The “shufflebuilding” game Smash Up starts with a simple premise: Take the twenty-card decks of two factions, shuffle them into a forty-card deck, then compete to smash more Bases than your opponents! Each faction brings a different game mechanism into play – pirates move cards, zombies bring cards back from the discard pile, dinosaurs have huge power – and every combination of factions brings a different play experience.

a new series of micro-reviews for table top games. This episode includes Drum Roll from Artipia Games, Star Trek The Next Generation the Deck Building Game from Bandai and the Lord of the Rings Dice Building Game from Wizkids!

In Civility you are the leader of a growing city and its people. It is your responsibility to raise an army, strengthen your city through economic and technological growth, and make sure your people are healthy and well educated. War will gain you more power and status, but the pacifist will acquire allies and other important skills. The choice is yours; strategy and planning is key. Will you choose the path of war and manipulation? Or will you be the great leader in Civility?

Mayfair Games and Gen Con are ecstatic to announce that for the second year in a row, a science fiction legend will be joining us in Mayfair Land at Gen Con 2013!

I would be the first one to groan about hearing about another trading card game (even though I admit this one looks cool), but this might be the future of board games in general (I know some of you won’t have your cardboard taken from your cold dead hands). From my trip to Seattle last year I spent some time at Microsoft offices, and seeing coffee tables with embedded touchable screens left the impression that card board games might not be around for ever. Will games start heading in this direction in the future or will there be two separate worlds of gaming heading our way. This is the beginning of that debate and you will decide it!

Dust Studio today announced that Battlefront Miniatures will become its publishing and distribution partner for the Dust Tactics and Dust Warfare miniatures game lines. Fantasy Flight Games, Dust Studio’s current publishing partner for those games, will transition sales and marketing activity to Battlefront Miniatures on June 1st, 2013.
“Dust has had a wonderful few years, during which we have seen the game’s community grow exponentially,” said Dust creator Paolo Parente. “Both Dust Studio and Fantasy Flight Games have evolved
significantly during our relationship, and we now mutually feel that we are both …

At the beginning of the game you are assigned a secret identity, which will either be that of a Restorationist or a Loyalist. Your identity matters as it determines what you need to do to achieve victory.

The Daybreak expansion for Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game brings humanity’s plight to its gripping climax. With two supplemental game boards and hundreds of cards and tokens, Daybreak invites players to undertake desperate missions, struggle under the constant threat of mutiny, and bargain with Cylon Leaders driven by motives of their own!

Players who usually find “Ticket to Ride” a little less challenging will find that this expansion sets a tone of the most thought-provoking, skilled-variant, and tension laden to date of the whole “Ticket to Ride” franchise, offering up a thrilling showstopper for the most picky of strategy players