Steamforged's £18.8m of undelivered games, the Rubik's cube that became Dungeon Cube, and a Helluva Boss co-op

The desk covers 9 to 12 October 2026. One campaign note carries its own 6 October start date and says so, because it opened while the previous issue was being set. The week's heaviest business story is a publisher with nine unfinished campaigns and almost nothing left to say about them. Two designer diaries show where a mechanical problem finally gave way.

BoardGameWire published the full ledger on 9 October. Steamforged Games has nine campaigns with outstanding fulfilment obligations, and together they raised £18,830,463 including late pledges. 1

Monster Hunter World: Iceborne is the largest of the nine at £6,261,436 from almost 15,000 backers. Delivery was first estimated for November 2024. Helldivers 2 raised £3,239,140 against an October 2026 estimate, and Hearts of Iron: The Board Game £1,240,053 against June 2026. 1

The updates have stopped. Steamforged said in January that it was aiming to deliver Iceborne to every region in July. It has posted twice since: an April note reporting production "back up and running following Chinese New Year", and a July apology for having no fulfilment information to give. 1

Backers have started working around the publisher. BoardGameWire reports waits of weeks or months for answers to refund requests, and multiple backers opening PayPal disputes and credit-card chargebacks. Steamforged's head of marketing, Chynna-Blue Perkins, told the company's Warmachine Discord on 23 September that crowdfunding questions belong on the campaign pages. 1

The licence holders have begun talking in public. Paradox Interactive owns Hearts of Iron and told BoardGameWire this week that it is in talks with Steamforged "to find the best way to get the game completed". Paradox added that it is not ready to commit to a course of action. Feuerland Games, which published Terra Mystica and partnered on the special edition, declined to comment. 1

Two public records sit under all of this. Companies House, the UK registrar, began compulsory strike-off proceedings over Steamforged's overdue accounts in early September. The agency discontinued them four days later, and the accounts are still listed as overdue. 1

The investor side is worse. Foresight cut the carrying value of its Steamforged holdings by almost 74% in the first half of 2026, from £3.68m to just over £960,000. That figure values Foresight's stake, not the company. 1

For a designer whose game sits at a publisher in this position, the useful signal is which channel the company still answers in. Steamforged's own instruction to backers is now that the campaign pages carry every update. Its chief executive, Rich Loxam, has not responded to BoardGameWire's questions across August, September and October. 1

The company's own account of its communication has moved in the other direction. It told BoardGameWire in June that it would move from posting during quiet periods to "providing key updates". Back in 2022, after a difficult Dark Souls fulfilment, Loxam wrote that handling problems "behind closed doors" had been one of Steamforged's bigger mistakes. 1

Warren James Games and the animation studio SpindleHorse announced Helluva Boss: The Seven Sigils on 9 October. It is a two-to-four player co-operative game built on Vivienne Medrano's Amazon Prime series. Tabletop Sentinel carried the announcement, and Collider had the exclusive a day earlier. 2

Warren James Games is the publisher behind SPACE KING! The Board Game, which raised almost $10m on Kickstarter earlier this year. 2

The mechanics are the reason to read this one properly. Players drop sin shards into a physical tower, and the draw decides which options are open to the group. Seven decks key to the Seven Rings of Hell. Finishing a Sigil raises the requirement on the Sigils beside it, so the board gets harder as the team closes in. 2

Gold buys single-use spell cards. Optional "remix" rules and higher starting requirements raise the difficulty once a group has learned the game. Medrano was involved in development. SpindleHorse's senior writer, Adam Neyland, says the game explores a corner of Hell's society the series has left alone. A Kickstarter campaign is planned with no date, price or delivery estimate yet, and pre-registration is open. 2

Wizards of the Coast showed two D&D: Star Wars books at New York Comic Con on 9 October. Star Wars Core Rules supplies the rules set for playing Dungeons & Dragons inside the Star Wars universe and arrives in 2027. Star Wars: Tyro Squadron is an adventure book set between A New Hope and Return of the Jedi. 3

Both books sit under the Lucasfilm licensing agreement Wizards announced at Gen Con this year. That deal lets the company publish D&D: Star Wars titles in its Universes Beyond line, which is the D&D rules engine being licensed out as a product in its own right. 3

The Core Rules book is the one to watch. It shows how much of D&D survives the move into somebody else's universe. 3

Nicolò Chioato's designer diary for Dungeon Cube went up on 9 October, and it opens with back surgery. For about twenty days in the autumn of 2022 he could walk or lie down and do little else. He spent them on the couch learning to solve a Rubik's cube. 4

The observation that carried the whole design is a property of the cube. Its six centre pieces never move relative to one another. Chioato read each centre as a hero and the eight squares around it as a micro-map, so one face became a scene. 4

Two prototypes failed before that scene worked. A LEGO cube with a minifigure in the centre could not carry enough meaning in its pieces. Sticking symbols onto the squares fixed the vocabulary and left open what the player was meant to do with them. 4

Connection points answered that. Every symbol on a movable square carries small points of its own, and a point matching the hero's own activates the symbol. The monster is fought, the obstacle bites, the bonus pays out. A face becomes readable at a glance. 4

The transferable lesson is what happened next. Resolving the hero's face after every rotation buried simple missions under endless chains of effects, and the project stalled for weeks. Chioato found the fix in the cube algorithms he had already been learning: some rotations move the lower layers while leaving the upper face untouched. Moves could cost different amounts. 4

So a player gets unlimited moves that leave their own face alone and two moves that may disturb it, then resolves. Six faces became six heroes sharing one cube. What emerged was a race of efficiency, since improving your own face rearranges everybody else's, and leaving problems for the next player turned out to be a real strategy. 4

Red Glove signed the game. Federico Dumas added a roguelite progression so a failed mission still earns upgrades, and Simona Lombardo wrote six stories that interlock into one. The finished game is Dungeon Cube: La Furia dei Drahakor. 4

Emiliano Sciarra's diary for Black Flag!, published 11 October, is a long account of what gets cut. The game reaches shops from DV Games nearly a quarter of a century after the first edition of BANG!. Its oldest notes belong to a draft called Caribbean, dated 30 March 2004. 5

That draft already held most of the finished game. It had the Ship, with range and size, and cannons, sail and sailor cards. The Storm was there too, then called the Doldrums. 5

The Mutiny card was the best thing in it and never balanced. The card let the player who used it switch sides for as long as it stayed in front of them, which promised a layered decision about which side to keep playing for. In practice, players played it on themselves at the right moment. Forcing it onto others produced a worse problem: the strongest line was holding it until the factions were clear, with no turns left to remove it. Sciarra cut the card, and calls that his one regret. 5

Removing player elimination took far longer, and the diary explains the size of the problem. In BANG! elimination is the timer, the scoring system and the balancing mechanism at once, because killing a player is permanent, measurable progress. Rebuilding all three took until 2010, when Sciarra found the scoring system that later turned up in Samurai Sword. 5

The route is worth following for the dead ends alone. The project resurfaced for six months as Tobago, with a Dutchman standing in for the pirate faction. An ending built on a haunted Ghost Ship ran long because it skipped sunk players. The fix came from noticing that sinking everyone should take about two or three rounds, roughly the time BANG! players need to work out the roles. 5

The finished game sits between BANG! and Samurai Sword and trades hidden roles for openly visible scores. The table reads the board more and speculates less. Sciarra's own summary is the takeaway: design often means letting go of a dozen brilliant ideas that refuse to work in that particular context. 5

Awaken Realms opened Nemesis: Legacy on Gamefound on 6 October, three days before this window begins, which is why the date is stated here. The campaign cleared its €50,000 goal in 54 seconds and stood at €5,198,595 from 14,974 backers when this desk ran. 6

The campaign page calls it the first full campaign experience set in the Nemesis universe. Its core pledge carries the miniatures, the unlocked stretch goals, infinity mode and a recharge pack that resets the campaign. A recharge pack in the core box says the campaign is built to be run again. 6

ThisWay's ARCTICA opened on Gamefound the same week. It is a card-driven engine builder about developing Arctic ecosystems and letting wildlife colonise new territory. It cleared its €50,000 goal in 20 minutes and reached €419,850 from 2,845 backers. 7

Dale Yu reviewed Kano on Opinionated Gamers on 11 October, having first played it as a prototype in April 2025. The Matagot release is designed by Angel Pintero for one to four players, ages 12 and up, in about 35 minutes. 8

A turn is short and tightly constrained. You may swap two orthogonally adjacent paint pots on the shared palette. Then you take pots of a single colour, and only from one row or column. Pots placed on your scroll fall to the lowest free space in their column, and the order of the pattern is fixed. 8

The four-pot limit carries the tension. Any visible pots beyond four at the end of your turn become Cloud tiles. Clouds occupy space on your scroll and score nothing, so taking more paint than you can place costs you board. Yu's warning for new players is that patterns must match exactly, with some pieces mirrored or rotated and the rest fixed. 8

Scoring concentrates in one place. Artworks pay 1, 3 or 7 points by size and a secret Masterpiece pays 12. The red goal sheet pays up to 30, against the white sheet's 3 to 7. That gap is why Yu plays for red first and fits the white criteria in late. He rates the game "I love it", and so does Doug G. 8

Nemesis: Legacy and ARCTICA both showed fifteen days left when this desk ran, which puts their closes at 27 October. Steamforged's accounts are still overdue at Companies House, and how its licence holders and its manufacturers respond is the thread to keep pulling. Helluva Boss: The Seven Sigils has no campaign date yet, so its pre-registration page is the place to watch. Dungeon Cube: La Furia dei Drahakor is finished and signed to Red Glove, and the free-move rule is the part worth testing in hand at the first opportunity.