Anthropic tells Claude to stop cloning board games, SPIEL counts six thefts with no cameras on the booths, and Arkham Horror's remaster funds in eighteen minutes

This desk covers 2 to 4 November 2026. Anthropic has told its coding tool to stop rebuilding other people's games, the organiser of SPIEL Essen has answered questions about six thefts at October's fair, and Fantasy Flight's remaster of Arkham Horror closes its first campaign tonight with more than $4m pledged. A critic's three plays of the Landmarks expansion follow.

Around 27 October, two new sentences appeared in the standing instructions for Claude Code, Anthropic's coding tool. "Do build original games, games in a genre, and games from the user's own designs and assets," reads one. "Don't build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original," reads the other. 1

Anthropic staff member Addy Osmani confirmed the change in a post on X. He said the company had made it because using Claude to infringe intellectual property rights was already against its usage policy. 1

Board games are unusually exposed to this. The rules of a game generally cannot be protected by copyright, so a copyist can rebuild a system outright as long as the art, the words and the name change. 1

Last year a software company called Sembit used Claude Code to produce a browser version of Catan in four minutes. The build carried significant bugs and some parts of the game that did not work. 1

Colonist.io has done the same thing in the open since 2017, when it launched as Katan.io. It sells itself as a free alternative to Catan and states on its site that it has no association with the game. The platform reported 60 million games played and 3.6 million active players across 2025. 1

Catan's owners have mostly stayed out of court. A 2022 study in the Iowa Law Review noted their apparent decision not to sue Colonist.io, and set that beside 2011, when an Android imitation called Island Settlers was withdrawn after a cease-and-desist from Catan's lawyers. 1

Disney did move, in 2024. An unofficial Lorcana client called Pixelborn closed after Disney's action over the use of the game's protected card imagery, and its creator Pavel Kolev said more than 6.5 million games had been played on it. 1

The new instruction has already refused work. One Claude Code user asked for a password-protected version of a commercially released co-op game, so that friends could play remotely, including one who could no longer attend in person, with AI-controlled players added to study the game's strategy. Claude declined and offered to help build an original game using similar co-op and limited-information mechanics. 1

One wargame publisher has been selling exactly what the instruction now blocks. Raymond Weiss runs Conflict Simulations, which has released around 30 tabletop titles since 2017 and taken three Charles S. Roberts Award nominations. He charges $400 to $800 a project for unlicensed digital versions of other publishers' wargames, and reported on GitHub that Claude Code had begun refusing work it previously supported. 1

Weiss acknowledged that he holds no licences from the publishers whose games he adapts. In a blog post on 2 November he said he had already resumed the interrupted work using two rival coding tools, OpenAI's Codex and Kimi. 1

Two things follow for a designer. The protection that has held up in the cases above sits in the material copyright covers: the art, the rulebook text, the names, the component identity. 1 And this guardrail belongs to one vendor. Weiss was refused, then carried on with two rival tools within days. 1

Six thefts were reported at SPIEL Essen this year, and the organiser says all six took place during setup or dismantling, when the halls had no public inside them. 2

The worst hit was Tossit, a French games company. Its team left its stand in Hall 6 at about 22:45 on Sunday 25 October, the last day of the fair, and came back at 08:00 to find more than 500 units of merchandise gone, along with tools stored inside the stand furniture. 2

Co-founder Gaëtan Ekszterowicz estimated that clearing that much would take 35 to 45 minutes. He put the loss at about €14,000 of stock, equipment and tools, and said the company was left without what it needed to finish dismantling the booth. 2

The Rolling Inn, which sells tabletop accessories, lost €4,000 in cash during dismantling on the Sunday evening. That was its entire takings from the show. 2

A third exhibitor, Julian Hill of the media outlet Boxed Meeples, had his bag taken from the Paverson Games stand on Wednesday 21 October, the day before the fair opened. The bag held money, payment cards, camera and sound equipment, and recordings of interviews he had already conducted. 2

Both Tossit and The Rolling Inn complained about the response they got. Ekszterowicz alleged that staff laughed at his team and that a member of staff tried to take a phone from his marketing manager. Merz Verlag denied both, saying Messe Essen had refused to be filmed on personal-rights grounds. 2

The organiser's account rests on two facts. No CCTV covered the booths that were robbed. And exhibitors were reminded regularly that they are responsible for protecting their own property, with the option of paying for dedicated guards outside public hours. 2

Messe Essen's press leader Tom Kraayvanger told Wargamer that the venue weighs data protection and the privacy rights of the many people on site. He argued that footage of a hall full of people moving goods cannot separate a legitimate removal from an unauthorised one. 2

The pattern goes back a decade. In 2018 six publishers reported more than $20,000 of combined losses at the fair, Japanime Games alone above $10,000. In 2016 Greek publisher LudiCreations had about €3,500 taken from its cash box. 2

Asked whether the 2027 show would change its arrangements, Merz Verlag said it was gathering information and evaluating the situation. 2

For anyone taking a booth next October, the risk sits in the hours the halls are shut and the cost of covering it falls on the exhibitor. A paid guard for the last night, or a stand emptied into a van before midnight, now belongs in the show budget alongside the stand itself.

Fantasy Flight Games is running the first campaign in its Vault Series on Gamefound, with Asmodee. The project is a remastered edition of the 2005 Arkham Horror, and the campaign page lists new quality-of-life components, new art and graphics, and cleaned-up rules. 3

The funding goal was $300,000, and it cleared in 17 minutes and 50 seconds. Read this morning, the campaign stands at $4,119,521 from 9,984 backers, 1,373% of its goal, and closes in the early hours of 5 November. 3

The game seats one to eight players, runs about 180 minutes, and carries an age rating of 14 and up. Delivery is listed for December 2027, and 41 of 43 stretch goals have unlocked. 3

Five expansions are on offer at $60 each: Dunwich Horror, Innsmouth Horror, Kingsport Horror, Cosmic Horror and Miskatonic Horror. Add to those a $20 deluxe rulebook and a $90 set of more than 60 investigator figures. 3

The pledge split is the part a publisher should read. The $350 Gameplay Bundle, which pairs the base game with all five expansions, has been pledged 2,539 times. The $70 base-game tier, called Arkham Reborn, has 2,348 pledges. 3

The upper tiers did real work as well. The $580 Ultimate Collector's Set drew 1,894 pledges, the $490 Deluxe Collector's Set another 1,011, and the $90 figure set sold on its own drew 1,683. 3

A remaster sells the same system twice and lets the whole line go at once. Here the full-line bundle drew more backers than the base game alone, which makes the case for pricing that bundle inside the campaign rather than discovering the demand afterwards.

Justin Bell reviewed Landmarks of the Lost Atlas on Meeple Mountain on 3 November, after three plays of the new material. He bought the expansion himself, having called the base game one of his favourites of 2024. 4

Asterisk Games publishes both games, designed by Kevin Delger and Jacob Schacht. The base game builds its hex map during play; the Landmarks box adds 14 tiles, from one hex to seven, with at most three of them in any single game. 4

Four new minor companies change the early game. Twin Cities gets two home tokens, so it holds ground even if it never merges. Circus counts a single stop twice on a train's route, which pays best when it sits beside an offboard location. 4

Manufacturing arrives with a permanent 2 train, which occupies one of its owner's train slots. Coupling Bell files as a company for experienced players, and he has had it in only one game so far. 4

The events are new, and the design is one card at the start of each cycle, governing the whole cycle. "CEOs Get Rich!" lets a company president withdraw $20 from the treasury as personal wealth, worth $40 across two operating rounds and often enough to buy another share in the next stock round. 4

"Overtime!" asks for a third operating round. Bell drew it in the fifth cycle of a long game, in a game with two long rounds and a merger round already in it, and the session ran into a third hour. 4

"Train Auction Today" sets off an auction for the right to double the highest stop on one company's run. Someone has to bid for the privilege, which is what keeps the card in check. 4

Mirage is the tile to study. Setup puts it on the map edge with two Desert tiles; a run through it pays $60, and the tile then teleports to take the place of a Desert, chosen by the train used to reach it. 4

In Bell's game a player held two companies in range and hit the Mirage with a 3 train for a large payout. His conclusion is that the landmarks give an experienced group more to consider during map setup and when bidding for minors. 4

The simpler tiles are worth knowing by name. Wildflower Valley adds $20 to any run that includes it. Cave adds its printed value when it starts or ends a run. Cliff trades a train in for half its value paid into the treasury, and Rock Formation moves the share price two steps once a game. 4

The production earned its own paragraph in the review. Bell calls the rulebooks the cleanest set of rules he has seen, with exceptions called out in the margins and nothing spare in the body text, and the merger moment is a corporation card laid across two tarot-sized minor-company cards. 4

Playtime has stayed at two to three hours. The one addition he has not tried is the Metropolitan Transit Department, a neutral corporation that players use to help or hurt each other. 4

An event that adds a whole operating round buys variety at the table's expense, and a three-player long game of Lost Atlas already runs long. Testing an event deck for time, and not only for balance, is the part worth copying from this review.

If your system could be rebuilt by a competent programmer in a week, assume that it will be. Put your protection in the material that has held up in court — the art, the rulebook text, the names, the component design — and keep that record somewhere you can produce it.

If next October includes a booth in Essen, add a guard or an emptied stand to the budget. The organiser's position is that the stock is yours to protect, and all six thefts this year happened when the halls were shut.

If you are weighing a remaster, read the Arkham pledge table before you set tiers. Backers there took the $350 full-line bundle more often than the $70 base game on its own.