoing issue that will take time and a united effort between publishers and distributors to overcome, but we have already seen the positive effect of instituting this policy, and we remain committed to its success, no matter what it takes."

Since Privateer announced its new free rider policy, over 200 brick-and-mortar stores who do not currently stock WARMACHINE and HORDES have committed to carrying the new editions of the games because of the policy. All launch kits for the new editions of WARMACHINE and HORDES are sold out at the manufacturer level through presales to distributors.

This sales policy change works along the same lines as that of Asmodee North America — something I've described in detail

on BGG News: Reduce the ability of online sellers to move product at prices nearly equal to the distributors' costs so that brick-and-mortar stores will more readily champion and promote that publisher's games. Why? Because these publishers believe that over the long term they will benefit more from the promotion of their games to new audiences through B&M outlets than through immediate sales to existing buyers through online outlets.

Designer Diary: Tramways, or a New Approach to Picking Things Up and Delivering Them

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/519…r-new-approach-picking-th

by Alban Viard

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2974065_t.jpg]I have played Age of Steam

more than two hundred times, and I really like the simplicity of this game. You just have to connect hexes of the right colors and move cubes of the same colors to those hexes. There is a mathy mechanism behind the shares auction, but there are no more rules. Easy, isn't it?

But Age of Steam

has several faults that I would have liked to remove if I were able to design a traditional train game:

• Building a network on a hex grid does not make sense, by which I mean that breaks the theme of building a rail network. All real city maps are printed on a square grid.

• The more you move a good in Age of Steam

, the more money you earn — but there is no real reason to move a cube in a particular direction. For example, in real life if I want to go to the shop by train, I have a purpose for this; there is no particular thematic reason to move a blue cube to a blue city in Age of Steam

.

• You gain the same income whether the link crosses one hex or five. In either case, you gain only 1, and that's unfair!

In 2011, I start designing a train game — Tramways

— with these three ideas in mind.

As I had already designed tons of Age of Steam

expansions, I thought that it would be a tough task to design an original and innovative new train game: "Ugh, there are so many good ones on the market..." In the meantime, I was developing my game Small City

, which is basically a city-building game, so my first map for Tramways

was my Small City

maps — on a square grid, of course.

I wanted to link buildings, and thus where we have goods in Age of Steam

, we have passengers in Tramways

. They want to go shopping, relax in their homes, or head to work in a factory. For track segments, I cut only straight lines and curves. There were no actions, no auctions; it was just a pipeline game for fun.

On a grid, you can have only straight lines or curves, so you can connect to a single square in only four ways. I immediately thought that my grid was weaker than the hex maps, but I solved this issue by designing two-space rectangular buildings that had six ways to connect to them.

To make the game as simple as possible, I kept only two types of tiles (straight and curved), but allowed players to make a crossroads or to build two curves in opposite corners of the space immediately. After solving the topological issues of the conversion of the hex map into a 90° map, I started working on the aim of the game...

Because I was at this time also working on connecting citizens in Small City

to "vote points", I felt that a kind of humanity was missing from my games. Why are we stockpiling victory points without any more interesting purposes? What do citizens or passengers really want in their lives? Why do they want to move?

I kept the idea of earning money when passengers move to a commerce tile, but money couldn't be the ultimate victory points. I needed something greater than this idea. What about happiness points then?

And that's how getting the most happiness points at the end of the game quickly became the goal of Tramways

.

I noticed that to keep tension in a game, we absolutely need two important things:

• Something that keeps you from getting victory points.

• Something that increases the speed of the victory point engine so that players have the feeling of developing something during the game.

Thus, I needed some negative happiness points — and what greater enemy does happiness have in our lives than stress? That's why passengers who move to a factory increase a player's stress!

Before printing the first prototype of Tramways

in 2011, I divided the game into two halves, focused on increasing the speed of the game. In the first half of the game, the players get cards and during the second half of the game, they use them. The more cards they have, the more actions they can take...

Tramways

has always been a train game with cards, and these cards are represented as tickets, so handing in tickets to move passengers also feels thematic. Some cards have symbols that allow the players to take actions, but there are always different combinations of symbols on the cards, so you have to choose which symbols to play.

If you want to take more actions with a single card, you can, but as you use more abilities on the same card, you have to increase your stress level. That's another tradeoff that players must keep in mind: You can use fewer cards if you are willing to accept some stress during the game.

Tramways

is a game with only three main actions, but each action is powerful and affects all players because everyone plays on the same map. Should you connect interesting areas to each other, upgrade old buildings, and build brand new lines to create new value in these buildings? Should you build long, expensive, but very beneficial lines, or short and inexpensive lines? When is it most appropriate to upgrade?

Now, how will the players get the cards? I very much like auction systems, but I also think that it is an easy (too easy) way for a designer to balance the game when the designer wants to provide different abilities to the players. It's a nifty mechanism, but overused in so many games. That's why I had to design a completely innovative auction system that took me two years to devise...

The winner of the auction gains stress; I think it makes sense that when you win the auction, you increase your stress because the other players focus their eyes on you and you have to make prompt decisions. I've lived through so many Age of Steam

games in which I won the auction, paying more than $10, without even knowing which actions to select.

I also like the idea of the cumulative bids. Each time you bid in Tramways

, you have to pay if you want to stay in the auction; you can pay with cash or with money symbols on your cards, but if you do the latter, you will have fewer cards, and thus fewer actions later in the game. Some cards have a negative effect that you cannot avoid when you play the card, so it's important to have as few of these as possible in your deck, lest they pollute it.

In a traditional, route-building train game, position on the map is crucial, so maybe you bid high (even though the cards up for auction are not important) solely because you want to build first! Or maybe you want to avoid some cards/tickets with negative effects (called "consequences") in the game (like voided tickets)? There is always a good reason to bid or to not bid in Tramways

.

So much stress! Is there no way to reduce your stress in this game? Easy! Just move passengers to their homes! Fine, good to know, but how do you get happiness points? Move passengers along your rail network; you will receive money from the bank, and the longer the line is, the more money you earn.

Lastly, if money is not the aim, what is money for in Tramways

? To stay in the auctions and to get the best cards, but also to buy happiness when you link up leisure tiles.

To be consistent with my other games in the Small City

universe, I kept the same "1+2+3+4..." mechanism, which works great here as well. For example, you could spend $15 at the Leisure building to get 5 happiness points all at once, or spend merely $6 to get 3 happiness points.

In the first prototypes of Tramways

, our main issues were to balance the action symbols, specifically figuring out how many of each to have and deleting stupid actions. (In the first prototype, passengers could use a boat on a river...) Also, the ability to move passengers required a particular symbol that was present on very few cards, so it was difficult to move passengers and too easy to build — which is strange for a pick-up-and-deliver game. Thus, in 2012 I decided that all cards would be tickets and inherently have the ability to move passengers. Sampo suggested using a magnetic strip on all the cards, and of course I immediately approved because it was so thematic!

In 2013, the game worked great, even if I disliked certain aspects such as some imbalanced actions (upgraded links and upgraded buildings). We also increased the replayability of the game by assembling the board like a puzzle; by printing on both sides, we could generate at least 64 maps for a four-player game. Around this time, I added a fifth player and reduced the number of spaces a little bit. Sampo made some really interesting graphics. Tramways

still took place in the same modern era as Small City

.

in 2014, CliniC

and Small City

took up all my time and I could not improve or develop Tramways

as much as I would like, but the game was still played by several groups around the world, trying to balance the symbols and the money/happiness tempo. That said, I found some time to design a nice solo variant for the auction system, and I again reduced the number of spaces.

At the beginning of 2015, Sampo introduced me to Paul Laane

and we decided to make a prequel to Small City

, placing Tramways

one hundred years earlier. I love old-fashioned locomotives from the 1920s, and the art deco style was an obvious choice. We were of one mind with Paul for the cover, and when I saw his first sketch for the box cover, it was love at first sight.

At the end of 2015, we returned to developing Tramways

, modifying the aspects I disliked in 2013. We balanced all the actions, we fixed the number of cards and the hand limit, and we cleaned up the rules for the auctions, which were hard to write simply. (Thank you again, Nathan!)

The last improvements were made March 16, 2016, when we changed the maps into modular boards with the two sides offering different difficulty levels. The possibilities are now endless and two games of Tramways

won’t ever be the same. (Thank you, David, for this suggestion!)

I hope I kept your attention and made you feel like you designed Tramways

alongside me over the last five years. I did not work on it each month, but we found something interesting to improve each month, such as the different progress of the last round that increases the strategy part of the game, the +2 stress when you win the auction of the last round, the development of the hand limit of cards, the number of factories, the increase of stress in the commerce tile, the stress track with the Fibonacci sequence, the rail worker limitation, or finally, the powerful development cards that you can purchase in the commerce instead of taking more money: They have been refined again and again, using several action icons on the same card to optimize everything!

I think I managed to replace the ideal hex map with a tight and tense square grid. It makes more sense to me. Playing tickets to play actions is a great thematic addition to this pick-up-and-deliver game. The players can decide to move passengers to certain places to get special abilities, so the passengers now have a purpose again, and the theme has been improved: It is not just goods moving to abstract places. Building new buildings that have a square size makes more sense to me than building hex cities. And finally, the longer the link, the more you are paid by the bank. That makes sense with the theme of the game, a ticket to a faraway place costs more money than a ticket to the next stop.

Now it is time to design another game: What about solving a crime committed in Small City or burgling the commerce?

Alban Viard

Game Overview: Brix, or Complementary Colors Fight for Dominance

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/534…plementary-colors-fight-d

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2946063_t.jpg]I posted an overview video of Brix

from Charles Chevallier

, Thierry Denoual

, and Blue Orange Games

in late March 2016, then I headed off on vacation without posting it in this space.

Now that I am on vacation once again, I can rectify that error, instructing one and all on the minor challenge of creating a row of four blocks in your color or symbol without helping your opponent too much in the process. Why would you help your opponent? Because you're participating in a competitive three-legged race, with you and your opponent sharing space on the same bricks and therefore always placing both colors in the wall each time you build.

This concept isn't unique as Néstor Romeral Andrés published the similar, but more free-form TAIJI

through Blue Panther in 2007, but I'd like to see more of it, if possible. Silly party games like Happy Salmon

and Hands

have something along these lines in that you score only when you help an opponent score at the same time (while still having only a single winner), but if you can suggest other competitive games with a three-legged element, I'm curious to hear about them!

Designer Diary: Dice Heist, or Art and Other Accidents

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/534…-or-art-and-other-acciden

by Trevor Benjamin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2981659_t.jpg]In 2014 we — that is, Brett Gilbert

and Trevor Benjamin

— began working on a push-your-luck dice and card game. Dice Heist

is not that game.

In that other game, players took turns making a run at a single ladder of cards. They would roll dice to move down the ladder, one rung at a time. After each roll, they could call it quits, taking all the cards on all the rungs traversed, or — in classic push-your-luck fashion — they could roll on, with the hope of winning more but at the risk of losing it all. After each run, regardless of the player's success or failure, a new card was added to each rung and the next player would take their turn.

While that game wasn't without its charm, it suffered from some pretty severe problems. First, the outcome could be swingy — really swingy. The size of the "pot" increased quickly, and winning a big one could net a ridiculous number of points. And if the player before you won big, you'd be faced with a very small pot — a pot that you were nonetheless forced to make a run at since the game offered you no other choice. And to top it all off, the extended nature of the dice rolling made individual turns too long — and in a short game players got too few of them — all of which made a "bust" feel devastating.

Enter Dice Heist

. One evening, on the way home from our weekly playtest session, the spark of a new game emerged from the ether — a spark that, as it turned out, contained a cluster of solutions to the problems we were having with our original game.

First, what if players weren't forced to make a run if faced with a weak pot? What if they could pass instead? And what if passing meant they could increase their chances of success on a later turn? This binary choice — to pass or play — became the core, driving mechanism of Dice Heist

: Each turn you either "recruit a sidekick" (that is, take a die and add it to the number you can roll on a later turn) or "attempt a heist" (roll your dice).

Second, what if there weren't a single pot? In Dice Heist

there are four separate museums, each accumulating their own separate stocks of exhibits: cards representing paintings, artifacts, and gems. When you attempt a heist, you must choose which of the four museums to target. If you succeed, you win only those cards. By splitting the pot in this way, a single good turn doesn't necessarily sweep the whole board and leave nothing for anyone else. The next player is never left just fighting for the scraps; they can always choose to take another die and improve their chances for next time.

Finally, what if the gut-wrenching risk-reward decision was condensed into a single moment? A single choice followed by a single roll? In Dice Heist

you don't keep rolling and re-rolling, each time calling it quits or pushing on. Instead you choose your level of risk — which museum to target and how many dice to roll — then roll those dice once. If at least one of your dice beats the museum's "security level" (a simple pip value from 2 to 5), you succeed and grab all of that museum's loot; if none of them do, you fail.

That's the story of how we made Dice Heist

: the happy accident. We didn't intend for it to replace our original game, but we're very pleased that it did — and we hope you are, too!

Trevor & Brett

Crowdfunding Round-up: Escapism Is What the Doctor Ordered

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/541…apism-what-doctor-ordered

by Dustin Schwartz

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2924300_t.jpg]• The island of Vanuatu is a tropical paradise, but Alain Epron’s game of the same name has been nothing but heartburn for many folks who backed ill-fated IndieGoGo and Ulule campaigns in 2011 from then-publisher Krok Nik Douil editions

. Fast forward to the present: Quined Games

is publishing Vanuatu (second edition)

as the 16th title in their line of bookcase editions. In a classy move, they are making free copies available to previously jilted backers (as they did with Massilia

in 2014), so it’s hakuna matata for everyone. ( KS link

)

• Word games are being reclaimed by hobby designers left and right these days, and Wibbell++

is the latest in the revolution. Behrooz Bahriari and company have put together a game system, with multiple games that can be played with the same deck of cards. Wibbell

itself is a word game that rewards quick thinking. Be the first to blurt out a word using one letter from every card. But the more rounds you win, the more cards you have to use, making your task tougher; it’s like the vocabularist’s version of a tractor pull. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2893102_t.png]• Darkest Night

from Jeremy Lennert is the fourth title to be handpicked by the Victory Point Games

crew for a shiny new edition, courtesy of KS pledges. The original campaign experienced a hiccup when VPG realized their audience had issues with some of the campaign structure, and it was canceled. But necromancers just can’t be kept down, as it turns out. The campaign has relaunched, none the worse for wear, including options for both miniatures lovers and standee supporters. I’m on Team Standee, myself; I love the smell of VPG soot in the morning. ( KS link

)

• Gil Hova’s party game Bad Medicine

quickly sold out its initial print run, but it’s being reprinted by Formal Ferret Games

and has even metastasized, with the new growth being the Second Opinion

expansion. The crux of this pitching party game is downplaying the side effects from your pharmaceutical concoction, but this expansion adds complications, an oddly thematic new mechanism with cards that will add surprise cards to your pitch. Gil has also teased that French and German localizations might be in the works; let’s just hope the EMA doesn’t look under this particular childproof cap. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3002775_t.jpg]• I can imagine that, in a few millennia, humanity will have run out of memorable titles for our petty wars, so I applaud the tongue-in-cheek backstory of Mothership: Tabletop Combat

, whose events were supposedly precipitated by the “great Space Disagreement of 5406”. (Somewhere, Picard is facepalming.) Rookie designer Peter Sanderson is trying to reduce the space epic to a manageable playtime while retaining tech trees, grid-based maneuvering with asteroid fields, and pew-pew dogfights. ( KS link

)

• Last year, a small publisher no one had heard of called Mindclash Games

stormed onto the scene with their heavy euro sim of 19th-century illusionist acts, Trickerion: Legends of Illusion

. They’re staying with a euro backbone for their new release Anachrony

, by the design team of Amann, Peter, and Turczi, but the plastic minis and coat of sci-fi paint will likely turn the heads of the meat-damage crowd, too. The hybrid style feels like a Schwarzenegger T-800: living tissue over metal endoskeleton. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2995761_t.png]• When you’re creating a big, sprawling fantasy adventure game, as NSKN Games

did in 2015 with Błażej Kubacki’s Mistfall

, you undoubtedly have to make judicious cuts to keep the content in line with your target MSRP. I’m guessing the game has hit expected sales numbers, because it has merited a standalone expansion, dubbed Heart of the Mists

. This expansion doesn’t seem to tweak the gameplay formula much, opting instead to go the variety route, adding more heroes, enemies, quests, and encounters. One can only assume that the “Bridgton Supermarket” scenario is next in line for development, right? ( KS link

)

• Would you rather be Indiana Jones or Rick Grimes? That’s the dilemma presented by the latest Queen Games

project, which features big box editions of the popular Escape: The Curse of the Temple

and its cousin Escape: Zombie City

. A shrewd observer might remark that Temple

has already received a big box, which is true; this second edition includes all three main expansions and all but one of the “Queenies”, as well as an updated insert to help keep it all sorted. So I guess it’s sort of the bigger big box? ( KS link

)

• Almost every ancient culture has a flood myth, but in a couple thousand years when inter-galactic travel is no big deal, those flood myths might be supernova myths. (The great part is that we’ll still be able to call the escape pod an “ark” since, you know, that’s a term sci-fi writers use.) Sol: Last Days of a Star

, from brothers Ryan and Sean Spangler and their Elephant Laboratories

imprint, is that story. You’re harvesting energy from the dying sun to power your ark, but the harvesting process is no multiplayer solitaire. ( KS link

)

• Veteran gamers will recognize Town of Salem: The Card Game

as another riff on the classic Werewolf

formula, but one with an interesting origin story: the card game is a back-formation from a video game of the same name — first browser-based and then released for Steam and mobile — originally created by Josh Brittain and Blake Burns at BlankMediaGames

. Folks from villages all over have been doing play-by-email Werewolf

sessions for a long time, but these guys beat everyone to the punch on actual video game implementation of that concept, and now the witchery they cooked up is paying off. ( 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

New nestorgames Round-up: Melting Chess, Ouroboros, Iqishiqi, Ni-Ju, and Fano330-R-Morris

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/519…ting-chess-ouroboros-iqis

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1071399_t.jpg]• I haven't covered titles from Spanish publisher nestorgames

in a while, yet owner Néstor Romeral Andrés

keeps kicking out one interesting title after another, so let's check out a bunch of them at once, starting with Markus Hagenauer

's Melting Chess

. As I noted

in a Jan. 2016 overview of All Queens Chess

, "chess" in the title of a game sometimes makes gamers groan, either because they view chess as old and lame or because they view chess as the greatest game ever and not something that should be messed with or "improved".

That said, some designers have re-used elements of chess to create something familiar yet new, and Melting Chess

seems like a good example of this. After creating an 8x6 game board of 48 tiles that show a dozen knights, bishops, rooks, and kings, the two players take turns moving their tokens on the board. To move, a player chooses a face-up tile orthogonally adjacent to their token, moves their token in the style of the chess piece depicted on that tile to another face-up tile, then flips face down the tile that their token previously occupied. If you can't move on your turn, you lose.

• A similar winning (i.e. losing) condition is at works in Fano330-R-Morris

from Masahiro Nakajima

, curator of The Museum of Abstract Strategy Games in Japan. The game board shows a geometric plane of seven points and seven lines, with each line having three points on it. Players (black vs. white) first take turns placing their pieces (two triangles and two circles each) on the board, with at most two non-identical pieces on a point, then take take turns moving one of their pieces from the top of a stack to an adjacent space. If you can't move or if you create a line of three pieces of identical shape or color, you lose.

• The gist of Ira Fay

's Ouroboros

is that you want to stuff the opponent with as many colored discs as possible — but to do so, you must risk giving them opportunities to rid themselves of discs.

In more detail, you fill the board with discs in four colors, then on a turn you (1) place a black stone, collect the colored disc you covered, then give the opponent all discs either diagonally or orthogonally adjacent to the stone; (2) remove a pair of stones from the board by discarding the appropriate set of discs: four-of-a-kind, full house, etc.; or (3) discard a disc from your collection. Whoever has no discs in front of them after the first turn wins.

• You can think "football" (a.k.a. soccer) when hearing how to win Iqishiqi

from João Pedro Neto

and Bill Taylor

— get the ball to one of your goal lines — but since you're airdropping highly precise kickers from the sky and can also win by stymieing the opponent, the comparison isn't that apt.

The ball starts at the center of a hexagonal field, and on a turn you place one stone somewhere on the playing field, either alone or as part of a group. At least one stone in the group must be in line with the ball, and the ball then moves along that line away from the group a number of spaces equal to the number of stones in the group. If you move the ball off the field or the ball can't move that many spaces, you lose; if you land the ball precisely on one of your goal lines, you win. This movement is hard to picture at first, and the number of options available to you during a game seems immense.

• Finally, we have Ni-Ju

from Romeral Andrés himself. In this tile-placement game, the tiles count as both winning conditions and the things that will satisfy those conditions.

Each player has twenty tiles, with each tile showing four squares on it. Players take turns placing tiles onto the playing area, with each placed tile being adjacent to at least one other tile. If one of your tiles is ever surrounded by tiles of your color in a pattern that matches that central tile, then you win (as with the white player in the image below). If both players have placed all of their tiles with no one winning, then you take turns moving a tile with at least one free edge to a new location.

Designer Diary: Branching Out from Kigi to Kodama

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/535…branching-out-kigi-kodama

by Daniel Solis

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2305566_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2971371_t.jpg]Hello, hello! I'm Daniel Solis

. This is the story of how I designed and self-published the tree-growing card game Kigi

, which was later adapted into Kodama: The Tree Spirits

by Action Phase Games

.

I wrote a little post about that adaptation

just before Kodama's kickstarter campaign

at the end of 2015, but Eric Martin asked me to go back into the past a little further to the earliest days of Kigi

's development and international growth, so here we go!

Self-Publishing

Back in 2013, I started self-publishing card games on DriveThruCards

as an affordable way to get my name out there as a game designer. Belle of the Ball

had just been released by Dice Hate Me Games

, and I was eager to get another game published.

It's a tough business, though. Even with one game under my belt, I knew it would be hard for an otherwise unknown designer to get noticed, so my plan was to release games on DriveThruCards, build up a few sales and customer reviews, and use those numbers to back up pitches to traditional retail publishers. I thought it might give my games an edge to have real data. The plan was always to use self-published, print-on-demand games as a laboratory and launchpad for other games I had in my back burner that would be too weird for a traditional publisher to take a risk on without something firm to show their viability.

At the very least, this plan gave me a reason to finalize a lot of small game ideas that I had shelved because I wasn't confident enough to take them over the finish line, with one of these ideas featuring an "organic" tile-laying mechanism similar to Agora

by James Ernest. I liked how Agora

allowed you to play cards at any angle, free from a grid, and thought it would be interesting to encourage overlapping as a viable tactic as well.

Early Development

Above is the initial two-page sketch that was the basis of Kigi

. Looking at this again years later, I can immediately see the faltering assumptions and missteps that I'd have to overcome to get the game to work properly. I can also see the heart of something that I knew would be unusual, eye-catching, and easy to produce — which was exactly the thing I wanted to pitch to publishers.

The arboreal theme was there from the start, along with the primary goal of making contiguous chains of features: sprouts, butterflies, flowers, etc. Though I tried other gameplay elements in early iterations, this seemed the easiest to figure out. The branching motif was already imprecise enough without using an obtuse scoring method as well. Though I had these core elements in place, I like to answer three questions when I teach a game:

• Who are you?
• What are you trying to do?
• How much time do you have?

For Kigi

, I contrived a scenario in which competing muralists try to make the best tree painting. They'd jostle to fulfill their commissions and even go so far as to erase each other's work. When the last card is taken from the deck, the game would be over, and each player would score their commissions, if able. That's who you are, that's what you’re trying to do, and that's how long you have to do it.

In the end, I had a pretty nice game with illustrations cobbled together from stock art sources. However, I see now how the design choices were at odds with the zen-like relaxing experience promised by the aesthetics. My art promised a slightly different feel than the game provided.

Connecting Theme and Mechanisms

The two main issues came from mechanisms designed with the best intentions: pruning and commissions.

First, I noticed that players would be encouraged to grow only a single branch since it already had the best opportunity to score maximum points, so I added a mechanism called "pruning". When you scored more than a certain number of points from a branch, all of those scoring cards would fall to the owner's personal discard pile. This would be used offensively against other player's trees to keep their scoring opportunities limited. You would sometimes play defensively, scoring sub-optimal points from your own branch just to cap off the maximum point value any other player could get from it.

Second, I wanted to reward long-term planning and the cultivation of an interesting-looking tree. As part of the theme, I thought these artists should have commissions that they're trying to achieve by the end of the game. Almost all of the commissions in Kigi

score based on having a majority of a particular feature or card. If you have more of that than any other player, you score the points! Yay! If you don't, then you don't. It was an oddly brutal note on which to end the game.

Both of these mechanisms conspired to make a more vicious game than I originally intended. At the time I thought it was a happy accident. I was sort of amused that this peaceful exterior hid a competitive take-that experience. The game certainly didn't seem any less popular for it.

I worried that it was a bait-and-switch, but 2014 was all about Getting Games Done. I can spend ages noodling over all of my games if I don't have a hard and fast deadline to meet. That year, I prioritized overcoming my own conservative reservations and taking the small risk of releasing these games as they stood. If small design tweaks came to mind later, they could be easily implemented and updated in the POD product.

Right away, Kigi

became my best-selling product and the overall best-selling product on DriveThruCards, dominating the top spot for months thereafter. For a good while, it was the site's top-selling product of all time.

International Attention

In early 2014, an American representative of Chinese publisher Joy Pie

noticed one of my first self-published games. Joy Pie thought games with Asian themes would appeal to the Chinese market. Apparently they had imported a copy of my game Koi Pond

, and local gamers thought it was from a Chinese designer already! So we worked out a contract and suddenly my second traditionally published game debuted in China, not North America or Europe. This is a very cool time to be a tabletop game designer.

That experience taught me that I should design more games with minimal text on the cards so that they'd be easier for international publishers to license and localize. It was the beginning of a business model that I stumbled on entirely by accident. My original intent was to use print-on-demand as a development channel leading directly to traditional American or European retail licensing. After the Koi Pond

license, I realized that designing within the constraints of print-on-demand made my games attractive to burgeoning game markets and publishers around the world.

I got my start in the games industry by working on indie RPGs that embody a strong punk-rock urge for independence, a feeling that sometimes resonates with me as well. At this point I started wondering, "Why not keep the rights to my games and license them myself internationally? There are a lot of languages out there. I could license the same game in each different language. Each license would be relatively modest, but they'd gradually aggregate into a small income. What the heck? Why not give it a shot?"

After that, everything seems like a blur, but I think the timeline went something like this:

• First, Creative Tree

also licensed Kigi

in China as a sequel to Koi Pond

.

• In December 2014, Game Field

contacted me to fast-track a Japanese version of Kigi

that would be available for the following Tokyo Game Market in May 2015

.

• In March 2015, the French game blog Tric Trac posted a very positive article

. (I still don't know how they heard about it.)

• Shortly thereafter, Antoine Bauza tweeted at me publicly

, asking how to buy the game in France. That seemed to get a lot of attention.

• In Q2 2015, Kudu Games

picked up the license for the game in Polish and German under the title "Bonsai".

• In mid-2015, Action Phase Games approached me with keen interest in publishing Kigi

in the U.S.

In less than a year, Kigi

had gone from a tiny print-on-demand card game to an internationally licensed game available in five languages. It was an unbelievably fast success for me on that front. However, that's when I realized being the "hub" of all these international licenses was a double-edged sword. In taking on that role, I made it more complicated for a U.S. publisher to take a chance on my games, too.

New Development, New Theme

Action Phase Games was interested in releasing Kigi

at retail scale in English, but offered some changes that would make the game significantly different than its previous iterations.

First, we would remove the pruning mechanism entirely so that players could add cards only to their own trees. Without this core interaction, the only way players affected one another was in choosing which cards to take from the display, perhaps with a bit of hate-drafting. This would be a much more indirect form of interaction than the "take-that" pruning.

We were fully conscious that we might be criticised for making a "multiplayer solitaire" game, but we doubled down on it anyway. If this game is about making you feel calm, relaxed, and satisfied that you've made a pretty object, then let it be exactly that.

Toward that end, we changed the endgame scoring as well. Instead of all-or-nothing scoring conditions, we used granular conditions. For example, instead of:

If you have the most flowers on your tree at the end of the game, score 10 points.

We took the more relaxing and forgiving approach to that scoring condition as follows:

Score 1 point for each flower on your tree.

Action Phase Games also proposed dispersing these scoring phases throughout the game instead of consigning them to the very end of play. Each player would begin with four scoring cards. Every four rounds, each player would have to choose one of these cards to score, then discard. Almost all of these scoring conditions would be best optimized as end-of-game scoring conditions, so choosing which ones to sacrifice earlier in the game would be a challenging puzzle.

Thematically, each of those rounds would be called a "season". Action Phase Games came up with some cool gameplay variations that would pop up at the start of each new season, adding another layer of puzzle to the game. The scoring cards themselves would become "Kodama", tree spirits taking residence in these new verdant trees.

Transition to American Retail

I liked all of these ideas, but in the back of my mind I was worried about my international partners and how they would feel about all of this. Like it or not, I suspected that a retail-scale English language version of Kigi

— especially one that featured substantial changes from the original design — would feel like a "definitive" edition for most people. Some of the international publishers who were the first to give Kigi

a chance were in the middle of manufacturing their copies of the game when these changes came up from Action Phase Games. Would a significantly different English edition render their international editions obsolete?

These concerns convinced us to market our redeveloped game with a different title and with a new theme. Though Kigi

and Kodama

were both tree-growing, card-overlapping games, I thought they were different enough that a new brand was warranted. This change allowed Action Phase Games to work with a brand new, fresh property and reduced some market confusion about which edition was the "real" game.

Thankfully, most of my international publishers didn't seem to mind. Later, I'll work to get those publishers first priority for the Kodama

license in their native language. It all worked out in the end, but it could have been a real mess.

Now I'm more cautious about this push for international licenses, at least for games that I think might have a chance in North American markets. A North American or European publisher usually expects to be the first one to license the rights to a new designer's game, but when I go into a pitch meeting for some of my games, I have to add caveats that the licensing rights in Chinese, Japanese, or Portuguese are already taken by other publishers. Even if the American/European publisher had no intent to publish in those languages, it's an awkward thing to have to explain.

This is all new territory for me and perhaps an unlikely path for any other tabletop designer. I got extremely lucky with Kigi

's success, and I got even luckier to have publishing partners in Poland (Kudu Games), China (Joy Pie/Creative Tree), and Japan (Game Field) who are so generous and understanding.

Kodama: The Tree Spirits

is hitting retail now and the reviews have been very positive so far. I love seeing friends and families playing this little game together. Here's hoping Kodama

keeps on growing!

Preview of the 2016 Previews: Origins, Gen Con, Dice Con and Spiel

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/542…gins-gen-con-dice-con-and

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3021047_t.jpg]With May more than halfway over, here's a look ahead at the summer and autumn convention schedule to let you know when to expect convention previews that highlight the new games that will be shown, sold or demoed at each of these shows. In chronological order:

• BGG.CON Spring

, May 27-30, 2016: Surprise! I'm not posting a preview for this con, partly because I don't know what to expect (having missed the first such convention in 2015) and partly because I'm planning to hang out and actually play games

instead of doing news stuff, although inevitably I'll still spend some time talking with publishers about upcoming titles. After all, we have just over a month before...

• Origins Game Fair

, June 15-19, 2016: I've already contacted several dozen game publishers about this convention to both assemble an Origins 2016 Preview — which will go live Monday, May 30 — and schedule livestream game demos. Yes, BGG will be at Origins for all five days of Origins, and the current plan is to livestream from 10:00 to 16:00 each day. This will be an interesting experiment since at Gen Con and Spiel we have no time to spare and typically rush through a new game on camera every few minutes. Given the smaller number of new releases at Origins, I expect we'll include more prototypes than usual and have time to engage in designer and publisher chit-chat. Different!

• Gen Con

, August 4-7, 2016: As we've done the past couple of years, BGG will livestream game demonstrations from Indianapolis over the four days of Gen Con, and the Gen Con 2016 Preview goes live Monday, June 20 — the day after Origins ends. I just hope that the Gen Con organizers turn on the air conditioning on Wednesday. Set-up was brutal in 2015!

• Dice Con

, August 27-28, 2016: Most of you have probably not heard of Dice Con, but this event launched in Beijing in 2015 to bring media attention to board and card game publishers in China, while also welcoming other publishers to China and encouraging designers to present new works to publishers for licensing. I met with the Dice Con organizers in Beijing in May 2016, and since I'm largely unaware of the Chinese game market and want to learn more, I offered to pull together a Dice Con 2016 Preview to both educate myself and encourage Chinese producers to put their information on BGG. I plan to publish this convention preview on Monday, July 25, 2016.

• Spiel

, October 13-16, 2016: BGG will livestream game demos from Essen, Germany once again, and the monstrous Spiel 2016 Preview — which I started before

Spiel 2015 opened — goes live Monday, August 8, the day after Gen Con ends. That preview boasted nearly eight hundred titles in 2015, and I'm sure that it'll surpass that total in 2016 given the ever-increasing number of publishers who show up at Spiel from around the world.

If you're a designer or publisher who plans to present new games at one or more of these shows, feel free to email me the information now to ensure that you're included in the convention previews later. My email address is in the BGG News header at the top of this page, and you can learn how to submit game listings to the BGG database here

. Please send a separate email for each convention and include the name of the con — e.g., "New titles for Gen Con 2016" — in the header. I'll also poke publishers with info requests, but feel free to act now! Avoid the rush!

New Game Round-up: Flicking Plastic, Building Spires, and Outlasting the Competition

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/542…lastic-building-spires-an

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3021640_t.jpg]• As noted

in Feb. 2016, Z-Man Games

plans to release a mass market version of Gaëtan Beaujannot and Jean Yves Monpertuis' Flick 'em Up!

, and now the publisher has placed both a release date (July 2016) and price ($35) on this version, while also announcing that this "wider audience" version will be available in a total of fourteen languages: English, German, French, Dutch, Hungarian, Polish, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Finnish, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian.

• Corné van Moorsel

of Cwali

has teased

his next release: a tile-laying game in which players build a wildlife park without cages or fences. Van Moorsel's short description: "Each animal has its own requirements for its surrounding landscape (grass/bush/rock/water). Further you can improve the value of your park by flora, watchtowers, trek tours, ziplines and extra entrance roads."

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3021686_t.jpg]• To continue with the theme of shooting things, we have Dead Last

from Matthew Grosso

, Andy Patton

and Smirk & Dagger Games

, with this title due out in June 2016. An overview:

Dead Last — originally known as Tontine — is a "social collusion" game of shifting alliances, betrayals, and murder for profit in which players must conspire and vote upon whom to kill each round. Any means of overt or covert communication is allowed — a glance, a nod, pointing under the table, flashing a card, anything – but make sure you don't tip off the target or they could ambush you instead! In the end, one or two players will remain, either claiming all the gold or squaring off in a final showdown before starting the next round of play. The first player to score 24 points of gold wins.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3021671_t.png]• Who doesn't love cards with numbers on them? I sure do, so I'm curious to fund out more about Nevermore Games

' Spires

from T.C. Petty

, which will hit Kickstarter in Q3 2016 for an anticipated 2017 release. Here's an overview of the game:

A king with a penchant for spires is asking his favorite builders – the players – to perk up his kingdom's skyline. Players compete to build the tallest spires to receive the king's favor, but his majesty has warned that the towers must not be taller than those on his royal palace.

Spires combines hand management, set collection, and trick-taking into a 25-minute game. Players compete for cards in different markets to try to build out their tableaus.

Every player aims to fill their tableau with spires of each type but must be careful not to add more than three of any one type of card. Once the spire exceeds three cards, all cards of that type become a penalty to their final score.

Competing for cards can be tricky as rival builders can force you to take cards that push you over the three-card limit, but not to worry! You can also win cards that allow you to discard or swap cards.

The builder with the most points, including spires and bonuses (special cards, icon majorities, etc.), wins!

Game Preview: Tak, or Retroactive Winner of the Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/542…active-winner-thousand-ye

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2975977_t.jpg]I've long been enamored of The Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge

that Daniel Solis

and his wife organized in 2010. The goal behind that challenge was simple: Create a game to be enjoyed by generations of players for a thousand years.

Okay, the goal was simple to state while not actually being simple at all. The challenge at the heart of that challenge is that you can't create a game that requires you to buy it; you must create a game that will spread organically from player to player, while allowing for each new convert to spread the game easily as well. This means that you can't think in terms of manufacturing or licensing because those elements inhibit the ability of a game to travel easily to new players. You want the idea

of the game to spread, so the specific physicality of the bits themselves must be secondary.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2292416_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2618399_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2618400_t.jpg]While not intending to win this competition, designer James Ernest

has done so retroactively with Tak

, a game reluctantly co-designed with novelist Patrick Rothfuss

— and I say "reluctantly" because initially Rothfuss didn't want Tak

to become a reality. He had introduced the game in his book The Wise Man's Fear

, presenting it as an ancient game in his fictional world but not detailing how to play it.

Ernest, a fan of Rothfuss' work, worked with him to create three Pairs

decks featuring characters and the world featured in The Name of the Wind

, the first book in Rothfuss' The Kingkiller Chronicle series. While preparing for the Kickstarter for Pairs

, Ernest asked Rothfuss about making a real game of Tak

and Rothfuss refused many times, finally agreeing to talk about the game's background just to get Ernest to stop bothering him. Then as Rothfuss tells it

:

Later, James told me he wanted to make Tak. He wanted to invent it. He wanted to build the whole thing from the ground up based on my descriptions from the book, and the unwritten stuff he knew I had hidden in my head.

Again, I said no.

"Why not?" he asked.

"Tak is supposed to be my world's version of Chess or Go or Mancala," I said. "I can't ask you to make a game like that. It's like saying, 'you know those games that have stood the test of time for hundreds or thousands of years? The best games ever? Do that, but in my world.' So first off, it's unreasonable for me to ask. Secondly, you can't do it. No one can. And thirdly, if you did somehow manage to pull if off, nobody would give a shit. We're living in the golden age of board games right now. Nobody cares about strategy games like chess anymore." ...

"Just let me try," James said. "Let me take a run at it. If you hate what I come up with, we'll never speak of it again."

So I told him, fine. Fine! Do it. Whatever. Jeez.

Amazingly enough, Ernest succeeded in his goal of creating a modern "ancient" game. The rules for Tak

are simple:

• Play on a square grid of any size from 3x3 to 8x8, with 5x5 and 6x6 being ideal. Use a number of pieces appropriate for the size of the board. Include a larger capstone piece for games on a board at least 5x5.

• To win, create a line of your pieces that connects opposite sides of the board.

• On a turn, either place

one of your pieces on an empty space or move

a stack of pieces that is topped with one of your pieces.

• When you place a regular piece, you can place it flat (allowing it to move or be covered later) or stand it on end to serve as a wall that cannot be covered and doesn't count as part of a winning line. Capstones cannot be placed on end.

• When you move, move the stack orthogonally, leaving behind zero or more pieces on the starting space and dropping one or more pieces on each space visited. You cannot enter a space with a wall — unless the top piece on the stack is a capstone; in this case, you can end movement by using the capstone (and only the capstone) to flatten the wall, turning it into a regular flat piece.

• If you create a line of pieces (flat ones and capstone) that connects opposite sides of the board, you win. If all the pieces have been placed, whoever controls more spaces with flat pieces wins.

Cheapass Games

sent me a rough version of the game with beta rules ( PDF

), and I've played seven times over a single lunch: three times on the 4x4 board and four times on the 5x5 board.

Tak

is one of those perfect strategy games in which it's easy to lose (or win) in your first games because you (and your opponent) have no idea what you're doing. You overlook the obvious things that an opponent can do to win out of the blue because you don't even know where to look or what to look for. The rules are simple, yes, but you need to internalize them in order to start defending against attacks and the only way to do that is to play the game and learn from your mistakes.

One final aspect to the rules: On the first two turns of the game, you place one of the opponent's pieces instead of your own. This functions as something akin to the pie rule in Hex

that allows the second player to take control of the stone placed by the first player, but is more interesting since (as the second player) you're reacting to the first player while also influencing that player's next move, which will be with the color that you've just placed.

Once the pieces start piling up on the board, you have a lot to consider each turn. The threats are everywhere, and you start working through your head how the mutually assured destruction would unfold if one of you makes the move the other keeps worrying will be made. It's easy to forget about the walls because in some senses that piece is wasted, but at the same time, the wall can neutralize an opponent's attack and protect multiple spaces on the board from one or more threats.

Once you graduate to the 5x5 board and the inclusion of the capstone — the full game, as it were — you discover another level of play, with the capstone serving as the game's queen in how it can warp play around it on the board; the capstone is a black hole that influences everything around it; it's a boot on the opponent's neck that cannot be removed but only shifted so that they aren't choking nearly so badly as you might wish.

I have no idea how many more games can be created that might meet the thousand-year threshold, but it can be done — at least as I view the situation only one year after Tak

was created — and I'm curious to see how long the game will survive once only the cockroaches remain behind to play.

Tokyo Game Market • May 2016 I — Going Small to Get Bigger

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/542…6-i-going-small-get-bigge

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2489670_t.png]Attending Tokyo Game Market is like taking a trip through the looking glass. For the most part, I feel like I have a handle on the U.S. and European game markets — not that I know everything about every game released by every publisher in those markets because that's unpossible, but I have a sense of how they work, which publishers to cover for the BGG readership, and who to contact for information on upcoming games.

When it comes to Game Market, though, I follow the work of a couple of dozen designer/publishers, but the total number of independent designer/publishers at TGM keeps increasing, with many of these people producing multiple games for every single show. For May 2016, the TGM Preview

I created listed only 38 games, less than 15% of the 251 new games available at the show from the 480 exhibitors(!) on hand. (I listed a larger percentage of games in my two previous TGM previews, but I had less time to prepare for this show due to GTS. Sorry! Numbers courtesy a TGM summary

on Table Games in the World.)

Thus, once I arrived at TGM, I felt like I was exploring a mysterious wonderland of colorful goods, most of which had rules only in Japanese, which meant that I was left to puzzle out what the games might involve based on all of the other games that I've seen over the years: This one is probably a word-based party game (and it was); that one looks like a connect-the-opposite-sides-of-the-board abstract strategy game (which it was, although I missed learning the details that distinguished it from all the others); there's a Werewolf

-style, hidden-role game, and there's another one and there's still another one; here's a card-based, music-themed set-collecting game of some sort in which you try to anticipate what others will do so that you can mooch off them.

In short, for those who haven't done their homework — by which I mean studying the Game Market website

in detail for weeks beforehand as designers blog about their creations — TGM is a real-time, meta-deduction game, with you trying to deduce what the games might actually be and whether they're to your taste before they're sold out and disappear from the market, possibly forever.

That said, a larger number of non-JP publishers was on hand at TGM in May 2016, including first-timers Crash Games and Zoch Verlag. Alderac Entertainment Group even had its own booth at the show, and given the sellthrough rate of what AEG brought, I'm sure that other publishers will bring their own selection of tiny games to TGM in the future.

My wife, son and I shot more than four hundred images during TGM, and we recorded more than a dozen game overview videos a couple of days after the show since it's not easy to find designers during the show who are (1) willing to demo their games on camera and (2) able to speak English. I'll start with a dozen pics in this report and follow with more over the next few days, ideally wrapping up everything before BGG.CON Spring starts on Friday, May 27. Deadlines — I need 'em!

Each time I attend Tokyo Game Market, it's held in a different, larger part of Tokyo Big Sight, which is the largest convention venue in Japan. What's more, at least three other events were taking place in Big Sight as well, probably more.

This shot shows those waiting at the front of the line at 9:58 a.m., a couple of minutes before the show opened. They had arrived at 1:00 a.m. to reserve their spot and had been waiting ever since. TGIW notes

that 2,400 people were in line when TGM opened, and approximately 11,000 people participated over the entire day — which is kind of amazing given that Origins Game Fair lasts five days and in 2015 it had ~16,000 attendees, a mere 50% more than TGM.

One of the faces at TGM that would be most recognizable by gamers belongs to Hisashi Hayashi

, who was selling the worker-placement word game Word Porters

and the heavy strategy game YOKOHAMA

— and by "heavy" I mean "weighty". While a large percentage of titles at TGM are tiny card games designed not to take up too much space in tiny Japanese apartments, Hayashi has gone big with his 2015 release Minerva

and now YOKOHAMA

, which Tasty Minstrel Games

has already announced

that it will release in a deluxe edition similar to what it did for Orléans

. This is one of many games that I plan to bring to BGG.CON Spring so that I can get a couple of plays under my belt. Not much time to prepare...

One thing that you can be assured of seeing at TGM are cute cats, whether on the games themselves or on accessories such as these acrylic dice towers sold by the Fuji Game Factory for approx. $27.

Designers Corentin Lebrat

and Antoine Bauza

were smitten by the self-publication efforts that many designers make for TGM, so they produced five hundred copies of the real-time slapping game Gaijin Dash!!

for May 2016 and included rules only in Japanese to frustrate any non-JP fans who managed to get their hands on a copy. Thankfully, I had a translator who helped me record an overview video later, so now I'm all set with the rules and soon you will be, too.

I encountered many games like this at TGM, word games or party games or conversation games of some sort that reduced me to taking a photograph and moving on. For the record, this title by アナログゲーム倶楽部 (Analog Game Club) is titled 対決！空論バトル

, which translates to something like "Showdown! Doctrinaire Battle". My loss for not knowing Japanese and getting more out of this...

Here's what fits in a typical booth at TGM: a dozen copies of three games, a small display of how to play one of the games, and a sampling of meeple-bearing accessories. BGG owner Scott Alden had asked me to pick up Peke's Mushroom Mania

for him, so I did. I then recorded an overview video later so that he'd be able to play it, and in the process I discovered that the translated name is nothing like Mushroom Mania

, which is the title that had been submitted with the listing.

Here's a closer shot of the meeple accessories at this booth. Think those bolo ties should find their way to the Geek Store? I don't know whether the crossover between bolo tie-wearers and gamers is an empty set, but I can't imagine the number being too large. Am I wrong?

LOGS

from 彩彩工房 (Sai2Workshop) is the "connect-the-opposite-sides-of-the-board abstract strategy game" that I mentioned above, and the publisher brought a grand total of twenty copies of this item — which features rules for two games, neither of which I know — to TGM. I look at these types of game listings on the TGM website and think that I should investigate this title more so that it can be included in the BGG database, then I realize that I just don't have time and move on. Sorry, LOGS

; maybe I'll catch you next time!

Another aspect of TGM is you thinking that you want to get a game, saying you'll get back to the booth later, then either forgetting that you wanted to get the game or discovering that all of the copies have sold out. That was the case with this booth from Ayatsurare Ningyoukan

as my trick-taking-loving self had noted at least a year ago that I wanted to get Tricks & Deserts

, but I didn't recognize the orange box when I snapped this pic — only the next day when I started reviewing and tweeting the images. Oops.

As I mentioned before, many TGM titles are tiny card games, and as a result much of the gameplay takes place not with the components themselves, but between the players, with the components merely being prods that spur players to action. With that thought in mind, perhaps it's not surprising the Werewolf

-style, hidden role games are so popular at TGM. I can't tell at first glance whether Wolf in the Village

from Kanzaki Hisahito and Dirty Labor offers any new spins on the genre, but it features graphics that top all of the other versions I've seen, so that's one big plus.

While most of the booths at TGM are tiny, the perimeter of the convention space houses larger stands by more established publishers, who naturally pay more to occupy that square footage. Oink Games

is one such publisher, and it has a crowd of assistants on hand to both set up prior to TGM opening and...

...sell games to visitors once things start hopping. Oink has a beautiful consistency to its offerings, with every game of the past few years coming in a box with the same footprint and bearing the same (discounted) convention price of ¥2,000 (~$18). You know you're getting a clever little game with sharp, minimalist graphics, so you step up, hand over your bills, and take a little blue bag home with you.

New Game Round-up: Surviving the Oregon Trail, Maximizing Your Harvest, and Driving Away the Competition

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/542…oregon-trail-maximizing-y

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic949006_t.jpg]• In addition to announcing that it has picked up licenses for Jesse Li's Ponzi Scheme

and Hisashi Hayashi's YOKOHAMA

, Tasty Minstrel Games

has revealed the basics of two titles in the works for release in 2017, starting with Pioneer Days

from UK-based designers Matthew Dunstan

and Chris Marling

. An overview:

Pioneer Days is a dice-drafting game set on The Oregon Trail. While you pursue your strategy, you must be prepared for impending disasters such as storms, disease, raids, and famine.

Round by round, players draw dice out of the bag, roll them, then take turns drafting one to either collect silver, hire a townsfolk, or take an action based on the die value. Townsfolk confer immediate or constant benefits as well as end game scoring bonuses, while actions help you collect wood, medicine, cattle, equipment, and gold nuggets. The unchosen die each round advances one of the disaster tracks based on its color, and when a disaster gets to the end of its track, all players must deal with its effects.

The other title, Harvest

, is from Argent

designer Trey Chambers

:

Mind the fields of Gullsbottom! Plant and fertilize your seeds, tend your crops, and utilize the various buildings at your disposal. You'll need to work smarter, not harder, as harvest season is coming to an end! Who will have the best harvest this year? Will it be you?

Each round in Harvest, you first draft turn order (and the benefits that come with it), then send your two workers into town and into the fields. Plant seeds, tend fields, and harvest crops to make room to plant some more! Utilize buildings and magical elixir to amass a bigger and better harvest than your neighbors at the end of five rounds of play.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2596949_t.jpg]• Many moons ago — July 2015, to be specific — Mercury Games

announced

that it planned to launch a Kickstarter funding campaign for a new version of Martin Wallace

's Princes of the Renaissance

by the end of 2015. That didn't happen, but now Mercury has stated the the KS will go live on Monday, May 23, 2016. Counter-programming to the revelation of the Spiel des Jahres nominees perhaps...

• AEG

has released All That Glitters

, the first expansion for Vangelis Bagiartakis

' Dice City

, so naturally it's time to announce expansion #2, this being Dice City: Crossroads

, which adds taverns, guilds, and new ways to get around to the city of Rolldovia.

• I've posted a lot about the self-publishers at Tokyo Game Market, but that doujin spirit is present around the world, as with designer/publisher Nick Case

of A-Muse-Ment

, who will have one hundred copies of The Municipal Golf Club

— the second expansion for his golf course-designing game The Front Nine

— available at the 2016 UK Games Expo, after which no more will be available. As for what the expansion offers, here's a short description from Case:

The player controls the Parks and Recreation department of a local council who have been challenged to build a suburban course for the general public. Funds are tight and those pesky neighbouring boroughs have the same idea as you, so the gloves are off and dirty deeds abound as players build sewage treatment plants, by-passes and electricity pylons on their neighbours patch in an effort to disrupt their courses. Not to mention those scum-bag locals who dump rubbish all over your lovely course when no one is looking...

Tokyo Game Market • May 2016 II — 88 Lines About 44 Images

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/542…6-ii-88-lines-about-44-im

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2489670_t.png]I noted in my first report

on the May 2016 Tokyo Game Market that my wife, son and I took more than four hundred images at the show — then I posted only a dozen pics in that report, and at that rate I could post once a day about TGM for the next month and still

not get through all of the images. Unacceptable! Let's see whether I can pare down my paragraph-long descriptions to highlight the games at a faster clip.

The highlight(?) of Tokyo Game Market might have been トイレを汚したのは誰だ？

, which translates roughly to Who Soiled the Toilet?

No fewer than three U.S. publishers took home a copy of this hidden-role game from 北野克哉 (Katsuya Kitano), a crap-filled Resistance

in which players either try to soil the bathroom or keep it clean without anyone guessing which side they're on.

Part of the gameplay in トイレを汚したのは誰だ？

involves players trying to flip poo chips into the round box, which represents the toilet. Do you have poor aim, or were you actually trying to drop your load on the floor? That's what everyone wants to find out!

Here are some of the role cards in トイレを汚したのは誰だ？

, which probably wouldn't fly on the U.S. market. ( Timebomb

is not from the same designer/publisher, but was simply being sold at the same table. Many hidden-role games show up at TGM since they tend to require few components to work.)

The Japon Brand

stand highlighted some of the licensed versions of game designs that originally appeared at Game Market and at the Japon Brand booth at the annual Spiel convention in Essen, Germany. JB's Nobuaki Takerube told me after the show that Japon Brand has now registered with the government and become a more official organization instead of being the loose network of designers it has been in years past. He also noted that it's only after this May TGM show that he and others start deciding which games will comprise the Japon Brand offerings at Spiel in October, so at this point it's impossible to say which games will make the cut.

マジョマジョ -迷いの森と４人のウィッチ

, which I think translates to MajoMajo: Lost in the Forest with Four Witches

, has players running through a card forest in which the landscape disappears in order to trap a little boy with their witch. At least I think that's what the game is about. Only a Japanese speaker would know for sure...

I mentioned in my first report that cute cats could be found in many places at TGM. One of those places was in Maigo-Neko

, a deduction game from 有泉誠浩 (Shigehiro Ariizumi) in which players are lost cats wandering around town, trying to remember the characteristics of their house so that they can find their way home. Take note of the adorable puffball cat pieces!

Another stand, another cat game, this time from 有限浪漫 ( BoardGameCircle

), publisher of the delightfully odd Donburiko

, which I covered

in 2013. I know bupkis about these three titles, alas, so I'll just say "Kitty!" and move on.

Take The "A" Chord

is a jazz-themed trick-taking game from Saashi & Saashi

. I need to get this (and many other trick-takers) to the table soon. It's been far too long since I've turned tricks...

Saashi & Saashi's other title at TGM is Coffee Roaster

, a solitaire game in which you roast and "taste" coffee beans, trying to bring out the optimal flavor (while avoiding smoke and a burnt taste) in three of the game's 22 varieties of beans.

I know the name of the designer/publisher — 安東和之 (Kazuyuki Ando) — but beyond that nothing.

The May 2016 Game Market was my third time attending the show, and by this point I recognize most of the offerings from Tagami Games

. Have I played any of them? No, but one of the steps that you take toward knowing a subject is knowing what you know and knowing what you don't know. You need to have a base from which to explore, and while I'm still building the base at this point, I'm getting there.

Admittedly the language barrier at TGM is an issue. You can already see that from some of my meager descriptions above, but the barrier goes both ways, with JP designers having a hard time getting information about their games to an audience outside of Japan. A few years ago, I think this wasn't a concern for most of those at Game Market; they created their games, sold them, then moved on. They had a small audience of enthusiasts, and they catered to that crowd.

Then Love Letter

happened. Now a greater number of publishers at each TGM that I attend seem to offer English rules, whether in the box or (as it says on the sign above) "registered on the BGG". Most designers still don't include English rules, but more do as they've realized that their audience isn't limited by the waters around Japan. Their creation could potentially appeal to anyone anywhere, so they're making the effort to meet that audience halfway, to move beyond the enthusiasts who are so crazed for variety that they'll struggle through Google translate for hours to determine 85% of how a game might work. I certainly appreciate the effort, and I bought a few games that I wasn't sure about simply because they did include English rules. If it turns out they won't work for me, at least I'll be able to pass them along more easily.

Cute dogs also show up in force at TGM, as in this game by フジモトが作ります (made by fgmt), but my guide Ken Shoda told me that cats are now the favored pet over dogs in Japan.

This booth presents the TGM newcomer, of which I still consider myself one given my lack of Japanese, with a typical problem: You approach the stand to discover the name of the publisher — TDS — that you've never heard of and three titles about which you know nothing. Solution? Sigh, take a picture, and move on.

A first look at ドラフト戦国大名

("Draft Sengoku Daimyo"?) from 遊志堂 reveals an area control wargame (possibly), with each player having a bank and personal action sheet — then you see all the cards with text on them, sigh, snap a pic, and move on.

A1 Casino

is from first-timer 岸田 ひとり. That is all I know.

Hey, Suburbia 5★

is no longer the only game with a "★" in its title thanks to チップ★

("Chip ★"), a longer-playing game (90-120 minutes) from なまはむ (Namahamu) with a setting that European and U.S. players will feel right at home playing: You each represent a princess and need to determine which princess will be crowned queen at the end of the game.

The other game in the upper right — まっぴ～！

("Mappings!") — seems typical of what happens at TGM as the publisher offered fifty copies for reserve, met that limit within ten days, then carried an additional ninety copies to TGM for sale to walk-ups. Will more than 140 copies of this game ever exist in the wild? Who knows?

And here's another familiar TGM sight: Eight tiny card games in the space of six cubic feet. I covered

ButaBabel

from こっち屋

(Kocchiya) after I bought a copy from someone at Kobe Game Market, and I bought Tarot Storia

in Nov. 2015 but still haven't played it, and I added Schrödinger Hero

to the database but avoided it since hidden roles aren't my thing. The other five games? Mysteries.

The short description of this game from パイライト (Pyrite) is that this is a simple 1-4 minute game for players ages 5 and up that can help prevent dementia in grandmother. Since I don't know the rules, however, Nana's out of luck.

Dessin

from 風呂まりもレコーズ (Bath Merimo Records) is of the "simultaneously play, then reveal" school of design, with players starting with the same cards and facing off against each neighbor at the same time to claim point cards.

I see only now, alas, while researching this game for this post, that Gem Duel

from カロチンミート (Carotene Meat?) includes English rules and text on the cards as well as Japanese. Oh, well — maybe next time!

Hey! Here's a game in the BGG database: Honnoji

from zhatgames, a title that first appeared in 2014 with players moving samurai through a burning temple in order to grab whatever treasure they can. While I often think of TGM as being flooded with new games each show that vanish forever, you also have the phenomenon of a designer/publisher returning to Game Market with the same title over and over again. Heck, Spiel is no different in this regard, as with (for example) the Dutch designer who shows up annually with his two-player racing game that plays on a balance beam.

Another newcomer at TGM in May 2016 was ぐるあゲームズ (Gluer Games) with 新聞記者奔走記

, which bears the following name in English in tiny type: Sagazaki Regional Newspaper Boardgame

.

I'd like to call out Jon Power for his assistance in getting more JP games listed in the BGG database, including Eat or Eaten

from Analog(ic+y), in which bunny players struggle to take out four opposing hares or occupy the opposing burrow. This design originated from a game design challenge in which you were supposed to create a game that used only two types of cards.

NINJAWORKS' Beast Master Tale

had a surprise showing (at least in my eyes) at Spiel 2015. At that show I had approached the publisher, asked for a flyer, then promptly lost the flyer amongst lots of other things I picked up at Spiel. At least at TGM I took a picture of the game.

Three games from ひとじゃらし about which I know nothing.

Here's a (relatively) large stack of 爆弾宝箱

( Treasure Chest Bomb

) from publisher Comet

. Note that when I use the term "publisher" for those at TGM, that typically refers to both the ones designing the games and publishing them. Comet is one of many examples of a "doujin circle", a group of enthusiasts who have decided to try their hand at self-publication.

Publisher 聖書コレクション (Bible Collection) features the games Bible League

(a Bible-based baseball game), Bible Hunter: Trinity

, and other Bible-inspired creations.

Sea of Clouds

designer Théo Rivière (middle) represented Repos Production at TGM; here he is checking out 魔人のごちそう

( Genie's Banquet

) from Kotatsu Party. I recorded an overview of this co-op game and will post it in the near future.

Multiple games of mystery from 兄者 (Brother's?), by which I mean I know nothing about them.

Four sets of cars that comprise the fighting TCG Spiria Material Card Game

, which despite the English title and subtitles has no English text on the heavily Japanese-texted cards. Pity.

Some of the offerings from まどりや (Floor Ya), which was still setting up when I snapped this pic; note that Lost Gemma

, despite the similarity of the logo, is not a Lost Legacy

variant, but a maze-based puzzle game.

Toy-like games and puzzles from ヒラメキ工房 (Inspiration Workshop), who understandably likes to highlight his press in the mainstream media.

The gloriously colorful and unfortunately (for me) Japanese-filled くるくるジュエル

( Round and Round Jewel

) from カンブリアゲーム (Cambria Game).

Idol PhotoGrapher

(on the left) from ごらくぶ (Entertainment Section) is listed on the TGM website; the two games about critters in the sewer and sheep of varied colors are not. So many mysteries...

Snow Mansion

, a design in which players secretly try to kill one another in an old house, is the work of ぎゅんぶく屋 (Gyunbukuya), another first-timer at TGM in May 2016.

Stand for ガーデンゲームズ (The Garden Games), which apparently had only one of its previously released titles, the 2015 release The Labyrinth of Cards

— which I only now see has English rules for download on BGG. More preparation needed next time!

"No Mahjong No Life!" is a pretty bold claim, but perhaps Mahjong contains essential nutrients that I've heretofore been missing. しのうじょう (Shinojo) has released two Mahjong-based card games — All Green

and Yaochu!

— since 2014.

I appreciate the folks from Team.U.C. posing for this pic, but then I didn't return the favor as I know nothing about Turn

and Build and Crush

. Sorry, guys!

I typically included the booth number in my shots or paired a close-up with a longshot that included the booth number so that I could track down info later, but this bunny-based game has eluded my search efforts. Just wanted to let you know that bunnies get some JP design love, too.

Three-fifths of the titles available from CRIMAGE...

...and the remaining two-fifths.

Multiple games from ゆるあ～と, including one played on an A4 sheet of paper in which the victim of a murder tries to leave clues about the killer by eating certain foods in the vicinity. At least I think that's what is going on.

Okay, I still have dozens more images to post from Tokyo Game Market, but perhaps not in another giant post like this one as I'm not sure how easy it will be to download and view all of these pics at once.

In any case, I thought I'd close with a fun pic. The day after TGM, my family and I took a taiko drumming lesson in east Tokyo from Yukihiro, who has been playing the drums for nearly three decades. (Sign up here

!) He was hosting a more experienced set of players at the same time, so we'd switch off frequently during the class, with them playing something awesome, then us learning some of the basic rhythm patterns, then them jumping on again. These students would also jump in during our lessons, possibly to help us grab the rhythm more easily and possibly just because they were all having a ball. Hard to find in the city, but highly recommended!

Crowdfunding Round-up: Digital Games Hit the Table in a Bevy of Nightmare Worlds

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/542…l-games-hit-table-bevy-ni

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3021719_t.jpg]• Another day, another post-apocalyptic survival mission, this time in the form of Grégory Oliver's Outlive

from La Boite de jeu

, with you fighting against others for survival in a radioactive environment. Also, the game features miniatures — but you probably already guessed that. ( KS link

)

• Disaster of another type awaits in Plague Inc: The Board Game

, an adaptation of the video game from James Vaughan and Ndemic Creations

that allows you to try to overrun the world with your unique pathogen. Can you infect countries and kill the entire population within their borders? ( KS link

)

• Another digital-to-analog conversion is taking place in This War of Mine: The Board Game

(note the helpful subtitle!) from Michał Oracz

, Jakub Wiśniewski, and Awaken Realms

. Now you can try to survive as a civilian in a city overrun by military forces on your tabletop! ( KS link

)

• On the flipside of Plague Inc

, Michele Quondam's Virus

from his own Giochix.it

presents the more traditionally cooperative "fight the virus" narrative, with players invading a laboratory while watching for potential traitors. ( KS link

)

• Speaking of viruses, you can attempt to turn the United States red, white or blue in Campaign Trail

from David Cornelius, Nathan Cornelius, and Cosmic Wombat Games

, with up to six players employing multi-use cards to fundraise and collect electoral votes on their way to the presidency. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3007776_t.png]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2986642_t.jpg]• Okay, enough doom and gloom for now. How about a pleasant game of snatching as much loot as you can from a sleeping dragon, this being the premise of the set-collection, press-your-luck game Hoard

from Tim Kings-Lynne, Julia Schiller, and Cheeky Parrot Games

. ( KS link

)

• Wealth acquisition of a more traditional manner is present in Dale of Merchants 2

from Sami Laasko and Snowdale Design

, although your end goal in this deck-building game filled with anthropomorphic animals — which can be played on its own or combined with Dale of Merchants

— is to complete your merchant stall, not simply amass a pile of loot. ( KS link

)

• Cute animals are also at play in 9DKP

, a trading card game from Erick Scarecrow and ESC-Toy Ltd

that consists of three decks — kats, zombies, and survivors — that can face off against one another. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3019101_t.jpg]• Chris Cieslik of Asmadi Games

released a beta version of his roguelike dungeon crawl card game One Deck Dungeon

at Gen Con 2015, and now he's moving forward with the final version of the game, which accommodates 1-2 players with a single set or up to four players with two copies. ( KS link

)

• Aside from dungeon crawls, in a list of common game tropes you'll find pirates, zombies, pirate zombies, pirate zombies on a dungeon crawl, and robot assembly. Thus, it's no surprise to find another game about robot assembly on KS, specifically the self-published BetaBotz

from Gargitt Au and Zack Connaughton. I don't see what differentiates this robot-assembly game from others, but I'm not a robot-assembly connoisseur, so perhaps others can spot such details better than me. ( KS link

)

• The zombie portion of this c.f. round-up comes from a German version of Jane Austen's Matchmaker with Zombies

from Warm Acre. ( Spieleschmiede link

)

• Another common gaming trope is railroad management, and frequent Age of Steam expansion designer Alban Viard

offers his own take on the subject — as detailed in this designer diary

on BGG News — in Tramways

from his own AVStudioGames

. ( KS link

)

• Nearly one year after its initial KS attempt, the disk-flicking, planet-destroying game Cosmic Kaboom

from Matt Loomis and Minion Games has orbited back onto the crowdfunding circuit, with the game being released in both a regular and KS-only deluxe version. ( KS link

)

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3018617_t.png]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2875155_t.png]• In 2015 Game Salute

released Philip duBarry

's Skyway Robbery

— a game of thieves set in the steampunkish Gaslight Empire — and now duBarry and Game Salute are giving players the other side of the story with Chief Inspector

, in which investigators try to apprehend the most notorious criminals in the Gaslight Empire without becoming too corrupt in the process. ( KS link

)

• The Gaslight Empire is also the setting for Garrett Herdter's City of Outcasts

, a microgame in which players use special-powered allies to secure support for themselves from those in control, with optional location cards allowing for a slightly larger area-control game. ( KS link

)

• A similar battle for governmental control takes place in Coup: Anarchy G54

, an expansion for Rikki Tahta's Coup: Rebellion G54

from Indie Boards & Cards

that adds six new roles and a new action card to the base game. ( KS link

)

• Battles of a more traditional manner take place in Ken Whitehurst's Polyversal

, a science-fiction mass-combat miniatures game from Collins Epic Wargames

that takes place on a "plausible-future Earth", according to the publisher. I appreciate the openness of this phrase, mostly because it makes me ponder what non-plausible-future Earths might be like. ( KS link

)

• If you've ever dreamed of playing Dejarik (or even know what Dejarik is), then you probably want to check out Hologrid Monster Battle

, a hybrid digital/analog tactical CCG from HappyGiant with monsters designed by Phil Tippett. ( 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

Spiel des Jahres Nominations for 2016: Codenames, Imhotep and Karuba

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/543…ons-2016-codenames-imhote

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2334183_t.jpg]In Germany, the Spiel des Jahres and Kinderspiel des Jahres juries have announced

their nominations for the largest awards in gaming in terms of publicity and generated sales, and as usual the Spiel des Jahres nominations are a combination of the expected and "Really? That one?" The nominees for Spiel des Jahres, Germany's "game of the year" award, are

• Codenames

, by Vlaada Chvátil

and Czech Games Edition

( overview video

with the designer on BGG)

• Imhotep

, by Phil Walker-Harding

and KOSMOS

( overview video

)

• Karuba

, by Rüdiger Dorn

and HABA

( overview video

)

Codenames

was on every list of SdJ nominations that I saw, and given the way that this game has taken the hobby by storm — especially how players have created their own variations for the design using Dixit

cards, Cards Against Humanity

cards, other game boxes, and so forth — I have a hard time imagining how it won't win. Just yesterday during a game session, a single fellow and a couple told me how they had each introduced Codenames

to new people within the past week, with those converts wanting to play again and again and again. The gameplay is as easy or as involved as the players make it; the design invites creativity from the players; and people can join (or drop out) of the game as needed, making it something that goes on the table while you're waiting for guests, only to absorb those guests into the game when they arrive. That said, who knows what will happen as "surefire" winners have failed to take home the red poppel in previous years...

The SdJ jury has also issued a recommended list of five titles

, with those titles being:

• Agent Undercover

(a.k.a. Spyfall

)

• Animals on Board

• Die fiesen 7

• Krazy WORDZ

• Qwinto

Nominations for the Kennerspiel des Jahres — the enthusiast's game of the year — have likewise been announced by the SdJ jury:

• Isle of Skye: From Chieftain to King

, by Andreas Pelikan

, Alexander Pfister

and Lookout Games

• Pandemic Legacy: Season 1

, by Matt Leacock

, Rob Daviau

and Z-Man Games

• T.I.M.E Stories

, by Manuel Rozoy

and Space Cowboys

Pandemic Legacy

has to be the odds-on favorite to win given how the game has dominated the mindspace of those who play it. The game is a story created by you and your fellow players, a world that you both travel through and affect with your actions, leaving you in the end with an incredibly personal experience that feels more like an event than a game. I've been a huge fan of T.I.M.E Stories

since 2012

when I first played the prototype, and that game took years to come together — both in terms of assembling scenarios and figuring out how to package the experience into something that players could do easily at home — only to find itself overshadowed by Pandemic Legacy

once it finally hit the market.

The recommended list for the KedJ

is a bit shorter, but it contains probably the three most expected titles by the BGG audience:

• 7 Wonders: Duel

• Blood Rage

• Mombasa

Finally, the separate Kinderspiel des Jahres jury has its own list of nominations for the children's game of the year, and those are:

• Leo muss zum Friseur

(Leo Goes to the Barber), by Leo Colovini

and ABACUSSPIELE

• Mmm!

, by Reiner Knizia

and Pegasus Spiele

• Stone Age Junior

, by Marco Teubner

and Hans im Glück

Hans im Glück with a Kinderspiel nom and HABA with the SdJ nom — things have flipped on their head in Germany! I've played both Leo

and Mmm!

a fair amount, so it's time to get to work on overview videos for those games. Mmm!

already won the Spiel der Spiele in Austria in 2015, and I thought that its absence from the Kinderspiel nominations in 2015 was surprising given how well the game introduces kids to the concept of pressing their luck in games (not that they have any aversion to pressing their luck in real life, mind you), but perhaps it absence was merely a fluke of the calendar, with it being released too late for consideration.

The recommendation list for KidJ

consists of the following:

• Burg Flatterstein

(a.k.a. Flutterstone Castle

)

• Burg Schlummerschatz

(a.k.a. Sleepy Castle

)

• Die geheimnisvolle Drachenhöhle

(a.k.a. The Mysterious Dragon Cave

)

• Dschungelbande

• Harry Hopper

• Mein Schatz

• Sag's mir! Junior

(a.k.a. Time's Up! Kids

)

The Kinderspiel des Jahres winner will be announced on June 20, 2016, while the SdJ and KedJ winners will be revealed on July 18, 2016. Should you be at BGG.CON Spring

on Memorial Day weekend (May 27-30, 2016), four members of the SdJ jury will be on hand with all of the nominees so that you can try them out. How this will work for Pandemic Legacy

will be interesting to discover!

New Game Round-up: Welcoming Tides of Madness, Succeeding Alexander, Revisiting Barony & Eating Fresh Fruit

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/544…-tides-madness-succeeding

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3028109_t.jpg]• In mid-March 2016, I posted

about a sequel to Kristian Čurla

's Tides of Time

titled "Tentacles of Time". Turns out that info had leaked early as the final title of this Portal Games

release — which will debut at Gen Con 2016 in August — is Tides of Madness

, with the "madness" coming from a new way to score and/or lose. Some details:

Tides of Madness is a sequel to Tides of Time and features gameplay similar to that design. Tides of Time is a drafting game for two players. Each game consists of three rounds in which players draft cards from their hands to build their kingdom. Each card is one of five suits and also has a scoring objective.

After all cards have been drafted for the round, players total their points based on the suits of cards they collected and the scoring objectives on each card, then they record their score. Each round, the players each select one card to leave in their kingdom as a "relic of the past" to help them in later rounds. After three rounds, the player with the the most prosperous kingdom wins.

Tides of Madness adds a new twist to the above game: madness. Some cards, while powerful, harm your psyche, so you must keep an eye on your madness level or else risk losing the game early as your mind is lost to the power of the ancients. More specifically, eight of the eighteen cards in the game feature a madness icon, and while scoring, you receive a madness token for each such icon in your collection of cards. Whoever has the most madness in a round either scores 4 points or discards 1 madness token — and the latter option is valuable because if you ever have nine or more madness, you lose the game immediately.

A draft of the English rules for Tides of Madness

( PDF

) is available on the Portal Games website.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3023008_t.jpg]• Speaking of time, a couple more publishers have decided it's time to start unveiling information about titles they'll release at Spiel 2016 in October. Designer/publisher Bernd Eisenstein

of Irongames

explores a similar era as in games past with Phalanxx

, which bears this brief description:

Alexander the Great has conquered a vast empire, but his power is now waning and the time is ripe to compete for his inheritance.

Each player in Phalanxx leads one of four competing factions that are ready to rule that vast empire. To do this, you must become the most powerful faction by reinforcing your troops, ensuring sufficient supplies, and occupying the most important cities and oases.

In addition, in April 2016 Eisenstein released solo rules for the Peloponnes Card Game

, his Spiel 2015 release, in English ( PDF

) and German ( PDF

).

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3028099_t.jpg]• At Spiel 2016, Matagot

will expand Marc André

's 2015 release Barony

with Barony: Sorcery

, which includes components for a fifth player — new tiles, new wooden components, new player aid — as well as something new to the gameplay itself:

Barony: Sorcery brings magic to the world, with a sixth action now available to the players that allows them to cast powerful spells. Before they can cast spells, however, they need mana, and only a few places on the board allow them to collect those precious mana points. The battle for control and access to these places will be hard!

Barony: Sorcery stays true to the base game as the new elements add no luck to the game, instead opening up possibilities for players to bend the rules, thereby adding even more tension to the board.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic433784_t.jpg]• Crash of Games

has acquired publication rights to Wolfgang Sentker

and Ralf zur Linde

's Finca

, which was nominated for Spiel des Jahres in 2009. In Finca

, players use their workers to collect fruit, then fulfill orders scattered across the Mallorca countryside. You're not free to move your workers however you wish, though, as their movement is restricted by the location of workers owned by other players — just as their movement is restricted by yours.

Crash of Games plans to release its new version of Finca

in Q2 2017, keeping the farming-based nature of the original game, but moving the setting to North America and using new artwork throughout the game. CoG's Patrick Nickell has raved to me about the wondrous wooden bits of the original version of Finca

, so I'd expect something similar in this version.

New Game Round-up: Aliens Battle, Rats Return, Blocks Ship Early, and Ants Want Your Money

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/544…tle-rats-return-blocks-sh

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3028434_t.png]• Upper Deck Entertainment

's unwieldily named Vs. System 2PCG

expands once again on July 20, 2016 with the release of Vs. System 2PCG: The Alien Battles

, which consists of two hundred cards that cover all four Alien

movies. Players can play as any of the major characters from the Alien

universe or as the Xenomorphs themselves. Vs. System 2PCG: The Alien Battles

can be played on its own or combined with any other standalone Vs. System 2PCG

title for more battling fun.

• Speaking of the Vs. System 2PCG

, Upper Deck notes that attendees of BGG.CON Spring (which takes place May 27-30, 2016) will receive extended art Venom promo cards. Whoever does the best impersonation of Venom at the Upper Deck exhibitor booth receives a bonus set. I look forward to videotaping those efforts!

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic612591_t.jpg]

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2841771_t.jpg]• Here's something that I missed months ago: White Goblin Games

is reprinting the base game of Åse and Henrik Berg's Rattus

and expects to have information in mid-2016 about its availability. Some of the Rattus

expansions and promos are still available in the WGG webshop, and it expects to release "new things later this year", i.e. 2016.

• Following Imhotep

's nomination for the 2016 Spiel des Jahres

, Thames & Kosmos — the U.S. branch of German publisher KOSMOS

— has announced that it will release that game in North America on June 21, 2016, instead of in August 2016 as previously planned. (I'm checking whether copies will be available at Origins Game Fair, which takes plae in mid-June.) Clearly those goods aren't crossing the Atlantic on a solar ship...

• Helaina Cappel of Kids Table BG

notes that it's headed to Kickstarter in September 2016 to get backing for Problem Picnic: Attack of the Ants

from Kickstarter king Scott Almes

. No details on the gameplay yet, but clearly ant farms need to be a stretch goal.

• Mariano Iannelli from What's Your Game? posted the following teaser image on Facebook, noting that they're "[t]esting the next game from Zhanguo

's authors", those being Marco Canetta

and Stefania Niccolini

. He expects this title — whatever it might be — to be released at Spiel 2016.

New Game Round-up: Sweets on the Streets, More Zombie Fighters, and Team Spirit for Cash 'n Guns

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/544…eets-more-zombie-fighters

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3030150_t.png]• The weather's getting hotter — at least in the Northern Hemisphere — so Green Couch Games

is preparing a game filled with cool treats that, um, won't be delivered until the end of 2016 when the temperatures have dropped once again. Oh, well, that's game publishing life in the Kickstarter era, with the worst part being the backers in Australia probably won't receive copies until mid-2017 when they're in the midst of winter once again.

In any case, here's an overview of the game in question: Rocky Road a la Mode

from first-time designer Joshua J Mills

:

Get in the driver seat and feel what it's like to live the life of a sweet treat trucker! Stock up your truck, attract customers, and serve a hefty scoop of tasty frozen delight! The best truckers get to know their customers' favorite selections so that they can always meet demand and gain an edge over the competition in the battle to claim the hottest locations. You'll see the business of icy entrepreneurship is no day at the beach. Buckle up, turn on the loudspeaker, and take to the rocky road...with ice cream!

Rocky Road a la Mode is a game of managing time and resources to meet the demands of sweet-treat-seekers! The game features multi-use cards and a time track that determines the players' turn order. The player whose ice cream truck is furthest back on the road goes next and may choose from several actions on their turn: stocking up on new treats, playing music over the loudspeaker to attract business, or passing out treats to fulfill customer desires. Every choice costs time and forces players to move ahead on the road track. Once a player is no longer in the rear of the pack, their turn ends until they find themselves lagging behind again.

In addition to gaining loyalty points from happy customers, players can gain bonus treats in their permanent supply so that they can meet demand a little easier. Throughout the game, players also fight to earn the right to take over several of the different territories that make summer great: the beach, the pool, the park, and the ballfield.

• I'm attending BGG.CON Spring 2016

, which takes place May 27-30, but for the first time in years I'm attending a convention as a player and not as a news guy. That said, I keep finding announcements of goodies that will be available at the show, so here I am spreading word of them to you all, such as the I Hate Zombies: Spyke and Geek

promo cards that Steve Jackson Games

will hand out to those who participate in its "horde-sized" games of I Hate Zombies

that will accommodate up to 48 players.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3030817_t.png]• A second expansion for the second edition of Ludovic Maublanc

's Cash 'n Guns

is due out Q3 2016 from Repos Production

, with Team Spirit

taking a page from the Yakuzas

expansion for the original Ca$h 'n Gun$

in that you'll now be able to play with up to nine at the table with players competing in teams instead of on their own. Team Spirit

also includes four new guns, seven new characters you can play, and twelve mercenaries you can hire to put extra muscle on your team.

• Reiner Knizia

's Silver Screen

, a card game version of Traumfabrik

that fell into limbo when publisher Cambridge Games Factory vanished, might appear in print after all. In April 2016, CGF developer Robert Seater posted the following on BGG

: "I have tentatively found another publisher for it, which Knizia is now working with. I don't know the timeline, but I think the game has a future!"

• The image below appeared on a Facebook group page, then was referenced in a Reddit post

. I asked Asmodee North America whether Arkham Horror: The Card Game

was indeed in the works from Fantasy Flight Games, and social marketing coordinator Cynthia Hornbeck responded as anticipated: "Our official statement is 'no comment'."

Tokyo Game Market • May 2016 III — Game Overviews of Gaijin Dash!, Trick of Spy, Rummy 17, Mushroom Mania, Same One!, Genie's Banquet & Matadoon!

Link: boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/543…6-iii-game-overviews-gaij

by W. Eric Martin

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2942632_t.jpg]Filming at the Tokyo Game Market is tough. The event lasts only seven hours, tables are small, few people speak English (and I can only count a bit in Japanese), and most JP designer/publishers don't want to appear on camera anyway. Add all that together, and you can understand why I didn't film any game overviews during TGM itself.

Instead my guide/translator Ken Shoda met me at the Tokyo game café Dear Spiele

on the Saturday following TGM, where we spent four hours reading rules (Ken), asking questions (me), and filming these videos (my wife Linda). As you might be able to tell from the walls around us, Dear Spiele has a great selection of games and I'll post lots of pics from the café in another TGM picture round-up. Many thanks to Ken for volunteering to do this, especially since he seemed to be coming down with a cold at the time!

• We'll start with an overview of the non-Japanese game Gaijin Dash!

, self-published by designers Antoine Bauza and Corentin Lebrat and released in a 500-copy edition at TGM.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3022786_t.jpg]• Reiner Knizia seems to have had a handful of games released or re-released at each TGM that I've attended. In May 2016, Oink Games released a snazzy version of Twins

, New Games Order had an in-joke-filled version of Escalation!

, and Ten Days Games released the seemingly new Rummy 17

. I say "seemingly new" as (1) it's hard to track everything that Knizia has released over the years and (2) the game is mostly standard rummy aside from a few twists — but naturally the twists are what's going to make this game something different.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2925488_t.jpg]• A couple of titles from designer Susumu Kawasaki ( Traders of Carthage

/ Osaka

, R-Eco

) have made their way into markets around the world, but he produces at least one new title each year through his own Kawasaki Factory and those never seem to leave Japan. At TGM in May 2016, Kawasaki debuted Trick of Spy

, a trick-taking/deduction combination for 3-4 players.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3002980_t.jpg]• I wasn't sure what to expect from looking at the Mushroom Mania

box, but BGG owner Scott Alden asked me to buy a copy for him, so I did. Then I discovered that it contained rules only in Japanese, which isn't uncommon, but thankfully Ken was able to explain all, so we can now all consume the 'shrooms (so to speak) at BGG.CON Spring. Here's an overview of this design from Peke and Takamagahara:

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic2953412_t.png]• Before TGM opened, I didn't know all the details of Genie's Banquet

— a title from Naoki Eifuku and Yu Takada — but I did know that (1) it's a co-op game with (2) a solo mode and (3) players laying down numbered and suited cards in order to clear goals, and that reminded me enough of house favorite The Game

to transport money out my wallet and into the hands of publisher Kotatsu Party.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3032416_t.jpg]• I wrote an overview

of Yoshihisa Itsubaki's MountTen

in November 2015, and now he and One Draw have released Same One!

, an evolved version of that hand-voiding design that allows you to scale the difficult up or down depending on the age (or experience) of the players.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3032455_t.jpg]• Most of the games released at TGM consist solely of cards since those games take up less space on shelves, cost less to create and buy, and take less time to produce — but sometimes you'll find board games among the TGM offerings, as with Ejin Laboratory's Matadoon!

, which contains a tiny handmade board that folds up to fit in the equally tiny box, along with four player screens, four meeples, a bunch of paper tiles, and a bag.

Aside from the game, I've amazed by the "Matadoon!" name given the explanation presented in this video. Lots of layers in a single word!

[Blockierte Grafik: http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic3032487_t.png]• In addition to recording these game overview videos at Dear Spiele, Ken and I interviewed café owner Masashi Kawaguchi about his experience running the store and dealing with competition from those setting up game cafés in the wake of his success.