Wizards' D&D and Magic teams move to unionise, Avalon Hill signs Connie Vogelmann, and Nascard races a trick-taker

The desk covers 5 to 7 October 2026, and the hard news in those days landed on the people who make games. The teams behind Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering have moved to unionise, and Hasbro's hobby imprint has put a designer's name on a box. The desk also holds a designer diary about a racing game that gave up its track, a five-year-old word game heading back into shops, a live campaign from the Galactic Cruise team, and what seven plays of a SPIEL Essen release reveal about simultaneous turns.

On the morning of 6 October the Dungeons & Dragons team — the people on Dungeons & Dragons and D&D Beyond — and Studio X, the Wizards of the Coast studio behind the tabletop Magic: The Gathering and Duel Masters, told leadership they intend to join the Communications Workers of America. They go in as part of United Wizards of the Coast–CWA, which already represents the Magic: The Gathering Arena team. 12

The move follows a win inside the same company. The MTG Arena team announced its union in April and won its election in June, and the two new units prepared alongside it. Workers have filed an election petition with the National Labor Relations Board and given management until Tuesday 13 October to recognise the union voluntarily. 3

What the two units are asking for is the useful part for a designer reading from outside. Their open letter cites mounting instability within Wizards and across the games industry, pay that reflects the work, and clearly defined career progression. The union's public list adds layoff protections, protection against the encroachment of AI, remote and hybrid working, accessible healthcare, and full ownership of work created outside the office. 23 Joey Haeck, a senior game designer on Dungeons & Dragons, said they are organising "because scared workers are neither happy nor productive", and named layoff protections, forced relocation protections, equitable pay, mandatory AI use protections and parental support as subjects for bargaining. 3

The scale behind that list is worth knowing. CWA counts more than 4,000 games workers organised through its CODE-CWA campaign, from Microsoft's studios to independent publishers, and its direct-join body for freelancers and laid-off developers, United Videogame Workers–CWA Local 9433, launched in 2025 and now holds nearly 600 members across the United States and Canada. 3 The two units are the benches a designer deals with when pitching a D&D adventure line, a licensed card game or a co-development deal, and staff churn is what ends those relationships halfway. The 13 October deadline decides whether that organising gets recognised without a fight.

Avalon Hill's next board game is Tideward, designed by Connie Vogelmann, and it reaches shops on 16 January 2027 at $39.99 for two to four players aged ten and up. 4 Vogelmann designed Apiary and Wyrmspan, both published by Stonemaier Games, and a Hasbro imprint putting her name on the cover is the detail a designer should take from the announcement. 5

The game itself stays deliberately light. Each turn a player takes three actions — hatch eggs, feed the turtles, or move the hatchlings — and scores on how the hatchlings end up arranged on the mat, plus whether the player completes the secret mission printed on their Tide Quest card. The race ends when one player has every hatchling into the water. 4

There is a retail half to this too. Wizards of the Coast has opened its Wizards EventLink scheduling to Avalon Hill and Hasbro Games events, which puts the imprint's catalogue in front of the same store base that runs Magic nights and pre-releases. 4

Phantom Ink first appeared in 2021 and was recommended by the Spiel des Jahres jury in 2024. Allplay releases it into general retail on 20 November at $20. 6 Two to ten players spend 10 to 15 minutes as mediums, asking the spirits questions and reading their answers one letter at a time. A team that has enough to guess the word shouts "Silencio!" before the other side works it out, and then has to get the word right. 6

That is the retail second-life route in one example: the same game and the same credits, with a publisher spending a shelf slot and a $20 price point on a design that came out five years ago. 6

BoardGameWire reported on 5 October that Hasbro has extended its licensing agreement with Renegade Game Studios again, with new games and expansions planned for 2027 and beyond across Axis & Allies, Acquire, Diplomacy, Heroscape, Robo Rally and Ikusa. 7 The renewal itself was in the last edition of this desk; the new information is where the relationship now reaches. Renegade's Hasbro work has spread to Wizards of the Coast, where a new edition of the Dungeons & Dragons board game Lords of Waterdeep and its Scoundrels of Skullport expansion arrived last year, and the long out-of-print Castle Ravenloft board game returns to retail in 2027. 7 Power Rangers: Impossible Odds, a co-operative dice game built around boss battles, was detailed at Renegade Con and is due in April 2027. 7

Guillem Coll's diary for Nascard is built from four decisions, and the third one is where a designer will get the most. Coll and Ferran Renalias started at SPIEL Essen 2023, where the two were showing Trekking for TCG Factory and Devir's new Pocket line of small, cheap boxes caught their attention. Renalias plays Flamme Rouge with every expansion; Coll was playing a lot of Heat that year. The question they set themselves was whether those feelings fit in a Pocket box. 8

Four premises followed: drop the physical track, make trick-taking the engine of the race, give each suit an ability tied to car management, and set turn order by track position so the leading car commits first and everyone behind can react to it. 8 The track was the expensive premise. Their first attempt tracked only relative distance, with players adding or removing spacer cards between cars, until the edge cases and the constant handling of cards beat the idea. A straight multi-lane track was more tangible but needed the cars repositioning every round to keep their gaps. They ended up building the track out of cards, two cars per card, one inside lane and one outside — and when a third car wanted the same space, NASCAR gave them the answer, because contact between cars fit the system. Collisions became part of the race. 8

The trick-taking system took the same route through failure. Seven suits with values from 1 to 9 and an ability each gave them too much to balance; five suits of ten cards was manageable but still flat, even with a stage card revealed each round to set the rewards. The lock came when they tied aggression to trump. Play trump and you drive hard; play another suit and you move less but get the suit's ability. The winner of a trick moves six spaces, second place five, third four, down to sixth place moving one. The four suits map onto parts of the car — yellow is power for extra movement, orange is fuel for drawing cards, grey is tyres for recovering worn cards, blue is leadership and always counts as trump — and each suit has four ability variants that change from one game to the next. 8

Wear went through one rejected design and one that stuck. The first version put a tyre card in your own hand: you could not reorder the cards, you could only play cards to the right of the tyre card, and pushing the car slid that card rightward until you made a pit stop. Coll loved that the wear sat physically in the hand, and playtests killed it anyway, because players ran out of available cards and keeping the hand order was its own chore. The final system uses two speeds of damage instead. Worn cards leave your hand and sit in front of you until a pit stop or the grey suit ability brings them back, while burning fuel discards a card for the rest of the race. Tyres cost you temporarily; fuel costs you permanently, and both follow from how you drove. 8

Two smaller choices are worth carrying into your own designs. The automa exists to fill out two- and three-player races, and it costs five seconds of upkeep: at the start of each turn you place one card in front of each automa car, which shows each automa car's suit on the card back while keeping its value hidden. 8 And Devir put the game through a second development phase with Diego San Martín before Meeple Foundry handled illustration and graphic design, with the finished game debuting at this year's SPIEL. 8

Jamey Stegmaier has been a guest on The Bits, the podcast run by Joe from Allplay and Nick from Bitewing, and has published his own answers to the three questions he put to them while the episode is still unaired. The answers are short and specific. He names unique, human-made art on every card and tile as the thing Stonemaier does best and describes it as a significant expense; he names first-printing errors as the company's biggest weakness and says the PageProof app and the PPC playtests are the current countermeasures; and he ranks word of mouth first among the ways new players find a Stonemaier game, ahead of reviewers, since the company sends thousands of review copies a year. 9

Kinson Key Games, the small Tennessee publisher behind Galactic Cruise, has Excursions on Kickstarter now. It shares the setting and the company rather than being an expansion: players are cruise directors working out of Preston Space Station, planning trips for passengers who come in three types. 10

Designer Ben Rosset has built simultaneous action games before, including The Game Makers, Fromage & Formaggio and Between Two Cities, and the shape here is one action chosen for the table. The active player picks one of seven main actions — take two credits, take two passengers, take two excursion cards and schedule them, take two ad tokens, buy an upgrade, buy a development, or launch a shuttle — and every player may then use that same action. The active player also takes the bonus attached to it, and any player can spend a development gear to use the adjacent main action instead. Players who cannot or will not follow along take a consolation pick of one credit, one ad token, one card or one fuel or food. 10

The scoring is back-loaded, and the reviewer says so plainly: in his games, end-game scoring came to half or more of what players scored during the game. Unlocked upgrades pay in bands of 2, 5 or 9 points, company goals pay the same way, the rightmost empty development column scores, and unused goods and guests are divided by five. The game triggers when a player passes 50 points, finishes the current turn, then gives everyone a final turn treated as the active player. 10 He played it five times in two weeks and taught it to nine people, including a six-player game with four players new to Galactic Cruise; the board carries a first-play side with starting setup cards. Solo runs on six bots, one printed on the back of each player board, still in playtesting. 10

Justin Bell's piece on Timespan, Alion's SPIEL Essen release, is written seven plays in, and the mechanical claim is small enough to check. Timespan is a medium-weight strategy game with zero direct conflict, built on simultaneous play, with "peace" as a resource you can bank and score. Its five tracks cover science, culture, spaceship, balloon and ship; luxury tiles boost the strength of actions, each player has their own action tableau and tech board, and the whole thing runs about 90 minutes multiplayer and an hour solo. 11

The honest caveat is about player count. Bell loves combos and dislikes waiting through other people's, which is why he avoids Tiletum at four players and rates it at two or three, and simultaneous play is what keeps Timespan viable in the same range. He also flags how far the scoring sits from the mid-game: games where 75 points looked like a stretch ended with someone on 133. 11

Excursions is on Kickstarter now, and the interesting question for a designer is the one the preview answers: with one action offered to the whole table each turn, how much control does a player keep, and how much of the score arrives at the end rather than along the way. Tideward reaches shops on 16 January and Phantom Ink on 20 November, two different bets on a shelf slot worth watching — one on a designer's name, one on a jury recommendation carried over from a different edition. And 13 October decides whether the Dungeons & Dragons and Magic teams are recognised without a fight; those teams sit behind two of the licences a designer is most likely to pitch for, and their labour position now belongs in the risk you price.