W. Eric Martin | Board Game Beat

Want to Join the Cult of the Old? At SPIEL Essen 24, Candice Harris and I stopped at a used game vendor's stall and yakked about old games for an hour, with me doing most of the yakking as I described old games that she had never seen before: We've continued to talk about old games on and off since then, with the most recent conversation taking place for the seventh episode of her _Kickin' It Creative_ podcast: How did this episode come about? In late 2025, we talked about forming an "Old Game of the Month" club, with us inviting others to join us in playing a specific old game each month, then getting together online to discuss that game, which we would ideally have played several times. The idea would be to choose an old game, e.g., at least a decade old, that wouldn't be too ubiquitous — no _El Grande_, no _Pandemic_, etc. — but that wouldn't be too hard to acquire either. In May 2025, I published a written and video review of **_Venedig_**, a 2007 release from Klaus-Jürgen Wrede (_Carcassonne_) and AMIGO. After owning _Venedig_ for at least fifteen years, as I used to make a habit of buying cheap games on eBay.de, I finally pulled it off the shelf, playing it four times and loving its old-school charm. Why not do this more often, I said? Then I didn't. Now Candice and I are collectively making a push along these lines, using the time-honored technique of getting a buddy to link arms with you and make you feel like you can't let the other person down. For the podcast, we each chose two older titles, with mine being Leo Colovini's **_Aztlán_**, which Ares Games released in 2012, and Reinhold Wittig's **_Wabanti_**, which debuted in 1974 and which I've owned for approximately twenty years in a 1986 edition from Franckh, the precursor of KOSMOS. Those two games were going to hit the game table today... ...until a fifth person RSVPed. Time to change plans! Here's the new line-up for game day on Friday, March 13: I've played **_Lumberjack_**, a 2002 title from Alan R. Moon, Aaron Weissblum, and Schmidt Spiele twice — once in 2007 (which I don't recall) and again in January 2026 on an in-shrink copy that I purchased cheaply at some point and opened umpteen years afterward. I'm more familiar with Andreas Steding's **_Scottish Highland Whisky Race_**, which he released in 2004 through his own MOD Games brand. I've played nine times since buying it at SPIEL '04, but not since 2011, so in a way I'll be relearning this game at the same time I'm teaching it to others. We'll see. Maybe it will all come back to me as I'm deciding how much malt to sock away in my hand to determine my movement bid for the turn. The other two titles — **_Big or Bang_** from Peter Jürgensen and Korea Boardgames, and **_DNUP_** from Kai Kejino and asmodee — are both review copies that accommodate five players, so they're possibilities as well. We'll see what happens once everyone arrives. What old game recommendation would you have for me — or for yourself should you be willing to undergo this challenge as well? • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

Time to hit your shelves and see what you've been missing

Don't Chicken Out on Growing Enchanted Ivy over Goat-Filled Containers U.S. publisher Allplay had its own room at GAMA Expo 2025, one of several publishers to do so in order to show off games on its own schedule instead of relying on the few hours available during the "media first look" period and game nights. Allplay has built up a catalog of dozens of titles in just a few years, in addition to partnering with other publishers to provide discounted shipping and cross promotion for all involved, and this room replicated that partnering, with upcoming titles from Allplay and others in display. Components from __Container__ on display at GAMA Expo 2026, with the table mat and resource trays not being included in the produced game One of Allplay's biggest releases in 2026 will be its new edition of **_Container_**, which raised more than US$1.1 million in a crowdfunding campaign in October 2025. This design for 3-5 players from Franz-Benno Delonge, Thomas Ewert, and Kevin Nesbitt is conceptually simple, yet challenging to play since you can't easily foresee the ramifications of your actions. The gist of the game is that each player has a secret chart showing which containers are worth which amounts to them at game's end, and during play you're going to produce containers that must be purchased by others, store containers that must be shipped by others, and ship containers that others will buy. In the end you want to have more money than anyone else, but how to make that happen will depend on decisions by you and others throughout the game. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Sample event cards in Allplay's new edition of __Jibber Jabble__ _Container_ is due out in Q3 2026, as is Allplay's new edition of Cassie Sikes's party game **_Jibber Jabble_**, which she had self-published in 2024. _Jibber Jabble_ is listed as being for 3-30 players, and in practice it's one of those party games in which you could keep score, but will likely decline to do so. In a round, a player calls out 1-6 to identify a mystery word or phrase on a card that everyone else will see and try to get that player to guess. How you give clues to the guesser, though, is one letter at a time. I might say "T", then you'll say "H", and the third player — despite knowing what the mystery word is — might have no idea what we're trying to spell, so they'll say some letter like "O" just to play along or some letter like "S" to try to re-direct what this clue might be. Eventually one of the cluegivers feels like nothing else can be meaningfully added and will say "STOP", after which they can start a new clue. The guesser has two guesses to give the word or phrase, with the team winning the round if they do so. The Allplay edition includes new event cards, with one in play each round, if desired, and it's arranged the words and phrases to be guessed by difficulty, so you can say 1-2 to get an easy one, 3-4 for medium difficulty, and 5-6 for something challenging, such as "zugzwang", which I'm going to guess is not actually on one of the cards. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Mock-up components in the solitaire game __Enchanted Ivy__ Sarah Joshua's **_Enchanted Ivy_** is a solitaire game that can be played as a one-off with random guests, which are seen at left in the image above, or in story mode with a particular group of guests. The guests matter because they have scoring conditions you want to maximize while constructing your magical inn over the course of play. Each turn, you draw two cards from the deck, then flip one of them face down, after which you add both to your tableau. A story will specify the shape of your inn, so you're constrained in what you can add where. _Enchanted Ivy_ will debut at Gen Con 2026, and a second standalone title in the series — **_Enchanted Ivy: Festival of Spirits_** — will debut at PAXU in December 2026. That game will feature new guests and stories, as well as spirits that enter play and take residence in your inn. Some are good, and some aren't, so you'll want to take actions to keep the right ones around. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Some of the components, envelopes, and new items in __Mountain Goats: Legacy__ Another Gen Con 2026 release from Allplay is **_Mountain Goats: Legacy_** from Alex Cutler, Michael Mihealsick, and original _Mountain Goats_ designer Stefan Risthaus. As in the original game, you want to use dice results to climb mountains with your goat and stand above everyone else, but the "legacy" version of the game adds a story mode that will introduce new elements in each game, as demonstrated in this spoiler-y image: The story book includes branching paths that will introduce elements to the game in an order that you (unknowingly) choose, and once you've finished all ten chapters, you'll have ten mini-expansions on hand that you can use singly or together as you wish — or you can reset the game and play through it again to see how different choices will impact your precious goats. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Druid City Games is a new Allplay partner, and two of its recent releases were featured at GAMA Expo 2026. **_Off With Their Heads!_** is a 2-4 player trick-taking game from J.B. Howell and Michael Mihealsick that plays somewhat like a roll-and-write game. The queen moves around the board, determining the trump suit for each trick, and each player will play a card into the trick, with the winner of the trick advancing on the top third of their individual player sheet, the player of the worst-ranked card advancing in the bottom third, and everyone else advancing in the middle. You won't play all of your cards in a round, and the better the poker hand that you leave yourself unplayed, the more points you'll pick up at round's end. After three rounds, whoever has the most points wins. **_Madcala_** is a two-player game from Aaron Hein and Manny Trembley that contains six character sets, with four cards per set. Each player takes a character and lays out their unique cards, as well as shards — several small, one large — on plates in front of them. On a turn, you pick up all the shards from a plate and distribute them mancala-style clockwise on the plates, gaining the bonus where you land, which might be power cards from the deck, additional shards, damage for your opponent, health for yourself, or the refreshing of a one-shot character card that you've already used. If you move the large shard, that must be the final one you place, and you get double the reward listed. Your long-term goal is to eliminate all of your opponent's health, so don't be too distracted by the spinning plates to make that happen. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Matt Mundy's **_Flock Together_** from Sea Cow Games, which is featured at top, is another title available through Allplay's partner system. In this co-operative game for up to five players, you want to combine the powers of your chickens to ward off predators. Many painful chicken puns are featured. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • I'm not sure what to make of the giant concrete head on the street near Louisville's University Kidney Center, but thankfully I don't have to. Don't make eye contact, Eric. Take a pic, and move on... • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

An overview of new and upcoming releases from Allplay and Druid City Games

Roll Call Recap: Help Shape Our Coverage One of the first posts on Board Game Beat was a survey that invited readers to tell us what they wanted to see on the site, and in that post I wrote, "In a week or so, I'll write a Roll Call Recap, sharing what our community would like to see more (or less) often." I think "six weeks later" falls into the "or so" bucket. The day I posted that survey, I headed to Germany to cover the Spielwarenmesse toy and game fair, and I've since attended both Toy Fair NY and GAMA Expo. While I had wanted to make a splash with convention coverage, I think experiencing three conventions within six weeks has been more enervating than invigorating, with my notebook and phone still filled with unpublished material from Germany, not to mention from the later shows. With that trio of trips behind me, I'm finally looking at the survey responses to see whether convention coverage like this is even what people want. As it turns out, "Conventions" is actually far down the list of reader interests. For the question "Which topics in the board game industry do you wish were covered more frequently by journalists?", with readers being able to choose five items from a list, the top results are: * 49% - Industry news * 41% - Games from less-covered regions/emerging markets * 35% - Game design * 35% - Game announcements * 31% - Creator profiles (designers, artists, developers, etc.) * 31% - Business and financial side of the industry * 30% - Game reviews * 29% - Social issues in the industry/community * 26% - Game previews "Conventions" and "Graphic design & art direction" are next with 19%, so that's roughly half the level of game announcements in general. In other words, tell us about games, but don't worry about being on the scene to tell us ASAP. That said, the Beat's most popular post to date, with nearly twice the views of the second most popular one, is "**_Forbidden Legacy_** to Debut at Gen Con 2026", possibly because Gamewright and parent company Buffalo Games have posted almost nothing about the game. (My images keep ending up on the BGG game page because they're the only images out there — then I ask to have them deleted.) The third most popular Beat post is my write-up of the new version of **_Sushi Go Party!_** , so maybe convention coverage is of interest, but only in specific circumstances. The difficulty, of course, is that you often don't know what you're going to see at a convention. Perhaps you'll run across a sequel to a popular game series from a pair of famed designers, and perhaps you'll encounter yet another publisher of adult party games that go for gross-out moments. (I bypassed many such booths at Toy Fair NY.) Writing about games from less-covered regions was one of my initial priorities before I blitzed myself into covering these conventions, so I had asked in the survey "What countries/regions would you like to see covered more in board game journalism?", with readers being able to choose three items. The most popular results are: * 40% - Southeast Asia (e.g., Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam) * 31% - Central and Eastern Europe * 22% - Africa * 22% - South America (other than Brazil) * 19% - Australia * 17% - Brazil * 16% - India Everything else was between 10-15%. I might have tipped the scales by including all of southeast Asia in a single response, and the next three most popular answers were similarly grouped, but I felt that listing every country separately would have spread out support smoothly across the board — more jelly than jam, if you know what I mean. As for how you'd like to see industry news, these countries, game announcements, and so on covered, the top answer to the question "What are your favorite content formats for board game coverage and discovery?" (for which readers could choose two items) is no surprise: * 73% - Written articles/blog posts * 38% - Long-form video (e.g. 10+ minute YouTube videos) * 27% - Podcasts * 24% - Email newsletters/digests * 13% - Community discussions (e.g. forums, comment sections, Discord chats) I mean, I focus on written content, so people responding to a survey on my site will likely want to see written content. While I appreciate the support for long-form video and podcasts, they are not forms with which I'm generally comfortable. I created so many videos at BGG because my boss asked me to create videos, not because I was inspired to do so...other than when I swept components into a box and asked someone to film me doing so. That might remain my largest contribution to game culture, with my gravestone reading "EAT / SLEEP / GAME / SWEEP BITS INTO A BOX LIKE AN ANIMAL BECAUSE LIFE'S TOO SHORT TO WORRY ABOUT BAGGING WOODEN COMPONENTS / REPEAT". I will likely release videos infrequently, and as for podcasts, I've instead opted to record an audio version — which I've spoonerized into "Boardcast" — of at least one long article per week. That way I can focus on the writing, then record what's already written instead of riffing and hoping to say something meaningful. (I've hired editors for the one video released to date and the Boardcast versions of articles because I'd rather pay someone to do this work than struggle through it myself.) As for the related question "Where do you usually find or follow board game coverage?", with two choices being possible, the top answers are: * 66% - Dedicated websites/blogs * 52% - YouTube * 16% - Podcast apps * 13% - Reddit * 10% - Email newsletters So much support for YouTube! Personally the only game-related video coverage I watch is Efka and Elaine's "No Pun Included", the name of which I still remember as "No Pun Intended" no matter how many times I see it written down. Otherwise my videos of choice are essays about music and movies. (Shout out to Trash Theory!) Finally, we come to this question: "What do you most dislike about current board game coverage?", with respondents being able to choose up to three items. The top vote-getters are: * 69% - The content is too promotional/feels like advertising * 48% - The content is too clickbaity * 17% - The content is not detailed enough * 14% - The coverage doesn’t include the games or topics I care about * 13% - The site or channel has poor design/is hard to navigate * 12% - The content is boring Okay, the vast gap between the top two answers and everything else highlights the main sources of discontent about content in the game industry. I think I avoid clickbaity material — although I do sometimes use cryptic headlines to wedge in as many games as possible — and ideally my posts do not feel like advertising. To be clear, none of the material on Board Game Beat is paid content other than banner ads and the sponsor messages at the beginning of videos and Boardcasts. For game announcement posts, I try to cover what I find interesting or relevant (or what I think others will find interesting or relevant), with the games featured typically being grouped by designer, publisher, subject matter, player count, country of origin, point of discovery, or some other linchpin. For my first six weeks, yes, sometimes that "hook" was only "I saw all of these games at the same convention", but ideally I can cover game announcements in the context of a trend, as with March 2's "Nostalgia" article and March 10's "Make it smaller" article — or if not a trend, then with a focus on a less covered part of the world or within a profile of a creator or publisher that I've not written about previously. Before the Beat launched, for example, I had reached out to about a dozen creators to get started on profiles, then those mostly got sidelined as I swept myself up in convention fever. The longer articles will continue as well thanks to a weekly content calendar I had mapped out through June, with numerous other topics on the sidelines waiting to be fleshed out. My "article ideas" folder is bursting with possibilities, so I need to expand my point of view and look beyond every single announcement. Plus, I have nonsense ideas aplenty, and they've gone nowhere, too. Let's consider these first six weeks an introductory period, and we'll see where things go from here... • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

Time to make some adjustments?

Omens Show Rising Cultures on Seven Islands in 2026 Here's a sampling of what I saw during the "media first look" portion of GAMA Expo 2026, which involved dozens of publishers setting up games on tables in a ballroom, then media folk like me wandering around going, gosh, there's no way we can see everything in here. And we didn't. **_Dog Fluxx_**, which I believe is the 48th _Fluxx_ title from Andy Looney and Looney Labs, hit retail markets on March 3, 2026, and while other _Fluxx_ titles are in the works, the company's next release will be **_Seven Islands_** , which arrives on June 30, 2026. The game starts with the "START" card in play and with players having a couple of cards in hand. On a turn, you draw a card and play a card. Perhaps you'll play gear so that you have access to its special power later, or you'll add to an island with pyramids, moai, towers, portals, wells, and bridges. You want to move your tokens around the islands, with one portal teleporting you to another, a pyramid giving you an extra card, a well a bonus play, and so on. Your goal is to occupy the flagged tower that matches the ship at the dock, but ships come and go, in the tradition of Looney titles with shifting goals. Action cards are included in the game as well, making this design akin to a _Fluxx_ /_Aquarius_ mash-up in how the island chain grows throughout play. To celebrate the company's thirtieth anniversary, Looney Labs will release "Little Purple Bag", with this being a carrying case that holds one _Fluxx_ -sized game and comes packaged with seven promo cards: one specifically for _Math Fluxx_, with the others being usable in any _Fluxx_ game. Looney Labs is also working on a sweet version of Kristin Looney's 2000 pyramid game **_Volcano_**, with this version having a see-through game board that you can illuminate with a light underneath so that the frosted pyramids glow like technicolor lava. No pics yet as the materials were all mock-ups, but the hope is to release this item in late 2026, with packaging to match _Pyramid Arcade_ and other recent pyramid releases. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • I've already written about the involved roll-and-write game **_La Cosecha_** in an early March 2026 post, but U.S. publisher Capstone Games showed off a few other upcoming releases at GAMA Expo 2026: * **_Québec_** is a second edition of a Philippe Beaudoin and Pierre Poissant-Marquis design from 2011 in which players build the city of Québec over a period of four hundred years. For more on the game, read this designer diary from Beaudoin that I published on BGG News back in 2011. * **_The Royal Society of Archeology_** is an Eric Jumel design for 1-4 players in which you travel the globe in search of relics and knowledge. * **_Papyria_** is a Bernd Eisenstein design that he released through his Irongames brand in 2025. In this, another 1-4 player design, you construct canals, discover inventions, develop mines, and build temples, sanctuaries, and cities in 1,500 BCE where the Euphrates and Tigris rivers meet. Capstone Games released **_Pirates of Maracaibo: Bermuda Triangle_**** __** in February 2026, with this expansion adding a "treasure hunt" module to the base game, in addition to new improvement cards. In April 2026, the publisher will release **_Wandering Towers: The Magic Tower_**, which contains five modules that can be mixed and matched and which I wrote about in October 2025 when originating publisher Abacusspiele first announced it. Also arriving that same month is **_Wandering Towers: Spell Pack_**, which features six new spells for the game that were previously released two at a time in promo form. May 2026 brings the release of **_Tea Garden: Puerh_**, an expansion that adds two new actions to your possibilities each turn, upping the complexity of this Tomáš Holek design. **_Rising Cultures_** is a two-player game coming in March 2026 from Aske Christiansen and Francesco Testini that HUCH! first released in Q4 2025. Each player represents one of four civilizations — Egypt, Persia, Rome, or the Abbasid Caliphate — and employs its unique deck of multi-use cards to build, install leaders, conquer provinces, and more. Another May 2026 release is **_Pagan: Expeditions into the Wild_**, which adds still more to the world of Kasper Kjær Christiansen and Kåre Storgaard's _Pagan: Fate of Roanoke_. Man, I played this game once in April 2025 and really dug it, yet I haven't got it back to the table since. In my younger years — read this as "pre-child twenty years ago" — this game would have been on the table daily, giving me time to explore both sides of this asymmetric game and dive into each expansion. Wistful memories... Capstone Games will release an "updated English version" of the 2025 game **_ANTS_** from Renato Ciervo, Andrea Robbiani, and Cranio Creations at Gen Con 2026, along with a "limited reprint" of Cranio's 2023 game **_Rats of Wistar_** and the debut of the **_Rats of Wistar: Clans & Portals_** expansion. (For details on _ANTS_ , check out my preview from September 2025. I would have played more, but someone has borrowed my copy for quite a long time at this point...) Finally, Capstone Games has partnered with Czech publisher Albi on two upcoming releases: **_Night at the Zoo_**, which will debut at Gen Con 2025, and **_Prague Unseen_**, which will debut at SPIEL Essen 26. You can learn about these games in my Feb. 6, 2026 post from Spielwarenmesse. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • At GAMA Expo 2026, Hachette Boardgames USA revealed that the English-language edition of Maxime Rambourg's funky trick-taking-ish game **_Présages_** will be...originating publisher Spiral Éditions, with the name of this edition being **_Omens_**. I posted an overview of gameplay in this October 2025 BGG News post when Ravensburger revealed that it would release the game in German. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • **_Mythic Legions: The Roleplaying Game_** is being crowdfunded through April 4, 2026, and I know nothing about the game, but I liked this shot I took. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

Overviews of future releases from Looney Labs, Capstone Games, and Spiral Éditions

Scurry Up to Pack Canal Houses with Cats, Cucumbers, and Pressure Let's run through a bit more of what I saw at GAMA Expo 2026: Publisher UP Games debuted in 2025 with **_Floristry_**, a two-player game from designers David Gordon and TAM, who co-own the company with Ammon Anderson and Greg May, and its second game — **_Scurry Up!_** — will debut in early 2026. Each round in _Scurry Up!_ , you secretly set your die to the space you want to visit on that round's cards, with the game lasting seven rounds and with the cards holding as many spaces as the number of players. If you go to a space on your own, you get all of the resources depicted; if you share the space with another player — and not all spaces fit two players — you divide those goods; and if more players go to a space than the number of slots available, you all fall out of the tree, advancing on the "Oops" track. The heart-filled spaces must be occupied by the number of players depicted, in which case each player receives the depicted resources; in any other situation, no one gets anything. Resources score in different ways as shown in the lower-right of the image: the "Oops" track and flower track rewarded the two or three players who have advanced the most, berries score in sets, and ladybugs score 1 or 3 points depending on how they land when you flip them at game's end. Mock-up components in __Pressure__ UP Games' early 2027 release, which is designed by all four company owners, is **_Pressure_**, a press-your-luck bidding game for 2-6 players. In each round, each player starts with three cards in hand, while one card is face up on the table and two face down. Each player adds two of their cards to the face down pile, then places the final card face down in front of themselves. Players then bid on how many cards they think they can flip over before revealing three leaks and busting. As players drop out, they stack their diving helmet tokens. Once the "dive master" has been established, everyone else bets on whether or not they'll make it, after which the dive master starts revealing cards one by one. Three leaks end the dive, but tape will cover a leak to help extend a dive. Some cards count as two or three cards, pushing you deeper without risk, with others force you to reveal an extra card. If the dive master succeeds, players draft one card from the revealed cards or face-down ones, with those who dropped out later getting an earlier choice; if the dive master fails, you reverse the drafting order. Whoever bets correctly on success or failure drafts a bonus card. Play multiple rounds. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • **_Stick 'Em Up_** is the debut design from Topher Hernandez and 1HUNDRED GAMES, which is also co-owned by Ammon Anderson. Interesting... Over nine rounds, players try to get as much loot as possible, with each player taking the role of a character with a unique one-shot ability (unless you choose to ignore these for your first games). Each round, you reveal a card that shows which character is in charge of making a deal for how to split the loot — with the number of loot tokens randomly specified, and with each being worth $1-3 — and which characters must agree to be part of this deal. Players can play cards to take charge of the deal, represent other characters, and do other things. If this sounds familiar to you, that's because Sid Sackson's _I'm the Boss!_ from 1994 plays similarly. Hernandez says he's a fan of that design, but he added elements like one-shot powers, _Cosmic Encounter_-style power cards, a limit on how many cards can be played, and other modifications to make the design more suitable for his tastes. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • **_Cats vs Cucumbers_** is a 2-5 player game from Ammon and Melanie Anderson, owners of publisher Levity Game Studios — yes, another Ammon co-owned company! — and it's a press-your-luck design in which you want to place cats in boxes or move them up to more valuable boxes without rolling three cucumbers and busting for the turn. Treats score points in sets, balls of yarn have mystery actions on their reverse side, and swiping paws let you knock other cats into less valuable boxes. Each time you bust, you get a cucumber token to save you from a future bust and you reduce the "live" counter by one. Once players have collectively lost nine lives, the game ends and you tally points. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Mock-up components for __Pack & Paddle__, with each player getting their own game board and set of five bidding cards I've covered some titles from KTBG and sister company Burnt Island Games in a themed article, but **_Pack & Paddle_** — a 2-5 player game from Matthew O'Malley and Ben Rosset — didn't fit that theme, so let's get to it now. This game will be crowdfunded in May 2026 for a planed 2027 release, and your goal is to spend three fabulous days in the woods doing all sorts of camping stuff, ideally getting first dibs at everything you want in order to make the most of the available time. In game terms, each day you will draft four items from what's available, and for each draft you'll choose one of the five bidding cards in your hand; the higher the number, the earlier you'll draft, but drafting with lower numbers gives you a bonus tile or other action that might make waiting worth it. All spent cards are visible, so as the day progresses, you know which cards each player still had in hand. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • My final house display in one game of __Canal Houses__ To close, we'll look at Zach Hoekstra's **_Canal Houses_**, one of the few games I played at GAMA Expo 2026, a game that I actually played three times thanks to lunch partners who were willing to try and try again. Dutch publisher Wulfhorn Games first released **_Grachtenpand_** in 2024, and now multiple publishers have licensed the game for release in other languages, with Gigamic handling the game in both English and French. Gameplay is straightforward. Start with one building base, one building middle, and one building top in hand, and a random building base on the table. On a turn, draw a random card from one of the three decks — bottoms, middles, or tops — then simultaneously with other players add a card from your hand to your tableau. To end the turn, pass your cards to your left-hand neighbor. You can have any number of bases, with each specifying a point value (in tulips) if you satisfy that building's condition. From left in the image above, I need a building with at least one cat, at least six seagulls, at least four cards total and no cats, and at least four cards and no seagulls. You can place any number of middle cards on a base, then close it with a top, with each of those cards also having a scoring condition. Cards come in four colors, and whoever has the largest contiguous grouping of a color scores 4 bonus points. As soon as someone completes their fourth building, the game ends, with everyone scoring 1 point for each flower display in their tableau and the listed points for all bottoms and tops that met their condition. I won the first two games easily, then in the third game my two opponents (intentionally?) snatched tops that I was building toward and rushed the end of the game, burying me in the canal with a miserable score. It was good to play multiple times quickly as we all got a sense for how you need to monitor others since their choices affect what's possible for you. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Bearno's Pizza near the Kentucky International Convention Center hosted one of the media events I attended, and in addition to handling gluten-free pizza properly, it celebrated local celebrities, including Darrell Griffith, who was the #2 draft pick in 1980 and played for twelve years on the Utah Jazz. Once you get a nickname like this, you're unlikely to ever shake it, for good or ill... • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

Get a taste of what's coming from Gigamic, UP Games, 1HUNDRED GAMES, KTBG, and Levity Game Studio

To Succeed in 2026, Make Your Games Smaller (+Boardcast) This Boardcast is sponsored by Czech Games Edition. Become a supporting member today! > _The Boardcast is audio narrations of select articles. Listen to all episodes (or find out how to get them in your favorite podcast app)__here_ _._ > Prototype+ members can access an ad-free version here. You can also listen on your favorite podcast app using the private invite and link you received via email. Lost your link? Email admin@wericmartin.com. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Over the past few years, I've noticed publishers in both Europe and the United States moving toward smaller game releases. Neither region is in a recession — although tariffs imposed by the U.S. government on goods being imported into the country might push various economies over that line — but publishers have been hearing from retailers that their customers want less expensive games, so they're listening to feedback and creating products that fit that request. Two publishers told me at Toy Fair NY 2026 that US$40 is the upper limit for a game's MSRP these days. To be clear, these publishers primarily release games for _mass_ , i.e., mass market/mainstream outlets, not for hobby stores, although you will often find their titles in both locations. (Crowdfunding sites are a third retail outlet with v. different rules regarding pricing.) The Q1 2026 issue of _Around the Table_ , a quarterly publication by GAMA, features an article by Lyle Lowery titled "The Incoming Wave of Card Games" that hits the same point, quoting Eric Price, owner of Japanime Games and a GAMA board member, as saying, "I've put a halt to several games we were developing in the $50 to $60 range. We quit doing big-box or even medium-weight games to focus on [standalone] card games, accessories, and collectible card games." I saw an example of this from Japanime Games at GAMA Expo 2026 in early March. In 2021, the company had released **_Naruto: Ninja Arena_** from French publisher Don't Panic Games in a compilation edition, with the base game and **_Genin Pack Expansion_** in a single box featuring ten characters and components for up to six players for US$50. For 2026, Japanime has repackaged _Naruto: Ninja Arena_ in a smaller box with only four characters and dice for up to four players and with the price now at US$35. (Six additional characters — with no extra dice — are sold for US$18 in a **_Sensei Pack Expansion_** previously available solely in France and Spain.) Spot the difference between editions of __Naruto: Ninja Arena__ Many other examples of shrinking games are already on the market or have been announced for release in 2026. I've already written about **_CATAN: On the Road_**, a US$10 card game from Benjamin Teuber based on his father Klaus' classic _CATAN_, but in early March 2026 CATAN GmbH announced **_CATAN: ZIP! Edition_**, with this portable version of the game featuring punchboard resources and development tokens, punchboard tile holders, and a mapbook that features fifty unique paper maps that you'll draw on with pen. _CATAN: ZIP! Edition_ is due out in May 2026 and will retail for US$25. Components in the __CATAN: ZIP! Edition__ In October 2025, Pegasus Spiele released **_Dorfromantik: Light Luggage_**, with this being a new standalone game in the _Dorfromantik_ series from Michael Palm and Lukas Zach. Gameplay is the same as in the original 2022 _Dorfromantik: The Board Game_, but _Dorfromantik: Light Luggage_ features a new co-operative campaign that is simpler and easier to keep track of, according to Zach. Whereas _Dorfromantik: The Board Game_ and the standalone sequel _Dorfromantik: Sakura_ both retail for US$45, _Dorfromantik: Light Luggage_ sells for US$25, and its box is one-quarter the size of the original game, with smaller tiles to match. Separated at birth? While at GAMA Expo 2026, I got a peek at **_Lairs_** by Christopher Westmaas and KTBG, a game for two in which each player creates a dungeon from which the other player will attempt to escape. During the late 2024 crowdfunding campaign, KTBG had pitched a _Lairs_ base game that would include multiple boxes and envelopes to explore so that you could introduce new game material bit by bit, as well as a separate **_Deeper Dungeons_** expansion. The price to back _Lairs_ was CA$69 (approx. US$50), with the base game + expansion being CA$115 (approx. US$85), but now KTBG has broken the base game into _Lairs_ and **_Lairs: Adventurer's Pack_**, with the latter containing the boxes and envelopes. By doing this, the _Lairs_ base game will now retail for US$40, while each expansion box will be US$35-40, thus bringing down the entry price for this game line. Along the same lines, in 2026 KTBG's sister company Burnt Island Games — which has previously released beefy titles that retail for US$50-60 such as _Fall of the Mountain King_, _Endeavor: Deep Sea_, and _How to Save a World_ — will launch a new small box game line with **_Treeline_**, a 2-4 player game by Christopher Ryan Chan. Each turn, the active player flips two tiles face up, then marks the empty spaces on one tile with their troops, while the next player places their troops on the remaining tile. Then the next player flips two tiles, and so on. When a row or column has each space filled, you see who has the most troops in that line, with that player claiming the points for that line, but losing troops in the process — which makes it less likely to win the crossing lines. Mock-up components and boxes for __Treeline__ and __Familiar Spirits__ The second title in this Burnt Island small box line will be 2027's **_Familiar Spirits_** from Yuval Grinspun, who designed the aforementioned _How to Save a World_. In this game, 2-4 players are wizards who have three sizes of familiar, and you'll send these familiars into the wilderness to collect herbs, fungus, and crystals, possibly by bumping a smaller familiar from its spot. Alchemists will distill these ingredients into potions with unique powers that you'll ideally arrange in ways that will please the familiars. To make the cabinets in your office look their best, you can also hire imps and acquire rarities at vendors. Unlike the titles mentioned so far, Lyle Lowery's article in _Around the Table_ focuses on the increased prevalence of card games in publisher's catalogs, both now and in the years to come, and it highlights tariffs as the primary cause for this switch, but I'd argue that publishers have been moving in this direction for years, thanks in part to the success of **_7 Wonders Duel_**, a two-player-only version of _7 Wonders_ that debuted in 2015, retailing for US$30, half the price of the original game. Publishers are already well-versed in line extensions, that is, in releasing products that expand an existing game line — think of _CATAN_ , _Carcassonne_, and yes, _7 Wonders._ Line extensions generally carry less risk than new releases since they have a built-in audience of fans who will automatically look at this new product, but they also require those fans to already own another product since those line extensions are typically expansions. That was not the case for _7 Wonders Duel_ , which stood on its own, appealing to fans of the original game, but also drawing in players who might have liked _7 Wonders_ yet lacked the crowd to play it. The success of _7 Wonders Duel_ opened a new angle on line extensions. Sure, we had previously seen titles like _Carcassonne: The Castle_, _Blokus Duo_, and _Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small_, but in the few years after 2015 we saw _Kingdomino Duel_, _Yokohama Duel_, _Imhotep: The Duel_, _Zooloretto Duell_, _Cosmic Encounter Duel_, and _Carcassonne für 2_. Yes, this was a second _Carcassonne_ game for only two players with this one being the original game, but with smaller tiles and fewer of them. _Ticket to Ride_ followed this latter model — the same, but smaller — with _Ticket to Ride: New York_ in 2018, which plays like the original game but with fewer pieces and a much abbreviated playing time. Five other such city versions of _Ticket to Ride_ have been released since then, and this trend of "the same game but smaller" will only accelerate in the years to come, with publishers wanting to mitigate risk by selling what's already successful, while also having the possibility of upselling buyers in the future to the larger game. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

Publishers shrink packages to knock down prices

Treat New Pets to Time on the Table If you want to create a game that's more approachable for those who aren't gamers, perhaps you should consider making a game about animals. Even if people don't have pets, they generally know what pets are like, which gives them a leg up on learning a new game...assuming you make those animals do pet-like things, mind you. That's what Courtney Shernan did with her debut release: **_Treat, Please!_**, which publisher Solis Game Studio released on the market in February 2026. As Shernan details in a designer diary, she mocked up the idea in 2019, then worked on it heavily in 2020 before pitching it to Chris Solis, who oversaw development, art, and production, with a crowdfunding campaign running in late 2024. The game lasts seven days, and on each day you play two behavior cards from your hand to gain attention, energy, bones, and indicated actions. Bones let you acquire new behavior cards, which go to your hand for future turns, while attention and energy let you complete objectives for affection, which is the game's scoring metric. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Games about cats seem far more plentiful than those about dogs, but I don't know whether that's an indication of the dog market being underserved, of cat lovers buying more games, or of something else entirely. Maybe cats are just better than dogs, ergo we have more cat games than dog games. Maybe dog owners are playing with their dogs in real life, whereas cat owners need playful substitutes since cats can't be bothered to associate with humans. Jason Tam's self-published game **_Cat Spotting_** debuted in late 2025, and gameplay is as simple as you can get: Turn over a "Spot This Cat" card, then spot this cat. The game includes 120 cats to spot and four sets of crowd cards, with each crowd card featuring forty cats. In fact, rules for multiple games are included with _Cat Spotting_ , and a print-and-play version is available for those who don't want to wait for a game from Australia. (Tam also has **_Peep Spotting_** for those who'd prefer to peep people over cats.) • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Hmm, _Cat Spotting_ seems to be the only realistic cat game on the market: Look at cats sitting there doing nothing. Every other cat-centric design places them in unrealistic settings and activities. For example, in **_Muffin's Kitchen_**, a D. Brad Talton Jr. design for 2-5 players that Level 99 Games will crowdfund in March 2026, cats assemble ingredients to fulfill recipes. In each of six rounds, you can ditch up to three ingredient cards from your hand and draw replacement cards up to three times, then everyone in turn reveals the ingredients for one of five recipe cards, summing the value of all ingredients used and marking their score for that recipe. You can repeat a recipe in a future round, but only your most recent score stands. At game's end, players earn ribbons depending on where they placed (first to fourth) in each recipe, and whoever has the most ribbon points wins. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Jeff and Rylie Wallace's **_Kittens in Space_**, which Dead Alive Games crowdfunded in mid-2025, puts 1-6 players to work in the Lunar Kitten Adoption Center to find homes for gravity-challenged cats — although in gameplay terms that means you need to shed your hand of cards first. Each player has a hand of cards, which are numbered 0-9, and four discard piles are available, with a "Save 'Em" card on one pile; arrows on this card show whether the piles to the left must have higher cards played on them and piles to the right lower cards or vice versa. Each turn, you either draw a card and pass, or play up to one card on each discard pile, with the difference between your card and the covered card being at most two. In the latter case, you then move the "Save 'Em" card to a pile where you played, flipping it if you played a cat bell card. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Gareth Edwards' **_Cat Earth_**, which is coming from Outset Media in Q1 2026, is somewhat realistic in that cats like to knock things onto the floor, and that's what you're doing in this game. However, the cat doing the action is three times the size of a house, and it's knocking houses off the edge of a flat Earth. Okay. Players take turns using movement cards to direct the cat, trying to push opponents' houses into the abyss, and each time the deck runs out, a new cat is added to the board, allowing for more breakage. To win, be the last player with a house still standing. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Mock-up components in __The Cats of Mont Saint-Michel__ ahead of the crowdfunding campaign Publisher RAYBOX Games released a few "serious" fantasy titles in the early 2020s — _Escape from Stalingrad Z_, _Gates of Niflheim_ — but its newest releases have moved on from zombies and Vikings to cats and more cats, all of which are doing rather uncatlike things. In late 2025, for example, it crowdfunded **_The Cats of Mont Saint-Michel_**, a 1-4 player design from Marco Pecota and Tom Frank that has started shipping to backers. This miniatures-based solitaire/co-operative game is set in Mont Saint Michel before the French revolution, with the cat players fighting cockroaches, rats, and other beings in order to cleanse the abbey. The game features a coil-bound scenario book, with the outcome of each scenario affecting what comes next. The Gamefound campaign also featured a separate design by Pecota, with **_The Kittens of Mont Saint-Michel_** being a co-operative card game in which you "explore the town and castle while learning the virtues courage, patience, competence, selflessness, perseverance and integrity on the path to becoming a true warrior", with the game ending with a battle against a vermin army. Cover artwork for __The Cats of New Orleans__ And with _Cats_ in boxes on the way to backers, RAYBOX has revealed its next release: **_The Cats of New Orleans_**, with this also being a miniatures-based solitaire/co-operative game that features a coil-bound scenario book, with the outcome of each scenario affecting what comes next. Hmm, déjà vu! You're now fighting mosquitos and snakes, in addition to rats, so that's different. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

Spot cats, place kittens, floof dogs, destroy houses, and fight rats

Rolling Three Sisters into Middle-earth Every so often, I wonder whether we've hit peak "roll-and-write" in the game industry, but dice are a wonderful tool for game designers to challenge players with the unexpected, and they're intuitively easy to use, and they allow for relatively inexpensive game productions — although many publishers lean in the other direction in their manufacturing — so we're unlikely ever to retreat to the pre-_Qwixx_ era of 2011. Here are a few of the latest games announced in this style of gameplay: In November 2026, Office Dog will release **_The Lord of the Rings: Circle of Conflict_**, a 2-4 player design from Stephen Buonocore and Geoff Engelstein that could in theory support any number of players should you have additional copies on hand. How? Because each player represents armies of both the Free Peoples of Middle-earth and the Shadow, and you compete against your left-hand neighbor with one army and your right-hand neighbor with the other. On a turn, two dice are rolled, then each player chooses to use one die for their Shadow forces and the other for the Free Peoples. A battle board between each pair of players records information about certain battles, as well as how badly the Fellowship has been corrupted, so based on that public info and what you think your opponent(s) are doing, you make choices to try to succeed on both fronts. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Front covers of the original __Three Sisters__ and the new __Harvest Edition__ for 2026 Intertwined forces of a more natural sort await in **_Three Sisters: Harvest Edition_**, a new version of the 2022 game **_Three Sisters_** from Ben Pinchback and Matt Riddle. The game name refers to three crops — maize, beans, and squash — raised together by the Indigenous peoples of North America. To quote from an article on "Historical Indigenous Food Preparation": > Corn provided support for beans, beans provided nitrogen through nitrogen-fixing rhizobia bacteria that live on the roots, and squash and pumpkins provided ground cover to suppress weeds and inhibit evaporation from the soil... > Archaeological evidence dates the adoption of the Three Sisters complex in North America to 1070 AD. The complex was adapted to local conditions over the 500 years before contact with Europeans, so much so that it was the dominant food plant association of every nation practising agriculture in the northeast USA as well as in several other parts of North America, including southern regions of Quebec and Ontario, Canada. In the game _Three Sisters_ , each of up to four players has their own gameboard in which they manage these crops, as well as compost, tools, perennials, and other interconnected elements. In each of eight rounds, players take turns drafting a die from a "farmer action wheel", then everyone uses the lowest-valued undrafted die for an additional action. Player sheet for a solo game of the original __Three Sisters__ (image: Zoltan Geffert; used with permission) _Three Sisters: Harvest Edition_ , which is co-designed by Adam Hill and due out in May 2026 from 25th Century Games, includes the original game as well as a new "twelve-chapter campaign mode", with the components and gameplay elements of this campaign being playable as expansions for the original game. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • A mock-up of __La Cosecha__ at GAMA Expo 2026 Farming is also at the heart of **_La Cosecha_**, a design from Isra C., Shei S., Michael Keller, and Andreas Odendahl that German publisher Spielworxx will debut in October 2026 and that Capstone Games will release in North America. _La Cosecha_ is set in the world of _La Granja_, a Keller and Odendahl design that debuted in 2014, and the publisher offers this short description: > It’s harvest time on Mallorca, where you run your farm in the idyllic hamlet of Alpich near the town of Esporles. Each round, you harvest goods such as olives, grapes, and grain to mark boxes in different areas of your farm sheet. Fields need tending, the barn roof needs covering, and market carts want loading — your farm is full of opportunities, with the challenges differing on the two player sheets. In "La Fiesta", shown at top in the image above, you will host a banquet, and in "El Camino", you can travel the long road to Port de Palma. > Often, you'll need upgraded goods such as food and wine, which you must first produce from harvested goods. You need to balance short-term revenue against long-term planning. In addition, you can acquire tools and farm extensions with special abilities that may give you the decisive edge. > Whoever manages to use their revenue most effectively, combine the strongest bonuses, and keep an eye on the competition will earn the greatest renown and win. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

Use dice to farm in North America or Mallorca — or to fight in Tolkien's world

Assembling Mosaic Studio while Flickering Stars Go Out In a March 2026 newsletter, Matt Leacock states that **_Flickering Stars_** — a game he co-designed with Josh Cappel that was demoed at Gen Con 2024 by publisher Friendly Skeleton — has been cancelled "due to the publisher's financial troubles". Says Leacock: > Friendly Skeleton assures co-designer Josh Cappel and myself that they will be working to get refunds to everyone who pre-ordered the game. > Josh and I will be looking for a new partner to publish the game in the coming months. This game is a favorite in our household and I'd love for you all to get a chance to try it somehow. If you're a game publisher (or know of one) looking for a fully-developed, toyetic, joy-generator, please get in touch! Side note: I love to say and hear the word "toyetic". The fluidity of its vowel sounds between the tacky "tuh"s and ahead of the final click is refreshingly pleasing. Side note x2: I'm amused that Leacock has to use my front cover image of **_Forbidden Legacy_** in his newsletter since Gamewright hasn't yet released an official image of its own. Why am I marketing that game better than its publisher?! • • • • • • • • • • • • • • At GAMA Expo 2026, designer John Coveyou of Genius Games told me that his next design will focus on immunology. This will be Coveyou's first published design since 2022's _Cellulose: A Plant Cell Biology Game_ __ and continues his company's focus on games based on biology, chemistry, and other scientific fields. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Not pictured: John Coveyou in a Santa suit In other Genius Games happenings, in July 2025 Coveyou took control of U.S. publisher Elf Creek Games, which had been floundering for a couple of years, with unfulfilled crowdfunding projects for a second edition of **_Santa's Workshop_**, **_The Paradox Initiative_**, and other games. In case you weren't aware, Coveyou's primary job is running Simple Financials, a bookkeeping, accounting, and tax firm that he founded. Someone who knew the situation at Elf Creek and who had worked with Coveyou suggested that he look at taking over the company given Coveyou's experience with business acquisitions. Coveyou examined El Creek's financials and found lots of trouble points, but figured he could turn the company around. At GAMA Expo 2026, Coveyou told me that thanks to his company's efforts, Elf Creek achieved profitability in 2025 after three years of losses — although it still has a deficit overall — and the company has now fulfilled _Santa's Workshop_ to U.S. backers of that June 2024 crowdfunding campaign, with worldwide fulfillment scheduled to be complete by June 2026. It's also paid outstanding designer royalties for 2025, while making continued payments toward older royalties owed. After that, according to a Genius Games press release, the company is prioritizing: * Small quantity batch-based fulfillment of **_Atlantis Rising: Monstrosities_** * Production of _The Paradox Initiative_ * Finalization and production of **_Merchants of the Dark Road: Secret Villages_** * Reprints of base games: **_Honey Buzz_**, **_Atlantis Rising_**, **_Merchants of the Dark Road_**, and _Santa’s Workshop_ > This approach is designed to rebuild momentum, increase visibility, and bring meaningful traffic and attention back to Elf Creek Games, while continuing to strengthen the operational foundation of the company. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • A new non-_Magic: The Gathering_ game from MTG head designer Mark Rosewater will be presented during MagicCon: Las Vegas, an event taking place May 1-3, 2026, with the game being "available exclusively via Secret Lair", which is Wizards of the Coast's online retail site for direct sales of tiny, yet incredibly expensive _Magic_ sets. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Mosaic Studio is a new game publisher founded by Thomas Provoost, co-founder of Repos Production and PlayPunk, and Thomas Vermeir, who worked as an external consultant with Repos for fifteen years before taking charge in 2020 after asmodee purchased the company. What will Mosaic publish? That's unclear as the publisher's introductory statement focuses more on its intent than anything else. Here's an excerpt: > [T]he games that truly matter are driven by close collaboration between designers and publishers. > To achieve this objective, our studio will be structured around key figures: the**Game Makers**. > Like stage or film directors, our Game Makers support and challenge designers just as a director guides actors. They work on pacing, duration, and narrative tension alongside the designers. They shape the visual identity and refine the components, just as a director chooses sets and music, ensuring that each game is perfectly aligned with its packaging, its price, and its overall game experience. Mosaic Studio says its first two Game Makers are Matthieu Verdier, co-designer of _In the Footsteps of Darwin_ and developer of many titles for Sorry We Are French, and Aurélie Raphael, a project manager with LOKI and Panoplie. Verdier will work on family, hobby, and expert games, and Raphael will work on the product lines and children's games. In an email, the two Thomases told me, "The goal is for them to choose games that resonate with them and to work hand in hand with the creators to develop the most polished game they feel proud of." _Ants_' designers Renato Ciervo and Andrea Robbiani have signed...something with Mosaic Studio, which also met with designers during the FIJ game fair in late February 2026. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

Also, Genius Games takes over Elf Creek Games and makes like Santa

Symbly Delightful As is usually the case, I played only a few games at GAMA Expo, which took place the first week of March 2026. The show features three game nights in which dozens of publishers set up dozens of new and upcoming releases for retailers, distributors, and media to play, but I typically find myself getting fixated with a handful of creators and their titles, spending most of my time talking and little time playing. So be it. Even so, I did play a few games, with the most intriguing one being **_Symbiosis_**, a 2-4 player card game from Jérémy and Christelle Partinico that French publisher Subverti debuted as _Symbiose_ in 2025. A Czech edition of _Symbiose_ also hit the market in 2025, but other publishers have caught on in 2026, with Pegasus Spiele releasing the game in German, Mandoo Games in Korean, Rocket Lemon Games in Spanish, and...Subverti in English via distribution through Hachette Boardgames USA. _(Disclosure: I received a review copy of_ Symbiosis _at a publisher event during GAMA Expo and Hachette Boardgames USA has advertised on this site.)_ _Symbiosis_ features the same appeal as Johannes Goupy and Corentin Lebrat's **_Faraway_** and Grégory Grard and Mathieu Roussel's **_Castle Combo_**, the later of which I reviewed in September 2024. That appeal: Players take turns drafting cards from a shared market and adding those cards to their personal tableau in order to create their own scoring conditions during the game. _Symbiosis_ consists of 36 cards, with each card showing one of four colors, a creature, and either a number or a scoring condition. Each player is dealt eight cards, then arranges them face down in a 2x4 pond without looking at them. four cards are placed face up in the river, then everyone reveals one card of their choice. On a turn you either: * Take a card from the river and swap it with a **face-down** card in your pond, revealing the latter card when you place it in the river, or * Take a card from the river and swap it with a **face-up** card in your pond, revealing the latter card when you place it in the river, after which you flip up a face-down card in your pond. _Castle Combo_ has you draft nine cards, _Faraway_ eight, and _Symbiosis_ seven, after which you count points. As such, _Symbiosis_ runs 10-15 minutes, slightly shorter than those other games. The main difference between the three designs is that in the first two, you interact with players solely when drafting cards, with your score unaffected by which cards opponents take. In _Symbiosis_ , an opponent might draft a card you want, as in the other games, but your score depends on the contents of both your display and your neighbors', so sometimes you _want_ them to take certain cards since you'll score more from the card being in their pond than in yours. More specifically, your pond's center four cards score based on the contents of your entire pond, with cards bearing a number being worth that many points and cards bearing a scoring condition being evaluated at game's end. In the image above, I ended up with five green cards in my pond, with two cards each scoring 3 points per green card, so those netted me 15 points each. (As in _Castle Combo_ , you score tediously with each player calculating their points for each position, but we caught multiple errors by one another, so perhaps the tedium is necessary, at least in your first games.) The two cards on the left of your pond score based on your left-hand neighbor's pond, and the two cards on the right do the same in the other direction, although cards with a value in those slots are still worth the listed value. Thus, everything you place in your pond affects how your neighbors score and vice versa. My right-hand neighbor skimped on dragonflies, so I would have better off with my top right two cards being swapped, but you don't have that luxury during play. You make a choice, then possibly regret it — or you take a card that the player to your left would want and end up giving them garbage while enriching yourself. Again, you have all of seven choices during the game, so the luck factor runs high, but some of us love that aspect in game design. In fact, I played with someone recently who said they thought the ideal game design was one in which luck played enough of a factor to give everyone the chance to win, but with that luck factor not necessarily being obvious. In this case, it's somewhat obvious, but I'm okay with such things. That said, when you play with four, all of the cards are in play, so if you want, once you know the deck, you could play the odds as to what might be hiding in your pond, leading you to choose action two above so that you keep a good card for yourself and don't risk handing points away. With three players, you interact with everyone at the table instead of having a null force catercorner to you, and with two you set up a dummy player, with the two of you drafting from this dummy to create the pond that you'll score with the two cards next to it. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • To continue my practice of including random photos during convention coverage, here's a poem embedded in the sidewalk near Sicilian Pizza & Pasta, which has a gluten-free pizza option on its menu that I cannot recommend as I don't think they take enough precautions handling GF dishes. (Translation: I did not have a pleasant evening after my meal.) • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

From Faraway, the card game Symbiosis resembles Castle Combo

Borg, Bauza, and Reynolds Inducted into the AAGAD Hall of Fame On the final day of GAMA Expo 2026, The Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design Hall of Fame, which is curated by designer Mike Elliott, announced the people and creations that make up the "Class of 2026": * Designer **Antoine Bauza** (_7 Wonders_, _Hanabi_) * Designer **Richard Borg** (_Liar's Dice_, _Memoir '44_) * Artist **Wayne Reynolds** (_Dungeons & Dragons_, _Dungeon Twister_) * Game **_Can't Stop_**, created by Sid Sackson and first released in 1980 * ** _Apocalypse World_**, created by D. Vincent Baker and first released in 2010 Antoine Bauza (right) at a game design presentation during Tokyo Game Market in May 2017 These people and creations will be honored in an induction ceremony to take place on June 19 during the Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio. I'm not an RPG guy, so I had never heard of _Apocalypse World_ previously, but these covers really convey a look, a feeling for what you're about to explore. Covers of the first and second editions of __Apocalypse World__ • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

Can't Stop and Apocalypse World are also part of the "Class of 2026"

Join Critical Role for Adventures in Codenames During GAMA Expo 2026, publisher Czech Games Edition announced two new titles for release in 2026. _(Disclosure: CGE has purchased advertising on Board Game Beat that will run the week of March 9.)_ **_Codenames: Critical Role Adventures_** puts a new spin on Vlaada Chvátil's 2015 party game _Codenames_, with this 2-4 player game co-designed by Felix Podlesny being fully co-operative, akin to 2017's _Codenames: Duet_, as one player steps into the role of game master to lead the other players on a series of adventures inspired by the _Critical Role_ web series in which professional voice actors play _Dungeons & Dragons_. In the style of a _Critical Role_ campaign, the game master gives clues to the other players, with them ideally figuring out how to advance on missions toward the final boss. To quote the publisher's description: > Together, they can journey through three separate campaigns, each consisting of multiple branching missions. Every mission features its own goals, as well as rules that tweak the standard _Codenames_ gameplay — requiring the GM and their party to adapt and think differently to overcome the challenges at hand. Mock-up character sheets at GAMA Expo 2026 > The party chooses three out of seven iconic _Critical Role_ characters to embark on the adventure. The base game introduces Vex (and Trinket), Percy, Grog, Jester, Nott, Dorian, and Fresh Cut Grass. Players can mix and match these heroes before every new campaign as different combinations result in distinct gameplay styles. > Playable heroes have their own cardboard miniatures to be placed on the words during guessing. Each hero also comes with personalized abilities that unlock as players collect XP from successful missions, and they can equip items that can be purchased along the way. To track XP, HP, character progression, and items, every character has their own character sheet. And yes, there is a D20 included in the box as characters must pass their own unique skill checks that determine how well (if at all) their abilities are executed. Mock-up components at GAMA Expo 2026 _Codenames: Critical Role Adventures_ includes two hundred double-sided word cards, and the number of _Critical Role_ -specific codewords, such as "Exandria" in the lower-right corner, is limited. At GAMA Expo 2026, a CGE rep said that the word mix leans into classic fantasy, while still trying to match the format of classic _Codenames_ in which lots of cross-referencing is possible in the clues. (I'll confess that I've so far come up empty in trying to think of a clue that links "bidet" and "natural 20". Any suggestions?) Should you wish to indulge in eponymous geekiness, a separate **_Vox Machina_** expansion pack will be released, similar to other _Codenames_ expansion packs due out in Q2 2026, with this expansion consisting of a new character (Keyleth), two new items, and 42 words themed on _Critical Role_ 's first campaign, which ran from March 2015 to October 2017. Both of these items will debut at Gen Con 2026, with a retail release in Q3 2026. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Mock-up components at GAMA Expo 2026 The second CGE title due out in Q3 2026 is **_Drillers_**, a 1-4 player game from _Project L_'s Adam Španěl and company artist Říman, who is getting their first design credit. _Drillers_ is a deck-building game in which most of the cards allow you to move your drill or drill with your drill — but you are not a dentist drilling teeth, as fun as that might be. No, you are using your drill to dig far into the earth. The game board consists of multiple levels, and when a drill reaches a level, you reveal the ! or !! card to discover the features of that level. Levels might feature resources that you can acquire, or you might be the one to dig up new resources that other players might then grab before you can do so. (As you do so, you take tiles — which are longer at deeper levels — and build across the top of your player board, as seen at the lower right.) Your deck is on a stand with the top card visible to you, and as you acquire new cards, they are stacked onto the deck, so if you buy the right cards in the right (reverse) order, you can set up future turns. Mock-up components for __Drillers__ at GAMA Expo 2026 To play cards, you need to spend energy, with your reserve initially being capped at 10, but you can boost that ceiling during play. You can spend energy to use cards or discard cards to regain energy, but if you can do things the right way and end your turn on the surface, your energy tops off automatically. (I'm guessing you're solar powered, but you could also just handwave it away as "The game says so".) Of course, the deeper you go, the harder it will be to surface. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • CGE is also getting into the "upgraded bits" game, with (from left to right below) coin and compass tokens for _Lost Ruins of Arnak_, metal coins for _Drillers_ , and energy and credit tokens for _SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence_. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

Design a deck to drill for minerals because they won't excavate themselves

The Rules Ratio: A New Stat to Geek Out About I spend a decent amount of time looking at game listings on BoardGameGeek, and over the past year I've started paying attention to the relation between two numbers on those listings: * The total number of forum posts on a game listing * The number of posts in the "Rules" subforum of that game listing The image at the top of the page highlights these two numbers on the BGG game listing for Tomáš Holek's **_SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence_**, which Czech Games Edition released in 2024. The sum of all forum posts on that page is rounded to 1K, but if you add up the individual numbers, you'll get a sum of 1,003 — which means that SETI has a **Rules Ratio** of 50% since half of the forum posts on that game listing are in the "Rules" subforum. Let's look at a few other games in the BGG database: * BGGers tend to love involved, rules-heavy games, and near the top of the rankings we can find **_Brass: Birmingham_** with a Rules Ratio of 39%, while **_Ark Nova_**'s RR is 52%, **_Gloomhaven_**'s is 42%, and **_Terraforming Mars_** has a modest RR of 26%, so having a metric ton of cards with unique abilities isn't always a recipe for confusion. * My beloved **_Innovation_** has a RR of 40%, whereas **_Innovation Ultimate_** is at 55%. More cards = more questions about interactions! As for one of my other top games, **_The Mind_** has a RR of 14%. * **_Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island_** had a reputation for a challenging rulebook, but its Rules Ratio is "only" 41% (at 1,766 rules questions out of 4,332 total forum posts). Portal Games' spinoff title **_First Martians: Adventures on the Red Planet_** has a RR of 42%, whereas Portal's 2009 title **_Stronghold_** has a 62% RR — the highest of any game I've looked at — and its 2010 release **_Prêt-à-Porter_** has a 53% RR. * The original **_Puerto Rico_** has a RR of 19%, **_El Grande_** is at 26%, **_CATAN_** 16%, and **_Ticket to Ride_** only 8%. * Looking at a few other Spiel des Jahres winners, **_Cascadia_**'s Rules Ratio is 39%, which seems incredibly high for a family-weight game — until you look at **_Bomb Busters_** and see a RR of 48% or **_Dorfromantik: The Board Game_** with 52%. (Maybe the German rules are cleaner and more comprehensive than the English ones?) **_Just One_**, by comparison, is at 26%, **_Sky Team_** at 34%, and **_MicroMacro: Crime City_** is an outlier beyond all others with a Rules Ratio of 0%! That's right — no one has asked a rules question in 162 forum posts. What is _MicroMacro_ doing right?! What does the Rules Ratio say about a game? Possibly nothing. I realize one objection to this concept is that some say people ask "dumb" rules questions all the time despite the answers being clearly explained in the rulebook. I would counter that (1) what's clear to you is not clear to everyone and (2) if this concept applies equally to all games, which is debatable, then it's not much of an objection since subtracting all of the "dumb" questions from the count would lower all RR percentages proportionally. One might expect that more complex games will (inevitably?) have a higher Rules Ratio, which means that comparing games of differing complexities will likely favor the simpler game, making it look less fraught with ambiguity and ankle-breaking rabbit holes, so perhaps we need to update the stat to equalize all things. This brings me to RRW, or **Rules Ratio by Weight** , in which we take a game's Rules Ratio and divide it by the game's weight as listed on BGG. _Brass: Birmingham_ has a 3.86 weight, making its RRW 10.1, while _Ark Nova_ 's RRW is 13.7...which is proportionally the same difference from _Brass: Birmingham_ as with RR alone — that is, one-third higher — but that's because _Ark Nova_ 's weight is 3.79, which is nearly identical to _Brass: Birmingham_ 's weight. _Bomb Busters_ , by comparison, has a RRW of 23.9 and _Dorfromantik: The Board Game_ is at 31.7%, which suggests those games are relatively less internally coherent and comprehensible than the previous pair of games. If you've played all four of these games, does that finding line up with your experience? Even more surprising, _The Mind_ has a RRW of 13.4 thanks to its 1.07 weight, which suggests that as simple as the game is, folks still have questions. (Six of the 31 rule questions relate to throwing stars, and another half-dozen are about playing high cards on purpose to "accidentally" clear a level at the cost of only one life.) _CATAN_ has a 2.28 weight, making its RRW 7.0, while _Puerto Rico_ 's RRW is 5.8, _Ticket to Ride_ 's is 4.4, and _MicroMacro: Crime City_ still beats all comers with a RRW of 0. What are the Rules Ratios of your favorite games? Does this metric seem meaningful, and while acknowledging that a low score is clearly better than a high one, what seems like a "reasonable" RR for games on today's market? • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

How well do your favorite games measure up?

How to Use BoardGameGeek — and Why I spent fifteen years as an employee of BoardGameGeek, and I've been a user of the site since October 2003, so I have a fair amount of experience with BGG, both inside and out. In this article, I'll present an overview of BGG, detail aspects of the site with which you might not be familiar, and suggest ways for publishers and creators to get the most out of it — which will ideally help other users get a lot from the site as well. ## Game Listings Let's start with what BoardGameGeek is: As posted on the wiki's welcome page, BGG is "an online resource and community that aims to be the definitive source for board game and card game content". The "online resource" aspect of BGG will likely be obvious. At heart, BGG is a database of board games and card games, and if you browse the database, you'll find a list of these games organized by their _rank_ — a term we'll get back to later. As of February 26, 2026, a date that applies to every number and image included below, the database has listings of more than 174,300 items. (Each page defaults to listing one hundred items, and as you can see from the circled area in the screenshot, the site requires 1,744 pages to list all of these items.) You can click the blue numbers in the upper right to look at page 2 of this ranked game list, page 3, and so on, or you can modify the URL on the page to jump to any page you wish. Jump far enough, and you'll see that the BGG database has 30,191 ranked games, with _Chutes and Ladders_ being the worst ranked game. All of the games that follow _Chutes and Ladders_ are listed in order of their BGG game number. You can see a game number only by looking at the URL for that game listing, e.g., the URL for _The Garden Game_ is https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/65/the-garden-game. The game number shows the order in which the games were added to the database, ergo _The Garden Game_ was the 65th title added. (This counting system does not hold up historically. Sometimes a game listing is removed from the database because it turns out that the designer or publisher announced the game, but didn't release it. Sometimes game listings get merged because they featured the same game, but in different languages or in two editions that were essentially the same thing.) Why isn't _The Garden Game_ ranked? If you go to that BGG game listing, you can click on the **STATS** tab underneath the main information box to discover that the game has been _rated_ only 29 times. Any game that receives thirty or more ratings will become ranked the next time that part of the database is updated. (Different systems update at different times: some almost instantaneously, some hourly, some daily, and so on.) Other items in the BGG database that don't get ranked are expansions (since their ratings are almost always higher than their base game due to haters of that base game never playing those expansions) and compilations that include items that are ranked, such as _El Grande Big Box_, which would likely be ranked higher than _El Grande_ since, once again, those who hate the base game probably aren't checking out the compilation that includes it. How does a BGG user rate a game? While logged in, they click one of the star values in the main information box on the game listing. When you mouse over a star value, you'll see a short description of what that value represents in BGG terms, with (for example) a 9 meaning "Excellent — very much enjoy playing". Note that while BGG has suggested interpretations for what the 1-10 ratings mean, any user is free to rate a game any value from 1-10 for any reason. The only restrictions on ratings is that a user must not violate the terms of the site, such as using an automated tool to rate games instead of doing it by hand or having multiple accounts in order to rate a game multiple times. If you see someone rating games in a way that seems arbitrary, spammy, or vindictive, you should (at most) use the contact form at the bottom of any BGG page to write an admin about the situation. Unless a user is violating site rules, their ratings will remain in place. How do games get added to the BGG database? Users submit them — but the method for doing so is not immediately apparent. To do so, click **COMMUNITY** in the dark blue navigation banner at the top of any page, then under CONTRIBUTE, click "Board game". (If you're on a mobile device, click the hamburger in the upper-left corner to open the nav bar.) Doing so will bring you to a game listing submission form that features more than thirty fields to be filled in, although only eight of these fields are required to be filled. As I mentioned, any user can submit a game listing, and the quality of that submission will vary depending on how much that user knows about that game. If you represent a game publisher or work for one, I highly recommend that you be the one who submits listings for your games to the BGG database. After all, you (ideally) know the game better than anyone else, possibly including the game designer since designs are often modified during development, and you have details about that game that will matter to BGG users: the player count, the playing time, the suggested age, the release date, the creators, the rule languages included, and so on. Why is submitting game listings important? Two reasons: First, BGG regularly has about six million unique visitors a month, with half of those being from the U.S. The number of people who play games worldwide is far larger than six million, of course, but you're unlikely to find an audience of dedicated gamers of this size elsewhere on a regular basis. Second, BGG performs incredibly well in search engines, so anyone searching for information about your game after seeing it in a store, at a convention, at a friend's house, or on social media will likely find BGG in their results. As a publisher or creator, submitting a game listing costs only time, and it results in potentially years of free marketing. What's more, once the game listing is live, you can submit images, videos, and rulebooks to that listing, giving site visitors as much info about the game as possible. I frequently see comments on crowdfunding projects for games not listed on BGG that suggest the publisher must be an amateur if their game is absent from the site. Don't put yourself in that position! (I recognize, of course, that time is not an inexhaustible resource. I don't do free things that I could do to promote Board Game Beat because I'd rather spend that time elsewhat. That said, I'm making this argument anyway.) ## Subscriptions BoardGameGeek is a game database, so it's no surprise that having your games listed on the site is important, but an equally important tool is something on the site that's easy to overlook, but which is omnipresent and incredibly powerful, something represented by a tiny bullhorn. BGG has a customized subscription system that allows a user to subscribe to all sorts of features on the site in order to be notified of updates related to that subscribed-to item, with the most straightforward option being to subscribe to a game listing. After you click **Subscribe** on a game listing, you'll receive notifications when someone uploads an image, video, or file to that game listing, when someone posts in that game's forums, when someone lists a copy of that game for sale, and so on. When you click on the bullhorn, you'll be taken to your subscription page and see a reverse-chronological list of all subscription notices. To read something, click on the title, such as "Designer Diary: The Four Doors". If you don't want to read something, mouse over or click on the time period listed in the right-hand column, with the time period being how long that subscribed item has been available on BGG. A green "Mark Read" button will pop up. Click this button, and the item will vanish. Click "MARK ALL READ" at the top of the page, and all items will vanish. If you neither click on an item nor click "Mark Read" for that item, the item will vanish from your subscriptions page after thirty days. This keeps the system from needing to track thousands of notices for a single user. Should you not want to receive every notification possible, which is quite likely given how many _are_ possible, you can click **Preferences** near the top of the subscriptions page to see the following: Much of what you see here might not make sense initially, but as you receive subscription notices, you'll start to realize what you do and do not want to be notified about. You might then decide to click "Subscription Defaults" and modify which subscription notices you receive. Here's part of my default set-up: Note, though, that these are _default_ settings. Let's say you don't want to be notified of eBay auctions for most games, but you do want to stay updated about eBay auctions for a particular title. Scroll to the top of the subscriptions page, then click on the **Subscriptions** subhed to see ALL of your subscriptions, divided up by the type of object being subscribed to. Yes, I'm subscribed to seventeen thousand items. Again, I've been on this site regularly since 2003, and I subscribed to all of the BGG News posts I've published, all of the videos I've uploaded, and so on. While under the **Subscriptions** subhed, you can **Unsubscribe** from an item if you feel you're done with a topic, or you can **Edit** a subscription to change the settings from your defaults, which is what I've done below. Now if a copy of _Feeley Meeley_ pops up on BGG via an eBay auction, I'll know about it. Phew! So far I've written only about subscriptions to game listings, but as you can see from the classifications on my summary list of 17,000+ subscriptions, you can also subscribe to any comment thread in a forum; to any publisher; to any designer, artist, or other creator with a database listing; to any video; to any GeekList or individual item on a GeekList; to files, guilds, blogs, and blog posts; even to individual users! I would argue that BGG's subscription system is the most valuable part of that site because of how widely integrated it is and because of how users can take advantage of it. As a publisher or a creator, you can subscribe to everything you publish or create and receive notifications of every comment, image, video, file, and so on related to those items. If someone posts a review or image, you can thank them; if they post a question, you can answer them. You can thumb up a comment or tip a user GeekGold for listing your game on a "top games of the month" GeekList. You can create a connection with those interested in your games so that they think not just about games in the abstract, but about _your_ games, that is, about games created by people with whom they've been in contact. I'll confess to being dumbfounded by the number of times I've seen a user create a thread on BGG that addresses a publisher with a complaint about, say, a box insert or color-blindness related issues or with a request for a future update. Why are they posting on BGG instead of writing to that publisher directly? I mean, maybe they are also writing the publisher, but what do they hope to achieve by posting on BGG? You as a publisher or creator might find such things equally baffling, but if you subscribe to your items on BGG, you'll see such posts and be able to respond to them, providing customer service where customers honestly should not expect to be served. ## Forums and GeekLists While the game forums are relatively prominent on BGG, the general forums are less so, even though you can reach them quickly by clicking **FORUMS** in the dark blue navigation bar at the top of any page, then clicking "All". Much of what takes place here is general chitchat, but if you're able to help people — talking about which games worked with your kids, welcoming someone into the community, congratulating someone's crafting skills in the "Do It Yourself" subforum — then kudos to you. You've probably made someone's day better. Unless a user specifically asks about one of your games, you should not be marketing yourself in the forums, but you _can_ market yourself as a helpful human being, and you can learn things as well: how to take better photos, how to create thumbnails for videos, where to find older games, and much more. The "Board Game Design" subforums are incredibly active, and while I'm not suggesting that you might discover there the perfect design for your catalog, you could offer advice to aspiring designers on particular questions they might have. You are an expert who can help others. The "Bulletin Board" subforums include a general "Press Release" section and an "Employment Opportunities" section — post your press releases in the former and job openings in the latter. Again, the BGG userbase is deeply invested in exploring games, so you can likely find individuals who are interested in what you're offering or who have what you're looking for. "Events" and "Regional Gaming" subforums can serve many purposes. Ahead of a trip to Japan, for example, I located groups that met near where I was going to be and asked questions about Tokyo Game Market, which I was attending for the first time. GeekLists are similar to forum posts in that each one is started by an individual user for a specific purpose, but they differ in that in a GeekList the user will link to various items in the BGG database to create the list, often commenting on each item. They can keep the GeekList private to make it more like a diary, make it public so that others can view and comment on their list, or open it to contribitions from others. When looking at the six "most recent" GeekLists as shown in the image above, you can see the variety of the GeekLists users create: one is auctioning games, one is about game design, two are about favorite games, and two catalog games played at recent events. As with forum posts, these GeekLists are about making connections with others, about sharing experiences and interests. Alternatively, instead of looking for what's recent, you can view GeekLists ranked by "hotness", that is, the number of thumbs received by users who want to express their interest in that list, and you can use the pulldown menu to look at "hotness" over a day, two days, a week, a month, a year, and forever. GeekLists and forums are a way to sample what gamers are talking about. Given the timeline involved in the production of games, you're probably not going to, for example, see lots of people expressing interest in a game about komodo dragons and therefore decide to sign komodo dragon-based design for publication, but you can skim GeekLists and forums to see what's resonating with gamers and take that into account when deciding which games to feature at conventions, how to market upcoming titles, where to pitch games to retail outlets, which countries might license your releases, and so on. Maybe, like me, you'll discover a decades-old game that sounds perfect for you, whether personally or for your catalog. Essentially, BGG is constantly updated, user-driven market research. You can't control the questions being asked, but you can see what's getting attention and why, then take that into account in your own business. And to reiterate what I mentioned earlier, you can subscribe to any forum post, any GeekList, or any item on a GeekList to follow the conversation without needing to remember where to go. ## Quickbar While subscriptions on BGG can serve as an external memory system of sorts, a more direct system available for that purpose is the **Quickbar** , which has been (unobtrusively?) depicted in most of the screenshots in this article. The Quickbar has ten "pages", each with ten slots, and you can use these slots as a bookmarking system on BGG. As you can see in my list, I've saved links to pages that explain how to format forum posts and wiki pages (since I don't find these systems intuitive). I've saved a link to a list of recently approved game listings. Did you know that list existed? Probably not. I don't recall how I found about it, but as soon as I did, I saved it since I'm a guy who writes about new games for a living. I also have a link to recent additions to the site, which is an overwhelming list of replies, comments, videos, game listings, and so on, with (at this moment) one hundred items having been posted in the past fifteen minutes. If I wanted, I could keep clicking links to explore the previous six thousand-ish items posted over the past seven days. Again, this is a real-time view into what a certain segment of gamers are talking about. To save a shortcut in the Quickbar, click the + symbol next to an empty slot. An "Add Shortcut?" pop-up window will appear with a suggested name for the page you're currently on. You can edit that name as you like, then save the link. Click on a number under the Quickbar header to view one of the other pages of saved links. To edit the links in your Quickbar, click the pencil, which will pop up a screen showing the ten links and their descriptions for the current page from 1-10 that you're looking at. To move a shortcut from one numbered page to another, you need to open different Quickbar edit pages in different browser tabs, which is a pain, but I find I need to do this at most once a year. All of the links I need to use most frequently are on page one, with the other pages holding peripherally useful links, such as to convention previews of years past. I can navigate to these previews directly — click **BROWSE** in the nav bar, then "Previews", then scroll down to what I need — but since I have the space available, I've saved links to previews from the recent past. ## Convention Previews Speaking of convention previews, after I left BGG in late January 2026, the site has moved to a system in which publishers submit their own info to these lists. Looking at the FIJ/GAMA Q1 2026 Preview, you can see that the accuracy and completeness of the listings varies depending on the publisher: release dates are outdated or missing; images are missing or cropped in odd ways; sale prices are listed, even though those prices are identical to the MSRP; and booth information is absent, making it unclear whether a publisher will be at GAMA (which is closed to the public) or at FIJ, the annual convention in Cannes, France that is open to all. All that said, convention previews equal free marketing for new and upcoming games, so you should endeavor to add your games to these lists when relevant. Read this tutorial to see what's involved as you will frequently have to jump through several hoops prior to adding games to a preview, such as submitting a version listing to a game listing, submitting images and linking them to the aforementioned version listing, or correcting version information. (I did a lot of that stuff myself over the years and am glad to no longer feel the pressure to do so. I know people find the convention previews valuable; I just don't want to do them myself.) ## The Hotness One BGG feature that gets a lot of attention is The Hotness, which is the second thing visible on the front page below the featured articles and posts and which has a page of its own that highlights the fifty "hottest" games on the site. What does "hotness" mean? I never learned this as an employee, but my layman's understanding is that "hotness" is a general gauge of activity for that game listing. Sometimes the reason for this activity is obvious: _Brass: Pittsburgh_ is a sequel to the #1 ranked game on BGG; _Dice Horde_, _The Old King's Crown_, and _Concordia_ all have crowdfunding campaigns underway or freshly announced; _Magical Athlete_ was on several "best of the year" lists and has lots of jazzed fans; and _Limit_ (which is barely visible above) was just released on Board Game Arena. Many users have noted that any game that participates in a sponsored contest on BGG will rise in The Hotness, presumably due to activity on the game listing, which will lead others to wonder "Why is this rising in The Hotness?", then they'll click on the game listing to find out, which will also contribute to that game's "hotness", so perhaps running a contest is one way to rise in the ranks. I feel like semi-popular games with bad rulebooks will also rise in The Hotness as users head to the game listing to ask one rules question after another about how the game should work. (_Magical Athlete_ might be an example of this phenomenon, with 132 posts in the rules subforum out of 294 forum posts in total.) This isn't an approach you want to take voluntarily, but the opportunity might be there for you. You can't choose to have your game in The Hotness, but you can take advantage of it being there. _Dice Horde_ , for example, would benefit from having a more interesting short description than "Roll & Write meets Tower Defense!" What a blah nothing of a description compared to the other four shown above. Ideally both your game's short description (as well as its long description) give players a feeling for what the game is like without devolving into a list of mechanisms or a BLARING SALES PITCH! Here is my recommendation for how to approach this task. ## Guilds, Podcasts, and Stats If you click around on the BGG nav bar, you'll find parts of the site that get little attention, such as the guilds. Guilds are started by individual users and are centered on something like a location, an audience, a game, an occupation, and so on. No search system exists for guilds, so the only way to explore them is to click through various categories and see what's there. To reference my trip to Japan once again, I searched through the guilds to find ones in Japan, reaching out to some people involved in those guilds, but also just getting an idea of what folks were talking about in that part of the world. BGG has an extensive list of game-related podcasts, and that list is, like the guilds, not searchable, which makes that list far less usable than it could be, but I don't recall seeing a comprehensive list of game-related podcasts elsewhere, so here's a research tool should you be looking to find either listening material or a place where you might be an ideal guest. BGG has a tiny stats feature that features three clickable categories: top 10s, games played total for the lifetime of BGG (sorted in order by game name), and games played (by month). What hit the tables in the month of February 2026? Check out that page. This information is biased around (1) people who have created BGG accounts and (2) recorded what they have played, but it's better than having no information at all. If you click on the top 10s, you'll see the list above, which gives you a few more stats to explore. The #1 game most wanted in trade, for example, is _A Feast for Odin_. What does that indicate? No idea, but that's fair given that the section is called "Stats" and not "Business advice". Would it surprise you to know that _The Game of Life_ — the eighth worst ranked game on BGG — has the fifteenth most views among all 174,300+ items? I was surprised. Did you know that BGG has a "find users" function? If you need playtesters for a game you're working on, you could post in the forums in the appropriate places — or you could search for people who live nearby and reach out to them with a personal invitation. ## User Badges Finally, let's look at BGG user accounts, specifically the badges that users can get to identify themselves as creators and publishers. If you represent a game publisher, you can use the contact form at the bottom of any BGG page to write to an admin and request that they add a "Game Publisher" badge to your BGG account. (Be sure to include your BGG username when you write!) When a user clicks on this "Game Publisher" badge, they will go to the publisher page in the BGG database, and that page will show a linked user account, as demonstrated above. By placing the badge on your account, you get to "officially" represent the publisher on BGG. If you are commenting about a game's release date or clarifying a rule, your status as publisher should give your answers more weight in terms of their authority — assuming you are writing about your own games, of course. Multiple users can be linked to the same publisher page, but due to quirks in how the BGG system is currently set up, the earliest created user account is the one that will be listed on the publisher page. Maybe this system will change some day, but that's how it worked as of my final day at the company. The disadvantage of adding a "Game Publisher" badge to your BGG user account is that you risk seeming biased should you write about another company's games. Additionally, should you hire someone as a representative of your company and get a "Game Publisher" badge added to their account, that badge will now appear on everything that person has ever posted on BGG, so even if they never post about other companies in the future, their previous posts are now retroactively representative of your company. To avoid situations like these, I suggest creating a separate user account on BGG that is named after your company. Place the "Game Publisher" badge on that account, and give access to that account to any employees within your company who will represent your business on BGG. Designers, artists, and others can also reach out to a BGG admin to request a badge that will link to their creator page in the database, but due to limitations in the current set-up of these badges, they will say "Game Designer" no matter what your actual role is. Yes, ideally those badges would say "Game Creator" and that change should be easy to enact, but here we are. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

Let's explore the world's largest online tabletop game database

Nostalgia in the Game Market Some days I feel like most game news is coming out of a time capsule, with old designs and game systems being revived for today's "kidult" market that thrives on nostalgia and is (relatively) flush with money for non-essential goods. I recognize that "kidult" is a term that many find demeaning since the word's definition is not the most flattering, such as this one on Wikipedia: "A **kidult** is an adult whose interests or media consumption is traditionally seen as more suitable for children." Even so, the U.S. and European toy and game industry fully embraces the term as one that describes a vast audience accounting for roughly one-third of all toy sales in a year. Children want to buy lots of playful things, sure, but adults are the ones with the money, so the industry will cater to their interests, often by returning older game designs to market in new, improved versions: "Want that thing from your past that you pined for but couldn't afford or never found in stores near you? Now's your chance!" In mid-February 2026, for example, UK publisher Rebellion Unplugged announced a March 2026 crowdfunding campaign for a new edition of the **_Tunnels & Trolls_** RPG, which debuted in 1975, making it one of the oldest RPGs in existence. And in November 2025, World's Largest RPGs announced a March 2026 crowdfunding campaign for the **_Traveller 5E_** RPG. This is a new edition of the _Traveller_ RPG that debuted in 1977, with it being compatible with the game system for _Dungeons & Dragons (5th Edition)_. (_Traveller_ is already on the market in a second edition from Mongoose Publishing, with this "second edition" being more like a seventh or eighth edition given all that's been published over the past fifty years.) Renegade Game Studios already has four **_G.I. JOE Heroscape_** titles due out in mid-March 2026 — titles that mash together nostalgia for product lines from the 1980s and the 2000s — and in a February 27, 2026 livestream, the company announced six new **_Heroscape_** titles that will be released in July 2026, with five of them being offered in both painted and unpainted versions. The least expensive versions of all ten titles collectively retail for US$510, so this is hardly a line being purchased by youngsters. Another older title that Renegade Game Studios is still bringing to the market anew is Richard Garfield's _Robo Rally_, which in February 2026 was joined by Kane Klenko's **_Robo Rally Dice_**. This new design features the same set-up as the original game, with players programming their robot to move through a warehouse-like space filled with dangers in order to reach all the checkpoints before anyone else can — but instead of programming robot movement with cards, players now roll dice at the same time, locking in movement, turns, and more as they wish. As soon as one player fills all spaces on their board, they function as a timer, trying to keep others from using their dice effectively. The new game boards included in _Robo Rally Dice_ can be used in _Robo Rally_ and vice versa, so each is now an expansion for the other game. At SPIEL Essen 26, Z-Man Games will debut **_Citadels Duel_**, a two-player-only game from Guillaume Montiage and Manuel Rozoy that's based on Bruno Faidutti's 2000 game _Citadels_. Two city planners compete to design a district that generates wealth and renown, with the building tiles coming in the five types present in the original game and with characters like the thief, king, merchant, and assassin that you will call on for assistance. On March 3, 2026, Cryptozoic Entertainment will launch a crowdfunding campaign for **_Fight! Mortal Kombat 1_** , with this being a deck-building game using the "Cerberus Engine" game system previously applied to the DC Comics universe, _The Lord of the Rings_, _Street Fighter_, the Cartoon Network, _Naruto Shippuden_, _Rick and Morty_, and _Attack on Titan_, with the latter title being reprinted in a new edition bearing a new "Season 1" subtitle ten years after its debut in 2016. The _Mortal Kombat_ video game debuted in 1992, and this game series now features sixteen titles, including two reboots in the continuity of the series, with 2023's _Mortal Kombat 1_ ironically being the second such reboot. In April 2026, Mantic Games will release **_Noble Team_**, a new expansion for _Halo: Flashpoint_, which is based on the _Halo_ video game series, which is a decade younger than _Mortal Kombat_ , having debuted in 2001, but with seventeen titles compared to sixteen. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Sometimes I feel like I should have a moratorium on IP-based games and spinoffs, even for just a month, to force myself to write about games that are bringing something new to the market in terms of setting and world-building...yet at the same time, I know of spinoff and IP-based titles soon to be announced that folks will really want to know about, so it seems wrong to hamstring myself this way. I just need to prioritize the new on a more regular basis — or get over my bias against more of writing about more of the same! • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

New releases for Heroscape, Mortal Kombat, Citadels, Robo Rally, and more

Toy Battle Wins 2026 As d'Or The evening prior to the opening of the Festival International des Jeux, an annual game convention in Cannes, the jury for the As d'Or — France's game of the year award — holds a ceremony in the Palais des Festivals where the Cannes Film Festival takes place in order to announce the year's winners. For 2026, the winner of the main prize — the Jeu de l'Année — is **_Toy Battle_**, a two-player game by Paolo Mori, Alessandro Zucchini, and Repos Production. The winners for the other three awards are: * Children's category: **_Mooki Island_**, by Florian Sirieix and Scorpion Masqué * Intermediate category: **_Zenith_**, by Grégory Grard, Mathieu Roussel, and PlayPunk * Expert category: **_Civolution_**, by Stefan Feld and Deep Print Games Congrats to all the winners! (If you're curious, I wrote about my love of _Zenith_ in July 2025, but I've yet to play the other three games.) • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

Other award winners in France: Civolution, Zenith, and Mooki Island

Become an Almighty Lion Dancer Thanks to my time at both the Spielwarenmesse toy and game fair and Toy Fair NY, for the past four weeks I've mostly been focusing on games due out in early 2026, but let's look a bit further into the future with a sampling of games looking for financial support on crowdfunding, starting with **_Lion Dancers_**, the third title from Pauline Kong and Marie Wong of Hot Banana Games after _Steam Up_ and _Moon Bunny_. (Kickstarter) In each of three rounds of this 1-4 player game that blends lion dancing with the traditions of Lunar New Year, the players' lions dance across the stage to demonstrate their routine while collect items worth points. From the publisher: "When you think you have enough items, seize the Lucky Lettuce and return home, forcing the other lions to do the same. Timing is everything: ending early means fewer points…but ending too late might mean no points at all! Plan carefully to maximize your score." • • • • • • • • • • • • • • I first wrote about **_Almighty_** — a 1-4 player game from Kevin Privalle and Malachi Ray Rempen — in April 2024, and publisher Keen Bean Studio has finally launched a crowdfunding campaign for the design, with delivery anticipated in early 2027. (Kickstarter) In this game, you are a moody ancient god competing for belief and glory by playing act cards in one of four different lands to create, move, bless, curse, and poke mortals in that land. Whichever god has the most belief in a land gains glory, but only worthy mortals are worth glory, so if any unworthy mortals walk a land high in belief of your mighty self, you had best move them elsewhere — or smite them. No god owns the mortals, so you need to manipulate them to best effect ahead of a round's end. Each god — of Sun, Love, Storms, and the Dead — has a unique deck of act cards, and you see only a smattering of the mortal deck in each game to enable variety in gameplay. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Through the Ash is a new U.S. publisher founded by Joshua Koester and Michael Young, and they're crowdfunding their debut title: **_Sugarworks_**, a game in which you need to manage the flow of candy down three conveyor belts in order to get the right bits packaged to fulfill orders. Newly arriving candy bumps the belts, as do opponents, so don't take a sweets break until one type of candy runs out, after which players tally fulfilled orders. (Kickstarter) • • • • • • • • • • • • • • André Teruya and Igor Knop's **_Àiyé_** first appeared in 2023 in a Portuguese edition from Grok Games, and now U.S. publisher Moon Saga Workshop is crowdfunding an English-language edition for release in late 2026. (Kickstarter) This 2-4 player game uses mancala as the basis for its engine-building engine, with each player developing a personal display of cards and activating one or two columns of cards each turn. Initially you start with basic cards that provide only sun and moon seeds — the currencies of the game — but over time you can acquire character cards that allow you to add and remove columns, sabotage other players' columns, develop and trigger a council that can't be sabotaged, convert one currency to another, and so on. Moon cards include scoring conditions based on seeds on hand, icons in your display, the number of cards in columns, etc., and play continues until someone has four moon cards or eighteen cards total in their display, after which scoring takes place. Moon Saga Workshop is crowdfunding two other games at the same time, with Jason Harris's **_Loom_** being a tile-laying game in which you score for extending chains of the same color yarn and for creating loops and weaves, with more colors granting more points. Mark Jambeck's **_Dragon Scrolls_** is a minimalist game in which 2-5 players build scrolls of only seven cards over three rounds. You start with a single card showing one of eight colors of dragons, and in each of three rounds, you all simultaneously choose one of three cards in hand and add it to your scroll. After seeing what your neighbors did, you pass one card face down left and right. From your face-down cards, you randomly pick one and add it to your scroll — or you throw it away and get the other card instead. Surprise! The eight dragon colors all score differently, so ideally you end up getting something good. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

Manage the flow of candy, seeds, scrolls, yarn, and your paycheck

Navigate Your Way Through Furry Pawlitics In January 2026, Phalgun Polepalli of Mozaic Games released **_Furry Pawlitics_**, in which 2-4 players become vets who must care for animals (and their owners), while trying to satisfy personal goals that they will likely keep hidden from those owners so that they don't come across as weirdos. The game lasts thirteen rounds, which represents your lengthy shift at the vet hospital from 9:00 to 22:00. You each start with two animals and two goal cards in hand, with four of each in a public display. Five cubicles in a line can hold an animal on each side, and on a turn you're going to add an animal to an empty cubicle, place your vet with an unattended animal, move or swap animals, reserve an animal, play a goal card (which requires certain animals to be adjacent and which has you claim those animals), or take one of a few other actions. Points come from fulfilling goal cards and maximizing points from endgame scoring cards, which are random each game and grant points based on the animals that end up in your collection. Leave no animals in hand as those untreated animals will be a hit on your reputation. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Polepalli's son Hruday has a new game on the market as well — **_RAIN_** — with the idea coming to him at age 6. In this small card game, Polepalli says, "Players create beautiful little scenes of rain in a village and gently discover how trees, water bodies, and rain come together to complete the water cycle." • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Let's look at another pair of games from an Indian studio, with both **_Hippo Crates_** and **_Hoppin' Halos_** appearing in 2024 from JollyKin Games. _Hippo Crates_ is a 2-5 player card game from Jakcy Dsouza in which each player's hippo wants to eat only one type of fruit, with you keeping that info a secret. The playing area starts with three rows of only a single fruit card, while each player has three fruit cards in hand. Each turn, everyone reveals a card simultaneously, then you place them into rows starting with the lowest card played. You can place a card in a row only if it's lower than the lowest card already there or higher than the highest card; if you can't place the card, then you take all the cards in a row and start a new row with your card. As a bonus, take a "mixed fruit" card from the reserve or from another player. Once players run out of cards in hand, you score points for all the cards in your fruit type. Additionally, for each mixed fruit card you hold, you can score a pair of cards with the same value from the other fruits you collected. All unscored cards go to the "dizzy hippo", which then scores for all unclaimed mixed fruit — and if the dizzy hippo scores more than anyone else, these points go to the lowest scoring player, vaulting them to victory. Dsouza, who works as a safety officer in Oil&Gas in Saudi Arabia, tells me that the "Hippo Crates" name is meant to highlight "our need to gain the upper hand in every given situation and at times become a hypocrite by trying to benefit from outcomes that were not originally in our interest". _Hoppin' Halos_ comes from Nicole Dsouza, Jakcy Dsouza, and Nash Rodrigues, with Jakcy Dsouza saying the design is one in which "all players have the same opportunities to move forward and prosper, making sure that we find ways out of sticky situations while players openly charge against you". The "halos" are rings in six colors, with six copies of each, and they will "hop" from player to player during the game. Each player starts with one card in hand (and, and on a turn you draw a card, then play a card. Cards come in one, two, or all colors; you chose the color on the card (if needed), then take a halo of that color from the reserve or another player. If you create a scoring pattern with your halos — a rainbow of all six colors, a pair of pairs, and so on — you score 1-5 points depending on the pattern, then you distribute one halo from that pattern to each other player. Whoever scores 10 points first wins. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

Discover two designs from Mozaic Games and JollyKin Games

Gamefound to Require Disclosure of Generative AI Use in Crowdfunding Projects Two stories related to generative AI have hit the board game industry in the past week: First, on February 23, 2026, the crowdfunding platform Gamefound issued updated Terms of Service for both Creators and Backers, and amongst items such as the ability for Backers to place orders without creating a registered account and for Gamefound to "withhold creator payouts, for example in cases of suspected fraud, abuse, legal violations, or regulatory non-compliance", item #7 reads: > **Use of generative artificial intelligence** > We've added specific rules for creators regarding the use of generative AI when creating, presenting, or promoting projects on Gamefound. And here are those rules from Gamefound's Terms of Service for Creators: > **9. USE OF GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL INTELIGENCE** > If a Creator uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools (including but not limited to AI-based text, image, video,), to produce any content published on their Gamefound Project page (such as campaign descriptions, visual assets, promotional videos, or other marketing materials), or in the creation or development of the product offered as part of the campaign or Pledge Manager (particularly where AI contributes to visual, textual, narrative, mechanical elements), they must clearly disclose this fact on the Project page. Such disclosure must: > - identify which specific elements of the content were generated using AI; > - be visible to Backers before pledging begins; > - maintain clarity and transparency in how the Project is presented. > If a Creator fails to disclose the use of generative AI in content posted on their Gamefound project page, Gamefound may, at its sole discretion: > - suspend the visibility of the Project on the platform, making it temporarily inaccessible to Backers; > - temporarily hide or suspend the campaign; > - issue a public notice to Backers about the missing disclosure; > - restrict the Creator’s account or some functionalities; > - exclude the campaign from Platform promotions. > Repeated or intentional violations may result in permanent removal from the Platform, especially if the lack of disclosure misleads Backers or infringes third-party rights. > Gamefound is not responsible for the content provided by the Creator on the Project page, including any information or claims relating to the use of generative AI. All content remains the sole responsibility of the Creator. I welcome a requirement like this as I'd prefer to avoid backing or even writing about any game that uses generative AI art. (I state exactly this on Board Game Beat's policies page.) I've written to Gamefound to ask why this change to the Terms of Service was added, whether Creators need to follow a specific format for disclosure, and whether it can provide an example of a project that discloses the information in the right way, and I'll update this post should I receive a response. Second, on February 17, 2025, Ryan Dancey, then-COO of U.S. publisher Alderac Entertainment Group posted the following as a comment on his own LinkedIn post about the inability of Claude, Anthropic's AI tool, to correctly intuit how to answer a question: Many people protested this comment, including designer Elizabeth Hargrave, who has had two titles published by AEG and who referenced _Tiny Towns_ designer Peter McPherson and _Cubitos_ designer John D. Clair in her response: On Facebook, Alderac CEO John Zinser first posted a non-direct response to Dancey's comment: Then on February 18, 2026, posted that Dancey was no longer with AEG: This was the second time that Dancey had become a flashpoint for criticism, with the first being in 2023 when he offhandedly speculated that fewer women than men are game designers because "females are socialized in the West to avoid situations where they're subjected to fairly harsh criticism of their abilities and creative ideas", whereas "[m]ales are socialized to take the punches and keep moving forward". In a February 19, 2026 article on BoardGameWire, Dancey clarified that in that LinkedIn comment he meant only that AI could produce "ideas for games as good as those", not that it could design from start to finish games as good as those, which is how many (including me) translated "come up with". (In that BoardGameWire article, he said much more about AI and clarified that AEG had never used generative AI in its products or "creative pipeline".) I understand the distinction between the two concepts that Dancey is describing — AI can produce good ideas, not finished games — but as many game designers have stated over the years, having ideas is the simplest part of game design. Let's ramble off a few: "a co-operative game about building the Golden Gate Bridge", "a deck-building game about establishing your credit rating so that you can buy a house", "a dexterity game that challenges you to build the strongest palanquin with unusual materials", "a trick-taking game in which the suits are literally suits and you want to assemble the best wardrobe", "a racing game in which you use dice to determine how far you move, with the ability to buy better dice", and so on. Are these _good_ ideas? Maybe, but that depends on everything that comes after those brain flashes. Saying that AI can produce good ideas isn't really saying much, but Dancey said this nothing much is such a dismissive, demeaning way that apparently Zinser decided it would be better for Dancey to not represent AEG in the future. (I reached out to Zinser for a comment on Dancey's dismissal on February 18, but have not heard back.) Aside from the issue of generative AI art using without compensation thousands of pieces of existing art as the source material for its products, what I find most damaging about generative AI art is the amount of distrust that it's created between gamers and publishers — not to mention, of course, among all human beings as they question whether what they see online is real or not. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

Also, Ryan Dancey was removed as COO of AEG for comments about AI

Spotting Criminals Is a Daily Challenge in "Clues by Sam" +Boardcast This Boardcast is sponsored by Board Game Beat. Become a supporting member today! > _The Boardcast is audio narrations of select articles. Listen to all episodes (or find out how to get them in your favorite podcast app)__here_ _._ > Prototype+ members can access an ad-free version here. You can also listen on your favorite podcast app using the private invite and link you received via email. Lost your link? Email admin@wericmartin.com. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • If you're not familiar with **_Clues by Sam_**, let's start with an example of what you'll find when visiting the site: What does this clue tell you? In case it's not clear, _Clues by Sam_ is a logic puzzle. You're given a 4x5 grid of cards, with each card in the grid representing a named person; the names all start with a different letter and are arranged alphabetically, with each person's profession being listed under their name. Your challenge is to discover who among these people is innocent and who is a criminal, and the only information you have to start with is a single clue under a person whose status has already been revealed: green = innocent, and red = criminal. That clue will allow you to determine the status of at least one other person, and when you correctly identify them as innocent or a criminal, you will often receive a new clue that will help you identify someone else, and so on. (The website details the meaning of words like "neighboring", "more", "all", and so on. In this puzzle, Xavi has five neighbors around them, four of whom are criminals.) I think I first saw _Clues by Sam_ thanks to Ambie of Board Game Blitz sharing images on social media, and as soon as I tried one of these puzzles, I was hooked. A new puzzle is available daily for free, and if you discover that one puzzle per day isn't enough — which has been the case for me — two packs of fifty new puzzles are available for purchase. ## **Starting with Murder** _Clues by Sam_ is the work of Finnish designer and programmer Johannes Ahvenniemi, which might prompt the question: "Who's Sam?" Says Ahvenniemi, "I always liked how Sid Meier's games were named after him. Another company name I like is Toys for Bob. The names made it feel like there was a person behind the games, creating a connection between the player and the creator. I wanted to do the same with my games, but 'Games by Johannes' didn't quite fit in a logo. Both Sid and Bob are three-letter words, so after thinking about it for two seconds, I picked Sam — a friendly, gender-neutral name. I did figure that tagging a name onto the brand would make any potential licensing much harder since what is 'Clues by Sam' without Sam? But this also helped me make a mental decision early on: I would be making games I can be proud of, games I would personally own and grow for years to come." Ahvenniemi is 37 years old and guesses that he started coding pretty much around the time that he learned to read and write: "The first words I learned to spell were probably 'LINE' and 'CIRCLE' since those were the commands I used to draw characters on my older brother's Amstrad's green screen, with one goal in mind: I wanted to make games." His first money from game design came in 2007 thanks to Flash games he created. Says Ahvenniemi, "It wasn't big money, but while it was of some help to a poor IT student, the amazing part was the validation. Now that I was being paid for my games, I knew I was doing something right. That was a very rewarding, even addicting, sensation. I knew I was hooked for life." Flash games didn't pay the rent, but by chance _Angry Birds_ — which was created by Finnish game designer Jaakko Iisalo — became a smashing success almost immediately upon release in 2009, and the office of _Angry Birds_ publisher Rovio Entertainment was essentially next to door to Ahvenniemi. "I was super lucky to get a junior position there," he says, "and so I was pulled into the world of mobile games and free-to-play monetization. It took me ten years to pull myself back out from there." Why leave a comfortable position like that? Because external success sometimes hides internal dissatisfaction. Says Ahvenniemi, "While working for bigger VC-funded mobile F2P companies, I grew tired of the fact that I didn't really ship games. I was part of one successful game launch, while all my other endeavors never saw the light of day. This is understandable since investors expect high returns for their money, and the games that don't show exceptional promise early on are killed. The model makes total sense to me, but it doesn't make me happy. Like so many others, what I wanted to do was make fun games and put them in the hands of players!" Ahvenniemi decided to quit and launch out on his own, and he had time to figure out what he wanted to do. "My wife, Vilma, still had a day job as an artist, also on mobile games, in a company run by Touko Tahkokallio, creator of the _Eclipse_ board game, and I had some savings. I could work on my own things full-time for a couple of years, then we'd see what would happen. The safety nets here in Finland are great, so I wasn't too worried." What’s more, Johannes and Vilma had already started a company, Ad Artis Oy, in 2020. "We liked going to escape rooms", says Ahvenniemi, "but that summer we had to settle for the ones you do at home. We were playing one of the _EXIT_ games outside, and the puzzles were fun, but the toughest part was fighting the wind as it was trying to blow away all the various cards and cutouts. Vilma asked, why can't this just be a magazine? We both thought it was a fantastic idea, so Vilma created our first _Cluehound Puzzle Magazine_, and I would soon join her to make more." Vilma Ahvenniemi at a convention _Cluehound_ features illustrated, murder-mystery, escape room-style challenges, and the couple attended conventions to sell their creations. Says Ahvenniemi, "The magazines were very well received, and we soon internalized something fascinating: Everyone loves crime, mysteries, and puzzles. Give these to people in an accessible, familiar format, and they will take it." To stay on top of what others were doing in the genre, the couple would check out the competition, which led to the purchase of a _Murdle_ puzzle book in February 2025 — but while Ahvenniemi enjoyed the book, he was less a fan of the daily digital puzzle, which was how _Murdle_ had started. "The concept required too many UX tradeoffs, especially on mobile," he says. "I wanted to see if anyone had attempted to improve the UX and typed 'Murdle' in AppStore search, and there it was: _Clue Master_, an accessible crime-themed puzzle game, with people and clues laid out in a grid." However, says Ahvenniemi, "Immediately I detected severe flaws and lackings in the way the game worked, but I knew exactly how to fix them and create my own take on the mechanic — and I knew it had to be a free daily puzzle. All this took place in one evening. The following week I put all my other projects on hold, and in May I launched the game to the world." The format for _Clues by Sam_ originated from Ahvenniemi's desire to make the puzzle work similarly on mobile devices and on browsers without scrolling or zooming. Thus, everything had to fit in the 4x5 grid format he adopted. "This meant that the time spent per deduction had to be fairly long," he says, "so I had to make it quite hard. And due to this, the solve path would have to be quite strict. Therefore, doing a wrong move shouldn't reveal any information since that would break the flow for the rest of the puzzle." He continues, "This last part was tricky. How do I prevent players from accidentally revealing information too early? Basically it's like _Minesweeper_ , but when you try to guess, the game tells you, 'Hey, there's not enough information yet! That could be a mine!' I had to ensure not only that illogical choices aren't allowed, but also that ALL logical choices are allowed. However, what if a player is smarter than me and finds a logical deduction I missed? I knew I couldn't trust my own wits, but I also knew I had to nail this feature to make the game work. Luckily I had experience in constraint programming. I created something I call 'The Solver', and it has worked flawlessly!" ## **Ranking the Riddles** The publication format for _Clues by Sam_ matches that of crossword puzzles in _The New York Times_ and elsewhere, with the Monday puzzle being classified as an "Easy" challenge, Tuesday's puzzle being of "Medium" difficulty, and so on, with the rest of the difficulty scale consisting of "Tricky", "Hard", "Brutal", and "Evil". Ahvenniemi says The Solver generates metrics that indicate the difficulty of a puzzle, such as how advanced the solving techniques are required to be or how many clues the solver must look at simultaneously, but he modifies the difficulty rating based on personal experience: "One clue that causes constant headaches is 'Everyone has at least one criminal neighbor.' You scan and scan and scan, and you can't find anything until you finally spot the obvious. (Usually you should check the corners first since they have only three neighbors.) The Solver sees this as just one simple deduction and ranks it Easy, but all human solvers know how hard this can be, so sometimes a puzzle that is algorithmically easy can be really hard for humans." He describes the difficulty levels as follows: * In an **Easy** puzzle, you never need to look at three clues simultaneously, you re-use clues maybe three times in total, and newly revealed clues are usually immediately useful. * **Medium** puzzles are much like easy ones, but with clues revealed "too early" as a distraction, more deductions where you need to look at two clues simultaneously, and more re-using of previous clues. * **Hard** puzzles can require bifurcation, that is, creating hypothetical scenarios and proving someone can or can't be a criminal in any of them. * **Evil** puzzles can be more about bifurcating than using common techniques. Says Ahvenniemi, "These 'rules' keep shifting. For example, the puzzles used to never require bifurcation since personally I dislike it in classic puzzles like Sudoku and Nonogram. But after sharing a really nasty puzzle in a newsletter, I realized many actually do enjoy the process, so I started introducing them more in daily puzzles as well. It's not for everyone, but hey, you can always use a hint!" Bifurcation makes puzzles more challenging, especially since you can't write on a _Clues by Sam_ puzzle the way that you might with a Sudoku puzzle, so Ahvenniemi introduced _corner tags_ , a system in which you tap on the upper right corner of a card and that corner rotates through four labels: yellow, red, green, and nothing. You can use this tagging system as you like to record information or make suppositions. By tagging two card corners yellow, for example, you can note that these cards are linked, with one being innocent and the other a criminal, but without you yet knowing which is which. As of early 2026, the corner tagging system includes six colors, and you can tag upper right and lower right corners. "Using tags made all puzzles easier", says Ahvenniemi, "so now I had to bring up the overall difficulty! And then, of course, players are getting better at solving these, asking for more of a challenge. Balancing this with new players is particularly tricky. That's why I start the week with an easy one and end on Sunday with a real head-scratcher, but sometimes if I notice there's a lot of new players, I keep the overall difficulty lower for that week. It's all very organic, but there is some design behind the madness!" While the format of _Clues by Sam_ is fixed, the types of puzzles that can be created within that format is more varied. Says Ahvenniemi, "The game is essentially a mash-up of several puzzle games, but the exact rules are revealed as you go. Sometimes you feel like you're solving a _Minesweeper_ , then suddenly it's like Nonogram, or Xs and Os, or Queens, but you don't need to know how any of these games work, and you can in theory start playing without reading any rules outside the gameboard! This, I think, is the magic of logic puzzles based on natural language. You enter a new puzzle every day, and you never know what it'll be like. You need to familiarize yourself with the world, its characters, their occupations, their relationships, and of course the rules." He continues, "This ties in well with the characters having some personality. Tom is not just a cell number, but a criminal ratted out by Anna, which is a good source for funny lines to further build the world." ## **Dividing the Innocent from the Guilty** Before we start diving into the personalities of the twenty individuals who show up in a puzzle each day, let's look at how puzzles are constructed. Ahvenniemi says that the process of making a puzzle is half manual and half algorithmic: > I mentioned The Solver that is responsible for listing all valid deductions. It can also work the other way: It can also suggest a clue that gives the missing piece of information for some deduction. It is terrible at understanding what a fun clue looks like, but it is very imaginative! It has a massive pool of clues to randomly pick from, while my brain is stuck running in circles between a handful of options, so it's a fantastic source of inspiration. In the end, the process feels more like curating than coming up with clues. This allows me to create puzzles at a pretty good pace! > Once I have a fun puzzle, I sprinkle the clues around the solve path, with The Solver always verifying that the solve path stays unchanged. There's a lot of room for moving clues around since not all clues are useful alone, and not every person has a clue. Click on clues (and random comments) to de-emphasize text when it's no longer needed > Then the final step is to fill in the gaps. Since there are characters without a clue, it would feel like a waste not to use that space for world building, so I solve the puzzle once more myself, and while doing that, I add quips to the persons without a clue. Usually I start by picking a random line for the first one, then spiraling that into surprising directions, while trying to maintain a common thread. The story can be tied to the puzzle, such as everyone commenting on the large number of criminals or blaming someone for ratting on them, and sometimes it's just random jokes. Sometimes they end up pretty funny, but at times I wonder if it's really worth it. It can take more time coming up with these lines than the puzzle itself. > Not everyone likes these lines, but they also receive lots of good feedback, and I do believe that making people smile while solving a logic puzzle is something pretty rare and valuable. Bringing about a sense of joy drives Ahvenniemi in his creations. He says, "In each puzzle, I want to challenge the player enough to make them frown, then to wipe that frown away with a smile, to make the player connect with a world. I kind of get the same feeling when solving a good Sudoku — the numbers start feeling special and alive somehow, but I feel like this is way easier to achieve with talking faces!" ## **Solving the Profit Puzzle** Ahvenniemi has published a few other puzzles — _Bee Sort_ , _Words by Sam_ , and _Block Puzzle by Sam_ — but they're all free, similar to the daily _Clues by Sam_ puzzles, which doesn't seem like an ideal business model, yet his previous business experience led him to believe he was on the right path. "_Clues by Sam_ has been running as a daily puzzle since May 2025", he says. "From the player numbers and very rough conversion guesstimates I took from my F2P experience, I figured I could pay part of my living expenses by publishing a puzzle pack now and then, so I wanted to try that before downgrading the experience with ads. My estimates proved astonishingly accurate, and for the first time since my early Flash career, I'm making some money with my own games!" Ahvenniemi has also done freelance work for Netflix Puzzled, a daily puzzle platform developed in Helsinki, and hopes to continue doing this in the future, but purchases of puzzle packs will allow him to continue creating and improving _Clues by Sam_. "I will most likely introduce new ways for the game to generate revenue, once I have something I deem worthy of paying for", he says. "Accessing all past puzzles is something many have announced being ready to pay for, but you can also find links to them floating around the internet. (The scenario sharing functionality makes this inevitable.) I could just break all the old links and put them behind a paywall, but that doesn't feel like the right thing to do. That said, I have some ideas I believe everyone will find fair and fun!" After all, says Ahvenniemi, "this is slowly becoming my day job now — in addition to the puzzle magazines, which are also growing! Vilma also resigned recently so that she can focus on them full-time. We're now trying to figure out logistics since shipping them individually from Finland is slow, expensive, and sometimes quite impossible. (Sorry, USA!) It'll be a crazy year for us, for sure!" • • • • • • • • • • • • • • _If you want a sampling of what_ Clues by Sam _is like, you can try_ _this Easy puzzle_ _from Jan. 19, 2026,__this Medium puzzle_ _from Jan. 20, and_ _this Hard puzzle_ _from Jan. 18 — or you can spend US$1 to get_ _fifty puzzles in one go_ _, ranging from Easy to Evil. Recommended!_ _Alternatively, you can follow along as I show the steps of one solution. Try to figure out the next step before you scroll down..._ ## A Step-by-Step Solution Although admittedly some steps are larger than others... This is a Sunday puzzle, and those will typically be Hard or Evil, so you'll have a decent amount of cross-referencing and hypotheticals. Here's the starting point, so what can we derive from this. "Neighbor", by the way, means any card orthogonally or diagonally adjacent, so Lisa (B3) has eight neighbors, with two of those neighbors being cops. A third cop, Uma, is at A5. The grid has three cops, and Tyler's clue says two cops are criminals, but only one of those is a neighbor to Lisa, so that means the third one must be a criminal. Let's tag Frank and Pam to indicate their link; one is a criminal and the other innocent, but we don't know which is which for now. Will Uma's clue help us resolve this? We know two cops are criminals, and only two pilots are in the grid, so if Uma tells us "There are as many criminal copes as there are criminal pilots", then we can resolve the status of the two pilots. Criminals! Sometimes clues give you direct information, in addition to info that's more fuzzy. Chase (C1) says "Gabe is one of 3 criminals above Vera", so we can immediately resolve Gabe: Gabe's clue is now revealed: "2 of Raul's neighbors on the edges are innocent"...which doesn't tell us much. We already know Tyler (D4) is one of those neighbors, but we have four choices for the other one, so what else do we know? Helen (C2) tells us "There's an odd number of criminals neighboring Alice". Gabe is a criminal neighboring Alice, so the other two neighbors — Bonnie (B1) and Frank (A2) — must be both innocent or both criminals. Better to look at a situation with two possibilities than one with four, so let's tag them both as criminals, then see what else we can figure out. Bonnie (B1) and Frank (A2), a cop, are both tagged with red to indicate their criminal status, but this means Pam (B4), the other cop, must be innocent because of their previous link via Tyler, which means that Lisa must be a criminal since Chase told us that "Gabe is one of 3 criminals above Vera". Now let's consider the other possibility: Bonnie (B1) and Frank (A2), a cop, are now both tagged with yellow to indicate their innocent status, but as before this means Pam (B4), the other cop, must be a criminal because of their previous link via Tyler. Once again, though, we have only two criminals above Vera, with Lisa's status being forced as a criminal in order to satisfy Chase's clue, so no matter the status of Bonnie and Frank, Lisa (B3) is a criminal. What does Lisa (B3) tell us now that she's been revealed? "Alice (A1) is one of 4 innocents on the edges". The grid has fourteen edge spaces, with only four innocents among them — and now Alice joins Tyler as an innocent. Alice's "clue" is a joke, which means we don't get any new information...other than Alice's innocent status, which is itself a clue, right? What can we look at along these lines? Alice is one of four innocents on the edges. Tyler is another one, and from Gabe (B2) we know that Raul has a second innocent on the edge, so that's three innocents — which means that our previous speculation about Frank and Bonnie both being innocent can't be true because that would bring us up to five innocents on the edges. Therefore, Bonnie (B1) and Frank (A2) are both criminals, which means that Pam (B4), the final cop, must be innocent. Resolving these three cards lets us gray out many clues since we've wrung all the information from them that we can. Frank has a joke, so we can grey that as well, leaving us with new information from Bonnie and Pam. Bonnie says, "Only 1 of the 5 criminals neighboring Raul is above Xavi". Raul (C4) has two neighbors above Xavi (D5), with Tyler (D4) already known as innocent, so Nancy (D3) must be a criminal. Pam says, "There's an odd number of criminals above Tyler", which means one or three, and Nancy is already known as a criminal, so the other two — Donna (D1) and Isaac (D2) — must be both innocent or criminal. But by the same reasoning we used before with Bonnie and Frank, we know they must both be criminal or else we'd have more than four innocents on the edges. Donna (D1) and Nancy (D3) give us jokes, so let's focus on what Isaac (D2) says: "Exactly 2 of the 6 criminals neighboring Pam are in row 5". Uma (A5) is already known as a criminal neighboring Pam (B4), which means that either Vera (B5) or Wally (C5) must be a criminal — and whichever one isn't a criminal is innocent, and that will be, recalling Gabe's clue, the second of Raul's neighbors on the edges who are innocent. And since Raul's "innocent edge neighbor" count will be satisfied, that means Xavi (D5) must be a criminal. I've tagged Vera and Wally in yellow to show their connected, yet unresolved Schrödingerian status. Xavi (D5) tells us "There's an equal number of innocents in rows 3 and 5", and the Vera/Wally status tells us row 5 contains only one innocent, so the same will be true of row 3. Can we determine whether Janet (A3) or Maria (C3) is the innocent party? Well, reviewing the unresolved clues reminds us that Bonnie (B1) gave us two clues in one. The clue, "Only 1 of the 5 criminals neighboring Raul is above Xavi", let us resolve Nancy's status as a criminal, but the clue contains a far simpler fact: "Five criminals neighbor Raul". We already know three of these criminals — Lisa, Nancy, and Xavi — and a fourth will be either Vera or Wally, which leaves only one unresolved person neighboring Raul: Maria (C3), who must be that fifth criminal. Now that Maria (C3) is the third criminal in row 3, we can use Xavi's clue to determine that Janet (A3) must be innocent. Janet's clue is "There are exactly 2 innocents in column B", which lets us untangle Vera, now locked in as innocent, and Wally, who must be a criminal. And with both Vera's and Wally's clues being jokes, we must return to past clues to see where to go from here. Yet again we can turn to Lisa's clue: "Alice is one of 4 innocents on the edges". How many innocents are currently on the edges? Four?! Okay, then we know what to make of Oscar (A4). Oscar (A4) must be a criminal, which leaves only Raul (C4). Isaac's clue is similar to Bonnie's in being a twofer, and with only five criminals neighboring Pam so far, Raul must be the final bad egg in that criminal half-dozen. And that's that! We don't care how many people are innocent and criminal; only that everyone's status is resolved. Uncertainty has been banished, at least until tomorrow... • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

How quickly can you sort the guilty from the innocent?

Expect No Mercy in Monopoly Deal In ye olden days prior to Covid, Hasbro had an off-site, multi-floor exhibit during Toy Fair NY to display all of its upcoming products, so it was a surprise in 2026 to find Hasbro having a booth on the exhibitor floor just like everyone else. I mean, the booth was completely walled in and accessible only by appointment, so that was the same as in ye olden days, but still — different! What wasn't different, though, was the focus on licensed products that match what's already available on shelves, such as this display of holiday-themed games: **_The Game of Life: Elf_** , **_Candy Land: Elf on a Shelf_** , **_Clue: Home Alone_** , both **_Monopoly: The Nightmare Before Christmas_** and **_Monopoly Deal: The Nightmare Before Christmas_**?! The Grinch appears in both **_Operation_** and (another) **_Monopoly Deal_** because why not? The only unbranded titles here are three versions of **_Jenga Mini_** , which feature small plastic tiles in various colors, with the pastel version being released for Easter, the purple and orange one for Halloween, and the red, white, and green one for Christmas. "Do they have any rule changes or twists?" I asked hopefully. No, they do not. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • When _KPop Demon Hunters_ became an unexpected hit on Netflix, multiple articles popped up to explain why so few licensed products were available. (Answer: Its hit status was unexpected.) Having surveyed both Spielwarenmesse and Toy Fair, I will comfort anyone worried about a lack of such products that you will soon find them everywhere you look, whether you want them or not. Here's a third new version of **_Monopoly Deal_** , for example, and the umpteenth version of **_Monopoly_**. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • For variety(?), you could instead turn to _**Monopoly Deal: No Mercy**_ , which follows in the footsteps of _UNO_ and _Flip 7_ by having a "mean" version of a game that can already be somewhat mean when played normally. Anyone who thinks that "take that" doesn't belong in a game design hasn't played games with "normal" people, if you know what I mean. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Ye olde game **_Crossfire_** will return in a new edition in July 2026, with the goal being to shoot all of the ball bearings into places where they can't be recovered so that you need to buy yet another edition of the game. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • I had not heard of Tonies prior to visiting the Hasbro booth, but Tonies is apparently a (sort of) interactive electronic play device for young children, with you placing a "sleeve" on top of the device to give it the parameters of the story, activity, or game the children will be involved with. Hasbro has created _Monopoly_ , _Guess Who?_ , and _The Game of Life_ modules for use with Tonieplay. I find it odd that Tonie touts itself as "a screen-free gaming experience" when it's...an electronic device gaming experience. I mean, true, no screen is present, but as I understand the situation, the "screen" itself is not the bogeyman; neglect of your children in the care of an electronic babysitter is. (I have issues with that argument as well, but I just wanted to point out the absurdity here. You might as well tout an "arsenic-free gaming experience".) • • • • • • • • • • • • • • As far I can tell, **_SERVD_** has been around since 2023, and it's one of those designs that's called a "card game", but would be more accurately described as a "card-based activity". _SERVD_ comes in different editions — Couples, Friends, Summer Daze, Newborn Parents, and Kids vs Parents — but the principle is the same: You split the cards among participants, and whenever the situation seems right, you serve a card to someone to make them do something, whether that's to pay you compliments, do an activity they don't want to do, organize a day trip, etc. That person now has that particular card, so they might serve it to you in the future, and the cycle continues ever thus. Hasbro has now added _SERVD_ to its catalog, and we should anticipate _Monopoly Deal: SERVD_ hitting the market in 2027. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • As noted in a February 11, 2026 post, revenue from sales of **_Magic: The Gathering_** was up 59% in 2025 compared to the previous year, so you should expect much more _Magic_ for as long as that gravy train keeps pouring. Pictured here are the four display cases within the Hasbro booth, with no individual cards being shown or available. _Magic_ players must learn how to do a French tuck if they want to accessorize their games with the proper clothing. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • _**Dungeons & Dragons: Welcome to the Hellfire Club**_ will include characters played by the characters on the _Stranger Things_ television show that can now be played by you, with those characters participating in adventures supposedly created by the _ST_ characters. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • I imagine that the cost of building my own six-foot-tall sculpture of a hand out of OKTO Sensory Art material would be prohibitively expensive, so I'll have to be satisfied with this image, which reminds me of the animated teddy bear in _Akira_. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

At Toy Fair NY, Hasbro revealed its 2026 game line-up

Stack Your Hippos High in Kumata French publisher Cosmoludo debuted in 2020 with new editions of four abstract strategy games — **_Hokito_** , **_Mana_** , and **_Pantareï_** , all from famed designer Claude Leroy, and **_Kamon_** from Bruno Cathala — and has since debuted two more such titles: **_Yoxii_** in 2022 and **_Oxono_** in 2024. I've been a big fan of Cosmoludo's catalog, both for its stylish, minimalist graphics and the quality of the game designs it's brought to market. (If you're curious, read or watch my review of _Pantareï_ and watch my review of _Oxono_.) So it was a surprise to visit the Cosmoludo booth at SPIEL Essen 24 and see developers Andréa Farkas and Tom Delahaye playtesting a new Claude Leroy design that differed from everything else I've seen from both him and this publisher: A prototype of the still-in-development game __Jumino__ at SPIEL Essen 24The final board from a demo game of what was then called __Jumino__ at SPIEL Essen 24 Cosmoludo has since finished developing this design and will sell and demo what is now called **_Kumata_** at the 2026 FIJ game fair in Cannes, France, which is taking place Feb. 27 to Mar. 1. _Kumata_ will debut at retail outlets in France on March 13, 2026. _Kumata_ differs from most Leroy designs in that everyone has the same set of numbered tiles, but they're shuffled into 2-3 piles, so you and other players don't know which tiles will be available when. Uncertainty! Randomness! What's going on here?! Andréa Farkas says that Cosmoludo's release of _Kumata_ is a result of the current game market: "Pure reflection games, while deeply appreciated by dedicated players, tend to reach a more limited audience overall. As a publisher, we felt it was important to adapt to this reality without compromising our identity, by offering games that invite more people to sit at the table." _Kumata_ maintains Cosmoludo's desire to publish "games that are simple, clever, and stimulating, games that develop the mind", while simultaneously broadening the potential market by allowing for games with up to four players and by rethinking its approach to graphics. Says Farkas, "We moved toward more family-friendly illustrations, with a jungle theme that feels warm, inviting, and engaging rather than intimidating. This visual universe allows the game to speak to a wider audience and makes it easier for families and younger players to step in, without sacrificing depth or strategic interest." Example of the starting set-up for two players As for how to play _Kumata_ , on a turn you place the top tile from one of your stacks onto the 6x6 grid, with each number being playable only on the same number, whereas a blank can cover (and be covered by) anything. As with many domino games, you can stack tiles as the game progresses as long as a stacked domino straddles two other dominoes at the same height. What are you trying to do? Have the most points at game's end, with your score being the sum of your visible numbers both in the grid and on unplayed tiles atop your stacks. Each player has 1-2 totems in their color depending on the player count, and after a turn, you can place a totem on your just-placed tile both to make that tile off-limits for future plays and to score points equal to the height of that tile in the grid. Blocking others seems like a good thing, but if your opponent can't play a top tile on their turn, they shift a top tile from one of their stacks to create a new stack — and unplayed tiles score them points at game's end! Maybe you'd be better off baiting them to play somewhere that you can cover up later... Production copy of __Kumata__ on display at Spielwarenmesse 2026 Developer Andréa Farkas notes that _Kumata_ will initially be available solely in French, with distributor Blackrock Games handling exports and assisting with localization of the game in other languages based on interest from publishing partners. As for what's coming from Cosmoludo in the future, Farkas says, "We are not closing the door on expanding our abstract game range. However, our primary goal today is to grow our audience, and we believe family games are the most natural way for a publisher to do that. Looking ahead, players can expect more multiplayer games from Cosmoludo, with real interaction between players and strategy remaining at the heart of the gameplay. Several projects are already in development, and we sincerely hope they will resonate with our community." • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

Designer Claude Leroy branches out from his abstract game roots

No Loading Games Brings More Cyberpunk to the Table Canadian publisher No Loading Games debuted in 2025 with _Gwent: The Legendary Card Game_, and at Toy Fair NY in February 2026 it highlighted three upcoming releases, all bearing licensed IP, that will expand its catalog. Non-final graphics and packaging Arnaud Perez's **_PAC-MAN: Craze Maze_** is the most straightforward of these titles, with each player starting with a 3x4 grid of face-down cards, with their personal PAC-MAN occupying one of the center spaces. On a turn, you can flip a face-down card in your grid or replace one card with another, with the goal of creating a point-rich labyrinth that your PAC-MAN can maneuver through easily once someone finishes their grid and ends the round. _PAC-MAN: Craze Maze_ is for 2-5 players, is due out in June 2026, and will retail for US$15. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Mock-up of __Cyberpunk Edgerunners: Hunted__ ** _Cyberpunk Edgerunners: Hunted_** is a co-operative game for 1-4 players based on the _Cyberpunk: Edgerunners_ anime series based on the _Cyberpunk 2077_ video game. No matter the player count, you'll use all four characters in each game, playing in real-time to explore and expand the board as you work toward completing one mission or another. _Cyberpunk Edgerunners: Hunted_ is due out in September 2026 and will retail for US$40, with each game taking about 25 minutes. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • The anime series ___Blue Lock_ focuses on the competition to become the top striker in Japan, earning a place on the country's World Cup team — and **_Blue Lock Striker_** is a 2-4 player adaptation of this series that plays in 15 minutes. That's all I can tell you about the game, which is shown in mock-up form here. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • View from the back of a construction vehicle transport truck I recall visiting the Spielwarenmesse toy and game fair in the late 2010s and being dumbfounded by this teenager wearing a ladybug costume that was being licensed by SO MANY COMPANIES. Not being a youngster, the _Miraculous_ cartoon series was a complete mystery to me, but jump ahead ten years, and now Marinette Dupain-Cheng, _Miraculous_ ' lead character, is adorning a several-story building right outside the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center during Toy Fair. I guess that series has made a successful leap to the U.S. — or at least someone hopes it will. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

PAC-MAN: Craze Maze asks to build a rich buffet for your hero

Throw Hands for a Wild and Crazy Summer Don Charlton and Ebony Miles launched U.S. publisher Wild Guess Games in 2024 with the eponymous card game **_Wild Guess!_** _Wild Guess!_ is a shedding game of sorts in that each player has a deck of cards, and you want to get ride of your deck first. Each turn, you which word is on top of your discard pile — suit or color — then you call out a specific card suit or color as appropriate, then you flip your top card. If your guess was correct, you pass cards from your discard pile equal to the number showing on the just flipped card to your left-hand opponent. If they have a "Block!" card matching that suit, those cards are removed from the game; otherwise, they add them to their discard pile. If you get through your deck, flip your discard pile over to form your new deck — and in theory you know all the cards in order, which means you're no longer guessing, but instead just shoveling cards out of the game. In theory... A future Wild Guess Games release is **_Summer_** , which is a Spades-style trick-taking game played with two teams of two. Cards come in four seasonal suits, and summer is always the trump suit. At the start of a trick, the lead plays a card and says "High" or "Low"; everyone must follow suit, if possible, then the highest/lowest card of the led suit wins...unless trump is thrown off, in which case the highest/lowest trump wins. **_Crazy 8 Ball_** is a two-player game in which you're trying to sink the 8 ball first, which should not be a surprise to anyone who has played billiards. Each player starts with seven colored balls — solids or stripes — with the 8 ball placed to the side. You have four cards in hand, with cards being a double-colored pocket, a colored cue stick, a colored cue ball, and blocks. On a turn, you take an action, such as playing a pocket card onto the table, playing a block card, or discarding a card and drawing a replacement, either from the deck or the top of the discard pile. Alternatively, you can sink a ball by playing the correctly colored cue stick and cue ball while a pocket of this color is available and you still have that colored ball. After you sink all seven balls, you can use any colored set to sink the 8 ball. _**Throw Hands**_ is a straightforward concept for 2-8 players: Everyone has their own deck and starts with a few cards in hand, and in real-time you start playing cards following the familiar "rock-paper-scissors" model. If scissors is on top of the discard pile, throw rock and say "Rock!" to call dibs and cut off others. Refill your hand as needed, and try to play out all of your cards first. (This game is similar to _ButaBabel_ , which I reviewed in 2016, but without the aspect of playing on other players' discard piles in order to end up with the secondmost cards in your pile.) • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Mock-up of __Foolette__ , showing the betting board with spaces 1-36 in alternating red and black colors ** _Foolette_** is a 2-6 player betting party game in which you try to end the game with the most money through deceptive and smart bidding. Each player receives a stack of chips and a card showing one of the 36 numbers. Players take turns placing chips on the board, either directly on a number or on borders and edges that touch two or four numbers. Cards are being revealed bit by bit, and if you're directly on a revealed number, you can shift those chips to other locations. Your goal is to win money by sussing out others' numbers and keeping yours hidden enough that opponents can't profit by placing stakes on your location. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • I spotted several booths like this around Toy Fair, and while I assume they're meant to convey a playful spirit, like, hey, let's chill for a moment from all the business deals and toss the ol' beanbags around, they mostly came across as a way to fill the booth of an exhibitor that cancelled at the last minute, with the space now being only 95% dead instead of 100%. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

U.S. publisher Wild Guess Games expands its catalog to five games

Member Survey: What's Your Favorite Escape Room Series? Inka and Markus Brand's _EXIT: Das Spiel_ series of escape room games from KOSMOS turns ten in 2026, and the success of this series — along with the explosive popularity of escape rooms in real life — led to other designers and publishers releasing escape room-style games of their own. Based on your personal experience, how would you rate these lines of games from most enjoyable to least? Yes, the quality of individual titles in a series will vary, but we're asking you to order these game lines as a whole based on which you would recommend to others. ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

How would you rank these lines of escape room games? This survey is for our Bits and higher supporting members.

The Op Games Welcomes a Menagerie of Hummingbirds, Cats, Camels, and Elephants for 2026 At Toy Fair NY 2026, U.S. publisher The Op Games ran me through recent releases and upcoming titles, with the headliners being yet more **_Flip 7_** from Eric Olsen. __Flip 7: Grinch__ is a produced version of the game, while the other two — __National Parks__ and __Liquid Death__ — are mock-ups for Toy Fair This hit press-your-luck card game from 2024, which I reviewed at the time, already has a Grinch-themed version on the market thanks to a late 2025 release, and 2026 will bring licensed versions based on U.S. national parks and canned water company Liquid Death. Nothing about the gameplay differs in these releases, making them more like gift items than new games. (A representative from The Op Games told me that the company has released many national parks-branded items over the years and they're good sellers, so hey, why not make this one?) What is new-ish for this burgeoning game line is **_Flip 7: With a Vengeance_**, a co-design between Olsen and Alyssa Swatek that hit the retail market at the end of January 2026. This release channels Nick Hayes' _UNO: Show 'Em No Mercy_, a 2023 release from Mattel that takes a "regular" card game and makes it mean. Here's how _Flip 7: With a Vengeance_ differs from the original _Flip 7_ : * The deck includes thirteen 13s, giving players a way to score more points and bust more often...although one of the 13s is lucky, allowing you to hold a second 13 in addition to this one. * One unlucky 7 causes you to discard all your other cards. * Instead of cards that add or double points in a round, cards subtract or halve points. * Five action cards give you more ways to mess with people. For example, if you use "Swap" to give both of the involved players a duplicate number, then they both bust. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Another January 2026 release from The Op Games is Jason Tremblay's **_Hummingbirds_**, a game for 2-4 players about feeding at the proper time. The game board features thirteen cardboard tubes, each of which holds a sand timer. The outermost sand timers last 30 seconds, and the central one lasts ten minutes, with the others lasting periods of time between those extremes. On a turn, a player takes one of their hummingbirds and places it on or moves it to a vacant sitting space or they pick up one of their hummingbirds where it currently stands. The base of each hummingbird is magnetized, so when you lift it, the sand timer will rise up as well. If the sand timer is empty, then it's feeding time! Take a point token matching the color of the sand timer, then flip the sand timer over and return it to the column, placing your bird to the side. If sand remains in the timer, you're too early and must lose one of your lowest-valued tokens before removing your bird from the space. The sand timer doesn't flip, so you've now given everyone else an idea of how long they need to wait for it to score. Game play continues until someone has 25+ points and wins — and since the red sand timer is worth 25 points on its own, you could just camp on that for ten minutes to guarantee victory...assuming someone else doesn't score 25 points first and you don't pull up the timer too early. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Another Q1 2026 release from The Op Games is **_Cats Knocking Things Off Ledges_** from David Killing and Sen-Foong Lim, and gameplay on a turn is mostly spelled out on the back of the box: Build a new platform, use tweezers to place a cat and its toy on a platform, use a wooden cat's paw to knock a toy off that platform, and hope the toy lands on another platform without knocking everything over. You score based on how far the toy falls as long as the toy lands on a platform as a table landing is easy and not worth anything. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Rounding out The Op's Q1 2026 releases is **_TEMBO: Survival on the Savanna_**, a co-operative game from studio Sidekick Games and designers Asger Aleksandrov Granerud, Mads Fløe, Dan Halstad, and Daniel Skjold Pedersen that I previewed in depth in late 2025 after playing a sample game at SPIEL Essen 25. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Note that the game board is not valid as the same spaces should be covered on each half Jason Katzwinkel's **_Evenglow_** will debut at Gen Con 2026 and hit retail in Q3 2026, with 1-4 players trying to balance what they build across day and night. Each player gets a game board with two hexagonal areas on it, and on a turn the active player draws a card showing four of the six colors of tiles, then places it on the green board to indicate which two colors of tiles they get and which two everyone else gets. You will place one tile on the night side of your board and the other on the day side — and they must cover the same numbered space. (Someone goofed when arranging the demo board shown in the image above.) Each tile color scores in different ways, and you want to maximize points. On top of that, if you arrange orange, yellow, and red tiles the proper way, you receive a potion in that color, with each potion granting a bonus ability and with sets of potions scoring points as well. Three of the game boards have specialty set-ups to facilitate a solo game against an automated opponent at three difficulty levels. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • **_Oasis: New Life on A Distant World_** is a game for 1-5 players by Leo Taylor, Duvey Rudow, and George Feledichuk in which you're on a foreign world that's been devastated by climatic happenings, and you are establishing new creatures both above and below the crust of this world. You start with a few cards in hand and will first build parts of your bottom row as the symbols on those creatures determine what can be played above. The top creature on the right, for example, has two red symbols, so it can be played only on two creatures with red symbols. Played creatures have effects on them, and (if I recall correctly) you can cycle cards from your hand to activate these effects. The cards on the side of the table are migration cards that can be played by anyone as if they're in your hand. The game lasts three rounds, and the earlier you pass in a round, the more cards you can protect before you move into the next round, with you drawing new cards — either from the above deck or below — before starting. As with _Evenflow_ , _Oasis_ should debut at Gen Con 2026 and hit retail in Q3 2026. Each game retails for US$40. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • **_Frenzy Falls_** is a 2-6 player design from Joseph Z. Chen and Randy Flynn in which cards will fall from one row to another, ideally cascading to score you points instead of dribbling away into nothing. Each player starts with five cards in hand from a personal deck, and score cards equal to the number of players are revealed. In turn, each player places a card face down by any score card, then does it again, after which you reveal the cards to the right of the top score card one by one, resolving any special actions: _bump_ pushes the card to the left or right down one row; _pull_ moves a card of your choice to this row; and _proxy_ gets replaced by a card in the hand of its owner. After all of this, if the sum of the score card and played cards in this row is at least 10, whoever has the most influence in the row claims the score card, then discards their cards in this row; each other player cascades one card of their choice to the next row down, with that row then being resolved, and so on. If the sum in a row is less than 10, leave all revealed cards in place. Play multiple rounds until the score cards run out, then see who has the most points. _Frenzy Falls_ will debut in April 2026. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Andrew Innes self-published the card game **_Anomia_** in 2010 and has had it on the market ever since — but now The Op Games has purchased _Anomia_ , and after selling off the existing stock (shown on the right in the image above), it will release a revamped version (shown at left) in Q4 2026. Each turn in _Anomia_ , you draw the top card of the deck and place it face up on your pile of cards. If the symbol on your card matches another visible symbol, then you want to name something in the category showing on the opponent's card before they can name something in your visible category. Whoever names something correctly first takes the opponent's card and scores it face down — which might reveal a new card and start another competition. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Similarly, The Op Games has acquired Rob Nelson's **_The Game of CULLS_** — which has also appeared in print as _Bollox_ , _Bolix_ , and _Bōku —_ and the renamed **_Culls_** will appear at retail in Q4 2026. In this two-player game, you're trying to be the first to place five discs in a row, but if you sandwich the opponent's piece (or multiple pieces), you turn those pieces face up and on their next turn(s) all they can do is pick up a face-up piece, thereby giving you time to do more productive things. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Another acquisition by The Op Games is **_Tapped Four_** by Marilyn Dick and Dorene Mills, which will be released as **_Tap4_** in Q4 2026. _Tap4_ is a shedding game of sorts in that you want as few points as possible when the round ends. Each player starts with eleven cards in hand and four piles in front of them, with each pile holding one face-up card on top of a face-down one. On a turn, play one or more cards of the same value from your hand and/or face-up cards that are equal to or lower than the most recently played cards. As you play, keep count of what's been played in total for a value: "one 11", "two 11s", "one 9", "three 8s", etc. If you play the fourth card of a value, remove the discard pile from the game, then play again immediately. The deck also contains "TAP IN" cards that let you immediately remove the discard pile and play. If you can't play, you must pick up all discarded cards, then start a new discard pile. To play a face down card, you flip it onto the discard pile. If it's a legal play, great! You can play more of that value from your hand, too. If not, pick up the discards! When someone has played all of their cards, everyone else scores points equal to their unplayed cards. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Yet another acquired game is **_Desperate Oasis_**, a lane-battling game from Dan Cassaro of Weast Coast in which two players take turns placing animal cards in rows, with some animals having immediate powers when played and others having ongoing effects. The Op's version of _Desperate Oasis_ will be out in Q3 2026 and retail for US$15. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Another constant presence at both Spielwarenmesse and Toy Fair: fart toys. I should visit one of these booths sometimes to see how they pitch the merits of their particular fart toys: "The more pressure you impose on their puffy, pliable bodies, the harder their cheeks undulate, shooting those rich pelvic blasts clear across a room. Here, compare these anemometer readings of our second gen Fart Monsters to competing toot trolls already on the market, and you'll see that don't hold a candle to the power ours can generate — and that's partly because ours will blast that candle right out of your mitt." • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

The Op also has four new acquisitions of previously self-published games

Horrified and Villainous Once Again Lead Ravensburger's U.S. Line-up To follow up my Feb. 14, 2026 article about Ravensburger's new version of _Krakel Orakel_, here's what else the publisher was showing in its booth at Toy Fair NY. Okay, not much to go on here, but a Ravensburger rep said that this Q3 2026 release would be another _Dungeons & Dragons_-themed version of **_Horrified_**. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Similarly vague are these three **_Disney Villainous_** releases, with the big box standalone game having no info available. The middle box above, **_Success at Any Cost_**, will feature Ernesto de la Cruz from the movie _Coco_ and Prince Hans from _Frozen_ , and this "expandalone" two-player game is due out in Q3 2026. **_Come, We Fly!_**, which is also due out in Q3 2026, is an expansion that features the Sanderson sisters from the movie _Hocus Pocus_ , with the player controlling these sisters switching roles from one to another throughout the game. This smaller expansion features only a single villain, so you can play it only by using a villain from any of the other _Disney Villainous_ titles. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Ravensburger's new edition of Rüdiger Dorn's **_Las Vegas_**, which I detailed at the start of January 2026, will be released in the U.S. in March 2026. Other English-language releases of titles out in Germany include Stefan Feld's **_The Druids of Edora_** and Christian Kudahl and Erik Andersson Sundén's **_The Glorious Guilds of Buttonville_**, which are both due out in Q2 2026. Some of the "Chronicle Boxes" to be included in __Labyrinth: Chronicles__ ** _Snackaroo_**, which I described in this Jan. 28, 2026 post on what Ravensburger is doing in Germany, will be released in the U.S. in July 2026, and **_Labyrinth: Chronicles_**, which is being crowdfunded in Q1 2026, will have a U.S. retail release in Q4 2026. A Ravensburger representative said that _Labyrinth: Chronicles_ would be a one-shot production and not something reprinted continually, with the retail release meant to cover those who missed the crowdfunding campaign. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Kseniya Kuznetsova's **_Half and Seek_**, which will hit Germany with the far less magical title **_Magische Spiegel_** ("Magic Mirror"), challenges players to find — or rather, create — images shown on the square grey and white cards within the colorful images on the larger cards, and to do this you will need to figure out where to place your mirror. I made a fern! Whoever first collects ten small cards wins. _Magische Spiegel_ is due out in Q1 2026 in Germany, while _Half and Seek_ has a Q2 2026 release in North America. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Ravensburger's "Mitbringspiel" line of tiny, cheap games for youngsters has been available in Germany for years, and now Ravensburger plans to make them available in the U.S. as well, most likely because retailers are seeing more interest in low-cost items from shoppers. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • The logic puzzle **_Gravity Maze_** debuted in 2017, and its success has led to spinoffs, such as **_Gravity Maze Builder_** for younger puzzle solvers and the forthcoming **_Gravity Maze Slide_** , which has a 3x3 grid in which you will stack plastic elements into towers and slide these towers into position so that you can solve each individual puzzle challenge. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • **_MazePop_** is another logic puzzle from Ravensburger's ThinkFun brand, with the solver needing to set up obstacles in the grid as shown in a challenge, then use a magnetic wand to raise metallic balls from within the grid to create a path through the grid following certain rules that will vary depending on the obstacles used. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • At Toy Fair and elsewhere, my focus is on finding games to talk about, but sometimes you see goods on display and are like, wait, that's a thing? I agree that the "paches" are fun shaped, but I think I would have been mocked more for wearing a kawaii cat sticker than for having acne. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

Check out what Ravensburger showed off at Toy Fair NY 2026

Build Roads on the Road to CATAN At Toy Fair NY 2026, asmodee mostly presented mass market and mainstream games that it distributes rather than games from within its own studios...which is the right approach to take for the Toy Fair audience, which is not typically looking for hobby games, but rules-light fare for a casual gaming audience. Let's see whether any of this will be of interest to you... • • • • • • • • • • • • • • In an overview of games coming from German publisher KOSMOS is early 2026, I lamented that I had failed to get a description of Benjamin Teuber's **_CATAN: Das Kartenspiel_** and vowed to do better at Toy Fair NY — and I did! **_CATAN: On the Road_** , as the game will be called in English, is pitched as a portable version of _CATAN_ for 3-4 players that can be played in 15 minutes, and that's largely true from the description I received. Each player starts with two random resources from the deck, along with a road and a settlement. On a turn, you draw a resource card, then try to trade with others — and those opponents have an incentive to trade because if they do, they also received a random resource from the deck. Next, you can build one of the cards on display, gaining any points depicted on the card, as well as the bonus showing at the bottom of the card; the more roads you have, the better the trade ratio when using extra cards to substitute for ones you're missing. Each you time purchase a settlement, you draw a card from the silver deck, which contains a few robbers along with other cards, and the effect of the card applies to all players (or whoever meets the listed condition). As soon as a player has 7 points in front of them, they win. _CATAN: On the Road_ will debut in the U.S. on April 3, 2026, and it retails for US$10, which is true of several of the titles listed below. As has been the trend for a couple of years, in general publishers are veering smaller and cheaper with their releases, with "cheaper" sometimes coming from going smaller and sometimes from using lower-quality components that you might have found in games from years past. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • **_Detonate_** is a press-your-luck design from KC Schrimpl and Lost Boy Entertainment in which up to twelve players are racing to hit the winning point threshold first. To set up, lay out a number of point tokens equal to the number of players. In the first round, you can drop out and keep the lowest point token or roll the ten-sided die. If you roll a 1, you go boom and are out of the round, with the lowest point token being flipped to +1 and added to the highest token; otherwise you're fine and pass the die to the next player. In the second round, you blow up on a 1 or 2. You can see where this is going: Drop out and make the point haul better for those who drop out after you, or risk blowing up and getting nothing. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • **_In a Nut Shell_** from publisher Confident Games is a party game in which your team scores based on its ability to guess answers with as few clues as possible. Each card shows an answer at the bottom, and up to ten words that form a sentence at the top. The clue giver looks at all of the words and reveals what they hope is enough for their team to guess the answer. (Any guesses for what I've revealed in the pic?) You can also play team vs team, with one person on each team revealing one word each turn until a team finally guesses, scoring the points or giving the points to the other team. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Moodbox Games is a new studio within asmodee that will release party games, with one of its first titles being **_Guess the Mess_**, which to my trained eyes appears to be a new edition of Jack Degnan's 2014 game of the same name. Each round, each player gets a secret place card, then players have two minutes to dig through the pile of mess cards, keeping any that seem like a good match for their place. When time is up, you pass your cards to a neighbor, then additional place cards are added to those used by players so that eight cards are revealed. Everyone places three number cards face down to guess which place is right, and the quicker you find the right answer, the more you score; the mess maker scores as well. Another Moodbox title coming is **_Link Out Loud_** , but all I know of it now is its forthcoming existence and the v. party game-looking cover shown above. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • A giant mock-up of __Cross the Line__ Another party game on display in the asmodee booth was **_Cross the Line_** , which seems _Wavelength_-like in that you're guessing where someone's answer falls on a scale of possible answers, with players earning more or fewer points depending on the size of the "guess bar" that they place in the grid. This game is aimed more at mass than hobby, however, so you're not thinking of your own answer between extremes on a scale, but working with suggestions on the question cards. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • **_Crashed Out_** is another Golf-style card game in which you're trying to score as few points as possible, with this one having various special action cards. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • I took a pic of **_Camp Hinterback_** meaning to come back to it in my questions, but I did not. Now you share the mystery of this game with me. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Butter was one the minor themes at Toy Fair NY 2026. I didn't see a ton of butter-related toys and kid-friendly items, but I saw a handful, which was more than I would have expected. Maybe this ties in with the "squish" theme being widely present with toys and playful objects of all types. Butter is squishy in the right circumstances, and you'll probably have more of an emotional connection to "butter" than just a generic squishy thing. I might be overthinking this, of course. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

Check out part of asmodee's coming release calendar from Toy Fair NY 2026

Moose Buys Bananas; KOSMOS Buys Kosmos Let's take a break from all the convention coverage to write about a few business deals within the game industry. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • While at Toy Fair in NYC in mid-February 2026, I was surprised to find a display of **_Bananagrams_** games on the wall outside the giant enclosed booth of Moose Toys. What's more, these games now bore tags listing the publisher as "Moose Games". I wrote a note to myself: "When did Moose buy _Bananagrams_?" I still don't know the answer to that as Moose has only an undated press release on its website announcing the acquisition and a call to the company got only a vague "end of 2025" answer. Here's two excerpts from the announcement: > This exciting move strengthens our global Games portfolio and unites two family-founded companies with a shared passion for creativity, innovation, and delivering truly unique play experiences. > "Bananagrams shares our family-driven values and embodies everything we represent at Moose," said Paul Solomon, CEO and Co-Owner. "This now instantly recognizable brand brings people all over the world together for connection and play — the same ethos behind all our innovation at Moose. We've admired how this amazing team turned a simple idea into a household name, and we see enormous potential to continue its legacy as part of our ongoing strategy to accelerate our growth in the Games category." • • • • • • • • • • • • • • At the start of 2026, German publisher KOSMOS acquired Thames & Kosmos UK, which was previously an independent foreign subsidiary. From a translation of the press release announcing the deal: > With this transaction, Thames & Kosmos UK becomes KOSMOS' first wholly owned foreign subsidiary. The Stuttgart-based toy and media company is thus consistently pursuing its internationalization strategy and further expanding its international activities... > As part of the complete acquisition, organizational adjustments will also be made and standardized processes established to further enhance control. KOSMOS is thus laying the foundation for the next stage of growth in the British market, a key component of the company's international growth strategy. > In addition to its location in Great Britain, KOSMOS also has another foreign branch in the USA and a worldwide network of sales partners who distribute KOSMOS products in over 80 countries worldwide. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • On February 17, 2026, asmodee announced a licensing deal with Netflix for "exclusive global rights to adapt the board game **_Ticket to Ride_**". From the press release: > - The deal covers scripted and unscripted projects across film, television series, and other formats, and will be the first on-screen adaptation of the game. > - The first project being developed under the deal is a feature film written by Ben Mekler and Chris Amick. Producers are Darren Kyman for asmodee, Eric Tannenbaum and Kim Tannenbaum for the Tannenbaum Company, and Jonathan Levine and Gillian Bohrer for Megamix. > - Alan R. Moon will executive produce on behalf of asmodee. In October 2025, asmodee had announced a similar deal with Netflix for adaptation rights to _CATAN_. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

Netflix licenses Ticket to Ride for adaptations

After Ten Years of EXITs, Inka and Markus Brand Aren't Going Anywhere (+Boardcast) This Boardcast is sponsored by Board Game Beat. > _The Boardcast is audio narrations of select articles. Listen to all episodes (or find out how to get them in your favorite podcast app)__here_ _._ > Prototype+ members can access an ad-free version here. You can also listen on your favorite podcast app using the private invite and link you received via email. Lost your link? Email admin@wericmartin.com. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Multiple publishers featured escape room-based games in 2016: ThinkFun with _Escape the Room: Mystery at the Stargazer's Manor_ and _Escape the Room: Secret of Dr. Gravely's Retreat_; Spin Master with _Escape Room: The Game_; Stay at Home Werewolves with _Escape Room in a Box: The Werewolf Experiment_ (with Mattel picking up this title in 2017); Space Cowboys with _Unlock!: Escape Adventures_ (although only in prototype); and KOSMOS with three titles: **_The Pharaoh's Tomb_**, **_The Secret Lab_**, and **_The Abandoned Cabin_**, each of which was branded under the label **_EXIT: Das Spiel_** , that is **_EXIT: The Game_**. Ten years later, escape room-style games are a regular feature in the game industry, with dozens of such titles being released annually from publishers of all sizes — but only two of the originating series still exist: _Unlock!_, which has had a couple of dozen designers creating stories within the series, and _EXIT: The Game_, which has been almost entirely the work of the husband-and-wife design team of Inka and Markus Brand. Image courtesy of the Brands The Brands have published many other well-received games — such as _Village_, _Rajas of the Ganges_, _Noch mal!_, and _The Rise of Queensdale_ — but these days their name is synonymous with _EXIT_ , which might not be surprising given that KOSMOS has published more than 80 _EXIT_ -branded titles over the past decade — books, puzzles, advent calendars, and of course the original "escape room in a box" designs — with those titles having sold 30 million copies across 35 countries in 24 languages. ## Escaping Categories When these escape room-inspired titles debuted in 2016, I was working at BoardGameGeek and the admins debated internally whether these titles should be listed in the BGG database. Are these designs, in fact, games? In the end, they snuck into the database the way that many puzzles do: by including a win/loss condition or a scoring system based on elapsed time. For the Brands, this type of distinction isn't important. In an email interview, they wrote: "To us, _EXIT_ is more an experience than a game. That's at least what we try to convey in the games when we develop them. We hope that the people playing our game get the chance to dive into the stories. It's always important to us that all the riddles match the stories in our games for that exact reason. We don't want anything to feel 'out of place'." (I'll note that just as the Brands have designed all of their games together, starting with the publication of _Guatemala Café_ and _Summertime_ in 2006, they asked that all quotes be attributed to both of them.) Even if _EXIT_ is meant to be primarily an experience, you can score yourself once you've finished based on how much time has elapsed and how many hint cards you used to reach the end. The Brands say that the scoring system exists for two reasons: "First, we are Germans and (especially in the beginning) our target market was mostly Germany — and we Germans don't play games for fun. There needs to be a way to measure your success! Therefore a star rating game!" The more important reason relates to the original inspiration for EXIT. Says the Brands, "Since the time you take to escape plays a big role in escape rooms, to us it was important to implement that element into our games. We wanted to ensure the 'escape room feeling' is also conveyed to the people playing at home." That said, timing and scoring is optional if it will detract from the experience. ## First Steps The concept for _EXIT_ originated thanks to Ralph Querfurth, a game editor at KOSMOS, and Sandra Dochtermann, who was an intern at the company in the mid 2010s. In a press release, Querfurth writes, "It all started when I became aware of one of the first escape rooms here in Stuttgart in the fall of 2014. During a conversation about it with my colleague Sandra Dochtermann, the idea came up to implement it as a board game." Concept development is a regular part of the job for internal editors at KOSMOS, and they pitched the idea to program managers. Meanwhile, the Brands had a history of publishing games with KOSMOS, such as the aforementioned _Summertime_ , _Der Goldene Kompass_ _,__Monster Trap_, and _La Boca._ In December 2014, they visited an escape room for the first time and talked about the experience with their editors, so they seemed like the right creators to take on this concept. The prototype for __EXIT: The Game – The Abandoned Cabin__ , then called "The Cabin in the Forest", on display in the KOSMOS booth at Spielwarenmesse 2026 The first _EXIT_ trio was well-received and went on to win the 2017 Kennerspiel des Jahres — an award from Germany's Spiel des Jahres jury for somewhat more involved games — over the other two nominees: _Raiders of the North Sea_ and _Terraforming Mars_. That accolade, along with sales success, of course, has fueled new entries in the _EXIT_ series over the past decade. Says the Brands, "The expansion of the product line wasn't our idea. KOSMOS came to us and asked if we would be interested in developing books. The idea for the puzzles and advent calendars, however, came from us later on. We have always enjoyed the work on _EXIT_ and therefore obviously said yes." They continued: > Different media bring different challenges. For example, in the books we can mostly use only riddles that are based on pictures; we don’t get extra material to play with. This is similar in puzzles, but the advent calendars are entirely different. > With the advent calendars, we usually pick a story that allows us to be creative in the way each "room" is designed. Every room can get a new design, can play in a new world, which makes the process very fun. > When it comes to the books, we have no part in the story since it’s written by an actual book author — which we are very thankful for! We feel like not necessarily the narrative changes when it comes to different media, but the focus does. The books, for example, focus much more on the story whereas in the games we mostly use the solution cards to implement parts of the story. The advent calendars are a mix of both. Since people usually play one room a day, we can afford to add more text than we usually would for every riddle. We see the story as equally important as the riddles in them. ## Escape Experience A press release from KOSMOS notes that _EXIT_ 's tenth anniversary coincides with the Brands creating their one thousandth puzzle for the series. As you might expect, with experience they've changed how they go about creating each design. Says the Brands, > We always start with an "easy" riddle in the beginning of the game to somewhat ease the players into the experience. The story of the games has also become much more important to us. We pay much more attention to incorporating riddles into the story now than we did before. > Obviously we try to think outside the box as much as possible when it comes to our riddles. We always try to leave an impression with creative and sometimes a little crazy ways to solve our puzzles. As time has moved on, we've learned about more possibilities to utilize the components of the game, but also different print styles like e.g., glow in the dark ink. Another change is that while the Brands have had co-designers on occasion — Ralph Querfurth, for example, has five co-design credits — they now work regularly with a co-designer who has lots of first-hand experience on how _EXIT_ gets made: their daughter Emely. Says the Brands, "She works with us on most of the _EXIT_ products now. She not only brings her own ideas for riddles and stories, but is really great with riddles that work with different perspectives. She thinks of a lot of riddles that are easily embedded into the story and often times originate from the story. She can also draw much better than either of us, which comes in handy when we try to bring a vision to life." Even so, all three Brands bounce ideas off one another continually. They say, "We are getting constant feedback and critiques from each other to try to find the best way for a riddle to be displayed in a game." They also have a "riddle book" that they carry everywhere so that they can write down ideas whenever they might arise. ## When Will _EXIT_ Exit? KOSMOS plans to release six new _EXIT_ titles in 2026 — details below — so the product line is still going strong for now, but the Brands recognize that as in an escape room, time will run out at some point: "The success we have had with the _EXIT_ product line has been heavily impacted by Covid. When people were stuck at home, board games in general became much more popular. Even though _EXIT_ was already popular before the pandemic, it just increased the impact our games had." They continue, "Whilst we assume that the number of sold units per title will decrease in the future, we will definitely keep working on them and keep enjoying working on them. We want to keep up the standard we have set for ourselves when it comes to _EXIT_ games in the future, and we have an ever-changing list of possible scenarios for future titles, although we have set some boundaries as we try to never incorporate religion or politics into our games." I guess we'll know the end is near if we start seeing titles like _EXIT: The Dingy Closet_ or _EXIT: Well, Here We Are Locked in Again_ , but until that day I hope that the Brands never run out of room in their riddle book so that they can keep us on the edge of our seat, looking for a way out. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • KOSMOS has a half-dozen new _EXIT_ titles due out in 2026, and I got sneak peeks at its line-up during the 2026 Spielwarenmesse toy and game fair — although some of these peeks barely qualify as more than a sign saying "This will exist!" Let's start with _**EXIT: Das Spiel – Der perfekte Einbruch**_ (The Perfect Burglary), which is explicitly labeled as an anniversary edition, coming packaged in a metal box and available solely in _EXIT_ 's tenth anniversary year. This title will be released in Germany on August 20, 2026. (_EXIT_ titles typically have an English-language release through Thames & Kosmos the subsequent year, but we won't know exactly which titles will appear until they're announced.) Here is this game's setting: > Sirens wail, flashes of light illuminate the sky, and glass shatters somewhere — a brazen break-in rocks the casino! Amidst the roulette wheels and playing cards, a race against time begins. Enigmatic clues, encrypted codes, and mysterious objects must be deciphered to crack the case. The publisher's teaser sign mentions a "clever bonus riddle" in relation to the gadgets. Might it have something to do with a misnumbered clock? The first _EXIT_ -themed advent calendar — _The Mystery of the Ice Cave_ — appeared in 2020, and as is traditional with advent calendars, they have appeared annually since then, with the 2026 entry being **_EXIT: Das Spiel – Adventskalender – Der versteckte Level_** (The Hidden Level), which will hit retail on September 7, 2026. The only info about this title is revealed on the booth sign: "Return to familiar locations from 10 years of _EXIT_ with 24 brand new riddles." The format of this calendar will be the same as in previous years. You know which door to open on December 1, and when you solve the riddle presented by the contents inside, you'll know which door to open the next day. The first _EXIT_ title aimed at children was 2018's _EXIT Kids: Code Breaker_, but this was a one-off title that didn't fit the _EXIT_ brand. The "Kids" line truly began in 2022 with _EXIT: The Game – Kids: Jungle of Riddles_, and a new such title has appeared annually since. The newest such title is **_EXIT: Das Spiel – Kids: Rätselspaß im Meer_** (Puzzle Fun in the Sea), which is due out in Germany on March 5, 2026. The story: "Shelly the mussel has lost her sparkling pearls, so Sam the turtle sets off with her to find them. At the far end of the reef, curious sea creatures await who will hand over the pearls only in exchange for solving tricky riddles." KOSMOS released four "EXIT: The Game + Puzzle" titles from 2020 to 2022, then took a break before the January 2026 release of _**EXIT: Das Puzzle – Die drei ???: Toteninsel**_ (Isle of the Dead), which leans on the "Die drei ???" book series that Franck-Kosmos has been publishing since 1968, a book series that debuted in 1964 in the U.S. under the brand "Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators" and a series that young Eric enthusiastically reached for once he had exhausted all of the _Encyclopedia Brown_ titles. These books were great entertainment for a teenage boy, but I have no idea how well they've aged. In any case, here's the setting for this title: > The Three Investigators find themselves in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on the mysterious Isle of the Dead, where they are trapped in a hidden command center during a volcanic eruption. Players assemble the 500-piece puzzle, full of hidden details, and read a gripping escape story featuring Justus, Peter, and Bob. Finally, they solve seven riddles hidden within the puzzle. Will they manage to find a way out of the command center and escape the Island of the Dead? My guess is "yes" since July 2026 will bring **_EXIT: Das Buch – Die drei ???: Spuk im Tresor_** (The Haunted Vault)...although perhaps the boys are the ones haunting the vault and you need to figure out what happened to them on the Isle of the Dead. Seems reasonable, right? I missed seeing **_EXIT: Das Spiel – Family: Der verlorene Piratenschatz_** (The Lost Pirate Treasure) at Spielwarenmesse 2026, but I think the gist of this August 2026 release is clear: With help from the pirate monkey Skip, find the lost pirate treasure. Finally, we come to _**EXIT: Das Spiel – Fourth Wing: Das erste Jahr**_ (The First Year), which will debut in August 2026 and which is the fourth game I've seen using the _Fourth Wing_ brand. Given the "30 million books sold worldwide" credit in the publisher's pitch card, I'm sure this won't be the last. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! Leave a tip

KOSMOS' EXIT: The Game series of escape room games has sold 30 million copies in its first decade