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The landscape was full of machines and scrap metal connected to the facility in one way or another. Always present on the horizon were the colossal cooling towers of the Bona Reactor, with their green obstruction lights.

If you put your ear to the ground, you could hear the heartbeat of the Loop – the purring of the Gravitron, the central piece of engineering magic that was the focus of the Loop’s experiments.


This is Tales From The Loop - a cooperative board game for 1-5 players. Take the roles of local kids and investigate whatever phenomena that threaten the islands (or perhaps just the local video store), and hopefully stop them.

Each day starts at school, but as soon as the bell rings you can use whatever time you have before dinner and homework to go exploring! Player actions are integrated, meaning there’s no downtime as you wait for others taking their turn. It also makes cooperating with your fellow players dynamic as you can react to things that happen in a turn and don’t have to plan it all out from the start.

Based on the award-winning artwork by Simon Stålenhag, this game is now live on Kickstarter, but you can play the first scenario right now on Tabletopia!



Art by Simon Stålenhag

Your goal is simple. Create a civilization rich with culture able to stand the test of time. To succeed, you will need to not only focus your energy on your own civilization, but those of your rivals as well. With a shared pool of resources to fight over, and a unique bidding mechanic that will have you guessing at your opponents intentions, Moaideas Game Design brings a tactically minded medium weight game for 2-5 civilizations will keep you on your toes from start to finish.

You start with a civilization that has an initial focus, such as Military or Trade. While many games reward a strong strategy from the start with a hyperfocus on your end goal, The Flow of Time instead rewards quick thinking and the ability to adapt to changing circumstances on the fly. You might start the game as a bloodthirsty clan, only to inevitably become a peaceful trade empire by the end.

A central tableau stores cards across the ages for players to bid on to improve their civilization or potentially lay waste to others. Players have five actions on their turn, which minimizes analysis paralysis for those groups that have players like that. You can activate cards you’ve previously purchased, harvest resources to let you pay for cards, or use the final three actions to interact with the cards available on the tableau, purchasing or investing in them to improve your civilization.

Designer Jesse Li (Guns & Steel, Ponzi Scheme) has created a game that combines many of the familiar elements of other civilization builders (7 Wonders, Through the Ages, Tapestry) and brought his own spin to it. It has clear, concise rules which are easy to teach people new to the genre, and lacks complex interactions that muddy down other civilization builders and prevent them from being as accessible.

That doesn’t mean The Flow of History is without its tricks. It brings a fresh, unique take to bidding mechanics by allowing you to invest in cards on the table, only to purchase them in a later round. This signals your intention to buy a card, but opens it up for players to snipe it from you. Having a card sniped from you gets you has you getting your investment back, as well as half the resource tokens from the supply... allowing crafty players to potentially bluff their way into resources if they can guess their opponents moves, force a player to overspend resources, or deny a player a crucial card.

The Flow of History offers both players seasoned to the Civilization Builder genre, and those new to it a game of interesting, thought provoking possibilities. Clocking in at less than 90 minutes for a full 5 players, it doesn’t overstay its welcome. Those that like their games with a nice amount of player interaction will find themselves right at home here in a game that is quick to teach, but hard to master.

A century from now all that remains of Earth is the detritus that humanity left behind. The races of a neighboring solar system have a penchant for artifacts left behind by extinct races. In Excavation Earth, you lead one of these races of alien explorers on their quest to excavate rare human artifacts and curate the ultimate art collection to sell off.

Excavation Earth is divided into three rounds, each of which starts with players drafting a hand of multi-use cards that will be used to perform actions. Players then take quick turns playing actions that allow them to move their explorers around the world map, excavate for artifacts, and deploy traders to bazaars and influencers to affect prices and wheel and deal on the black market.

The artifacts you dig up can be either sold to the bazaars housed on one of the aliens' ships that landed on Earth or added to a collection that will be sold off as a coherent art collection to museums back home. Excavation Earth ends after three rounds and the player who makes the most money during the game wins.

The game is also available on Kickstarter!

Fight for gold, blood and glory in asymmetrical skirmish game Valknut which is available on Tabletopia and Kickstarter now!

Valknut is a competitive game, where two players assume the role of a warband commander with unique powers that try to eliminate each other by flanking enemy warriors. The battlefield expands as the game progresses, providing limitless combinations and replayability!

Have you ever wanted to manage a fantasy guild of adventurers starting from fledgling adepts up through heroes and legends? With Guild Master from Good Games Publishing, now you can. Playing up to 4 over the span of 1-2 hours players will try to become the most renowned guild in the land.

Guild Master has a unique mixture of mechanics up its sleeve. At first glance the gameplay loop might seem simple: order your adventurers to go out and attempt contracts to gain coin or fame, recruit adventurers to do more complex contracts, or hire builders to upgrade your guild… but designer Chris Antony has made each of those choices carry weight, meaning, and tension.

Adventurers have things they’re good at, and combining those skills is a core part of the game. These will get you a larger chance at winning skill checks, giving a dice per skill point in order to beat static numbers, or rival guilds. They also have abilities that can only be activated in certain rounds of the game.

Giving your adventurers tasks is done in secret simultaneously by all players, programming out what you hope to achieve for the round, and combining skills of adventurers to help (Robo Rally, Root). Once revealed however, you may find that an order you programmed was too late and a rival guild got there first, or possibly worse, you are both attempting to do the same thing, and are contesting.

Contesting guilds behave differently depending on the action they’re contesting, with some actions simply requiring the adventurers to use their skills to beat the contest, or have the player have offered an adventurer more than another guild. But in the case of contracts, you’ll be negotiating with other guilds openly, discussing what facets of the contract you’d like to split, and then finally secretly revealing if you intend to cooperate, or conflict further.

Normally, negotiation in games becomes a centrepiece (Twilight Imperium, Rising Sun, Cosmic Encounter), but with Guild Master, there is tension to every action so that it becomes a seamless part of the game instead. Some games also restrict you in what you can negotiate on, but here even flat out bribing is encouraged.

There is a lot of depth, nuance and tension in Guild Master, with each action you can take being crafted to be as interesting as possible. With so many branching paths to victory, this is a game that will keep you wanting to play again for different outcomes. Do you have what it takes to make the most famous guild in the land? Or will your accomplishments lie unremembered through the sands of time.

Tabletopia Tip: Some games have zones where only you can see what is in them. Where you give out orders in Guild Master is one such place.