Robert J. Kuntz spent his teenage years three blocks from Gary Gygax’s house. He became Gygax’s co-Dungeon Master, played the character Robilar in the campaign that would become D&D’s founding myth, and was the first player to survive Gygax’s Tomb of Horrors. In a new Bleeding Fool interview, the last major living original creator of Dungeons & Dragons accuses Wizards of the Coast and its in-house historian of running a coordinated campaign to paint the game’s founders as bigots. He backs it with a list of named grievances, a documented legal dispute, and a threat to sue. And it arrives at the tail end of nearly two years of Wizards controversies this outlet has tracked one by one.

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Dark Sun is coming back to Dungeons & Dragons, and Wizards of the Coast wants fans to know the setting’s most notorious feature is getting cut. The 30-plus-year-old post-apocalyptic setting, teased at the GenCon 2026 keynote and slated for two full books plus a modified Player’s Handbook in early 2027, built its reputation on a world so brutal that slavery, genocide, and torture were baked into its lore rather than sanitized around the edges. According to the designers now handling it, that reputation is exactly the problem.

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Gen Con has hired Camilla Cleghorn, a longtime on-camera presenter for The Dice Tower and a key organizer behind its Dice Tower East convention, as its new head of events, putting her in charge of planning and running the thousands of events that make up tabletop’s largest annual gathering. The hire lands less than a week after this year’s Gen Con closed with a record 74,000 attendees, extending a growth streak that’s run from 70,000 in 2023 to nearly 72,000 in 2025.

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Gen Con has now sold out before its doors even opened for three consecutive years, and it’s pushing up against the hard physical limits of the Indiana Convention Center. The show is set for a major expansion tied to its 60th anniversary next year: an additional 143,500 square feet of floor space, roughly two and a half football fields, plus 800 new hotel rooms coming online with a new Signia by Hilton property. Cleghorn told BoardGameWire the real challenge isn’t finding room for more attendees, it’s making sure communication and support systems scale at the same pace as the convention’s footprint.

Cleghorn’s departure from The Dice Tower carries its own weight in the hobby. She’s spent years as a visible face for the channel’s 360,000-plus YouTube subscribers, reviewing games and helping build Dice Tower East into its own successful regional show, alongside running the outlet’s annual crowdfunding campaigns. She called leaving “bittersweet” in a Facebook post to fans, thanking Dice Tower founder Tom Vasel and the team for opportunities she said she never imagined having. Vasel, for his part, kept his on-air reaction light, joking about Gen Con’s “thievery” in a recent Dice Tower News episode before wishing her well and confirming she’d still make occasional appearances on the channel around her new job.

The move also means Gen Con’s longtime director of events, Derek Guder, is shifting into what Cleghorn described as an “adjacent role” at the company, with the two continuing to work together through the transition.

She posted to Facebook, “I’m incredibly grateful to have been a part of The Dice Tower’s journey over the last several years, and I’ll always be thankful to Tom, the DT team, and all of you for giving me opportunities I never imagined I’d have.”

She then spoke with BoardGameWire, “One of the things I value most about my time with The Dice Tower is that I’ve had the opportunity to experience the hobby from a lot of different perspectives: publishers, designers, content creators, convention attendees, and the people working behind the scenes to make events happen.

“It’s taught me that each group has different needs, but ultimately they all want a great experience and clear communication.”

Cleghorn also said, “The timing also felt right for me personally and professionally. I’m incredibly proud of my time with The Dice Tower and everything I’ve had the opportunity to be a part of there, and I’m excited to take what I’ve learned into this next chapter.”

Tom Vasel seemed to minimize the impact to his channel saying, “You’ll still see here occasionally here on The Dice Tower but she’ll be really busy working for Gen Con.”

Pulling a well-known reviewer and convention organizer out of independent media and into a leadership seat at the industry’s biggest show is a meaningful signal about how tightly board game media and the convention circuit have become intertwined. Cleghorn’s background gives her a rare vantage point spanning publishers, designers, content creators, and the attendees actually filling the halls, exactly the kind of cross-perspective Gen Con will need if it’s serious about scaling past a venue it’s already outgrown.

Does hiring straight out of board game media signal Gen Con finally taking creator and community input seriously at a leadership level, or is this simply the safest, lowest-risk hire available for a show that can’t afford to stumble during its biggest expansion yet?

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Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.

NEXT: Paizo Cuts Ties With Archives of Nethys, Longtime Free Pathfinder Rules Site, Amid Deeper Financial Trouble

Paizo has formally ended its eight-year commercial partnership with Archives of Nethys, the volunteer-run digital reference site that’s served as the de facto free rulebook for Pathfinder and Starfinder players since 2018. The split took effect July 24, and while both sides frame it as an amicable parting, the timing lines up with a rougher stretch for Paizo than the official statements let on.

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The partnership worked simply: Paizo sent Archives of Nethys early PDFs of new rulebooks and gave the site exclusive access to official artwork beyond what its standard Community Use Policy allows. In exchange, Archives of Nethys was supposed to generate royalties back to Paizo through that expanded access. According to both parties’ public statements, those royalties never materialized in eight years of operation. Archives of Nethys has always run ad-free and paywall-free, funded through donations and covering only its own server and search costs, and the site’s operators have said turning it into a real revenue source would undercut the openness that made it useful in t

he first place.

Money wasn’t the whole story, though. Paizo also pointed to what it called ongoing confusion over its artwork policy, noting that once assets appeared on Archives of Nethys under the special licensing terms, other unaffiliated sites routinely copied and reused them, creating extra legal and licensing headaches for Paizo’s team to chase down. Ending the formal partnership lets Paizo draw a cleaner line around what art is and isn’t fair game across the wider fan-site ecosystem, even if it costs the flagship reference site its early access and its art library in the process.

The bigger context is where this gets more interesting. Paizo has been absorbing real financial damage this year from Diamond Comics’ collapse, which reportedly left roughly $10 million of Paizo’s physical inventory stranded in a warehouse with no distributor to move it. That fallout forced Paizo to cut its organized play program and lay off staff in early June, just weeks before the Archives of Nethys decision became public. A licensing partnership that never paid for itself is an easy target to cut when a company is already trimming costs elsewhere, whether or not that’s the full explanation Paizo is offering publicly

.

Archives of Nethys isn’t disappearing. It continues operating under Paizo’s standard Community Use Policy, meaning the actual rules text for Pathfinder and Starfinder remains free and accessible. What changes is the polish: official artwork gets stripped out, updates arrive later since the site no longer gets books ahead of release, and players wanting day-one digital integration may increasingly look toward paid alternatives like Demiplane instead. For a hobby that has spent years positioning itself as the open, community-friendly alternative to D&D Beyond’s paywalled ecosystem, watching that openness quietly erode under financial pressure is the part worth sitting with.

Does an industry built on open community goodwill hold that model together when the money gets tight, or is Archives of Nethys the first sign that free tabletop resources are heading toward the same paywalled future as everything else?

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Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.

NEXT: Book Review: Deryni Checkmate by Katherine Kurtz

Sandy Petersen was there at the beginning. The designer of Call of Cthulhu and co-author of RuneQuest has been playing tabletop RPGs since 1974, and he pushed back this week against a claim spreading on social media: that Dungeons & Dragons was always the domain of what critics now call “theater kids.”

The exchange began after game developer Mark Kern, known online as Grummz, declared that “D&D is long gone.” A user responded by arguing the hobby had always attracted “theatre kid types.” Petersen rejected that framing:

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Robert J. Kuntz is one of the handful of people who actually built Dungeons & Dragons from nothing in 1972, and this week he told the company that now owns his creation exactly what he thinks of how it’s treated him and his late collaborators.

Kuntz’s credentials aren’t in dispute. At 17, in 1972, he lived a few blocks from Gary Gygax in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and played in the second-ever session of what would become D&D, running a character named Robilar who became the first to successfully complete the legendary Tomb of Horrors. Gygax made him co-Dungeon Master of the original Greyhawk campaign by 1974, when the play group had grown past twenty people. Kuntz went on to co-author Supplement I: Greyhawk, the first Deities & Demigods, Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes, and Mordenkainen’s Fantastic Adventure, and he built his own Kalibruhn setting, the third D&D campaign world ever created. Along with Gygax, Dave Arneson, Don Kaye, and Brian Blume, Kuntz is one of the small circle of people who were physically present at the game’s creation and spent years building it for free before it became a commercial product, let alone a billion-dollar industry.

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Gen Con 2026 turned into an unplanned survival scenario on Saturday, August 1, when heavy rain overwhelmed the Indiana Convention Center’s roof drainage system and sent water pouring directly onto the convention floor, hitting vendors and playtest tables in the middle of the event’s third day.

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The flooding started in Hall B, the convention’s packed playtest area, where attendees were in the middle of trying out games including Everdell, Canvas, and Bloodrage when water began pouring from the ceiling for roughly 20 minutes before spreading to multiple areas of the building, including entrances and hallway carpets. Staff wheeled in large trash bins in an attempt to catch the worst of it, with limited success. Convention-goer AlexanderTheGreatest, who’s attended for 15 years, captured video of the scene and wrote: “15 years of coming to gencon and I’d thought id seen it all. Feel bad for those vendors.” The timing made an already chaotic scene worse: a tornado warning for Marion County hit shortly afterward, forcing organizers to use the loudspeaker system to move roughly 72,000 attendees away from windows and exterior rooms, including evacuating people from Lucas Oil Stadium into connecting tunnels between the two buildings.

The Indiana Convention Center issued a statement afterward attributing the failure to the sheer volume of rainfall: “The water leaks we experienced Saturday evening were the result of the extreme amount of rainfall in a short period of time damaging some of the original piping in our roof drainage system. Our initial focus was on ensuring the safety of guests and employees during the threat of a tornado, assisting exhibitors impacted by the water leaks, and addressing the damaged pipe(s). We have not received reports of any significant injuries or significant damage to property of third parties. Once we have addressed the damages and can prevent further leaks in the immediate term, we will determine how the pipe damage occurred and what we need to do to ensure it does not happen again.”

The damage wasn’t confined to the convention hall. Outside, at the Gen Con Block Party behind the convention center, high winds tore through vendor tents entirely. Chris Bailey of Helm Coffee, a Garfield Park, Indianapolis-based vendor who’s worked the Block Party for several years, told WTHR his tent was knocked over and damaged in the storm, but he wasn’t dwelling on it: “It’s not going to knock us down. We’ll be back out here at 7:00 in the morning. It might look differently, but we’re still going to be selling the same product.”

That resilience matched what a fan clarified after author Gail Simone posted her reaction to the videos circulating online. Simone wrote: “I actually feel terrible for the people who got rained on at GenCon, especially merch dealers... what a sad thing to happen to what is supposed to be a joyful event. Sad for everyone involved, it sounds awful and the videos are just hard to watch. Hope no one got damaged too badly financially.” A fan responded with a more precise account of where the real financial exposure was: “As mentioned the leak was in one of the gaming halls, so the damage was to the demo copies of the games and not to the main selling stock. The one retailer said it started gradually and they were able to rescue most of their stuff. That being said, it should not have happened in the first place.” That distinction lines up with the broader reporting: the worst-hit area was specifically the playtest hall, meaning demo copies and display stock bore the brunt rather than vendors’ full retail inventory, a real difference between an inconvenience and a business-ending loss for most exhibitors.

This wasn’t a first for the tabletop and fan convention circuit generally, but it was a first for Gen Con specifically. ICv2 and Bleeding Cool both noted this marks the first time severe weather has caused significant damage to the convention halls since Gen Con relocated from Wisconsin to Indianapolis in 2003, despite storms being a fairly regular seasonal occurrence during the event’s early August dates. The comparison being drawn online is to Katsucon 2025, where a burst wastewater pipe above artist alley forced an early evacuation and ruined vendor merchandise entirely, a considerably worse outcome for the artists and small businesses caught underneath it.

Despite the flooding, the tornado warning, and the evacuation, Gen Con organizers kept the convention running. Sunday’s programming proceeded as scheduled, and the event closed out its run with its third consecutive attendance-record sellout at roughly 72,000 badgeholders. No significant injuries were reported. The Indiana Convention Center has said it will investigate the cause of the pipe failure once cleanup is complete, but for the vendors who spent Saturday evening bailing water out of their own booths, or picking storm-flattened tents back up off the pavement, the bigger question is whether a 54-year-old venue hosting one of the country’s largest gaming conventions is actually equipped to handle weather like this going forward.

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Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.

NEXT: Can Dungeons & Dragons Save Itself? Inside The Brand’s Two-Year Fight To Win Back Its Own Fans

Dungeons & Dragons spent the last several years alienating a huge share of the people who built it, and this week’s Dark Sun reveal is either the clearest sign yet that Wizards of the Coast finally understands the damage, or the latest marketing gesture in a company still unwilling to say plainly what went wrong. To understand which one it actually is, you have to look at how bad things got first.

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Wizards of the Coast confirmed at Gen Con 2026 what fans had suspected for months: Dark Sun, one of Dungeons & Dragons’ most beloved campaign settings, is returning in early 2027 as part of the game’s “Season of Survival.” The official D&D account posted the reveal trailer with its own content warning attached: “Viewer Discretion is Advised - This trailer contains violent content some may find offensive or disturbing. Beneath a fractured sun, bear witness to the bloodshed and carnage that defines a dying world.” That a company is putting a discretion warning on its own promotional trailer for its own product is itself a strange enough choice to draw attention before anyone’s even gotten to the actual content.

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Hasbro told investors this week that Magic: The Gathering just had the best quarter in its 30-plus year history. In the same earnings report, the company disclosed a $56 million write-down on canceled video games, and it’s the latest entry in a pattern that’s been building for three years, one that includes a live D&D convention in London getting pulled off the calendar with almost no explanation at all.

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Magic: The Gathering just confirmed what a few weeks of quiet previews had suggested might not happen this time around. Aragorn is back, and he’s still Black.

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For years, one voice in the Warhammer community was saying it louder than anyone else wanted to hear. Games Workshop was not a misunderstood corporation making clumsy mistakes, nor was it a company that simply needed better PR, or fans who needed to communicate their grievances more clearly. It was, in the words of that voice, simply evil, and it would keep getting away with it for as long as the community let it.

That voice was Arch. And right now, with GW’s copyright hammer falling on YouTubers, 3D printers, lore channels, and hobbyists across the platform, a significant portion of the Warhammer community is being forced to reckon with the fact that he was correct.

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Magic: The Gathering is adding Star Trek to its collaboration lineup, with Wizards of the Coast confirming a full Universes Beyond set built around the franchise’s 60th anniversary. The set launches on MTG Arena November 10 and hits tabletops worldwide November 13, following a prerelease window at local game stores from November 6-12.

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The product line covers nearly every price tier Magic offers. Play Boosters run $6.99, Collector Boosters $37.99, standard Commander Decks $74.99, and a Collector’s Edition Commander Deck $159.99. A “Beam Me Up Bundle” runs $99.99 and includes two randomly selected promo cards from an eight-card set. Four Commander decks anchor the release, alongside a Beginner Box aimed at Star Trek fans who’ve never touched a Magic card.

The chase cards are seven hand-signed collector cards pulled from Collector Boosters, limited to 250 printings each, featuring actors who played the characters on screen. Wizards has confirmed Captain Kirk and Captain Janeway so far, with five more to be revealed. Thirty Stardate cards reprint powerful existing Magic cards under Star Trek branding, including Sheoldred, the Apocalypse reissued as “Khan, Engineered Evil,” styled after the Kelvin-timeline Khan. Twenty-nine LCARS frame cards and ten LCARS shock lands recreate Starfleet’s interface styling directly on the cardboard, and twenty-four Classic Enterprise cards borrow the painted look of vintage Star Trek movie posters.

Three new mechanics arrive alongside two returning ones. Assimilate lets a player seize an opposing creature, slap a +1/+1 counter on it, and turn it into a Borg artifact creature that loses its other creature types. Federation rewards players for fielding a wide spread of non-Borg creature types. And Face a Dilemma names something Magic has done for years, spells and abilities that force a player to choose between multiple modes, on cards like Set Phasers to... and Seven of Nine. Whether Wizards intended it or not, longtime Star Trek fans will recognize the name. Decipher’s original Star Trek Customizable Card Game, which ran from 1994 through 2007, built an entire card category called Dilemmas around away teams having to face obstacles before completing a mission. The overlap in name and concept sits close enough that it’s worth noting, even without confirmation from Wizards that it’s a deliberate homage.

This is Magic’s fourth major outside-IP crossover in as many years, following Lord of the Rings, Doctor Who, and Marvel, with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles already announced for later release. Wizards’ own head designer has been public about leaning on outside franchises to keep the game’s card pool and player base growing, and Star Trek fills a demographic gap the previous crossovers hadn’t fully reached. A company built on twenty planeswalkers and its own multiverse increasingly finds its biggest sales moments come from licensing someone else’s.

Whatever the reason behind the strategy, there’s something to it as a product on its own terms. Signed Kirk and Janeway cards, a Borg mechanic that actually turns your opponent’s creature into a Borg, and a nod to a twenty-year-old license game’s card category are the kind of details built for people who grew up on both franchises at once. Wizards is borrowing other people’s universes because Magic’s own well has run dry of surprises. That doesn’t mean the result isn’t worth a look on November 13.

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: How Star Trek: The Customizable Card Game Went From Brilliant Innovation To Complete Failure

Decipher, Inc. built the second-biggest trading card game business in America on the back of Star Trek and Star Wars, then watched a company vice president siphon millions out of the register while the games he was supposed to be steering grew too complicated for their own players to track. The Star Trek Customizable Card Game outlived its publisher by nearly two decades because a volunteer fan committee refused to let it die. Getting to that ending means walking through where Decipher came from, how it built the game, and how the company fell apart around it.

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From Puzzle Boxes to Pente

Warren Holland founded Decipher in Norfolk, Virginia in 1983 as a puzzle company. The first product carried the company’s own name: a jigsaw puzzle called Decipher, built around four embedded cryptograms and a cash prize for solving them. A sequel followed. The final puzzle in that line, Decipher III, has never been solved. From puzzles, Holland moved the company into party games with the How to Host a Murder line, then picked up the Pente license from Parker Brothers. By the early 1990s, Decipher was a small, established name in party and abstract strategy games with no card game pedigree at all.

That changed because of two former Pente world champions. Tom Braunlich and Rollie Tesh had watched Magic: The Gathering take off and pitched Decipher on a new idea: a customizable card game built on licensed media instead of an invented fantasy setting. Decipher approached Paramount, and in December 1993 acquired the rights to Star Trek: The Next Generation. The game previewed at Gen Con in August 1994 and released that November as Star Trek: The Next Generation Customizable Card Game.

Expansion, Success, and the Seeds of Bloat

The TNG game was supposed to run three years and five sets. It did well enough that Paramount renegotiated in November 1996, handing Decipher the rights to every live-action Star Trek property: the Original Series, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and the films. The card game’s name shrank to match its new scope: Star Trek Customizable Card Game. A month later Decipher had already applied the same formula to Star Wars, licensing the property from Lucasfilm in December 1995. Both games ranked among the top five CCGs on the market for most of their runs, with Star Wars regularly trailing only Magic itself.

Growth on this scale came without a governor. Star Trek CCG launched with three factions (the Federation, the Klingons, and the Romulans) plus a catch-all Non-Aligned slot, and nine card types. Within a few years that had grown past seventeen card types, spread across new affiliations for the Kazon, Vidiians, and Hirogen introduced through Voyager. There was no unified point-cost system governing what a card was allowed to do relative to its price. Instead, Decipher patched the rules set after set, layering fix on top of fix rather than rebuilding the foundation. The community’s own oral history of the era, preserved on fan wikis, names the Voyager expansion as the start of what players still call “the Time of Breaking,” when specific cards (the Holy Hexany and Vic Fontaine among them) broke the game’s balance badly enough that organized play never fully recovered from the memory of it. Sales dipped through the final sets built around the films and holodeck scenarios, and Decipher itself took note.

Chasing Younger Players, Losing the Big One

1999 brought two moves in opposite directions. The Phantom Menace convinced Decipher its two flagship games were too dense for younger players chasing Pokémon, so it built the simpler Young Jedi Collectible Card Game around the prequel era. In the same year, Decipher tried to extend its card-game brand into party-game territory with an Austin Powers Collectible Card Game tied to The Spy Who Shagged Me. The property never found its footing as a card game and production stopped after the initial release.

Then came the loss that mattered. Star Wars was Decipher’s biggest earner, and at the end of 2001 the license came up for renewal. Wizards of the Coast, freshly folded into Hasbro alongside Hasbro’s existing Lucasfilm relationship, took the rights out from under Decipher. All three Star Wars card lines Decipher had built stopped cold. Decipher had already hedged by picking up the Lord of the Rings film license that same year, timed to release one month ahead of Peter Jackson’s first movie in November 2001, but the loss of Star Wars was still the loss of the company’s flagship product.

The Reboot, the RPGs, and the Kids’ Market Again

2002 brought Decipher’s attempt to fix what seven years of unmanaged growth had done to Star Trek. The company relaunched the game as Second Edition, keeping the mechanics that had made the original popular while adding the point-cost system the first version never had. The same year, Decipher bought most of the design staff from the collapsed Last Unicorn Games and used them to build licensed Star Trek and Lord of the Rings roleplaying games on a new system called CODA. 2003 saw another swing at the youth market that Yu-Gi-Oh! now dominated, with card games built on .hack and Beyblade. The Beyblade line died quickly. The .hack//Enemy game lasted years and won an Origins Award. 2004 added a Mega Man NT Warrior card game and Decipher’s first original, non-licensed card game, WARS, built on the same underlying system that had made the original Star Wars CCG work.

The Rot Nobody Could See

None of that diversification could offset what had already happened inside the company’s own finance office. Rick Eddleman, Warren Holland’s brother-in-law, had been Decipher’s Vice President of Finance since 1993, the same year Braunlich and Tesh first pitched the Star Trek game. Beginning in 2000, Eddleman began writing company checks to himself and running personal expenses through company credit cards. The theft continued until his resignation in 2001, and by the time it was fully accounted for in a civil suit, Decipher’s claim against him totaled $8.9 million. Eddleman pleaded guilty to twelve counts of embezzlement covering more than $1.5 million of that total and was sentenced in July 2009 to six years and five months in federal prison.

The money was gone years before anyone outside the company knew it. Decipher’s fan community has long pointed to the embezzlement as the root cause of the company’s collapse, and Holland himself built a public accounting of the fraud after the fact. The mechanics of the fraud are less important here than the timing: a company burning through licensing fees, print runs, and payroll on the belief that its books were sound had a multimillion-dollar hole in exactly the accounts it needed to weather a shrinking hobby market.

2005: The Year It Broke

2005 delivered every remaining problem at once. The .hack and Mega Man cartoons lost their audience, forcing Decipher to cancel both card lines. WARS never found players without a built-in media brand behind it and went on indefinite hold. Decipher shut down its roleplaying game division. The broader collectible card game industry was contracting on its own, and layered on top of an embezzlement loss the company was only now fully reckoning with, Decipher laid off as many as 40 employees. Warren Holland kept the company out of bankruptcy, but the staff left behind could not keep pace with the release schedule for the two properties still generating revenue: Star Trek and Lord of the Rings.

The result was a death spiral with a name among Lord of the Rings TCG players: the Hunters block, originally due in November 2005, arrived seven months late with what the game’s own community still calls the least playtested, least balanced set Decipher ever printed, full of overpowered cards and combinations nobody had time to catch before print. Delays fed retailer distrust, distrust fed falling sales, and falling sales fed more layoffs, in a loop that left a single employee doing the work of an entire studio to finish out the final sets.

Two Licenses, Two Endings

The Lord of the Rings license expired on schedule in 2007, and Decipher released its last expansion, Age’s End, rather than losing the property outright. Star Trek ended differently. On December 12, 2007, Decipher announced the current expansion, What You Leave Behind, would be the Star Trek CCG’s final set. The company spent that holiday season teasing a “player revolution coming in 2008” on its homepage, which turned out to be Fight Klub, a combat card game licensed across disparate action-movie properties like Rambo and Chuck Norris. It released in February 2009 and did not revive the company’s fortunes.

The Fans Who Refused to Let It End

What happened next is the part of this story that gives it a different shape than most dead trading card games. Within days of Decipher’s December 2007 announcement, a group of players organized the Star Trek CCG Continuing Committee to keep producing new content on a volunteer, non-profit basis. By the account of the game’s own longtime players, the Committee has since released more sets of cards than Decipher ever did, distributed as free print-and-play files. In 2010 the Committee issued a set of Modern Rules, including a ban list, specifically to correct the balance failures that had accumulated across the original run, the same power creep and rules bloat that had made the game harder to learn with each passing set. Star Wars got the same treatment years earlier: after losing that license in 2001, Decipher donated more than a million dollars in product and financial backing to help fans form the Star Wars Customizable Card Game Players Committee, which still runs tournaments today.

The game Decipher built in 1994 introduced ideas that no card game before it had tried: missions instead of an open-ended win condition, an away-team structure that made every card in the deck function as a role rather than just a stat block, a dilemma pile that punished careless deck-building as much as it rewarded clever construction. Two volunteer committees have now kept that design alive for longer than the company that built it managed to keep it running honestly. Was the game undone by its own ambition, by a corporate parent that never controlled its own bloat, or by the man inside the building who was stealing from it the whole time?

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: Tired of What They Did to Your Favorite Franchise? Here’s the Fix!

Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering Arena development team voted 79 to 16 on June 23 to certify United Wizards of the Coast, the first union in the company’s history. The National Labor Relations Board tally covered 102 eligible workers across animation, art, design, engineering, and QA at the company’s Renton, Washington office. It also arrived under a shadow the Hasbro-owned publisher built for itself three years earlier, when it sent Pinkerton agents to a fan’s front door over a leaked pack of cards.

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The organizing drive began in late April, when Arena senior software engineer Damien Wilson announced the effort on behalf of the Communications Workers of America. “At Wizards, we’re organizing for a say in layoffs, accountability that runs up and down the chain, and a living wage that actually lets people build a life,” Wilson said in a statement to press. The union asked Hasbro for voluntary recognition by May 1. Wizards let the deadline pass. The company’s public statement said it was “committed to fostering a workplace where every person feels heard, valued, and supported” and pointed to its “direct relationship” with employees as the reason a union was unnecessary.

Behind that statement, the NLRB case filing showed Wizards had retained Fisher Phillips, a law firm that markets an “interactive union organizing activity map” to clients and has built a national practice advising companies on how to defeat organizing campaigns. Arena team members later told reporters the company followed up with mandatory meetings, letters sent to employees’ homes, and a daily email campaign aimed at the bargaining unit before the vote. None of it moved the needle. The election closed 79 to 16 in the union’s favor.

For workers watching the fight, the company’s history made the tactics land differently than a standard anti-union playbook. In April 2023, a YouTuber known as oldschoolmtg posted unboxing videos of an unreleased Magic set, March of the Machine: The Aftermath, after unknowingly buying the product early from a reseller. Pinkerton agents showed up at his home the following Saturday morning, demanded the cards back, and raised the subject of jail time to him and his wife. Wizards confirmed to Polygon and Kotaku that the agents were part of its investigation into the leak. Gizmodo reporter Linda Codega found the 2023 incident was not the company’s first recourse to the firm: a source described a similar Pinkerton deployment in 2017 over a leaked Ixalan foil sheet.

Pinkerton’s name carries a specific weight in American labor history that has nothing to do with card games. Founded in 1850, the agency spent the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the enforcement arm of choice for industrialists fighting organized labor. Henry Clay Frick hired 300 Pinkerton agents to break the 1892 Homestead Strike at Andrew Carnegie’s steel mill; the ensuing gun battle killed several strikers and agents and triggered a national outcry that led Congress to pass the Anti-Pinkerton Act the following year, barring the federal government from hiring the firm. Pinkerton agents were also deployed against striking coal miners at the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921. The company has spent decades since rebranding into corporate risk management, but the union-busting reputation followed it into the present: Amazon hired Pinkerton to monitor warehouse workers for union activity in 2020, and Starbucks brought on a former Pinkerton employee for its own anti-union effort in 2022.

Wizards never had to invoke Pinkerton by name during the Arena union drive. The company didn’t need to. A publisher that had already sent private investigators to a fan’s home over cardboard packaging chose Fisher Phillips and a saturation email campaign instead, and workers who had followed the 2023 story took the pattern as confirmation of where the company’s instincts sit when it feels ownership of something threatened, whether that something is a leaked rare or a bargaining unit. The vote count suggests it didn’t work.

United Wizards of the Coast now moves to contract negotiations, the stage where voluntary recognition fights and certification elections stop being symbolic. Wizards will have to bargain in good faith under federal law, though the timeline and substance of that bargaining remain open questions the company controls as much as the union does. Does a company with three documented decades of anti-union legal strategy behind it approach that table any differently than it approached the leak, or does Fisher Phillips simply become this year’s Pinkerton?

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When genetic engineering nearly doomed the species, humanity made a desperate bargain: let the frontier do what nature intended. In a harsh universe, these cadets have to make impossible decisions. Read Space Fleet Academy today.

NEXT: BoardGameGeek’s Activist Crowd Tries to Cancel Kingdom Come: Deliverance: The Board Game Over Gamergate

Czech Games Edition announced Kingdom Come: Deliverance: The Board Game this week, a licensed adaptation of the popular medieval RPG designed by Tomáš Holek, creator of the hit eurogame SETI, and Vlaada Chvátil, the designer behind Codenames and Galaxy Trucker. It is an epic adventure game set in 15th-century Bohemia, planned for debut at Essen SPIEL in October 2026. Within days, a thread appeared on BoardGameGeek titled “Concerns regarding the license and the studio’s background.”

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Games Workshop published new Horus Heresy artwork on June 8 showing MkIV Tactical Legionaries deploying alongside a Sicaran Battle Tank. One Space Marine in the foreground has six fingers on his bolter hand. The hobby community noticed within hours.

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Wizards of the Coast is heading toward a union election it did not want, in a culture war it manufactured, over a workforce it spent years reshaping in its own ideological image. The results of the Magic: The Gathering Arena union vote will be announced June 23. The chaos leading up to it tells you everything about where the company is right now.

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Paizo Publishing announced Wednesday that it is laying off 12 employees and scaling back its Organized Play programs, the direct result of losing nearly $2 million in 2025 to the ongoing fallout from Diamond Comics’ bankruptcy.

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The collapse of Diamond, which had served as Paizo’s exclusive bookstore distributor, set off a chain reaction the Pathfinder publisher is still paying for eighteen months later. When Diamond declared bankruptcy in early 2025, JP Morgan Chase moved to claim a lien on all inventory sitting in Diamond’s warehouses, including roughly $10 million in Paizo books and games shipped on consignment. Paizo sent the product, never got paid, and couldn’t retrieve it. A judge eventually terminated Paizo’s exclusive distribution contract with Diamond earlier this year, allowing the publisher to sign with Independent Publishers Group. Diamond immediately appealed, stalling recovery.

The practical result: Paizo is cutting staff, reducing Pathfinder Society and Starfinder Society scenarios from four per month to two starting in October, and pausing Foundry VTT modules for organized play until the company can rebuild margins. CEO Jim Butler announced the layoffs in a post on the Paizo website Monday evening, noting the decisions were negotiated with the United Paizo Workers union. Affected employees received 20 days’ notice and 18-month recall rights.

The mechanics of the disaster are real. Diamond’s bankruptcy wiped out cash flow that Paizo had counted on. JP Morgan’s claim on the inventory was legally defensible under bankruptcy law even though the stock belonged to Paizo. The litigation has ground on for over a year with dozens of other publishers stuck in the same position.

But the financial catastrophe arrived at a company that had spent the previous several years shrinking its own audience before any bankruptcy hit.

Pathfinder was built on a specific promise. When Wizards of the Coast abandoned Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 in 2008 and replaced it with a streamlined fourth edition that bore little resemblance to what players had known, Paizo stepped in. Their Pathfinder system kept the complexity, the crunch, and the classic fantasy feel that the D&D 3.5 community loved. It worked. Pathfinder outsold D&D for stretches of the early 2010s, built a tournament organized play infrastructure, and established a loyal base of players who had nowhere else to go.

Those players were predominantly the same demographic that built the hobby: gamers who wanted rules depth, classic fantasy adventure, and escapism without a lecture attached.

Paizo spent the next decade replacing them in the messaging if not the rulebook. The company’s public-facing content shifted toward Pride Community blog posts celebrating every LGBTQ+ identity imaginable, canonical trans and nonbinary characters spotlighted in official blog entries under headers like “Trans Pride, Trans Power, Trans Rights,” deity entries specifically designed around sexual liberation, and a running organizational identity that told its core audience their values were unwelcome.

The second edition Remaster in 2023 stripped out the alignment system that had been a cornerstone of classic fantasy RPG design since Gary Gygax. The reasons given were mechanical. The subtext was not hard to read.

In January 2025, Paizo’s Director of Games posted on social media that Vice President JD Vance should “send his books back” and declared there was “no space for fascists in our game.” When conservative players and gaming figures pushed back, the director blocked them. Mark Kern, a former World of Warcraft lead developer, was blocked. The Paizo business account itself joined in blocking critics. It became a viral demonstration of exactly who Paizo had decided its customer was, and who it had decided to eject.

The layoffs are expected to be finalized by the end of June.

Are you still playing any Paizo games?

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