Five up-and-coming designers to know

I’m sitting down to write this week’s newsletter far too late, and that’s just sort of how life goes sometimes, isn’t it? We’ve all been there. Things get busy, life gets crazy, toddlers scream at you about not wanting to wear a diaper. The usual. A worker placement game, it isn’t. (More rewarding than a worker placement game? Absolutely. More stressful than one? Debatable.)

I’ve actually started my very first prototyping for a board game, if you don’t count the extra-large maps I made for our games of Risk back in high school. There were fundamental flaws with those, at any rate, including an extreme lack of balance. Still, Australia wasn’t the stronghold it was, so I think that counts as a bit of a win, at least.

Anyway.

I thought this week I’d write about five game designers out there doing interesting things in the hobby. I won’t be talking about your Knizias, your Garfields, your Brands, your Hargraves, your Shinzawas — I love games from those people, certainly, but they get their flowers regularly. No, I’d like to focus on lesser-known names that attract my attention. When these designers release something new, I want to check it out.

My criteria is pretty simple: These designers haven't been publishing games at any sort of scale for more than five years, and I'm excited by their games generally.

Geonil, the best two-player trick-taking designer out there

If you’ve any interest in two-player trick-taking, or if you’ve been around the scene for a bit, you’ll know the name Geonil for one of several games. They’re a South Korean designer who’s put out some of my favorite games in the genre. The rate at which they’re producing games seems to have sped up, too, and there’s really quite an interesting array of trick-takers and climbers on offer.

Three games worth noting:

• Jekyll vs. Hyde (2021) is certainly the most widely available; it’s a thematic trick-taker based on the classic Robert Louis Stevenson tale. It’s great! It’s a game with a real push-and-pull as you try to avoid winning or losing too many tricks as Dr. Jekyll, or doing exactly the opposite as Mr. Hyde.
• Odyssey (2025) is one of Geonil’s latest, and while I’ve only watched this one played, it’s high on my list to play. You’re having to navigate a boat on a long journey, and there seem to be lots of twists and turns.
• The Yellow House (2024) is a fascinating little game I’m still coming to grips with — it’s essentially a climbing game wherein you’re constantly having to strengthen the value of suits in order to play, and it has a track on which you’ll be maneuvering the relative ranking. Geonil took a lot of inspiration from Taiki Shinzawa’s Maskmen (2014) on this one. According to the linked post, climbing games are actually more popular in South Korea than trick-taking games. Neat!

Marceline Leiman, one of the hardest-working designers I’ve seen

The first published game I saw from Marceline Leiman was High Tide (2024). She released it initially at the Indie Games Night Market at PAX Unplugged in 2024, having only a few unpublished titles to her name beforehand. High Tide was perhaps the biggest story to come from that particular event. It’s a quick two-player abstract strategy game wherein you’re trying to move hexagonal tiles of your color atop your opponent’s tiles, with the player with the most uncovered tiles coming away the winner. It’s such a smart little game.

Since such a point, she’s released a game with Button Shy — Phantasmic (2025), with the upcoming Banana Cart set for release this year — and she has two IP-driven tie-in games coming this year, too, with Wednesday: Friend or Foe and Minnie and Mickey’s World Tour both slated for release. She’s also serving as a games developer, with the most prominent title being The Hobbit: There and Back Again (Knizia, 2025), for which she developed the solo mode.

Watch this space — I suspect Marceline Leiman isn’t going to be slowing down.

Bajir Cannon, he of the tricky Trickarus

Trickarus (2024) is one of my favorite trick-takers of the last couple of years, and it emerged out of Japan from an American-born designer, Bajir Cannon. His backstory is fascinating and worth reading about. He’s also made music and a documentary — he’s a multi-disciplinarian in the best sense, releasing relatively short-run indie games, indie music, an indie documentary. It’s the sort of thing I can really get behind.

Trickarus is a blast. It’s a little chaotic, but if that’s not a concern to you, I think you’ll love this trick-taking game. Each player has their own little Icarus figure that goes on a track, and when you win a trick, you go up on the track, passing people who are in your way. However, when you exceed the top of that track, you’re going to come plummeting down to earth, triggering the game-end condition as well. There are few feelings better than sending someone to their doom only to win yourself. One of those is coming back to claim the throne after said plummet.

His latest effort, Dualis (2026) is a four-player partnership trick-taker, and it has a similar aesthetic style to Trickarus. It seems a bit more of a strategic game than the sometimes-chaotic Trickarus, and I’m looking forward to playing it at some point in the near future.

Bryan Bornmueller, the wearer of the ring

Have you played The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring — Trick-Taking Game (2024)? It’s the latest cooperative trick-taking game to take hobby board games by storm, following in the footsteps of The Crew (Sing, 2019). Or it was the latest until its successor, The Two Towers — Trick-Taking Game (2026), arrived on the scene. It’s a finely tuned, wildly executed trick-taking game. Both games are broken up into chapters, and the way they tell Tolkien’s story is just incredible.

Would you believe that these are the first two published games from Bornmueller? Yes, he’s worked in board games publishing for his entire career, according to his Board Game Geek profile. But just because one works in board games doesn’t mean one’s good at designing board games, and I really think Bornmueller might just be really good, given these two games are his first efforts. I suppose it's possible that after The Return of the King trick-taker in 2027 that he steps back from designing, but I'm hoping he continues.

Taylor Reiner, trick-taking advocate

If you’re into the trick-taking hobby, you know Taylor Reiner. Whether it’s from his videos, wherein he introduces all of us to trick-taker after trick-taker, or if it’s from his game design, you probably know who he is. He’s been working as a developer on the two Lord of the Rings trick-takers, and he’s designing the ambitious Sail Legacy (2026). His name’s popping up all over.

In addition to being one of the voices we turn to in trick-taking, he’s also one of the genre’s more fascinating early designers. His dual 2023 efforts Of What’s Left (a climber) and Short Zoot Suit (a trick-taker) still attract a ton of attention, though both have since seen wider release: Of What’s Left became Seers Catalog (2024) and Short Zoot Suit became Tricky Twist (2025). His Zoo and More (2025) is a five-game compendium, and each game is its own fascinating thing. (It also includes Short Zoot Suit, which was the only way I was really going to get a copy of this game.) His 2025 climber Bested Another Time is an amorphous game that plays differently at each player count.

Taylor Reiner has become one of the go-to designers in trick-taking, and I’m extremely excited to see what the future holds for him and his designs.