Imagine a deserted Earth, long devoid of humans, visited by tribes of alien collectors eager to get their appendages all over the stuff we’ve left behind. This is the setting for Mighty Boards’ next game Excavation Earth, coming to Kickstarter next month. Though thoughts of an abandoned Earth have long been a part of our …
How many times have you heard – or even said – the phrase, “It’s just a game”? Perhaps a fellow player, someone you thought was your best friend, believes you shouldn’t be upset about his betraying you and robbing you of the victory that was within your grasp. Or your annoying friend keeps bringing up …
We’ve just about recovered from our participation in Essen SPIEL ‘19, where we were busy launching Posthuman Saga, Nights of Fire and Petrichor: Honeybee, previewing the Vengeance: Director’s Cut expansion (on Kickstarter right now!) and Excavation Earth (hitting Kickstarter in 2020!), talking to our fans, running from meeting to meeting, and, in between, trying to find time to check out everything …
At Mighty Boards, we work both on game design projects coming from our own internal designers and on projects that we receive from external designers. This is a privilege: it gives us a greater pool of potential games to develop, and allows us to work specifically on projects that we really love. At the same …
In this week’s blog post, our art director, Mark Casha, talks about the choices behind our games’ art style. Whether it’s the bright, tactile beauty of Azul, the richly-painted world of Scythe, or the cute-yet-autumnal cartoon style of Root, beautiful artwork can make a board game stand out on increasingly crowded shelves. Of course, it’s …
An occasional series of reflections on concepts from game studies, applied to board game design. Let’s talk about play. ‘Play’ is a big word. We play a board game, sure, and we play a videogame. We play a game of tennis. An actor plays a role on stage. A chamber ensemble plays a sonata. Shakespeare …
The term ‘worldbuilding’ is going to be familiar to anyone with a passing interest in genre fiction: it’s increasingly grown to be much-used, perhaps even overused. It’s a cliché for a reason: any work of fiction worth its salt should leave you with the distinct sense of having breathed in deep and filled your lungs …
What is the germ of a board game? Before the long, long processes of design, testing and production, what form does a board game take, when it first springs into the mind of its creator? Most often, for us, it’s an image: a vivid picture conveying a strong emotion. Take, for example, Vengeance: a lone, …
UPDATE #34 Delay announcements are never pleasant to write. No one likes delays unless it’s a mutant virus manifesting itself creatively on your body parts… and I guess it’s one way you can look at this one. In the last update we stated that final assembly was expected to be around the end of June …
This is the second in a series of designer diaries in which I talk about the challenges of narrative design for board games. Just about every academic definition of what narrative is understands it as a story – a sequence of events in which a story-world of characters and other existents undergoes changes – conveyed …