How hard can it be to move from point A to point B? A lot of the most basic games out there have this as their sole mechanic: Candy Land, Chutes/Snakes and Ladders, Sorry!, Trouble and many others. It’s not usually a premise we see in modern, European-style board games, although you can still distill a few of them down to this simple challenge, like RoboRally or River Dragons. Gravwell: Escape from the 9th Dimension, the debut design from Corey Young (published by Cryptozoic), asks this in the most straightforward manner yet. All you have to do to win is advance 54 spaces from the center of the board to the end of the single track. Sounds easy enough, right? READ MORE

Board games are awesome, but they are not without their flaws. The number one flaw, of course, is the fact that you actually have to get together with other people in the same physical location to play them. What is this, the Dark Ages? Note that for the purposes of this article, “the Dark Ages” includes the entirety of mankind’s existence on Earth prior to the mid-1990s.* Although probably only the period after the invention of the first board game counts, which is still a lot when you consider the likes of Go and Chess. READ MORE

When I first heard that Martin Wallace (The Witches, Ankh-Morpork and other non-Discworld games I haven’t covered) was designing a board game based on Neil Gaiman’s Sherlock Holmes-Lovecraft mash-up short story A Study In Emerald, my response was literally “take my money!” I haven’t even read the story yet, but the concept and talent involved sold me. So how did the actual game version of A Study in Emerald turn out? It’s mixed, honestly, but on the whole a satisfying experience. READ MORE