You are the challenge in Crawl
But good luck figuring out what Crawl really is.
Board games
Abstract strategy game Constructo is looking extremely pretty
Yeah, eurogames get the lion’s share of praise and adulation, but abstract strategy games need love too, especially when they’re as nice-looking as this one. Your goal in Constructo, currently in the home stretch of a 1500 euro Indiegogo campaign, is to build geometrical shapes from laser-cut tiles
Classic parlor game Werewolf gets rebooted to tear more friends, marriages apart
How to rebrand the most morally bankrupt human activity.
The Thing From the Future will make you into Isaac Asimov
“Trying to predict the future is a discouraging and hazardous occupation,” wrote British sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke. The author of 2001: A Space Odyssey would know a thing or two about what’s to come, seeing as he literally wrote a book called Profiles of the Future. And yet Stuart Candy and Jef
Thump those pesky meeples out of your way in Bruno Cathala’s new boardgame
Other people’s meeples—those famous, multicolored, wooden board game pieces—have a bad habit of claiming the territory you have your eye on. It can get annoying. So for his Five Tribes, designer Bruno Cathala decided to design a meeple displacement system to help on your path to becoming the dominan
Behold, a levitating chessboard
It may be a bit impractical, but it’s hard to deny the coolness factor of playing chess on a board that’s levitating in midair. This is not an optical illusion, but some very impressive tech from the levitation design firm Crealev. Seriously, their motto is: We Make Things Float. They’re tight-lippe
We talked to Les Savy Fav’s frontman about his obscene illustrations for the Beowulf boardgame
Grendel meets his match.
One of the best boardgames ever just blew up Kickstarter
Wrangling and cajoling a group of friends to your small apartment’s kitchen will no longer be an impediment to playing Twilight Struggle, because the digital edition of that great Cold War card and dice game is already fully funded on Kickstarter. I know it’s a can of worms to say anything is the “b
And the finalists for best Euro-style board game of the year are…
Germany to boardgames, particularly “eurogames,” is like 1970s England was to punk, or post-WWI Paris was to Lost Generation literary works. It is the motherland, so it’s important to keep an eye on the German boardgame festival Spiel des Jahres. This year’s grand prize finalists include the very L
It will be an awful long time before coders come close to cracking Go
Go is an ancient contest of meditative strategy, but in the present day another deeper meta-game of cracking its mastery with algorithms is going on. Yet the way the mind of a Go player works continues to elude programmers. Computers are no match. Wired has a pretty fascinating feature on the subjec
Hitman GO is a dapper little mutation
Shuffling the pieces with the video-board-videogame.
Riot aims to politicize the board game with, what else, riots
We’ve seen a lot of great videogames that deal with social issues, but we haven’t seen that many boardgames. The crew of Italians behind Riot want to change that by putting you in the shoes of a citizen who is caught in a dangerous riot situation, where tension between protesters and officers is eru
Heavy machinery is super-talented at Jenga, apparently
Jenga is a game that requires finesse and a steady hand, unless of course you are playing with a stack of 600-pound wooden blocks. Then, heavy machinery is called for. Enter Cat’s excavators, which are, for the mechanically uninformed, huge construction trucks equipped with claw arms. This real-life
The Doom that Came to Atlantic City updates Monopoly with harried results
Cthulhu destroys your nostalgia.
The secret history of the American boardgame
Or: why you hate Monopoly.
Expos are so much better with this deck-building business card game
Your de facto business card is a no-frills presentation of your name and number and Twitter handle, so potential business partners can contact you later on. But if you are a game designer among an expo of game designers, it might be advantageous to flaunt your chops by designing an entire game that
Forget tabletop: Hard Livin’ turns a whole art gallery into a boardgame
It’s the game of life. (But not Life.)
Monopoly should be less bad now that it’s crowdsourcing a new rulebook
Monopoly is, factually speaking, a bad game. But now the boardgame about greedy banking is trying to set things right after all those yawn-inducing living room snooze-fests, which doubtlessly soured millions of Americans to the pastime of boardgaming before they reached the age of consent. Hasbro, t
Kill Shakespeare is the boardgame based on the bard’s bloodiest plays
Even if you managed to sleep your way through your sophomore year, you know the story of Macbeth. The Thane of Glamis meets some witches, hallucinates about seeing a bloody dagger, kills his boss, and develops obsessive compulsive disorder. Well, Kill Shakespeare has nothing to do with any of that.
Dark is the stealthy RPG adventure for, uh, playing cards
Tabletop gaming takes another step toward democratization.
Why we need more tabletop game stores
Twenty Sided Store in Brooklyn is, if we’re lucky, a harbinger for the future of gaming.
Last week in boardgames: Bruno Cathala’s new game has men at work, elusive complexity
Celebrated game designer Bruno Cathala’s next game for Days of Wonder looks fantastically complicated. Not much is known about it, as it is still a prototype, but it has something to do with workers, and pyramids, and tile rotation, and a cup of espresso. Come to think of it that could just be someo
They’re making a Magic: The Gathering movie, and it has high "awfulness" potentiality
Magic: The Gathering is the perennial deck-building card game about wizards and elemental spirits and evil and stuff. And sometime in the future it will be a motion-picture bursting at the seams with high-fantasy lore, as Twentieth Century Fox has acquired the rights to adapt it into a motion pictur
What is the Dice+? I’m still not sure
It’s a cube, definitely.