Osprey's board game team is gone, Wizards lets the union deadline pass, and The Great Harbor moved its dice to the edges
Osprey Games has let its whole board and card game team go while Bloomsbury sells the catalogue on its own, Wizards of the Coast has let the union deadline pass, and two designer diaries show how to cut rules without cutting decisions.
The desk covers 16 to 19 October 2026. BoardGameWire's Friday afternoon brought the week's biggest story: Osprey Games has let its entire board and card game development team go, five months into selling the business. The weekend added a union ballot at Wizards of the Coast and two designer diaries about cutting rules without cutting decisions.
Business
Osprey's board game team is gone, and the catalogue is what is for sale
Bloomsbury, Osprey's parent, told BoardGameWire that "all our colleagues who exclusively worked on creating and manufacturing our board and card games have now left the company". Multiple sources described the exits as redundancies at the end of September; the company declined to say how many people went. 1
Osprey announced in May that Bloomsbury had made the "difficult decision" to sell the board and card game side as part of a refocus on book publishing. At the time, two sources said the hope was a buyer who would take the team along with the games. 1
That buyer has not appeared. Bloomsbury is now looking for someone to take the catalogue on its own, which leaves the question every designer with a game at Osprey needs answered: where does the contract sit now? 1
BoardGameWire reports that some Osprey designer contracts restrict the transfer of publishing rights to third parties. Some appear to limit a transfer to a buyer acquiring all or substantially all of the imprint's titles. 1
Bloomsbury called those arrangements confidential, and said it would share information with the designers and partners directly involved as soon as it could. Osprey also holds unreleased board and card games at "various stages of development", with no word yet on whether it publishes them or hands them over. 1
Two titles still ship this month as planned: Undaunted 2200: Revolution by David Thompson and Trevor Benjamin, and Upland & Prairie by Peer Sylvester. Existing stock is described as well stocked, with no current plans for reprints. 1
The catalogue is the reason to bid. Osprey Games launched in 2015 inside Osprey Publishing, whose military history list had carried wargaming rulebooks since 2008. Cryptid, The King is Dead and a second edition of Martin Wallace's London came first, then Undaunted and Imperium. 1
Bloomsbury's own numbers are healthy. It expects revenue above £350m this year and record adjusted pre-tax profit of £49.9m, and the April restructuring that cut about 55 jobs made no mention of Osprey. 1
Wizards lets the deadline pass, and the union goes to a ballot
The Dungeons & Dragons team and Studio X, the unit behind Magic: The Gathering and Duel Masters, asked Wizards of the Coast on 6 October to recognise their union voluntarily by 5pm Pacific on 13 October. 2
The deadline passed. The union told supporters that Wizards "doesn't intend to voluntarily recognize the D&D or Studio X units of our union ahead of a vote". 2
German trade outlet Würfelreich dates the company's answer to 13 October and the union's publication of it to the following day. 3
The question now goes to the National Labor Relations Board, which reviews the petition and normally sets an election within 33 days. Employees then vote by secret ballot. 2
The Magic: The Gathering Arena team went the same route. Wizards declined to recognise it voluntarily in May 2026, and the team won its NLRB election in June with 83% in favour. 23
Bell of Lost Souls quoted an internal email in which Wizards said it was "not neutral on the question of unionization", and that it would respect the result of the election. The email cited a 20% rise in base salaries, annual bonuses, five weeks of paid leave and free product as products of working directly with staff. 2
The asks behind the filing were protection from generative AI in development, transparency about pay and progression, and job security. This desk covered the filings themselves on 7 October; what is new since then is the route they take. 2
Design writing
The Great Harbor moved its dice from the corners to the edges
Milan Tasevski of Archona Games wrote up The Great Harbor on 18 October. The game reached the publisher as Lubecca, a dice-placement engine builder from Matteo de Nardis, who also designed Magna Roma. 4
The setting moved to Carthage to extend the Mediterranean world Archona had built for Magna Roma. The development change worth borrowing is smaller than that. 4
In the first version, a die went onto a corner where four tiles met, and its number had to match the space before it could be placed. Every placement asked the player to process a lot at once. 4
Tasevski put the dice on the edges between two tiles and let any number be placed there. The number now sets how much the placement pays. 4
The board reads faster, turns run quicker, and the decision about where the die goes carries the same weight. Tasevski's framing is a game that got easier to understand without giving up the decisions underneath. 4
The push-your-luck trading came in at the end of development: take the trade in front of you, or push for a better one and risk losing it. The game runs five rounds. 4
Mythologies is built against the engine
Maxime Babad and Mickaël Garcin published the designers' diary for Mythologies on 17 October. Super Meeple publishes it; four rounds, about 30 minutes, aimed at experienced players. 5
The pair set out to avoid the combo game that becomes an engine. They limited permanent effects that fire every turn, timed the objectives, and left players reassessing their hand each round. 5
Four rounds does part of that work. Over a span that short, a well-timed one-off effect pays better than a passive bonus. 5
A card here is worth what it contributes to an objective, which changes its value between games and across one game. Mythologies from different pantheons are built to combine, so the mono-colour dive stops being the best line. 5
Interaction is modular, and each mythology is labelled for how much of it it brings. A table can choose how disruptive the game gets. 5
Signing it took a year of meetings. Publishers' schedules were full three years out, and Super Meeple's Charles-Amir had played successive versions before he took the game. 5
After a few plays
Upland & Prairie: one bag, two ways to end it
Dale Yu reviewed Upland & Prairie on 18 October. Peer Sylvester designed it, Osprey Games publishes it, and two to four players take 15 to 25 minutes over it. 6
The map has two sides with slightly different rules: the Scottish uplands and the shortgrass prairie of Montana, each with its own animals. 6
A turn is three discs out of the bag. One goes back in, one goes behind your screen, one is placed face up on the map. 6
Map spaces hold a single disc at the start, and rewilding raises that cap. Rewilding discs sit in the same bag: draw one, put it on the tracker, lift a space's capacity, draw a replacement. 6
Two endings reward opposite play. The game stops when one animal type links its paired goals, or links all three triple goals, and whoever holds the most discs of that colour takes it. 6
If the bag falls below three discs, the other ending fires: most complete sets of all three animals wins. 6
Yu found the board looks bigger than it plays. His games finished inside 15 minutes, and the slow one was a game where the rewilding discs stayed in the bag and locked up the choices. He wanted a few more turns. 6
What to do with this desk
SPIEL Essen opens on 22 October and runs to 25 October, with Osprey's booth among those given up. 7
Undaunted 2200: Revolution and Upland & Prairie reach shops this month as planned, while the sale of the catalogue continues without a timetable. 1
The clause to read, if your publisher is changing hands, is the one on transferring rights to a third party. For some Osprey designers, that clause may decide whether the game travels with the catalogue. 1
The mechanic from this desk to test next is The Great Harbor's: let a die go anywhere, and let its number set the payoff rather than gate the placement. 4
References
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- 2
- 3Wizards of the Coast lehnt D&D- und Magic-Gewerkschaft ab
wuerfelreich.de
- 4Designer Diary: The Journey of The Great Harbor
boardgamegeek.com
- 5Designers' Diary — The Making of Mythologies
boardgamegeek.com
- 6Dale Yu: Review of Upland & Prairie
opinionatedgamers.com
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