Playing Card Information

Ten Years of Opinionated Gaming

I posted my first game review to this site 10 years ago today. It was a review of Hare & Tortoise, the first entry in my 36-part series revisiting the Spiel des Jahres winners. Each entry featured not only a … <a href="https://opinionatedgamers.com/2025/05/08/ten-years-of-opinionated-gaming/">Continue reading →</a>

Deliver Goods like Lightning, Grab Gnomes from a Maze, and Experience Seven Years of War in 20 Minutes

publisher Floodgate Games crowdfunded Connor Wake's Hedge Mage in October 2024 and expects to have it to backers around the end of May 2025, choosing to absorb all tariff costs on those copies in exchange for backers sharing the game with everyone in reach and for a higher than anticipated MSRP, which should not be a surprise to anyone at this point.Here's an overview of this 2-4 player game:In Hedge Mage, you build a hedge maze of polyominoes to prevent your rival from stealing your gnomes, whi

Designer Diary: The Birth of Trickerion

Tricks are the heart and soul of Trickerion, and we needed a lot of them in the game, so we were going for a good mix of:• Tricks from The Prestige: Bullet Catch, Water Tank Escape, and of course, Transported Man• Classic stage illusion: Zig Zag Lady, Card Manipulation, Rabbit from the Top Hat• Tricks based on technology that matched our slightly steampunk visuals: almost the entire "mechanical" category• Tricks that are borderline supernatural: Ghost Trap, Séance, MetamorphosisIn addition to al

Dale Yu: Review of Top Tier

Top Tier Designer: Amar Dzomba, Dom Korzecke, Tyler O’Tsuji Publisher: Indie Board and Cards Players: 4-10 Age: 10+ Time: 30 min Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4hnfrwY Played with review copy provided by publisher Top Tier is a light party game based … <a href="https://opinionatedgamers.com/2025/05/07/dale-yu-review-of-top-tier/">Continue reading →</a>

Dale Yu: Review of Arkham Horror: Lovecraftian Letter

Arkham Horror: Lovecraftian Letter Designer: Seiji Kanai Publisher: Z-man Players: 2-6 Age: 14+ Time: 15-30 minutes Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3Ysxjje Played with review copy provided by publisher Step into the eerie town of Arkham with Arkham Horror: Lovecraft Letter, a … <a href="https://opinionatedgamers.com/2025/05/06/dale-yu-review-of-arkham-horror-lovecraftian-letter/">Continue reading →</a>

Designer Diary: How Corps of Discovery Came to Be

by <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/blog/1?bloggerid=1279" >Jay Cormier</a> <div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7884208"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/GbluwCXXLn2Y3MtRykBdbg__small/img/Y6xFkP7g2AFTkJyrE9F2_EPYGtI=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7884208.jpg" border=0></a></div><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/396895/corps-of-discovery-a-game-set-in-the-world-of-mani" >Corps of Discovery</a> started, in essence, on a call with <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepublisher/601/buffalo-games" >Buffalo Games</a>. John Bell from Buffalo Games asked me and my partner in crime, <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/20991/sen-foong-lim" >Sen-Foong Lim</a>, whether we could design a solo game about being stranded on a deserted island. (This was during the Covid pandemic, and they were thinking of making some solo games.) On that call, I immediately had a train of thought that led to a scratch-off game in which you were scratching off and exploring the island. I thought there could be logic rules for how and where each terrain was found. I thought there could be challenges that require specific resources from these terrains, and if you can't resolve them, then you lose water...or die. We all agreed that this idea sounded cool, so after the call I put together a map with random terrain types, with each one needing to adhere to specific rules. Immediately this game was already cool and intrigued me greatly! <center><div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8862504"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/k9Cf3bC1_VTq24M2-NukeQ__small/img/e_v9Dttbtv5Y3IV2uSWlnGS0br4=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8862504.png" border=0></a></div></center> We got back on another call with John, and we all loved the core concept. We created a pitch deck so that John could take it to the rest of his team...then we played the waiting game, and as we all know, the waiting game sucks! Fast forward two years, and I'm looking for a third game to publish with my <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepublisher/42670/off-the-page-games" >Off the Page Games</a> company. I had done <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/284653/mind-mgmt-the-psychic-espionage-game" >MIND MGMT</a>, then <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/360899/harrow-county-the-game-of-gothic-conflict" >Harrow County</a>, and I didn't have a plan for a third game. I thought about that solo game and hadn't heard from John, so I reached out to ask whether they were still thinking about it. He said they weren't as interested as they once were in the solo market, so I asked whether I could have that idea back and he was excited to see what we could do with it. A bit like the Godfather, I made him an offer he couldn't refuse — which was that we'd make a really great game and he could play it! <center><div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8862505"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/c0PY8HEZ_cPnFUqHe99mFw__small/img/ambcnWhmw-ozPNeoOW09aap3wxA=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8862505.png" border=0></a></div></center> Okay, great — we have a game, but wait (there's more)...aren't all the designs published by Off the Page Games supposed to be based on indie comic books? Yes, yes they are. So we started thinking up all the comics about being stranded on an island, or a planet, or about exploring a new land. A few comics came to mind, but they weren't fitting strongly enough with the mechanism we already had, so instead of rubbing a lamp and hoping for a djinn to grant us a wish, Sen posted on social media, asking the world for comic ideas that fit. Many people replied, and amongst them was Tricia from Skybound with the title Manifest Destiny. I hadn't read that comic yet, so it was time to head off to the comic book store! <center><div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8867175"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/UMuWDuMYK1oSW6rnbjWaVA__small/img/lhFqQjqgby8wdMZj_YDFVCw4p84=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8867175.jpg" border=0></a></div></center> It. Was. Excellent. Wow, what a story — and that art?!! This comic is about Lewis and Clark and their entire Corps of Discovery crew exploring America...and fighting monsters! Wild! This was a shining example of how perfect a match this was for us. I reached out to Tricia at Skybound and showed her the deserted island concept we had and asked whether they thought it could work well with the Manifest Destiny IP. They seemed to love it, and soon enough we had contracts to secure the rights! Huzzah! Now we had to transform this basic concept for a solo game into the Manifest Destiny world. Instead of setting gameplay on an island like Tortuga, we knew we had to have players start on the right side of the board and explore westward, just like Lewis and Clark did. We transformed all the beach-specific terrains to a more forest-y setting. We had many of the logic deduction rules already in place, and things were working — but we still had a few issues, with one of them being that I didn't want to make a solo game. How would we turn this into a multiplayer co-op game? We knew that this town wasn't big enough for the 2-4 of us — but it needed to be! <center><div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8862502"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/XknDx86kybV2roC-jlGu6w__small/img/oUbZfTSw_X24ZPNIsm6bbAlxMso=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8862502.png" border=0></a></div></center> For a while, we had players each playing as tokens on the board as they each moved around separately, but this was too restrictive when exploring. With players needing resources that appeared on randomly drawn challenge cards, they needed to explore more freely. We knew that there couldn't be individual player tokens, so how can we make this design multiplayer? Well, the crew has a lot of characters. Maybe each player could be a different character with a unique ability. That was intriguing, and it led to us adding gear cards that introduced more unique things each player could do on their turn that no other player could do. It took us quite a few tests to figure out how often character abilities and gear cards could be used. At first they could be used every turn, but that was too powerful for some of the abilities — and once per game proved to be too little. It wasn't until we figured out how to present our challenge cards that we also solved this issue. <center><div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8862500"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/OaMcaABeTaskSwgpD85vEA__small/img/STx6nnz2k0Kzbv8tJrh5fbuqU1Y=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8862500.png" border=0></a></div></center> We used to have three challenge cards face up on the table, and when you solved one, you flipped over a new one so that three face-up challenge cards would always be available. When a challenge card was revealed, you placed sun tokens on it equal to the number in the top right corner of that card. After each explore action, players had to remove one of those sun tokens, which acted as our timer. If all the sun tokens had been removed and you couldn't solve the current challenge, then you failed and were penalized by losing water or resources — but in this earlier version of the design, whenever you had enough resources for the current challenge, you could solve it immediately. Any remaining sun tokens would then slide onto the next challenge card, giving you more time for that challenge. This meant players had to keep sliding cards down the table as they added new challenge cards, and sliding these sun tokens as well, which often led to orphan black and yellow sun tokens that had been misplaced or forgotten. While this set-up was largely working, we were trying to figure out how to have a night phase. Did night happen after each card? That's too often. We wanted night to happen after three cards, so we placed a "You must eat" token on top of the third card to remind players they had to eat after that card, after which they would move that token three cards down. The (in retrospect obvious) solution was to present three cards as the entire day and not reveal any more cards until after the night phase. This way you are focused only on today's challenges, and you have no idea what the challenges will be tomorrow. We thought this might be too limiting, but the concept worked fine — and it even gave us new ideas for gear cards that let you look at cards for the next day. As a bonus, now that we have a full day being three cards, our character abilities' issue was also solved because now each player can use their ability and gear once every day. Perfect! <center><div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8862519"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/G46bDB5gZVmCgIsy15C1fw__small/img/wNq3B5Fzc9y-vCjknGtkjcYrEeg=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8862519.png" border=0></a></div></center> Until then, we had been testing the game by placing a bunch of tokens on each of the terrains, so we had to be careful to not nudge any of the other tokens when we removed one. This approach worked, but it meant I could never play my own game because I knew all of the maps. <div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7199765"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/bF3mpY8eshxgR_lvmdUGhA__small/img/9xb9h8sNcO1AxiGQS8kz96pQEbA=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic7199765.jpg" border=0></a></div>I started thinking about how the scratch-off system would work and saw a scratch-off game launched in early 2024 called <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/375365/once-upon-a-line" >Once Upon a Line</a>. I reached out to them to discuss challenges they experienced and learned that they got flack from some backers that the scratch-off concept was too disposable and bad for the environment! I hadn't thought about it from that perspective. Yikes! That made me wonder whether we could do this design in other ways instead of making it a scratch-off game. I brought the basic prototype to a convention and brainstormed with other designers, as well as manufacturers. We thought through many ideas, like an advent calendar system in which each space had some sort of door. This sounded super cool to me at first, but any way we thought of how to do it had huge drawbacks. If each space was an actual door that swung open, then that door would block the view of the terrain to any players on the opposite side of that door. Dang. We recalled those travel bingo cards that have sliders to reveal spaces. This seemed pretty interesting, but if we have a door that slides open, that door has to go somewhere, so we would need the width of that door on the other side of the space. This meant that we could have columns with tightly spaced areas, but the rows would have giant empty spaces between each area. This would make it harder to determine what was orthogonal when exploring and make the contraption super wide — which would make the box super wide, too. That's where I had to draw the line as I wanted a "normal-sized" box! We settled on a board with holes, combined with dual-layered tokens that "snap" into each hole so that tokens won't slide around during play. This solution also meant our map board could be smaller! This is about when I thought, hey, wouldn't it be cool if we made the maps letter-sized so people could download and print more maps in the future?! I kind of felt like a rock paper wizard! I asked my manufacturer to make a sample of this, and they obliged. Once I got it, playtesting became a lot easier. This change also solved another issue we had. Players would often forget to remove the sun token on the challenge card, something key to our design since the passage of time was our pressure in this co-op game. When we got our new board with the dual-layered circle tokens, we realized — I say "we", but I believe one of our playtesters pointed it out — that we can use these path tokens instead of sun tokens! When you explore a space, you have to remove a path token any way — and now we can add that to the challenge card instead of removing a sun token. Sweeeeet! We removed a necessary component — but kept the timing! — by using another necessary component in a secondary way, and now this requirement was way easier to remember. During our playtests, we kept tweaking our logic rules. We learned which rules were interesting and which were harder to deduce. We also wanted to make the logic rules have a common sense to them. We didn't want it to feel like you were playing Tic Tac Moo!! ▪️ Mountains had to be connected orthogonally as if they were all part of one mountain range. That makes sense. ▪️ Water had to be within two spaces of a mountain. Water flows down from mountains, so this seemed to make sense. ▪️ Trees could be present only once per row and column. Um, okay, this one didn't make sense thematically, but this was one of our favorite terrains for deduction. ▪️ Skulls are from humans who were defeated by monsters in the past. These are maybe close to a tipi. ▪️ Berry bushes are food, so they're probably near a tipi too, right?! <center><div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8862501"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/VlfaK4dC3f-QklcGpMYyAw__small/img/ArkLR4EqrwAwPMJMELwVJagHv38=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8862501.png" border=0></a></div></center> Playtesting these rules told us that players liked when there could be multiple ways to find things. Not only that, but we noticed that depending on the size of the mountain on a map, finding water was random since "within two spaces of a mountain" was almost the entire map! We changed the rule so that water is found adjacent to each tree. Now you know that if you find a tree, you can find water around it. This helped a ton! We also made more of the rules link to other rules, like a field now needed a berry bush and a tree on either side of it. Therefore, if you find a tree, there could be a field adjacent to it — and if that were the case, then you could find a berry bush, which is our food, and if you found that, there was a tipi diagonal to it, then a skull around that tipi. That felt like some great deduction right there! I loved it as you would have been able to tell from my singing! Monsters also had to be in this game, right? I mean, that's the whole comic concept! We toyed with ideas for how monsters could come out and what they did. Also, um, how do we kill these mutants or monsters? For a long time, we used to have sound icons on spaces orthogonally adjacent to a monster. This felt thematically really cool! If you revealed a terrain and it had this sound icon, that meant a monster was nearby! Tread carefully! In practice, we learned that this system actually made the game too easy. Players could avoid monsters for the entire game, then ping them off once they had everything they needed to kill them. This made the game experience very swingy. One group could accidentally bump into two or three monsters and have a heck of a time trying to defeat them, while another group had a walk in the park as they deftly maneuvered around them. We removed the sound icon, then thought: What if we combine the monster and the skull — and say that the monsters are all on the skull icon? We already had deduction rules for how to find them, but they weren't as obvious. You could still stumble into monsters, or if you found a tipi, then you knew a monster was somewhere around it — but not exactly where. This worked great! <center><div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8862520"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/SMmuM3cKTo-a_RigiC0wug__small/img/-8DA5XwqOW8esn-MJEPWl8EW4_4=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8862520.png" border=0></a></div></center> But how can we kill these monsters? In the comic, other forts existed before the "Corps of Discovery" crew got there. Maybe we could use that. Maybe players learn how to kill monsters when they find a fort. Soooo, now we have to add forts to each map? Yeah. How can we do that though? I had this neat idea: What if players are given a mini map of three terrains showing where forts are located? The mini map could be different for each map, too. This reminded me of the way you find temples in our game, <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/154458/akrotiri" >Akrotiri</a>! This was another challenge for making maps, and boy, oh boy, was it super hard making these maps fit all of these logic rules — and this was a problem because I was the only person making maps! Additionally, I had to make maps by hand to get people to test this game. This was a challenging task by itself! I'd make ¾ of a map only to learn that I couldn't fit the rest of the required terrain on it, so I'd have to start over. Ugh. I asked my co-designer of <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/265402/in-the-hall-of-the-mountain-king" >In the Hall of the Mountain King</a>, <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/29176/graeme-jahns" >Graeme Jahns</a>, whether he could help us by writing a program to create maps. He could — and he did! This was amazing because now I could generate a map, print it, and playtest my own game for the first time! Double huzzah! It's probably no secret, but I loved it! During our playtests, we were having issues with terrains vs. resources. You'd find a terrain, then you'd find a resource there. For example, you'd find a tree, and that would give you one wood to put in your backpack. <center><div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8862503"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/jH7tYpOgLFERV8i4fduMyg__small/img/BG2dXEnPYQ28Anit93cbRtm7ViE=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8862503.png" border=0></a></div></center> This added an unnecessary level of complexity to the game. The deduction was already challenging, and players had to convert what they needed, as printed on the challenge cards, to the terrains found on the map. I had always thought the map would look more real if we had terrain images, but the feedback kept coming in that this approach might not be worth it, so we removed terrain altogether. This kind of sucked since we had challenges that asked you to find a tree; this was an interesting challenge, but if we removed terrain, we couldn't just say, find a wood because what if you already had wood in your backpack? Did that count? This felt like a puzzle that even the Goonies would have a hard time solving — but once we tested the game with resource icons instead of terrain, the game was waaaay more clear. Removing this layer of obfuscation was a great way to make this game more approachable. Now we had a game! Things were working nicely, and it was very exciting! However, Off the Page Games is starting to get known for having a lot of value in their releases — MIND MGMT has fourteen sealed packages to unlock, Harrow County has four factions and numerous legends to try out — so how are we going to add value here? Well, the comic did run for 48 issues, so there are many more story arcs to explore! The first chapter is called Fauna and is what the game was based on, but the next chapter was called Flora and included these zombie plant creatures that roamed the kingdom. Rushed as we were, who doesn't like a fun zombie slam?! We wanted this chapter to feel different from the Fauna one, and we wondered how many of the logic rules should be carried forward from each chapter. We thought that adding one or two new logic rules — and perhaps removing one or two — made the most sense. We knew we wanted these flora to hurt us somehow, so we added crew tokens since we didn't think that we should hurt the players' characters. Since the comic story showed that bullets didn't hurt these flora and only fire did, we leaned into that. We already had fire as a concept in the game, so we said that if you find a flora icon when exploring and don't have fire, you lose one of your little men in black tokens that we had added. Oooh — a new way to lose the game! Ha! This was neat, but the comic story also has the crew locating a giant plant once they learned it had a hive mind. How can we replicate that? We started by making players use deduction to find the giant plant. They also had to move one of the crew along explored paths to do this. Eventually we learned that this was a lot of work for not as much fun. <center><div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8862531"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/ieGaGIun-zOZvawMStADlA__small/img/ONOLy0FMPJVstC2CYoXIA6Hf0Eo=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8862531.png" border=0></a></div></center> We changed the giant plant — and how this whole chapter would be played — with a new idea! What if we added new cards and you reveal three of them at the start? Each card has 2-4 resources, and you place one of your crew tokens to the left of the first card. When you find the first resource on that card, move the crew token one space forward. Now the goal is to find the resources in this order! This added a whole new level of difficulty to the game. You didn't want to find, say, the third mud now because you knew that you would need a mud a few steps down the path on these new cards. This meant trying to avoid areas around the rocks since mud is found adjacent to rocks. Once you reach the end of these cards, then you fight the giant plant! Noice! No need to get Scooby-Doo and his gang to help you solve this mystery. This designer diary is already super long, but once we made a flora chapter, we started looking at the rest of the comic to see whether we could make more chapters, without making it feel like junk. The art continued to be excellent in every story arc including Insecta, in which giant insects infect the crew, forcing them to figure out how to make insecticide. <center><div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8862530"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/F_EScA5wFICZHhG5ymwCVg__small/img/66HlZ2V26psslhEUgUD-sge6f6c=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8862530.png" border=0></a></div></center> That's cool — a new monster type! Vameter? A headless, winged creature flies around and uses the heads of its victims as its own head. Awesome — we can re-use the crew tokens and place them on the board, and they have to line themselves up to the Vameter to fire at it. Maldonado? A ghost whispers into the ear of one crew member. Okay, that's a traitor mechanism if I've ever heard one! Fog? A fog appears over the land, and the crew can't see what's in front of them. What if we mixed up the logic rules for how each resource is found and we didn't tell you what they were? Now the goal is to deduce WHAT the rules of each resource are! That's maybe my favorite chapter! This involved sooooooo much playtesting! Each chapter meant going back to Graeme to ask him to update the map maker program for us. Not only that, but we kept learning what made better maps and asked him to update the rules for previous chapters, too. Then came time to wear the publisher hat: how to release this game? If I learned anything from my first two games, it's that I wish I made the base game leaner and put more into expansions to make the core game as affordable as possible. After many different ideas and combo possibilities, I settled on including Fauna and Flora in the core box and made each of the other four ideas as expansions! Time will tell, but I think this was the right solution as we now have a core game at US$39! <center><div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8862532"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/kdqXdYS7LfgtZ8Q7RUf8RA__small/img/xrnHANnki2AXbaBRV9v5m1Ji7Ww=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8862532.png" border=0></a></div></center> Our final challenge came once we announced that this was our next game. I was excited...but then surprised when many were shocked that we were using "Manifest Destiny" as our title. Possibly due to me being Canadian (or possibly due just to ignorance!), I had no clue about the American history around this term. The term "manifest destiny" means the god-given right for white people to take over the land from indigenous people!! Yikes! I had no idea. While I think a comic with the title Manifest Destiny is interesting and begs you to pick it up and read why it's called that, a board game doesn't have that kind of liberty. After a lot of back and forth with Skybound, including bringing in <a href="https://pemetawe.com/consulting/" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">Pe Metawe Consulting</a> as a cultural consultant, we all agreed that we should change the title to Corps of Discovery, that is, the name of the entire expedition. I felt like that name still fit with the game since you're doing a lot of discovering throughout the game. (Sen also wrote up <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/dvqutf964hja6ikiewz4i/CoD_sen_letter_01.pdf?rlkey=1t2c41lhxcx8b9f2rkw6qua3o&e=2&dl=0" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">a letter</a> that goes into more detail about Manifest Destiny and the reasons behind the name change.) What's next for Corps of Discovery? We do have an idea for a mutiny expansion — which is a chapter that we didn't yet explore and that would turn the design into a competitive game. We haven't solved it entirely yet, but if there's interest, we could try to figure that out! I also have ideas for other standalone smaller games set in the world of Corps of Discovery! Now we're back to playing the waiting game to see whether you all like the game or not. We'll let you draw your own conclusions! Just for fun, I've hidden in this diary the name of numerous games that Sen and/or I have designed over the years. Post below with how many you were able to find! <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/20990/jay-cormier" >Jay Cormier</a>

Welsh games business launches Kickstarter campaign for trailblazing punk rock playing cards

The Mosh Idols deck from Llanfairfechan-based Solitaire.io contains 52 classic playing cards (plus Jokers). Launching on Tuesday (6 May), backers of a Kickstarter Campaign will receive a Punk Rock ...

Game Review: Venedig, or Old Things Are Still Worth Looking At

One that I've had on my shelves for at least fifteen years waiting for its tabletop time?That brought me to Venedig, a design by Klaus-Jürgen Wrede that AMIGO published in 2007 and that no other publisher released at the time or since.Venedig falls smack in the middle of the Eurogame lagoon, with the design consisting of a shared gaming area in which 2-5 players will collectively drain the swamps in the northwest corner of the Adriatic Sea so that they can found buildings that will shower them w

Alison Brennan: Game Snapshots – 2025 (Part 8)

Alison Brennan: Game Snapshots – 2025 (Part 8) There are a few in my gaming group who really enjoy It’s A Wonderful World. Which is unfortunate – they’re now only able to play it if I’m playing something else as … <a href="https://opinionatedgamers.com/2025/05/05/83626/">Continue reading →</a>

Collect Ukiyo-e, Decipher Letters, and Seat People Properly at the Great Evening Banquet

Whoever gets this in hand must play it during the first trick; they win this card, which counts as a trick, then determine trump and suits based on the other three cards, with the highest card winning that trick.▪️ Yet another such release is Ukiyo-e, a 2-4 player game from Toshiki Sato of publisher さとーふぁみりあ (Sato Familie), in consultation with Michael Schacht since the design is based on his 2003 game Crazy Chicken, a.k.a. Drive.Here's an overview of the setting and gameplay:In 1867, the World

Discover Pulp Romance, Explore Night Soil, and Pledge for a Knockoff

by <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/blog/1?bloggerid=17" >W. Eric Martin</a> <div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8290490"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/DjSlazoiT4qsU3A2BXtozA__small/img/RKsSuWg0WS0YYVkiJKMWRnVfrLo=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8290490.jpg" border=0></a></div>When I first wrote about the effect of U.S. tariffs on goods from China following GAMA Expo 2025, I <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/blog/1/blogpost/171655/thoughts-on-gama-expo-2025-games-tariffs-trends-an" >mentioned</a> that some publishers plan to crowdfund more in order to sell copies directly to buyers and make a higher margin per game in order to cover costs. In addition, I talked about publishers possibly switching to a "direct sale only" model in which games are available via crowdfunding, then only at conventions, with publishers shrinking their print runs in order to bring fewer goods into their warehouse and sell through product faster. In its pre-launch info for <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/443927/aeons-end-beyond-the-breach" >Aeon's End: Beyond the Breach</a>, which I <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/blog/1/blogpost/173023/spin-more-pandas-pepper-more-paper-walk-in-more-fo" >covered the other day</a>, <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepublisher/10290/indie-boards-and-cards" >Indie Boards & Cards</a> <a href="https://gamefound.com/en/projects/indie-boards-and-cards/aeons-end-beyond-the-breach/updates/2" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">writes</a>: <div class='quote'><div class='quotebody'>[W]e have decided that Aeon's End: Beyond the Breach will not enter regular retail distribution after this project, for as long as tariffs add significant cost. That doesn't mean there will be no way to get the game if you don't back the project – we will still sell items at conventions and possibly offer the games direct — but this Gamefound will be the best and easiest way to get the game in the U.S. We are looking at options to offer Aeon's End: Beyond the Breach in retail in other countries. As many of you know, it's been difficult to get some of the products in many countries!</div></div> Everyone in the U.S. who backs crowdfunding campaigns needs to read the fine print more closely these days... ▪️ One example of this can be seen in the campaign for <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/421530/night-soil" >Night Soil</a>, a 2-5 player game from <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/74003/jon-moffat" >Jon Moffat</a> that <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepublisher/27311/grail-games" >Grail Games</a> is <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/grailgames/night-soil?ref=bggforums" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">crowdfunding</a> for release in Q4 2025, with pick-up being possible at SPIEL Essen 25. Will U.S. buyers need to pay a tariff on Night Soil when they bring it home from Essen? We'll find out! As for the setting of the game: <div class='quote'><div class='quotebody'>As the exemplar of cultural progress in Europe, Tudor London (1485-1603) is at the spear’s edge of cultural and technological development. However, as modern plumbing is still generations away, the city is gradually filling up with human waste, making it a terribly fragrant place to live. <center><div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8826630"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/t2FtGkVe35TV479wyCXO7g__small/img/Nw4hciyrVH90sFpEk3dir2zttxU=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8826630.jpg" border=0></a></div></center><center>Non-final components</center> In Night Soil, players run competing night soil companies. By night, laborer cards will be used to carefully maneuver waste cubes through the narrow streets of London to turn a profit and to recruit workers. By day, these workers can be sent out into London to advertise, to garner favor with local businesses, or to improve their company's assets. However, crowds of workers do tend to add to the waste problem... At the end of the game, the player who has managed to make the most money wins!</div></div> The crowdfunding campaign includes this warning note: "Prices shown on the Kickstarter page are net values and they will be increased by shipping tariffs for U.S. backers. As the tariff situation is in flux, we will not charge customers their tariff fee now. Tariff fees will be collected in our post-campaign pledge manager. We will do our best for our backers and will share the cost of this extra fee." (Emphasis in the original.) <div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8450107"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/ySyExAYYZaQzVSj1E7lHpw__small/img/vMohsNCv9RUgc-qrvqYDPyEB1QA=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8450107.jpg" border=0></a></div>▪️ <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/425255/eden-the-new-world" >Eden: The New World</a>, which publisher <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepublisher/57248/happy-together-games" >Happy Together Games</a>, is <a href="https://gamefound.com/en/projects/eden-the-new-world/eden-the-new-world" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">crowdfunding</a> on Gamefound, is a new version of the <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/109070/eden-survive-the-apocalypse" >Eden: Survive the Apocalypse</a> game system that designer <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/52291/pierre-joanne" >Pierre Joanne</a> and publisher <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepublisher/18666/taban-miniatures" >Taban Miniatures</a> debuted in 2009. Here's an overview of this 2-4 player game: <div class='quote'><div class='quotebody'>Eden: The New World is a miniatures game that immerses you in a dark and mature post-apocalyptic universe. It is a game of deep tactical richness that combines a strong requirement in the placement of your fighters and the multiple combinatorial possibilities of combat systems and special abilities. Thanks to a unique and original movement system and the resources you will have to collect on the field, the game is not only fast (one hour per game on average) but also particularly immersive.</div></div> "Dark and mature"? Are we talking about night soil again?! Eden: The New World is available as a physical game complete with miniatures and accessories or as STL files that allow you to print your own figures and terrain...which would mean a U.S. backer would pay a tariff only on the raw material, yes? A new decision with every project! ▪️ In April 2025, designer <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/10060/steve-finn" >Steve Finn</a> <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/blog/1/blogpost/172686/alley-cat-and-dr-finn-change-course-and-corey-koni" >announced</a> that he would cease publishing physical games through his <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepublisher/7978/dr-finns-games" >Dr. Finn's Games</a> brand and would instead design game books. His first release, <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/445055/dr-finns-book-of-solo-strategy-and-word-games" >Dr. Finn's Book of Solo Strategy and Word Games</a>, is being <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/drfinnsgames/dr-finns-book-of-solo-strategy-and-word-games?ref=bggforums" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">crowdfunded</a> through mid-May 2025, with backers able to purchase PDFs of one or more of the included games or pledge US$1 to be notified of the book's discounted availability through Amazon in the near future. All backers also receive a PDF of the solo game Nanga Parbat: Alone in the Wilderness. <center><div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8859957"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/4jtwhidNIIXwvd0aSWLqCQ__small/img/cT_c2FEzgtfG4rgcdpjUd-7vJrU=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8859957.png" border=0></a></div></center> Here's his pitch for the book: <div class='quote'><div class='quotebody'>Dr. Finn's Book of Solo Strategy and Word Games contains eight solo games that can be played in the book without cutting them out. Each game uses one sheet of paper and requires only 1-5 dice and a pencil. The book contains eight copies of each game, as well as a score chart to track your scores. The games are: • Cosmic Run: Mission One • Spell It Out • Pen Pals • Crunch the Numbers • My Perfect City • Leftover Letters • The Little Flower Shop: Open for Business • Word Wrap All of the games except Cosmic Run: Mission One are also playable as multiplayer solitaire. In this case, the player sheets need to be cut out of the book and/or copied.</div></div> Now that's an ideal tariff-avoiding production...even though Finn announced this career shift prior to tariffs on Chinese goods rising above 20%. <div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8822802"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/F0Vt1mDCrFP6YkPWsHDxjA__small/img/XGQ3Ou6MUZPUBbgU8t5efoj2Fdc=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8822802.png" border=0></a></div>▪️ I rarely dip into RPGs in this space, but I previously <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/blog/1/blogpost/145578/craft-drinks-musical-instruments-robots-and-a-curs" >covered</a> <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/91661/banana-chan" >Banana Chan</a>'s solitaire, horror-based RPG <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/rpgitem/423756/forgery" >Forgery</a> because it sounded like a fascinating concept, and two years later she's <a href="https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/banana-chan/knockoff" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">crowdfunding</a> a new title in what has become the Mephistopheles Trilogy. Here's an overview of Knockoff: <div class='quote'><div class='quotebody'>It's 2024. Fashion Week is only a couple of months away in New York City, and your boss is expecting you to come up with a design that will make an impact on the company's bottom line. You moved to the city thinking you'd be the next Willi Smith or Dapper Dan, but you ended up at this company, where you scour the internet for other people's designs to put onto T-shirts to make enough money to pay for rent. Hopefully this opportunity from your boss will finally put your name on the map. Knockoff is a story of a desperate and burnt out fast fashion designer named Marcos, who discovers a cursed dress design from an estate sale. You, the player, inhabit Marcos' point of view as you read about his story, journaling your character’s thoughts, feelings, and reactions at specific prompts. What's more, you will be cut out fabric textures and glue them over a croquis (a drawing of a fashion model) in a choose-your-own-path style of immersive storytelling that uses the dress you're creating to determine the outcome of Marcos' story. You don't need a background in fashion to create a dress. Keep a pair of scissors and glue or tape handy, then follow the directions to create your masterpiece.</div></div> <center>•••</center> Shoot, I had started a c.f. round-up earlier with this game, then I got distracted by tariff nonsense and now its campaign has ended. The publisher has it open for late pledges, though, so let's still take a look at this steamy offering: <div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8747920"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/LL6a6c7Yw_CmWr-h2PdubQ__small/img/aFMtkpA47cpyQ0NlF2BRuKvHvBE=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8747920.png" border=0></a></div>▪️ Following 2018's <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/233149/pulp-detective" >Pulp Detective</a> and 2020's <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/268469/pulp-invasion" >Pulp Invasion</a>, designer <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/42166/todd-sanders" >Todd Sanders</a> and publisher <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepublisher/30685/avstudiogames" >AVStudioGames</a> are dipping into the past for another dose of pulp action, specifically for <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/439367/pulp-romance" >Pulp Romance</a>, a solitaire card game about searching for your lost love in Europe between the two world wars: <div class='quote'><div class='quotebody'>The two main mechanisms of the game are placement and adjacency. From a "journey row", you acquire cards in five suits — cities, friends, detectives, newspapers, and bankers - and place them in your search tableau, activating them, with their actions dependent on cards previously played. You need to defeat a sixth suit — rivals — when they're dealt to the journey row through management of your tableau. Custom dice give bonus abilities to your chosen character, with the game including four double-sided characters and four double-sided love loves.</div></div> Pulp Romance is being <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1948889736/pulp-romance?ref=bggforums" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">crowdfunded</a> through the end of April 2025, with a <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgameexpansion/439368/pulp-romance-expansion-1-companions" >Companions</a> expansion offering more characters and lost loves, along with a group of companions.

Solo Gaming 2025: The First Four Months

I’ve been writing these solo gaming reports since March of 2020… yes, early on in the pandemic. This new era of well-designed automata and solo modes for multiplayer games, coupled with excellent new solo game designs, is actually quite heartening to … <a href="https://opinionatedgamers.com/2025/05/02/solo-gaming-2025-the-first-four-months/">Continue reading →</a>

Spin More Pandas, Pepper More Paper, Walk in More Footsteps, and Steam More Ages

That 2024 release from Moon Gate Design, which I previewed ahead of its SPIEL Essen 24 debut, is getting an expansion in 2025.When using Panda Spin: Mandate of Heaven, at the start of each round, you reveal one of the twelve "animal mandate" cards, with each of these zodiacal animals introducing a new way to play the game, such as recovering a card from a trick, continuing a sequence of cards played by another player, or taking a card from an opponent's hand.Panda Spin: Mandate of Heaven will be

Reviving the hand-painted royal playing cards of Maharashtra's Sawantwadi

Conservation efforts by an erstwhile royal family is bringing centuries-old hand-painted cards back into the spotlight ...

Welsh games business launches Kickstarter campaign for trailblazing punk rock playing cards

An innovative Welsh online card game platform is set to launch a groundbreaking new physical product. Mosh Idols Punk Rock Playing Card is designed for collectors and fans of punk rock alike. The Mosh ...

Designer/Publisher Diary: Lifeboat

by <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/blog/1?bloggerid=1412" >Jeff Siadek</a> <div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/3749963"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/c2B29kL9yXECkRCVxeBcbg__small/img/YLjn_A8nT4fm4ooWjwc6m02zhVs=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic3749963.jpg" border=0></a></div>The seed of the idea came in the mid-1990s when I was playing a game with friends that was better suited for two players than for more. I love multiplayer games but kingmaking sucks, so I wrote a love and hate card for each player and shuffled them up. The idea was that you'd add the score of the player you love, then subtract the score of the player you hate. I think I still have a <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/463/magic-the-gathering" >Magic</a> forest card somewhere with "I Hate Tom" on it... A few years later that mechanism started to haunt me. It wanted to be its own game. I woke up one morning thinking, "A lifeboat is a great place to gather people you love and hate in an isolated survival situation", and <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4174/lifeboat" >Lifeboat</a> was born. The first snag was what to do if you loved or hated yourself? In a five-or six-player game, you were likely to have at least one person with this issue. In my previous love/hate iteration, everybody reshuffled until we got it right, which was all right for a sloppy playtest, but a finished product needed a more permanent solution. Loving yourself isn't a problem since scoring double points for survival and not having to worry about keeping somebody else alive is fine. Hating yourself was stickier. I didn't want to reward people for dying. When explaining the game today, I always say at least twice, "Nobody gets points for dying", yet people still try to kill themselves. Sigh. For those hating themselves, I settled on them scoring the size value of everybody who died except you and your secret love. I was later to revisit this concept, but it worked well enough. That's one of the big problems with designing a game that works. You don't realize what isn't working because people are already enjoying it. My friend <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgameartist/34978/stephen-k-ratter" >Steve Ratter</a> was hosting a game day at his house for his birthday in the next week so I quickly cobbled together a prototype. <center><div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8841708"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/sRuYvNeQ-Y_30fV8CHt_Nw__small/img/3YeeR3RZnSaVtwbspoK5QdUYZP8=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8841708.png" border=0></a></div></center><center>The lack of quality in my own prototypes is legendary. I used a fancy font that more than made up for the lack of graphics.</center> The game was a hit. Steve suggested adding cannibalism and a bucket of chum. I hate it when the best things in my games are things contributed by other folks. Cannibalism was relegated to an expansion for fear of alienating game store owners. This was around the time that gaming was under siege for being "unwholesome". Steve happens to be a great artist, so he did the art for the cards. My first child had been recently born, so I dedicated the game to Arden. Steve named the boat the H.M.S. Arden as you can see on the parasol. Sir Stephen was in the original cast in honor of Steve. Lady Lauren was originally Lady Dara, but I changed it before we went to press to my wife's name. Steve and Dara had a kid, Henry, but the kid in Lifeboat is universally hated. I didn't want to do that to Henry so I changed the name. To date, no French person has taken offense with "Frenchy". <div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/177943"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/PM3B7htii11ZHOaUOC53nQ__small/img/LJLU7KOK_n4qyH-Yrex_fyaRGOc=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic177943.jpg" border=0></a></div>My first game company had left me with a smoking hole in the ground where my finances would have been, so I asked Neal Sofge of <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepublisher/285/fat-messiah-games" >Fat Messiah Games</a> whether he wanted Lifeboat. He said he would if I couldn't find a publisher. Not finding a publisher is my strong suit. After a few half-hearted attempts at sending out prototypes, Neal published it on a Docutech printer. Each card was its own page so that we could cut them into nine decks with a big paper cutter. I shrinkwrapped the print run myself. <center><div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8841711"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/-1IJGSRxgjsrJSgVN6UyRQ__small/img/U6CFoV29VoO_rWTk2TFdTo-ePMs=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8841711.jpg" border=0></a></div></center><center>The Fat Messiah Games edition used single color ink on different colored sheets of cardstock</center> The game was homemade looking, pixelated, and clunky — but that first print run sold out faster than anything Fat Messiah Games had ever produced. Finally, I had my first big success! And...the fulfillment company Wizard's Attic skipped off without paying Neal, so he felt bad about not paying me or Steve. A few years later, <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/12350/battlestations" >Battlestations</a> got <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepublisher/2744/gorilla-games" >Gorilla Games</a> going. During the downtime between missions, I'd break out Lifeboat and Battlestations fans would say, "I love Battlestations, but Lifeboat is your best game." Now I had a little bit of Battlestations money, which wasn't much but it also wasn't relegating me to photocopying. I was determined to print with Carta Mundi, the company that printed Magic: The Gathering. These were going to be good cards. I remember being on the phone negotiating a printing deal while I was changing the diaper on my second daughter. (Battlestations is dedicated to Eryl.) I printed the <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgameexpansion/37036/lifeboat-expansion-1-cannibalism" >Cannibalism</a> expansion at the same time so that there would be no quality control issues. (HA! More on this later.) <center><div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8824960"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/P9woztJWwehz8up5FNqe-w__small/img/zxqbtxmc6eHoXLaXoJ0YjQZyCH4=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8824960.jpg" border=0></a></div></center> I used glass beads to represent birds and put them into the boxes by hand in the first Gorilla Games edition. The Carta Mundi rep convinced me to put the game in a box with a "sombrero" hole so that you could hang them on a display. Unfortunately, that box set the decks side by side so they would mix together annoyingly. This annoyed some reviewers more than others — I'm looking at you, Tom Vasel — but it also annoyed me. Later versions of the game would include a separator between the card stacks. Remember when I said I printed the expansions at the same time so that I wouldn't have problems with the cards matching and I used Carta Mundi that prints Magic: The Gathering? Little did I know the saturation varies from the start of a print run to the end such that some expansions looked obviously different. <center><div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8841709"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/gClGzd9cbo4UmlBHuJ2Gnw__small/img/eyH35brZg_sydqLmbJzxpYCQ10c=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8841709.jpg" border=0></a></div></center><center>The cards in the center are the love and hate cards for Dr. Harter, the character from the first expansion</center> This can be a real problem if your game revolves around the idea of a hidden card. If the most purple card in the game is the "I hate Dr. Harter" card, then anybody who gets that card is at a disadvantage because everybody knows their agenda. Of course, I didn't know this until a few years into the process. People complained, and I'd send them a new Cannibalism, and sometimes they would complain again. Eventually, I figured out the problem, but it wasn't like I was going to be able to go back to my printer and have them reprint the whole thing with stricter quality control. The first month in print, Lifeboat sold a whopping thirty-six copies. The initial sales figure is supposed to be your biggest. Sigh. I sent a case of Lifeboat off to BoardGameGeek unsolicited, other than with a note on it hoping to get some free publicity. <div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/493833"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/PF_LtffPgsMcmrjpKlpwdg__small/img/hHZfkWP3v16G2sh4GGtMO8ESgPs=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic493833.jpg" border=0></a></div>I had two young kids, so I had my brother going to SPIEL to promote Battlestations. He brought a case of Lifeboat but didn't sell any. The next year, I went to SPIEL myself and was able to sell a lot of Lifeboat. It sold out pretty quickly. I realized I was going to have to reprint. I'd made connections with some foreign publishers, including <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepublisher/9234/swan-panasia-co-ltd" >Swan Panasia</a> in Taiwan, <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepublisher/8351/gen-x-games" >Gen-X Games</a> in Spain, and a French publisher, <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepublisher/10821/le-joueur" >Le Joueur</a>, that is no longer in the business, so I cooked up a plan to gang the printing for five languages all at once. I had also met some Russians who were interested in Lifeboat, but Russia had prohibitive import fees on printed goods, so they just wanted to license the design. I got their money up front because I wasn't going to have any way of going to Russia to shake them down if they cheated me. As it turns out more than a decade later, those Russians have been some of my most reliable partners. (I also have some great Ukrainian partners, too, now.) So for the third edition reprint of Lifeboat, I gang-printed Spanish, Chinese, English, and French versions and shipped them all to my partners. This worked great, with the biggest snag being when my local bank couldn't understand that a check from a Spanish company dated 10-5-2009 was for the tenth of May, not for October 5th. I had to wait two months for my bank to clear that up. Yes, I have a different bank now. <center><div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8841746"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/dSacdWuviN7kG6lBJon_Mg__small/img/vjqXUfCffQZdrNBvrDaMLb198RU=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8841746.png" border=0></a></div></center><center>Notice the lack of a German version of Lifeboat - HINT HINT TO POTENTIAL GERMAN PARTNERS</center> Another one of Steve's ideas was for <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgameexpansion/85927/lifeboat-expansion-2-liquid-courage" >Liquid Courage</a>. As a non-drinker, I kind of shy away from that stuff, but since I'm also a non-murderer and make plenty of games with killing in them, it's probably fine to include drink in my games. Steve had wanted to name the Dr. character in Cannibalism "Dr. Wong" in honor of his new girlfriend's father, but I'd already committed to the name Harter for a dear friend who put us up in Indy. Now we had the chance to do a new character for Liquid Courage, and Steve was able to make his girlfriend Max into Madame Wong. <center><div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8824979"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/2RkrPbupA2KXlgZvXiv_zA__small/img/qerzllb_Nwb42H_aOZ5iJSZ5s-k=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8824979.png" border=0></a></div></center><center>Max is every bit as lovely in real life but not half as conniving. Okay, maybe half as conniving.</center> I was staying with my friend Nico in Arnhem when I got the idea for the <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgameexpansion/105046/lifeboat-expansion-3-weather-deck" >Weather Deck</a>. It wasn't a blast of inspiration as much as realizing that people loved Lifeboat, and it would be nice to have more stuff for the game. With this expansion, at the start of each game round, you turn over a card to see what special thing happens: more people going overboard or more provisions or no birds, etc. <center><div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8841749"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/VUGtDofuMRsxKKg53oy7aQ__small/img/8VsX3Jk0HNdgjlsgpRau6VBKU4M=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8841749.png" border=0></a></div></center><center>The Weather Deck is not essential, but it adds fun variety to gameplay</center> Over the next decade, I reprinted Lifeboat without essentially changing anything — even though a few things bugged me. A psychopath — that is, someone who hated themselves — could sail around in circles because they had no motivation to survive. Also, the expansions kept adding new characters to the game but not adding their names to the original cards. I had originally intended for the large characters (Captain and First Mate) to go overboard and get thirsty more often than the small characters (Lady Lauren and The Kid) as a balancing factor, but my original Lifeboat card set didn't do enough of that. <center><div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/1887141"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/vlfsi__imgitpb0kDBxaAg__small/img/lzYsliIbB-rWFMf1VFYOsIU5lUQ=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic1887141.jpg" border=0></a></div></center> In 2015, I released a sequel game to Lifeboat called <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/151684/desert-island" >Desert Island</a>. This took the same love/hate situation and characters and landed them on an island. Even though technically better designed and balanced, Desert Island hasn't come close in popularity to its' predecessor. Something funny of note happened on my first playtest of Desert Island. I cracked open a copy of Lifeboat to use some of its cards, but forgot to shuffle before dealing out the character and love and hate cards. This meant everybody was a narcissistic psychopath, and the game played really weird. In May 2025, I'm launching <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gorillagames/1953686019?ref=bggforums" target="_blank" class="postlink" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">a crowdfunding campaign</a> for an updated version of Lifeboat that integrates all of the expansions into the main game and includes tokens and a board. Don't hate me... <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/1660/jeff-siadek" >Jeff Siadek</a> <center><div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8674224"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/7_jXdVTDobm4KmrNEAmWcA__small/img/5qDl2DQhff40Z8q2DBEtkUuptRQ=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8674224.png" border=0></a></div></center> <center><div style=''><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/image/8841761"><img src="https://cf.geekdo-images.com/BGg9yba89kBzXEGydf_-gQ__small/img/bU5a0fQceY_g_xJXASdffj1S7zs=/fit-in/200x150/filters:strip_icc()/pic8841761.jpg" border=0></a></div></center>

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