My most expected book of the year arrived. It’s not a new novel from Brandon Sanderson. It’s not a new Stephen King novel. It’s not even the new novel about my beloved Troll Slayer. It’s Dice Men by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson. It’s about the beginnings of the Games Workshop. 

You know, I am a sucker for everything that covers behind-the-scenes information. I loved these extras that back then were added to DVD discs. I loved documentaries about creating and developing games (like Indie Game: The Movie). I cannot express how I enjoyed  Designers & Dragons series by Shannon Appelcline. And now this – the origin story of the Games Workshop! OMG!

Heat is one of the best racing board games I have played. And let me pair this statement with another one: I am a sucker for racing games, and I played a lot of them. When I say the game is great, I really mean it.

It has a simple and brilliant heat mechanism that forces us to think desperately about what to do before each turn and curve. It’s a small deck – our valuable resource. How much do you want to burn it this time, how many cards from this deck may you risk discarding this time? With this one rule, designers Asger Harding Granerud and Daniel Skjold Pedersen created the best board gaming equation: maximum player excitement achieved with minimum rules complexity. 

It was 2015, I think. Our fan base in the US was growing like crazy, it was almost 10 years after our Essen debut, and I felt stunning support from the geeks’ community. At some point in the office, we came up with the idea to make a photo contest for our fans. It was almost a decade ago, far before Tik Tok, Facebook groups, and all that jazz. Instagram was already a thing, but not too much in the board games niche. We had a ton of standard product photos but wanted some creativity. We asked fans for help.

The contest, as you can assume, was super successful, we received many photos, photos that I was posting on Portal Games’ social media channels for years. The creativity of Portal Games fans was impressive. The photo above is the one that won the contest. It’s been years, and I cannot express how much I love the simplicity of the idea behind it and the message it sends.

It’s exactly what Robinson Crusoe is all about. The unknown. The walk. The adventure.

Ideas are nothing. Execution is everything. You heard this a thousand times already. You nod, you agree, but let’s face it – do you really understand it? Do you know what exactly it means?

I’ll give you an example. It’s called Mille Fiori. It’s been done by Reiner Knizia.

Mille Fiori has no single new idea in it. It’s a well done family eurogame. Each year hundreds of games like that are published in Germany. Most likely Reiner designed it during a lunch break, between his other bigger projects. It’s a simple play a card, put your piece on a board and score points. There are 4 unique areas on the board, therefore four unique ways of scoring. There is literally nothing new. I bet, and I am dead serious, most of you could play the game without reading a rulebook. I’ll give you your cards, your pieces, and you’d start playing.

I’d be rich. If the idea I want to discuss today were reality, I would buy a castle – just like Sting. I would have a massive library in it and would not work for the next 20 years. Are you ready for a ride to an alternate reality? Let’s go.

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We are living in the subscription era. The new format became popular a few years ago and spread like a virus in all different directions. Movies? You can subscribe to Netflix to have a vast majority of movies and tv shows. Video games? You can subscribe to Origin or Xbox Game Pass and have countless titles at hand. Music? We all use Spotify these days, right? The same goes for audiobooks, comic books, and any other content we consume.

Except for board games.