PLAY – The Game Festival, the international event dedicated to Board-Games, Role-playing Games, Miniatures Games, Live, and Collectible Card Games returns from May 22nd to 24th at Bologna Fiere with more than 40.000 square meters of covered area in five different pavilions.
More than 3000 tables ready to play, thousands of titles including great classics, latest releases, meetings and conferences.
Many news for this special edition. Here is the full program (more than 700 events)
All the main publishers will attend Play 2026 including Asmodee, Cranio Creations, dV Games, Ghenos Games, MS Edizioni, Giochi Uniti, Mancalamaro, Red Glove, Pendragon, Devir, Ravensburger, Clementoni, Ludus Magnus Studio, Need Games, Giochix, Spin Master, Djeco, the complete list is growing day by day.
In Bare Bones, players each begin with an identical base set of 7 cards + 3 additional cards they choose. Cards come in two varieties, Dice Cards and Action Cards. Dice Cards come in 7 colors. Every Dice Card played entitles the player to roll 1 die of the corresponding color. The different colored dice have different values representing points. White dice provide the currency needed to acquire new cards to build your deck. Action Cards grant powerful abilities players can use to multiply scores and enhance other cards in their decks. There are many paths to victory through card and dice combos, but it all comes down to how you build your deck and the luck of the dice. Seven different Action Cards are used in each game, but 20 are provided. After 12 rounds, scores are tallied to determine the victor.
BoardGameGeek has just announced the winners of their Golden Geek awards for 2025. There are three Game of the Year categories, for best Light, Medium, and Heavy games. Here are the top three finishers in each category, together with their designers:
Heavy Game of the Year
WINNER – Galactic Cruise (T.K. King, Dennis Northcott, Koltin Thompson) 2nd – Speakeasy (Vital Lacerda) 3rd – Luthier (Dave Beck, Abe Burson) Continue reading →
Honestly, I’ve been waiting for this Unmatched box for three long years. My younger son and I were playtesters for these characters in 2023 and fell head over heels in love with them. It’s a treat to get to write about them now.
And why now? Well, the good folks at Restoration Games understand marketing as well as game design – so it makes perfect sense to release a box with classic U.S.A.-connected heroes and iconic locations the same summer as we here in America celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
What is Unmatched?
For the uninitiated, the Unmatched system is a card-based combat game that pits heroes from across time, genres, and varying levels of historical validity in combat to the death. Similar to the John Wick films, “Why are we fighting?” is not really a question anyone is asking. It’s because we can.
Based on the Star Wars: Epic Duels game (released back in 2002), the team at Restoration Games “dreamed up a complete overhaul of the game… like you took your ’72 Ford Pinto into the shop and they sent back a Porsche 911. Both of them run on internal combustion engines, granted… but one has an annoying tendency to explode when it gets rear-ended while the other is one of the finest pieces of automotive machinery ever designed.” (The previous quote is from my original review of the system – in which I go into much more detail about how they fixed the game.)
Games are relatively short (15-25 minutes for two player battles, 30-45 minutes for four player battles) and over the past seven years has managed to incorporate characters not only from the public domain but also IPs like Jurassic Park, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Marvel Comics, and The Witcher. (And Bruce Lee – in full “Enter the Dragon” mode.) Even if you’re not normally a “combat game” type of gamer, I’d recommend giving it a try before you dismiss it.
A recent entry in the excellent Solo Hero series by Renegade Game Studios, Unstoppable is a unique combat-focused card-crafting game set in a dystopian future. It is a combat deck-builder where the focus of the game is to damage enemies or purchase upgraded cards to defeat more enemies in the future. The “hook” here lies in how the cards are used. Cards are “created” in sleeves – each sleeve is filled with a player-side card and an enemy side-side card. When a new player card is bought, it is placed in a sleeve with an enemy back, creating a unique double-sided card. During the game, up to two upgrade cards can also be added between the two sides to make the card more powerful to use (and to fight.) Few cards are drawn. Instead, players must defeat the back side of a card to draw its front side into their hand. With four heroes (with slightly different starting hands) and three unique bosses to fight, there is a considerable amount of boardgame space to explore in a relatively small box. If this particular dystopian future isn’t your jam, there is a crowdfunding effort to bring about a sequel featuring Dungeon Crawler Carl, the protagonist (along with his cat) of a series of books set in a planet-wide survival dungeon televised for galactic viewers. There’s obviously a following for it as the campaign for the new card game, along with a new RPG in the setting, is currently pushing $10 million raised.
Unstoppable Designer: John D. Clair Publisher: Renegade Game Studios Players: 1-2 Ages: 14+ Time: 30-90 min (depending on boss) (review copy provided by publisher)
In CATAN – On the Road, gameplay is driven by a deck of 120 cards and builds on well-known CATAN mechanics with a fresh variation. Players gather resources by drawing cards, construct developments from a common set of available choices, and negotiate trades either with the bank or with fellow players. Trading plays an even larger role in this version: any player who trades while it is not their turn is rewarded with an extra resource card.
How to Play:
– Be the first player to reach 7 victory points. – Collect and trade for the resource cards you need to build. – Expand your region, recruit knights, and upgrade your settlements for victory points.
