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Designer Diary - Nature: Climate - Redesigning a Classic
by Dominic Crapuchettes The Nature system currently has a BoardGameGeek rating of 8.6 - well beyond my wildest expectations! This designer diary tells the story of its most recent module, Nature: Climate. The first five modules introduced entirely new material, but Nature: Climate takes a different approach: it's a redesign of an Evolution expansion. I saved it for last because I knew it would be the most challenging module to create.
Hello, Old Friend
by Justin Bell Usually, I play games four days a week. Mondays, with my review crew; Wednesdays, with a group in Chicago I’ve known for years; Fridays with my wife; the occasional Saturdays with a group that gets together for a few hours in the afternoon. (I play games with the kids almost every day, so I’m not short on opportunities to chuck those dice.) Working through multiple plays of review copies occupies much of my week, but on Wednesdays I usually play games from the personal collections of both myself and others.
Designer Diary: Tanglung
by Mark William Howdy everyone. I am Mark William, former video editor, current data insights officer and the designer of Tanglung. This post is adapted from the blog series that I wrote on the game’s page. The Malay word tanglung [tahng-loong] is a direct loan from the Cantonese term for lanterns: 灯笼 [dang1 lung4], literally meaning ‘light’ and ‘basket’. Brought in to the Malay Archipelago by early Chinese Settlers, paper lanterns have been part of the Mid-Autumn Festival for centuries.
Designer Diary: Dungeon Cube
by Nicolò Chioato Twenty Days, a Couch, and a Rubik's Cube It was the autumn of 2022, and I had just undergone surgery for two herniated discs in my back. My recovery came with some fairly strict instructions: I couldn't stay on my feet for too long, but more importantly, I couldn't sit down. That meant no board games, no computer, and not much television either. For about twenty days, I could essentially do only two things: walk or lie down. A tragedy. Fortunately, at the time I was learning how to solve a Rubik's Cube.
The Capsule Collector and the Azul Kids Played Codenames on Netflix for the Gunsen
by Steph Hodge [imageid=9848748 medium rep]▪️ Czech Games Edition (CGE) announced Codenames Party! An all-new way to play Codenames. Now on Netflix! You simply need your phone connected to the tv as a controller. If you have Netflix, you are ready to go! From the newsletter: Alongside the new Party Mode, CODENAMES Party includes: Classic Team Mode (2–10 players): The traditional CODENAMES experience, with teams competing to identify their agents based on one-word clues from their spymasters.
Designer diary: NASCARD
by Guillem Coll Nascard aims to capture the excitement and feel of big racing games, but condenses that experience into a deck of just 110 cards. The challenge, however, was precisely that: how could we represent a race—complete with overtaking, risk, car management, tires, and fuel—without a board, without miniatures, and using only cards? And, above all, how could we ensure that this wasn't just a simple abstraction, but truly conveyed the feeling of driving on the edge, deciding when to push and when to preserve the car?
Please Pass the Combo
by Justin Bell “I mean…how are you DOING all of that???” The exasperated player to my right had finished their turn, and they were staring at my player board as I was finishing up a very long turn of my own. The game we were playing: Timespan, the upcoming SPIEL Essen release from the team at Alion—by Dr. Ø…the same publisher that gave us last year’s strategy title Recall. As profiled by the designers themselves in a recent Designer Diary posted here on BGG, Timespan is a peaceful, simultaneous play civilization game.
Publisher Diary: Fadenfroh
by Julian Steindorfer Where and when does this story start? Let me try to untangle the thread and tell you how Fadenfroh* came to be. *(a German word creation merging the words “thread” (Faden) and “colorful” (farbenfroh). Does this story start in June 2025 at the Austrian Game Design meeting? I walked by Alexander Pfister's table and saw a game I had never heard of before, even though we playtest together every week.
Designer Diary: From Spore to Underwood
by Remo Conzadori By Remo Conzadori & Andrea Mainini Sometimes, a game begins with a simple idea that refuses to grow. Other times, it just needs the right collaboration to finally take root. A Mechanic Looking for a Game For a few months, I had been experimenting with a “sowing” mechanic. I was intrigued by the idea, but all my attempts felt flat—confined to abstract hex grids that never quite came alive. I knew there was potential, but I couldn’t find the right direction.
Designer Diary: Triangulation
by Peter Hayward [heading]Triangulation Design Diary[/heading] Triangulation was designed in three years and four hours. During the height of the pandemic, I had the idea: two teams, one leader on each team. The leader of Team A is trying to get their team to guess a word (e.g. orange). They write down two clues, hand them to the leader of Team B. They pick one to show to their team, and the team (without seeing the second word) make a guess. Then, the other team sees the second word and makes a guess. I am a huge fan of Decrypto.
Designer Diary: Bake or Break
by cafestorybook Bake or Break started in a somewhat unusual place for a board game...behind the counter of my cafe in Osaka, Japan. I run a picture book cafe called Cafe Storybook, where people come not only for the picture-book-themed food and drinks, but also to read books and spend time together. The cafe looks peaceful and relaxed from the outside. But in the kitchen, it is a completely different story. Inside Cafe Storybook [heading]From Playing Games to Making One[/heading]
From the King of Siam via Afghanistan to Sweden and back to Berlin: Upland & Prairie
by Peer Sylvester Game design is a mix of experimentation and inspiration. If you condensed a description of Upland & Prairie down to a single sentence, you’d be excused for thinking I’ve simply remade The King is Dead: ‘Place one of three colours of marker on a board, then take one for yourself, and whoever has the most markers of the type that wins on the board, wins the game. Oh, and with four players it’s a partnership game’. Okay, so that was two sentences, but my point stands.
Behind the Hype: Rawan Anbar, Gigamic
by Justin Bell Welcome to my second edition of “Behind the Hype”; if you missed the first, I spoke with Eveline Foubert at Mighty Boards a few months ago. This week, I’m sharing a conversation I had with my friend and colleague Rawan Anbar at Gigamic, the massive French publisher and distributor of quick, family-friendly abstracts, party, and strategy titles such as Quarto, Looot, Akropolis and the team’s upcoming SPIEL Essen release, Odysseus.
Designer Diary - Crossing Heroes
by BGG Cranio Diary written by Johannes Goupy & Matthieu Verdier Crossing Heroes is our second game together after Odysseus, a family game published in France by Gigamic in September 2026. While both games reflect our love of Greek mythology and revolve around acquiring the right skills to overcome heroic challenges, they offer two completely different gameplay experiences! February 2025 We met at the Festival International des Jeux in Cannes to discuss new game together.
Designer Diary - Oil Rock
by BGG Cranio Diary written by Marco Piola Caselli If I had to describe in a few words the process that turned Oil Rock into the game it is today, I’d say it’s a story of oil, ambition, and collaboration. It’s the result of a long journey full of twists and turns;from the initial chaotic sketch through months of conceptual development to the awarding ceremony of the Premio Archimede ceremony and genuine teamwork with Studiogiochi, Simone Luciani of Cranio Creations, Andrea Chiarvesio, and their playtesting groups.
Designer Diary: Creating a unique twist on 'writing on cards' in Forage!
by Shawn Stankewich I wanted to share with you all the story of the evolution of Forage - a puzzly roll-and-write game about foraging in the Pacific Northwest! Molly, Robb, and I have been designing and publishing games together for almost ten years and we wanted to share some of our process in working through the design and also the development that happens with the Flatout Games CoLab team that we founded! Why design a game like Forage? What inspired us?
The Phantom of the Opera saw that Hope and Despair was his Yin and Yang
by Steph Hodge [imageid=9759680 medium rep]▪️ Capstone Games announced the release of Yin Yang, which was originally released from BGNations (Tang Garden, 12 Rivers). From designer DuGuWei (Jiangnan: Life of Gentry). This is a tight resource game to control the lands. for1-4 players that plays in 45-75 minutes. Also, the Metal Shell is simply awesome! From the newsletter: Yin and Yang is a concept of dualism in ancient Chinese philosophy, representing two opposite principles.
Designer Diary: Power Vacuum
by Kaleb Wentzel-Fisher The creation of Power Vacuum is a bit of a cliché. "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work," - Thomas Edison It’s a story about how I struggled for years to design a game, ultimately gave up, but then with a stroke of inspiration came up with something in just a few days that worked. Weeks later the game was signed by Keen Bean Studio and just six months later we had a successful crowdfunding campaign.
Designer Diary: How 'Sixty Below' Came to Be
by Peter Prinz ... or: How to Spend Almost Six Years Developing a Game When All You Wanted Was to Improve a Prototype Hi, I'd like to give you a little glimpse into how Sixty Below came to life. In the second half of the 2010s, Alex Pfister established a group of Vienna-based game designers that met weekly at Café Sperlhof, a traditional gaming café in Vienna's 2nd district. Ideas were born there, prototypes were tested, games were torn apart, and sometimes even improved.
Oh, What's Inside?
by Justin Bell I spent most of the last few years turning down opportunities to review legacy and campaign games. However, I turned that idea on its head at this year’s edition of Gen Con by picking up not one, not two, but SEVEN games that fit the description of a sizable tabletop investment. So, I added the following games to the “bag of hauling” in Indy: Regicide Legacy from the team at Badgers from Mars, Mountain Goats: Legacy and Enchanted Ivy (both from Allplay), Forbidden Legacy (Gamewright),
Designer Diary: Rival Seas
by David Ausloos The First Spark (No Meeples Were Harmed) When I started developing Rival Seas, I revived a peculiar little ritual from the making of Dreamscape, one that had somehow become part superstition, part creative compass, and, if I’m honest, part excuse to avoid getting down to "serious" work. One that has helped me kickstart every project since. It's a simple but effective method: build a rough improvised cardboard playground. A small imaginary arena to put pieces on, move them around, and discover what the game wants to become. I'
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