When you have favorite designers in the board game hobby, waiting for their next game can be a lot like waiting for a band’s new album, or an author’s next book. Today I want to highlight several designers that have a large following of fans, who devour each detail that gets announced about their upcoming titles.

One designer who has built a particularly fervent fanbase is Uwe Rosenberg. His early designs were relatively simple, including the classic game Bohnanza about bean farming. The game can drive some players nuts, as the central mechanic is that you cannot re-arrange your hand of cards. You must plant or trade the beans you have from left to right, and you only have two bean plots at any given time, so the simple rule of not being able to rearrange your hand creates a lot of tough decisions.

Uwe stuck with this harvest theme and struck gold with his much more complex game about farming, Agricola. Much of his output since this smash hit has been refining or re-implementing  the theme and mechanics of that classic. Specifically, the ongoing theme of harvesting and effectively utilizing resources. From the livestock and crops in Agricola, to the Coal and fish in the harbor based game Le Havre, to the monestary based Ora et Labora, where monks craft wine and beer from their basic ingredients. Once, these games were called the Harvest Trilogy, but since new games keep coming out it has since been redefined as the Harvest Series. 

He boiled the bigger Agricola into a two player game focusing on the livestock called Agricola: All Creatures Big and Small. He took the same concept to a fantasy realm and had dwarves that not only farmed but mined and went on adventures for resources in Caverna. Each game has its own interesting twists on just how the resource engine players build works. Just this year a new sort of greatest hits version of Agricola was released, proving that the classic still has a lot of staying power.

Another designer who has a lot of fans is Stefan Feld. Feld can be extremely prolific at times, like when he put out four separate games in 2013. His design style has been called “Point Salad” games, with the idea being that there are many ways to score points, but often they seem disparate, or unrelated to each other. They are fun games despite this lack of cohesion, because there is a constant point feedback loop, and what’s more fun than scoring points.

Often these different ways of scoring all revolve around a very original central mechanism. In his classic The Castles of Burgundy, players role dice to select properties off of a central board, and place those properties on their player board. The

dice rolling and tile like puzzle is the central mechanic, but how each different tile scores is the variety. Ship tiles get you good which you can sell, farm tiles score exponentially when they have the same animals, mines get you silver which in turn can get you more property. Feld also often includes a negative factor that players must try to avoid while still excelling at scoring points. In Notre Dame, this balancing act is in trying to keep the rat population down while still scoring points. In Aquasphere players must keep the octopi from overrunning the lab, and in Bruges, there are 5 different kinds of disasters players must try to avoid.

Vlaada Chvátil’s designs are extremely eclectic. Coming from the video game hobby, many of his games remind me of their digital cousins. They usually have difficulty levels, something that is common in Cooperative board games, to keep the simple AI challenging, but is not as common in competitive games. Vlaada’s games often have a beginner, intermediate and advanced mode simply because they are so mechanically dense. However, his games are also richly thematic and intuitive, and above all else, wholly original.

Nothing is more daunting than learning a game cold from the rules. After years of having done it, I’ve kind of gotten used to diving in head first, but when I was still new to the hobby a friend and I sat down to try to play Galaxy Trucker straight from the rules at a local convention. The tutorial style of the rulebook, with a first scenario laid out step by step, made it a joy to play, and we had no problems picking it up and having a great time.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, I sat down to play Through the Ages, an epic civilization game by Chvátil, at a different convention. We had a player who was running the game to teach, so no daunting rules, but since it was a convention and we had all the time in the world to play the game, he insisted on playing the full expert game right from the start. Six hours later, myself and two other players who had known we were losing for the last four of those hours, quit the game in defeat. When it comes to Vlaada’s games, they are richly rewarding, but require a commitment to build up to the full experience, and we all learned this the hard way. However, Vlaada came out of nowhere this year with the Spiel des Jahres winning Codenames, a game that is so simple to play that you wonder how it wasn’t invented 20 years ago. So he does have range, and not every one of his games is in the deep end of the pool.

All of these designers have created their own niche and fan groups that know what to expect from their games. They are some of the rock stars of the board game world, with fans who will buy their next game based just on their name being on the front cover. Several of their games line my shelves, and while I usually wait and read the reviews before buying their games, I am always intrigued by what they will cook up next.