What I've been playing / testing: Q1 & Q2 2026

 I feel like I haven't been posting in my blog lately, so here's what I've been playing (on BoardGameArena) and what I've been testing (on Tabletop Simulator) lately...

What I've been playing

I've discovered a lot of new games on BGA, some good, some not for me. Lately I've been pretty lucky to find a number of games I've been enjoying quite a bit on there:

Emberleaf is a cute game featuring cute, anthropomorphic animals wandering from clearing to clearing in a forest, collecting resources, building stuff, fighting off bad guys, and making promises. Your cards have come-into-play effects, activated effects, slide effects, and drop-off effects, and on your turn you either bring a card into play, or slide all your cards in play to the left. Setting up to trigger multiple slide effects can be pretty fun, and managing your cards in general is an interesting puzzle. After several plays, I think this game holds up -- it's good!

Dinogenics is a fairly standard worker placement game about running a dinosaur zoo, but it absolutely oozes with Jurassic Park theme. The more I play it, the more I like it! In this game you collect DNA cards to make a set and create a dinosaur, but you have to have the right size pen to put it in or it'll rampage - wreaking some havoc on your park. You can build stuff, including hotels to house visitors, which bring in money and points (if they survive). Some dinos are carnivores, and require an upkeep of goats, while others are omnivores or herbivores. Each dinosaur type has a special rule (T-rex's are worth a bunch of points, but require 2 goats each turn, and when they rampage, it's double bad... Brontosauruses are big points, and don't need a pen, but require 4 DNA cards to create, Ankylosauruses can co-exist in a pen with another type of dinosaur without either one rampaging, Stegosauruses earn you extra money each round, Triceratops like to be in pairs, etc. There's a pretty good variety of dinosaurs, and a lot of fun special cards you can get. I don't agree with every design choice, but man - what a fun game!

Soothsayers is interesting for a few reasons, not the least if which is that it feels like something I might have designed! It's a role selection game where you can upgrade your ability at each role. At 2p there's a real tug-of-war sort of feel as you fight back and forth for the Fate tokens (VP) for having the highest card in each suit and highest tarot in each suit as well. I've been enjoying it 2p, but it seems pretty cool multiplayer as well.

dnup is a unique sort of shedding game, where each card has 2 values, and one thing you might do is rotate your whole hand 180 degrees, switching all cards in it to the other value. You can also pick up your opponent's cards from the board, which sounds counterintuitive when your goal is to get rid of all your cards. Like Race for the Galaxy, I prefer this at 2p, where you get 2 turns in a row - it feels like you gave a lot more agency that way 

What I've been testing

I'm still plugging away at my playtests, trying to get in 2 playtest nights a week. My players' attendance had fallen off, in part because I always start so late (gotta wait until the toddler's asleep), but I think also in part due to people's availability on Thursdays -- I've recently switched to Mondays instead, and a couple of times I got some of my old players back, but it's still hit and miss.

But the struggle for players aside, I've managed to get playtests in fairly regularly. Here's what's been on the virtual table over the last few months:

Dynasty was a crazy ride. 20 years in the making... once I had an actual prototype, I played it a bunch in a short time, and then it got signed by a publisher! The only time I played Dynasty since then was irl with Corbin - the rest of my games have been on TTS.

Division of Labor had some new tweaks that I wanted to try, and strangely, for the life of me I don't remember what they were at the moment! Hope I wrote them down!

Joan of Arc - Maid of Orleans was another old design (only 1/2 as old as Dynasty) that I revived and played a couple of times. I've added a few aspects I've always wanted to try, and I was making some progress, but now it appears that game has been set aside again for another idea that came to mind...

Colony Collapse - The Decision Space podcast Discord is one I spend a lot of time in. they have a pretty healthy design subsection, and once in a while they host a little design jam (an informal challenge to create a game in a short timeframe, given some parameters such as component, thematic, or mechanical restrictions - much like the old Game Design Showdowns at BGDF). Not too long ago, they posted restrictions for a new design jam. As usual, I wasn't too interested in working on a new game for the jam... but as usual, an idea struck me, and I ended up designing a new game. This time, the idea that struck me wasn't exactly the design jam parameters, but rather a mechanism that someone (named Aurore) suggested. The mechanism sounded neat, so I asked Aurore if she wanted to work together on some game using it or something similar. In tossing ideas around for that, I joked that we could plug Aurore's gerrymandering game (another game she had been working on, potentially for a previous design jam) into this design wholesale. I had playtested the gerrymandering game, and thought it was a really neat idea, and once I made that comment, I couldn't think of anything else to do with the game we were working on, so it became another attempt at the gerrymandering game. As for theme, for some weird reason having to do with the game jam restrictions, we were thinking of bees, but there are several bee-themed games out there already. This would not normally deter me, but it got me thinking of how one might approach a common theme like that, and one way was to lean into it and create a sequel to an existing bee-themed game. So this design is tentatively called Apiary 2: Colony Collapse, and the story of the game is that the spacefaring bees from Apiary have found a new homeworld, and have decided to revolt against their queen and set up a democratic form of government... only to immediately succumb to corruption in the form of gerrymandering to get elected! I am amused by that story, though if Stonemaier isn't interested in the game, I suppose it could just be called Colony Collapse and not be about those spacefaring bees specifically.

Forbidden Art is my friend Steve's rondel game about necromancy - compel undead minions to pillage artifacts and bind demons! I like that game a lot, and have made plenty of suggestions for Steve, many of which I think have been keepers (especially a big change to how the Compel action works)

And I've had yet another new idea recently...

New ideas

The other day I saw an announcement for Wingspan Pocket, a new pocket-sized Wingspan game from Elizbeth Hargrave and Stonemaier Games. Wingspan is pretty cool, and I suspect a compact version of it would be good -- but mainly I just thought that a good title for my compact EmDo game Microcosm could have been Eminent Domain: Pocket Universe. To be clear though, I'm really happy with the title Microcosm - I have no regrets on that front at all. So I wondered... is there another compact EmDo game I could design that could appropriately be called Pocket Universe? I've said before that I was done creating EmDo content, but then again, last year I made a cooperative mode (EmDo: Coalition), so I guess you never know!

Here's what I've got so far for a compact EmDo game, inspired in part by the back-and-forth nature of 2p games I've been playing like Soothsayers, dnup, and Toy Battle:

Imagine there are 3 planets in the center of the table, between 2 players (this is a 2p game)... one Advanced, one Fertile, and one Metallic (like EmDo)

On your turn, you play a card for its effect, then put it into one of the 6 standard EmDo action stacks (maybe they're coded to a subset of the stacks, so you can choose between 2 or 3 of the stacks to put it in). Then you do one of the 6 EmDo actions with strength equal to the number of cards in that stack:

• Survey: Draw cards
• Colonize: Tuck cards from hand a certain way under one of the planets (these count as colonies). If there are enough colonies (and you have the most), gain control of the planet
• Warfare: Add ships to one of the planets (cards off the deck, tucked a certain way, counts as fighters). If there are enough fighters (and you have the most), gain control of the planet
• Produce: Add resources to one of the planets (cards off the deck tucked a certain way count as resources.. or maybe have tokens for resources. Maybe in this case, you add ONE resource, but your strength has to be high enough to do so, based on how many resources are already on there?)
• Trade: If there are enough resources on the planet, discard those resources and take control of the planet (str must exceed number of resources). Otherwise... maybe switch a card to a different zone (toggle something between Colony, Fighter, and Resource)
• Research: I dunno, maybe move stuff from planet to planet? Or gain a permanent tile thingy that helps you (req str based on tile "cost")?
• If you control 2 out of the 3 planets at the start of your turn, you win. You control a planet by having the most colonies (minimum X), the most ships (minimum Y), or if you've traded with it (see above). Once controlled, the planets can be taken away by the opponent, but it costs a little more (or you have to exceed what the controller has on it)

Maybe the planets list their minimum colonize/warfare/trade costs (Fertile is easier to take by warfare, so lower warfare cost, higher colonize cost... Metallic is the other way around, and Advanced is in the middle)? Who knows but I think it's nice if they're not so symmetric.

That's as far as I've gotten, and I haven't tested it at all (though I have made most of a TTS prototype)

How does that sound to you so far? Let me know in the comments!