GAMA Expo 2025: First Monday in October, Shakespeare’s First Folio, Dice Words, Dragoon, and Party Panda Pirates | BoardGameGeek News

by W. Eric Martin

Let’s continue walking the aisles of the GAMA Expo 2025 exhibit hall:

▪️ U.S. publisher Fort Circle Games showed off the final look of First Monday in October, the first design from lawyer/gamer Talia Rosen, with this 1-4 player game having been crowdfunded in late 2024.

I first wrote about First Monday in October in 2020 when the game was scheduled for a 2021 release, but as you know, projects get shuffled around for various reasons and the game will now hit the market when the impact of rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court will affect the future of this country as much as they ever have before. As for the game play, here’s an overview:

Over the course of two hours, First Monday in October re-creates the history of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1789 to the present day, through three distinct eras: Era I represents the founding of the Court in 1789 until the Civil War in 1865; Era II represents 1866 until the seminal decision of Brown v. Board in 1954; and Era III represents 1955 until the present day.

The game revolves around the following four judicial philosophy tracks, with each player representing a think tank that’s trying to influence opinion on them:

—Commerce Clause: This track represents the scope of Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, which grants Congress the power to “regulate commerce” among the several states.

—Equality & Liberty: This track broadly represents the scope of individual equality and liberty, including but not limited to the 14th Amendment (i.e., equal protection, due process, and privacy rights).

—Free Speech: This track represents the obligation in the 1st Amendment that Congress make no law abridging a person’s freedom of speech, and the scope of permissible restrictions on that freedom.

—Executive Power: This track broadly represents the scope of Article II of the U.S. Constitution, which enumerates the powers of the executive branch, including the Office of the President and law enforcement.

Shifting each philosophy one way generally represents a more expansive centralized Federalist interpretation of these constitutional provisions (consistent with a Hamilton-Madison perspective), whereas shifting each philosophy the other direction represents a more narrow decentralized Anti-Federalist application of these provisions (consistent with a Jefferson-Monroe perspective).

For more details, head to that 2020 overview, which is still applicable, although the game now features a solo mode not present at that time.

▪️ Fort Circle Games also had a mock-up of Shakespeare’s First Folio:

Just kidding! This is the box of The Halls of Montezuma decorated with Shakespeare stickers by (if I remember correctly) the niece of Kevin Bertram, founder of FCG. While I’d love to see a Shakespeare game marketed in this punk manner, here’s a draft of the actual cover:

Shakespeare’s First Folio is a 2-4 player game by Bertram and his wife Kate Bertram that combines trick-taking and worker-placement elements. The game features a 36-card deck featuring the histories, comedies, and tragedies from the actual First Folio in three suits. The winner of a trick claims their played card, whereas everyone else receives the resources on their played card. In the long run, you want sets and runs, as well as personage cards and coins.

Shakespeare’s First Folio is being released in co-operation with the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, which commissioned the design, with much of the first print run going to the Folger and to the Globe Theatre in London. Fort Circle Games will have six hundred copies for sale in Q2/Q3 2025, with a second print run to follow.

▪️ Designer Tim Phillips gave me an overview of Dice Words, which I first covered in January 2025 and which is due out from KOSMOS in the U.S. in Q4 2025.

In each of the five two-minute rounds, you start by rolling the four “ice” cubes to set up letters that you want to place in your word. Next, each player rolls their personal dice up to three times, after which they create a word and place it on their board. You score points for a word equal to the sum of the letters used multiplied by the number of ice dice used in that word, with a bonus based on the word’s length. In short: Try to cram as much ice into your long words as possible.

▪️ Party Panda Pirates from Adrian Alamo Borja, Gabriel González “Gabo”, Pepe Macba, and Victor Valdés debuted in Spanish in 2024 from Detestable Games and Draco Studios, and in March 2025 Draco Studios will release the game in English.

Your goal is to collect gold coins so that you can buy treasure chests, and you collect coins mostly by competing in mini games that feature a variety of game challenges. What’s more, you get to slide your panda through the turtle ship in the center of the board to try to land just so on island for more coins.

Also, look at the shape of that game board!

▪️ Lay Waste Games, which is now owned by Explosm Games, will release a new edition of Jake and Zach Given‘s Dragoon, which first appeared in 2016.

▪️ Designer Jamey Stegmaier has been answering questions about Stonemaier Games‘ mid-2025 release Vantage in a BGG thread, but to add a smidge to that conversation, here are a few Vantage game elements that were on display at GAMA Expo 2025.