Toast Elizabeth Hargrave, Side-Eye Game Reviewers, and Swap Sheep for Hemp | BoardGameGeek News

by W. Eric Martin

▪️ Designer Elizabeth Hargrave is Gen Con’s 2025 Guest of Honor and will give a presentation on Saturday, August 2 from 1-2:30 titled “Nature Systems Game Design”. The pitch for this presentation:

Join 2025 Guest of Honor Elizabeth Hargrave as she relates how she goes about translating cool things in nature into the form of a game — then practice brainstorming your own ideas for nature-based games from prompts she provides.

Followed by a Q&A and moderated by Kathleen Mercury

Hargrave’s just announced game Sanibel will be on display at Gen Con 2025 courtesy of publisher Avalon Hill.

▪️ Jonathan Schindler has a fun blog post on BGG titled “Hot Take: Reviewers Aren’t Representative“, which on the one hand — duh — and on the other hand is a statement readers and viewers should always keep in mind.

I rarely watch game review videos because if I have the time available, I’d rather do something productive, but when I do watch them, I groan whenever someone says they can’t wait to get the game back to the table again and again. I know from personal experience that once I do a video on a game, it rarely comes out again because I have to move on to something else. In some cases I hold off on doing a video by claiming I need to play the game more often to get a better handle on it, but really I don’t want to put it aside just yet.

Recently I find myself focusing on new editions of older games — as with Alex Randolph‘s Big Shot from Playte (review coming soon) — so that I have an excuse to put them on the table again.

▪️ Cardboard Edison runs a contest each year to honor “great unpublished board games”, and the 2025 winner is Sammy Salkind’s Dot Com, which is described as follows:

An app-assisted economic strategy game where your money is burned away in real time. Two players face off as startup founders in the booming internet industry of 1999, working to smartly structure their business, develop their product, and advertise their brand.

My wife and I were freelancer writers in the Dot Com era, and for a couple of years companies kept sprouting up with mad money to throw at new projects that seemed ludicrous, but had deep funding pockets behind them. Such a strange time…

You can check out the top five games, as well as sixteen other finalists (out of 348(!) submissions) on Cardboard Edison‘s award page.

▪️ The 2025 Euchre World Championship took place in New Glarus, Wisconsin on May 17-18. You can read profiles of the singles and doubles winners on the World Euchre Federation website, and you can watch the tournament on its YouTube channel.

▪️ In April 2025, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) suggested that CATAN players set aside the sheep cards and use hemp cards instead to avoid the game’s “sheep exploitation”, with an unofficial sticker pack being available for those who want to make the switch.

▪️ German publisher HCM Kinzel filed insolvency proceedings in February 2025, and in May 2025 the Heilbronn District Court assigned an insolvency administrator to monitor and secure the company’s assets. From a May 19, 2025 article on Verbraucherschutzforum.Berlin, as translated via Google and edited by me, “HCM Kinzel GmbH is prohibited from disposing of its assets without the consent of the provisional insolvency administrator. This applies in particular to all bank accounts and receivables of the company.” (H/T to BrettspielBox)

What’s more:

The administrator has been granted the right to enter the debtor’s business premises, to inspect the business documents, and to investigate the necessary investigations into the economic situation of the company. HCM Kinzel GmbH is obliged to provide all requested information and documents.

A central objective of the provisional administration is to clarify whether the company’s assets are sufficient to cover the costs of insolvency proceedings. Only then will the formal opening of insolvency proceedings be decided.

This is a decisive turning point for creditors, business partners, and employees. The coming weeks will clarify whether an orderly restructuring will occur, an insolvency plan procedure is being sought, or a liquidation is inevitable.