Knavecon Boardgame Briefing — Tuesday, 22 September 2026

Knavecon Boardgame Briefing — Tuesday, 22 September 2026

Four days out from Knavecon 27 and it’s a good week to be paying attention. There’s a new Kickstarter launching today, Essen Spiel is exactly a month away, and a couple of crowdfunding campaigns are in their final stretch. Let’s get into it.

The big thing landing today is Bookwyrm, a cozy midweight strategy game about book-hoarding dragons organising their shelves. It’s 1-4 players, designed by Lizzy Ives at Sword & Rose Press, and it goes live on Kickstarter today. The pitch is charming — it’s a spatial puzzle where new books keep arriving from the bookshop and you’re trying to curate a glorious collection without it descending into chaos. They tried the traditional publisher route, got nowhere, and are self-publishing. A Place For All My Books proved there’s an audience for this kind of theme, and this looks like it goes a bit deeper mechanically. Worth a look if that kind of thing appeals.

The Clank! Cube of Holding and The Forgotten Vault Kickstarter is heading into its final week, sitting at about $707k from nearly 5,800 backers. Dire Wolf are celebrating 10 years of Clank! with a new expansion, a deluxe storage cube, and updated Master Thief Edition components across the whole line. If you’re already a Clank! person this is probably a no-brainer, but the Mastery Pack upgrade path for existing copies is a nice touch — you don’t have to rebuy everything. Campaign page here. Ends September 29th.

Meanwhile, Space King: The Board Game from Flashgitz — the Warhammer 40K parody from the YouTube animation lads — has blown past $4 million on Kickstarter with a few days left (ends September 25th). It’s a HeroQuest-style minis-heavy dungeon crawl thing. The numbers are absurd for what’s essentially a comedy IP board game, with pledges averaging over $370 per backer. There’s apparently a trademark dust-up with Games Workshop brewing too, which is entirely on brand. Tech Times covered the phenomenon here. Not for everyone but the crowdfunding numbers tell their own story.

On the BGG Hotness this month, Entropy from Board&Dice (Luciani, Battista, Mangone) is sitting at #10 and continuing to generate buzz since its GenCon debut. It’s the rondel-driven eurogame about building solar systems and evolving life. Reviews have been broadly positive — Meeple Mountain gave it a “Fair” but BGG ratings are sitting at 7.8 from 500+ ratings, which is solid. If you like crunchy euros from the Teotihuacan/Messina 1347 school, this is the one to track heading into Essen.

Essen itself — SPIEL 2026 runs October 22-25 — and the BGG preview list has been live since early September. Deep Print Games have their pre-order system running through the official app, and publishers are now in full preview mode. If you’re going, or even just tracking what’s coming, the BGG preview list is the place to start.

In Ireland, the only thing that matters this week is Knavecon 27 on Saturday. Castletroy Park Hotel, Limerick, 10am, running into the small hours. Tickets are €20 adults, €10 students/unwaged, kids free with an adult. That includes the games library and free coffee all day. The raffle is reportedly a big one this year. If you haven’t sorted your ticket yet, this is the week. After that, Gaelcon 38 is the next big one on the calendar — October 23-26 at the Crowne Plaza Dublin Airport in Santry. Four days of RPGs, board games, LARPs and wargames. Their online RPG tickets are already on sale. Beyond those two, I couldn’t find any new Irish game shop openings or local event announcements in the last couple of days — if you know of something happening, drop it in the comments.

For the Knavecon community specifically: if you’re coming Saturday, have a think about what you want to play. The library will be massive as always, but if you’ve a game you’ve been dying to try, bring it along and rope people in. That’s how the best Knavecon sessions happen.

One for social media: “Bookwyrm launches on Kickstarter today — a cozy strategy game about dragons hoarding books. Meanwhile Clank! is about to close out its 10th anniversary campaign at over $700k and Space King has somehow cracked $4 million for a Warhammer parody game. Oh, and Knavecon 27 is Saturday. See you in Limerick.”