Office Dog is a very new tabletop board game label intended to showcase and nurture indie game designers. The label, owned by the board games giant Asmodee, has announced its Freshman Class of games which should be available via your friendly local games store in 2024.

Office Dog is still actively looking for games from freelance designers to add to their roster and is after “mechanically authentic” and original games that are suitable for everyone and aren’t tied to existing properties or licenses, which are well play-tested and aren’t region specific. 

Their Freshman Class includes three games. They are:

Thomas Dagenais-Lespérance’s Word Traveler. Players journey through the world’s greatest cities using a limited number of words to get to sites they want to see. Let’s hope the rest of the table can decode their directions as they visit Paris, New York, London, and Tokyo! 

Keith Piggot’s River of Gold is a trading game that focuses on the River of Gold, a fantasy trade route full of hazards and opportunities.  Players build locations along this important river, deliver goods, and compete for influence in this classic mid-weight Euro game.

The third game of this first set of releases will be called Crafting the Cosmos, from co-designers David Gordon and TAM and asks; why build a city when you can build an entire universe? In this game, players use the forces of the universe; Time, Ionization, Light, and Gravity, to build Nebulae and foster life across their ever-expanding Universe.

Head of the Office Dog Studio, Luke Peterschmidt, said, “We’re setting the bar pretty high with these titles, and I can’t wait to get them into the hands of players!”

A new version of Warhammer 40,000 will launch later this year alongside an enormous boxed edition of the game called Warhammer 40,000 Leviathan.

The tenth edition of the world’s most popular miniature wargame, Warhammer 40,000, will be available in other formats. Still, it’s very much a tradition that a new version of the game is launched with a big box stuffed full of goodies, and Leviathan seems determined to live up to its name. It’s the most comprehensive box of its kind ever produced.

The theme of the box is Space Marines vs Tyranids, heavily armoured human super soldiers versus a hive of alien insectile-dinosaur monsters. The back story is the Fourth Tyrannic War, essentially a horde of alien monsters called Hive Fleet Leviathan is on the brink of munching its way through a version of humanity that’s devolving into a sort of techno-barbarism. It’s Warhammer 40,000; it’s big, loud, lovely to look at and dark as the abyss.

Leviathan will contain 25 Space Marine models, including the heavy support Dreadnought, space marines in Terminator armour, a command team comprising of an apothecary, a primaries lieutenant and a Terminator Librarian (that’s a space wizard, rather than a community book wrangler). Of course, we also get plenty of regular-style space marines, including Sternguard and an Infernus Squad.

The box contains 47 raids, ranging from the various types of minion-like monsters such as Termagants, Neurogaunts and Barbgaunts to the terrifying Screamer-Killer and Winged Tyranid Prime. It’s a big set full of nightmares, pretty much.

The box will not contain dice, measuring sticks or related stuff – it’s assumed you have those. Instead, we get a gorgeous rulebook with a cover unique to the box, cards unique to the game, and transfer stickers for the Space Marine models.

Codex books, filled with additional rules for each faction and appropriate back story, are set for later in the year. The Leviathan box is planned for the summer, with Codex books for Tyranids, Space Marines, Necrons and Adeptus Mechanicus out by Christmas. Orks, Chaos Space Marines, Custodes, Dark Angels and the Tau will have to wait till spring 2024 for their books. Rules for all factions will be online from day one, however.

Other new sets have also been announced at Games Workshop’s expo event, Warhammer Fest. Age of Sigmar skirmish game Warcry is getting a box called Nightmare Quest. This will contain two warbands; Questor Soulsworn, who are good-guy nights who take on the most dangerous quests and the Royal Beastflayers, cannibalistic zombie-like horrors who believe they are noble knights but are actually hideous undead. Warcry is all about the fancy terrain, and this one doesn’t disappoint; it comes with a weird ziggurat-style thing which is meant to be an ancient magical terra-forming widget.

Sticking with the Age of Sigmar, a new squad for Warhammer Underworlds Wyrdhollow has been announced. The Headsman’s Curse takes the card-based, fast-moving skirmish game to the lands of the dead. It’s a card set featuring some really cool-looking skulls in robes, each wielding a bizarre weapon. Looks like they’ll be fun to assemble, paint and use in this fun game.

Sticking with fantasy, fans of the Middle-earth™ Strategy Battle Game are getting a new diorama to paint. Get Off the Road is a recreation of the famous scene from Lord of The Rings in which Frodo and chums hide inside the hollow of a tree in order to escape a Ringwraith. The rider and hobbits can also be used on the table, though it’s really designed as a display piece.