Contests: Fastaval Design Competition

In Bohemians, players take on the roles of artists wandering the streets of Paris at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, striving to create masterpieces while facing the challenges of daily life. Bohemians is a card-driven game in which players collect cards to find inspiration, seek muses, and manage everyday necessary tasks.

In each round, players must plan that day's routine and decide whether they will go on a date, participate in a social event, meet their muse, create new art, or...go to work. Each card offers them various bonuses and inspiration, so carefully managing your card supply and the order in which they're played is crucial to getting the most inspiration. Players then spend their inspiration to purchase cards and build their deck with new habits, inspiring muses, or new achievements in their career. The artist who acquires the most achievements from the achievements deck wins.

The prototype of Bohemians won three nominations and one award (Best Presentation, Best Innovation, Best Game) at Fastaval, Denmark's largest convention for board games and roleplaying games.

Pagan: Fate of Roanoke is an expandable deduction card game set in the colonial America of 1587.

The essence of this asymmetrical game is a witch's struggle against a witch hunter. As the witch strives to complete a ritual of renaturation, the hunter tries to discover her true identity among nine villagers. Each turn, the two players use their action pawns on active villagers to draw cards, play cards, and gain influence. Each player has their own variable card deck of fifty cards; with these cards, the witch can brew powerful potions, improve their familiar, and cast enchantments and charms, while the witch hunter enlists allies, claim strategic locations, and ruthlessly investigates the villagers.

As the witch, your objective is to collect enough secrets to perform a ritual so potent that the entire region will fall under your spell and Mother Nature will reclaim the island. As the hunter, you gather all the allies and support you can muster to bring the witch to justice before her fatal ritual comes to fruition.

The prototype won the Danish design award Otto at the Fastaval for best game of show in 2018.

Welcome aboard and congrats on the promotion! Your "new" starship is ready to embark on its first big voyage. Just scrape off some of the rust, and she'll do fine. And that crew? Might look a little green around the edges, but they're your crew now. Make us proud.

The stars are calling...and adventure awaits!

As newly promoted Starship Captains, players are in command of their first starship and hungry to prove themselves in a galaxy full of space pirates, grumpy old androids, ancient artifacts, and interplanetary adventures.

In this 1-4 player Eurostyle game, which mixes action selection and engine building, you'll manage a diverse crew of cadets, ensigns, androids, and officers — each with different special roles and capabilities. By earning medals, you can promote and train your crew for even greater effectiveness. Similarly, you can upgrade your ship with powerful engine building technology for maximum synergy.

What will you do with this enhanced crew and ship? Explore an ever-shifting galaxy full of dangerous pirates and interplanetary missions in order to boost your reputation with three distinct galactic factions for bountiful rewards.

Do you have what it takes to deftly command your crew and become the best captain in the cosmos? We'll see!

—description from the publisher

Welcome to the Northern Expanse, a place where nature is still unexplored, mystical and dangerous. When the humans first arrived, they thought they found an unspoiled paradise, filled with bountiful forests, lakes swimming with fish and cold freshwater flowing from the mountains. But as their settlements expanded and the surrounding forests grew thinner, nature itself pushed back. Great creatures known as Beasts emerged, and with their fangs, claws and mystical powers, they proved an incredible threat to the humans. In order to protect the settlements, humans enlisted specialised hunters, tasked with tracking and killing the Beasts before too many of their kin perish.

The Beast uses a deck of direction cards to move over forests, swamps and caverns, using guile and deceit to hide its track from the hunters. However, whenever a hunter moves over a location where the Beast has previously been, a trail appears. Only when a hunter searches a location or the Beast itself attacks an unsuspecting target is the Beast's actual position revealed. More so, each hunter has but one chance of searching each round, making it a tense and difficult decision. Hunters seldom have full information whether the trail they’re pursuing contains the Beast’s actual location, or if the trail has already gone cold.

Each action you perform in this game is done by playing a card from your hand (up to a maximum of two cards per turn). This means that if a player wants to search, attack or move, they need to have a card in their hand that lets them do that. Before each round, both hunters and Beast participate in a draft for the most important cards. All action cards can be used by both Beast and hunters alike.

In order to win this game, you either need to cooperate every step of the way if you play as a hunter, or skillfully outmaneuver your opponents if you play as Beast. On their own, hunters are never stronger than the Beast. Only when hunters communicate, strategize and combine their actions can they bring down the Beast before it’s too late.

—description from the designer

The Yawning Portal is an iconic inn that attracts fascinating adventurers with two things in common: They're famished, and they have unique tastes in food.

As part of the tavern's staff in Dungeons & Dragons: The Yawning Portal, you need to feed them by matching up food tokens with the orders pictured on their hero card. You earn colored gems (and points) for every matching food token, and a bonus for completing an order. The colored gems that appear most frequently on the board receive the highest value, so strategize to tip the scoring scale in your favor — and don't be afraid to use potions to make patrons love your food! Collect more points if you're the first to achieve an objective challenge or earn an endgame bonus. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins.