My good friend's birthday wish: Game day. Easily obliged. I kept the lead for the first half of the game, and seized and held Mecatol Rex, but it wasn't enough. I ran out of resources for the Stage II objectives and another buddy took the win with support for the throne and 10 trade goods.

I love this game. It's a shame it's so difficult to find folks willing to spend a day playing it.

Hello community! This is the first iteration of the very first board game designed by my 9 y/o, that she has entitled “The Valley of the Bread Makers.” She has incorporated worker placement, dice rolling for resource generation, turns, rounds and phasing, all to the ends of being the greatest bread-maker in the valley!

There are plenty of kinks to work out and some runaway leader problems, but we’re very proud of her efforts. She had some tears earlier because her brother found a way to make too much money too fast, “You’re supposed to be a bread maker, not a money maker!”

I told her all board game designers have a lot of challenges and learning from their prototypes and nothing could be perfect in version one.

Any words of encouragement here, I will share with her to boost her confidence.

If this kind of post is not permitted, please let me know, and I will remove.

For over 10 years we've been living in a golden era of tabletop game culture. Never in living memory has tabletop gaming been so widely accepted and adored as it has been recently. Over 50% of the modern board game renaissance, by economic volume, has been in the United States.

When I was young, there used to be a lot of talk about how to bring more people/diversity into the hobby, and it's been a joy to say that in recent years we've seen the demographics of who plays and designs board games change a lot. Now, I personally believe diversity brings its own values and rewards, but even if you don't, making tabletop games something that was increasingly for everyone meant more revenue for the companies that make games. It turns out if you can get groups like, oh for example, women, who I guess make up about 50% of the population or something trivial like that, to play your games too that means a lot more people and dollars in the hobby.

During this time of making board games increasingly accessible to larger groups of people, I have often seen complaints pop up, here, on BGG, and other venues, about "politics" in board games. Whether it's whining about gay "Mamas and Papas" in Viticulture, or people defending Puerto Rico to direct descendants of colonization uncomfortable with the themes, or whatever else, it seems that the bigger our hobby has gotten, the louder these whining complaints have gotten.

Well, it brings me no pleasure to say this, but y'all who thought "wokeness had gone too far", you won. People are removing their pronouns from email signatures and changing the names of things from spanish to english. You did it.

In exchange for that, you've killed our hobby. The golden era has ended. The tariffs are not just going to increase the cost of board games themselves, they're going to increase the cost of all other goods. This is a hobby that relies on people having expendable incomes, and in the United States that is going to be a very, very small number of people in the coming year.

We are going to go back to a time where very few people can afford to design/produce board games, cutting down on diversity of designers. We are also going to go back to a time where these hobbies will be considered prohibitively expensive and niche. We are going to go back to a time when getting people to participate in these hobbies is going to take a lot more effort.

Small board game content creators will have to slow down or stop. Local friendly retailers will go out of business. Board game cafes will become limited and increasingly prohibitively expensive (the biggest local board game cafe here was already too expensive for working class people).

I hope this was worth it to you.

I'd like to keep collecting and playing until I die of old age, so I wonder if I should proactively buy a heap of games that I want before they idk explode or something. Anyone else?

Also dunno how relevant this actually is to me, being in australia.

Best part was when he “beat” me around a corner and his last 3 (bomb sweeper) was heading towards the honeypot on my bottom right.

I wish I could have heard the screams of terror when he defused my bomb, surely to capture my flag in the next turn, but instead was killed by a 4!

Had a few insanely close calls but was a really fun game and a good way to shake it up. Highly recommend.

The rules for tea suggest that the number of cards in your largest set of cards counts as 1 extra point per card in that set.

Does that mean that all dessert cards count, including those played from previous rounds (since you don't discard them)?

My initial reaction is "Tea only counts for dessert cards collected in this round" but I'd like some other thoughts on the matter.

I’ve a rules question clarification…

When someone builds one of the special buildings (I forget what they are called) that allows you to convert goods types etc, does everyone at the table have access to it irrespective of whether they have a connected network access to it?

Also, does the original builder get paid each time another player uses it?

I have even playing as if the answers to both these questions are NO. However, I’m not sure what incentivizes anyone to be the first to build it if everyone can access it for free. That’s why I suspect I’ve been playing it wrong. Any help appreciated

Recently purchased TZAAR and enjoying the game. Had a doubt - if I have 4 TZAARs and a stack of 2 TZAARS, and I move a Tott on top of the TZAAR stack, does this mean I only have 4 TZAARs left in the game? And if those 4 TZAARs are captured, I lose?

Cozy home office/gaming room/ ready room! There is a filled bookcase too, but these are most of the board games (some party and simple dice game are left out).

Had to reorganize after receiving the elder scrolls BOTSE & The Witcher Path of Destiny (but a reorganization was long overdue). Very pleased with the collection as a whole but especially the cozy vibe (last picture it how I play my solo games often).

The table is foldable and can expand on the other side. Game mat is almost the size of the table. Works great!

I tend to play solo in my room and host game nights in the living room so most of the time the table is setup like this.

Currently my favourite games are:

• Elder Scrolls BOTSE (solo, 2-player and party of four)
• Dead Cells (solo)
• Slay the Spire (solo and 2-player)

Some of my all time favourites are:

• Keep the heroes out (group coop)
• Castles of Burgundy
• Star Wars: Outer Rim (includes Expansion)

As you might have noticed I own a lot of games published by Garphill games, although they may not rank the top of my lists, they are most definetly dear to me. I love the theme and the clever design they have used. The legacy of Yu took my by suprise and I still often play that solo!

Some games on the shelve of shame:

• Voidfall (plan to learn very soon, recently bought pre-owned)
• MageKnight (got it as a gift but it overwhelms me to pick up and learn. Also the art feels a bit off to me).
• Satori (Bought at SPIEL ‘23. One of those game I love the art but never hits the table).

Recently departed with these games: - Marvel Champions LCG (did not feel the need to keep buying the expansion and wanted to invest time/money elsewhere). - Too Many bones with a lot of expansions (reason being elder scrolls feels superior and it would not hit the table anymore). - The Great Wall (Awaken Realms tends to reel my in with amazing art, good quality products and much bling. Game was not for me though).

Furthermore, I made some space on the shelves to bundle the strictly solo games (got some button shy games which aren’t visible) and also the strictly 2-played (duel) games which I often play with friends or my wife.

Feel free to ask anything abouy my collection. If you feel there might be a game really well suited for me based on my collection, feel free to recommend!

There are several threads on this subreddit from the past year asking people to respond to the prompt:

"If you had to choose only five games from your collection to keep, which would you pick?"

I find this question pretty interesting, and I thought there was some interesting analysis to be done on the comments! I have a Python code that can scrape reddit threads, parse out board game mentions in top-level comments. I ran it on those threads to get around 500 total lists of games to see what fell out: to start, here's a table of the Top 50 most mentioned games, their corresponding "Keep 5" rank, BGG Rank, and the difference between the ranks.

You can see that there are some games that do WAY better by this metric vs. BGG score: Chess, Catan, and 6 nimmt are some of the biggest outliers!

Next, I attempted to broadly categorize the most-mentioned games (this is mostly vibes based- don't attack me too much for how I've broken it down!). In this one, the games are sorted in their respective category by number of mentions, and I kept only the top 10 games for each category, or all games with at least 10 mentions, whichever was more. The columns themselves go from left to right sorted by total average mentions in that category- people sure do love their engine building games!

Sorry mobile users- I'm sure this table doesn't render correctly on a vertical screen:

Finally, I looked at all of the game pairings that ended up in multiple lists to get a sense of "correlation" in people's choices. This one has the two games, the number of lists they both appeared in together, and then a "normalized" value where the count is divided by the "cross-sectional area" of the two games ([# mentions game 1] x [# mentions game 2]). The table is sorted by this normalized value, which I think is more interesting than seeing all the people that chose two super-popular games (ie. Spirit Island and Terraforming Mars):

I've added a final "summary" of the data as a Google Sheet here if you want to browse all of the games mentioned at least twice!

If you want to do some "board game astrology" with me, check out this table I put together and comment which player type you are!

I overheard a group of people when we were out, playing this game that I think I overheard was called balderdarsh or bulgergash or something?

Basically they were asking a question like that “a Michael Jackson song?”

Then spelling something out like “A-P-O-D … D-O-D”

Then the other players asked questions or something.. while the person who asked the question was saying “hold on.. while writing some things down”

Then they added up their scores or something?

It sounded really fun though!

Anyone got any thoughts on what game they were playing?

Hi Folks

This is my Last Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/1dnujr6/new_twilight_struggle_will_you_like_it/

I'm excited to share my game design project that’s been in the works for nearly two years — Dawn of the Evenstar, a two-player card-driven strategy game inspired by Twilight Struggle, but set in the modern geopolitical rivalry between the US and China.

The game is now fully playable online via VASSAL (an Old version that needs to be updated) and Tabletop Simulator (with an English version), and I'm currently looking for players, playtesters, feedback, or just anyone curious about strategy games with real-world themes

In this game, three types of influence exist: American, Chinese, and Anti-America Influence. The world isn't always under the sway of just the US or China — sometimes, it actively resists both.

On the game map above, red and blue star icons with negative numbers represent Anti-America Influence markers. The higher the value, the stronger the local opposition to US presence.

The game traces global developments from 1991 to the present (2024), depicting the rise of a multipolar world through historical events.

It currently includes eight turns, covering the rivalry's Early and Middle Stage phases

The full English module is now available on Tabletop Simulator for everyone to play.
The VASSAL version is still being updated, as I'm currently working on a new and improved game map.
Once the new map is ready, I’ll update the VASSAL module to match it!

Here I’m sharing the links to the rulebook and the full set of 110 base cards for Dawn of the Evenstar.
I’d really appreciate it if you could take a look and share your thoughts afterward!

Rulebook link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YyYkxf0q2uYCMd-GtYcjp6hPCCzNKZsz/view?usp=drive_link

Basic Cardlist link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14jHPsI1kJ6LWpKuCY_w7t6uuVAQeSZSR/edit?usp=drive_link&ouid=115447592182048401723&rtpof=true&sd=true

If you'd like to play the Tabletop Simulator module, here's the link to the TTS Workshop page: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3063962777

If you'd like to try the VASSAL module (note: it's not yet translated into English, but an updated version is coming soon), here's the link to the VASSAL page: https://vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:Dawn_of_the_Evenstar

If you're interested in the game, feel free to join the official Discord server: https://discord.gg/H7hwwDMSXy

I’d love to hear about your experiences and suggestions in the channel!

I genuinely hope this project sparks your interest. It’s been a long journey bringing Dawn of the Evenstar to life, and your support, feedback, and ideas would mean a lot.

Whether you’re just curious, want to play, or have thoughts on the design, I’d love to hear from you. Thanks for taking the time to check it out — and may the struggle begin.

Hey everyone! I'm not a professional game designer, but I wanted to share a chess variant I put together to play with friends. It’s called W-Chess, short for Wide Chess.

It’s still very much classical chess in spirit and mechanics — but with a small twist:

♙ A 15x8 board (instead of the usual 8x8)

♞ A double set of pieces for each player (except for the king)

♖ Four rooks = four castling options

♛ More flanks, more tactics, more comeback potential

The idea came from a simple desire to step a bit outside the bounds of traditional chess — to experience new strategies while still keeping the rules familiar and intuitive. After playing a few rounds with friends, it turned out that the wider format opened up new tactical and positional dynamics, especially in the mid- and endgame.

I also built a simple web page where you can play W-Chess locally on a single computer (with board rotation). The game logic is written in JavaScript, and I used ChatGPT to help me get it working. Unfortunately, it's not yet online multiplayer — if anyone with web dev skills is interested in helping make that possible, I’d be thrilled!

https://jsfiddle.net/TallKaleidoscope/65jvt2o7/

I’m happy to share the code, board image, or just talk about the variant. Any feedback is very welcome — whether it’s ideas, constructive critique, or just general thoughts.

P.S. I know chess can sometimes be a bit of a “punching bag” around here 😄 — I totally get it. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel, just sharing something small and fun that brought a fresh perspective to a familiar classic.

Hey all,

For Sky Team, my wife and I had some questions on how to interpret the rules from the communication stage. Here are some examples:

1. Can you say “i will put a dice on the brakes if I can”. If not, is that different than saying “lets try to focus on the brakes”? (Or any square you need a specific number)

2. Lets say there is a plane on your space and you want to move one still… can you say “lets try to clear it, if we cant, lets do this instead” is that different than sayin “if you role a 1 put it here, if not lets do this”

3. The rules say you cant say put ur lowest dice here, but isnt saying lets tilt the plane to the left the same thing?

Thanks for the help guys!!

My partner and I occasionally play trivial pursuit via facetime with two friends. They have a copy of the same board as us. It makes it easy to play online together since we can indicate where pieces are being moved based on other colors/landmarks. Lately, I've been wanting to find something else to play. We all enjoy trivia, mysteries and escape rooms. Anyone have suggestions on games we could try out?

My personal board game project recently celebrated 4yrs of being online, so I wanted to give a small update. I announced it back in January 2021 under the name GameWasm, and the beta launched March 2021 as Kallax! My pie-in-the-sky back then was 100 users, we are now past the 5000 mark!

I've been running it with one of my close friends since the beginning. We are both professional developers and it has become our creative playground where we can explore and experiment with technologies, design patterns and development practices before introducing them at work.

We recently doubled down and moved the project to a dedicated server.

What is Kallax.io?

Collection tracker and board game event organizer like geekgroup / gameshelf / boardgamecaddie / betterbggcollection / ... (yep, yet another). It differentiates itself a tiny bit from your favorite collection visualizer by running its own dedicated backend. Otherwise, it's the classic features...

Public Profiles 👋
You can share your public profile with friends so they can easily browse your collection. No login required.

Search in Collections 🤩
The core feature is advanced and shareable searches across multiple collections. You might want to see medium complexity games for 3 players that does not use player elimination, in my collection and not owned by my friend Aval.

Folders 🗂️
Board games can be organized into custom folders. Marking the folder as public will make it shareable and show it on your profile. For example, here is my shelf of 'opportunity' ^^

Game Events 🍻
Organize events and vote on what to play in advance. Participants can 'nominate' games they want to play. You can also enable 'hauling list' to help organize who brings what. Never forget snacks again.

This feature will receive a major update next release.

Fast Setup⚡
No e-mail required (optional, only used for forgot password).
You can import your BGG collection directly or manually add games.

Is your collection out of sync? Just re-sync with BGG, we'll make sure your custom data is kept.

Non-commercial 💯
No ads, no payments, no affiliate links. Kallax is a non-commercial project developed and maintained by a small but dedicated group of friends. Donations currently cover 15% of our hosting cost, the rest is covered by me ^^ It's a hobby and hobbies are allowed to cost a few coins.

Feedback?

Yes please! I stare myself blind on the project and always value input. Honestly, it's the thing that motivates me the most. A fair share of the website is a direct result of user feedback.

Comment, drop me a PM on Reddit, join our Discord, contact me on BGG or yell at me on the street.

For the technical peeps...

The initial version of Kallax was written using .NET 6 Blazor WebAssembly. It was hosted in Amazon S3 behind CloudFront. The current version is running .NET 8 Blazor Hybrid. The server serves dynamic pre-renders and then hand the rendering responsibility to the client.

We are hosted on a dedicated server in France.
Intel Xeon D-1531 @ 2.2 GHz, 32GB DDR4, 2x 250GB SSD (RAID 1) and use Bunny CDN for content delivery.

Feel free to ask, I love discussing these kinds of thing, I write a bit about it on my personal blog.

I'll stick around to answer questions as long as I can, I am in UTC+1 (might be sleeping)

Hello.

I'm looking for board games that are similar to the digital game of mine sweeper.

I'm interested in the mechanics of such a game and how I can further add tactical choices and/or actions.

I am investigating whether these concepts can be used to create a training tool for firefighters searching a building.

This often done "blind" and discoveries are used to build up a picture of the incident.

Hope that makes sense. I'm not a gamer but I am extremely curious and passionate to learn as much as possible about Wargaming/Serious games.

This seems like a very large increase, shouldn’t a card game just be a few dollars since it’s based on cost to manufacture?

Hello Everyone,

Debating on whether to get Root or Ironwood. For reference I primarily would be playing with my wife. My wife can handle heavier games but usually only when its cooperative (she enjoys spirit island). When playing against each other she enjoys Villainous but does not enjoy games with complex choices or engine builders (she hates wingspan and small world). Looking at BGG Ironwood is supposed to have a lower complexity, however I have not heard much from people about whether root itself is a difficult game to learn and maneuver.

Would anyone with knowledge on either game have any advice or should I pause from getting either game.

Thanks!

The Cursed Castle has the same atmosphere and basic concept as Darkest Dungeon. Not exactly the same game, since core mechanics is different: dice allocation, which makes game quite puzzley. It is also much shorter, more compact and less fiddly (no town phase, though).

Photos from BGG:

Hey board game lovers! I need your help (and taste 😄)

My name’s Nykyta, I’m a board game designer from Ukraine. Our tiny team (me, my wife, and one more awesome human) is working on three games right now. All of them are original, and we’ve been testing the prototypes in youth centers, IT hubs, and cozy anti-cafes.

The mechanics are done, and one of the games already has a full design. The others are in progress. We want to launch on Kickstarter soon — but we can only start with one game. Why Kickstarter? Because we don’t really have a huge budget for now, but want to bring something interesting to the board game society.

So I’m asking: which of these three games would catch your eye? Which one would you actually want to buy or support?

🟠 Game 1: Startup: The Road to Success A financial/strategy board game that simulates the chaotic journey of launching a startup. You build your business from scratch, hire specialists (Programmers, designers, marketologists), pitch to investors, manage crises, and grow your company. The goal: develop a full product and get 50 users. You are one of 5 startupers: A shark, a wolf, a cat, a dog or a racoon!

📦 2–5 players ⏱️ 70–100 minutes 💡 Think: resource management, investing, strategic choices

🔵 Game 2: Code Apocalypse A fast-paced competitive game about secret agents infiltrating a US base called Zone-636. Why? Because they are inventing a secret weapon to keep under the pressure the rest of the world? What could it be? Noone knows. Each player is a spy from a different country (Brtish Mi-6, Polish Agencja Wywiadu, Italian AISE, Ukrainian SZRU)), trying to collect fragments of classified data. You’ll dodge traps, fight guards — and each other.

📦 2–4 players ⏱️ 20–35 minutes 💣 Think: tactical movement, bluffing, risk & sabotage

🟢 Game 3: Project Meownager A light card game where cats run chaotic IT projects. You hire specialists, complete silly tasks, sabotage your opponents, and race to 20 success points. It's fast, fun, and full of cat-themed office mayhem. If the game gets a blast, we will create a group of games related to IT topic (with cats ofc!!)

📦 2–6 players ⏱️ 10–15 minutes 🐾 For fans of cats, IT culture, and memes

Regarding the 54% tariffs on Chinese goods, Jamey Stegmaier from Stonemaier Games says in his latest blog entry:

More publishers will turn to low-cost, high-markup products (e.g., packs of cards; not necessarily collectible card games, but that type of product). Not only do tariffs have a much lower impact on the margins of these products, but they’re also one of the few types of modern gaming products that can be produced in the US at places like Delano and Artiforge [American manufacturers of printed products like cards].

Board games include wooden tokens, plastic minifigures, punchboards, and other elements that are made in China. But card games just need cards which can be made in the US or in countries with lower tariffs. Considering this, will the tabletop games market see a surge in card games in the upcoming years?

I just picked up the Neom board game by Paul Sottosanti in a charity shop in the US. I sort of figured it had to be associated with Neom the planned city given the name and the fact that it’s about building a futuristic city, but I actually can’t find anything conclusive about a connection online or in the game materials. There are some people online saying it’s based on Neom but those could just be people assuming given the name. Hoping you folks might be able to answer or at least have clues. Thanks in advance.

Edit: found the answer, it is associated you’re so quick. I’m impressed. Thank you.