by W. Eric Martin

One of the upcoming games getting constant attention during demoes at Gen Con 2025 was The Game Makers, a 1-6 player design from Ben Rosset that publisher Bézier Games plans to crowdfund in September 2025 for release in 2026.

The primary hook of The Game Makers is that players take the role of game manufacturers and "construct" real-world games to score points, with more than three hundred games included thanks to licensing agreements with more than one hundred publishers.

The game plays the same no matter the player count because everyone plays simultaneously each turn. To set up, each player takes a game board, a basic worker (who starts in that player's break room), and four cards. Each card shows one of four types of games, such as worker placement or set collection, with the components needed to "construct" the game detailed at the top of the card; place up to three of these cards in your open contract slots, then place the rest aside face down. They'll now serve as pulp to help you complete your contracts!

Each player has three forklifts in a shared circular warehouse divided into six segments, two of which are off limits each turn. Each round, you take all of your forklifts in the segment that will be covered at the end of the turn (when the warehouse thingy rotates clockwise) and allocate these forklifts in the three open spaces "ahead" of you in the warehouse. Looking at an image might make this concept easier to understand:

Note that all images feature prototype components
In the image above, we've already emptied the segment that will next be covered, so effectively the turn is over. We can rotate the warehouse wheel, then start the next turn during which three green forklifts and one purple forklift will need to move.

Each segment has a different type of item available, and the items come in three strength levels. If you advance a forklift to the farthest segment available, you take the "strongest" item from that segment; advance two spaces, and you get the medium-strength item; and advance only one space, and you'll take the weakest item in that segment. The "advantage" of taking a weak item, though, is that your forklift moved only one segment, so you'll move it again next turn.

(If you've played Fromage, co-designed by Rosset and Matthew O'Malley, you will recognize this dynamic: Spend more time to take a more valuable action.)

Every item that you collect can be used in one of two ways. Cards, as previously explained, can be placed face up as an open contract, giving you something to work on, or place face down in your components pile, serving as raw material for game production. The "strength" of cards is the number that you draw — 1, 2, or 3 — with you allocating each card as you wish.

The other game resources — woodworkers, dice, tiles, and plastic — can all be placed on your components pile for game production, but they can serve other functions to help your business grow. Woodworkers, for example, go in your break room, and at any time you can move one or more workers to designated spaces on your game board to receive the depicted resource or action. Another image will illustrate the many possibilities:


Under "Enhancements", you can use a specific worker type to allow you to either upgrade the item you take on one turn or "explore" the items as in Race for the Galaxy. (If you're drawing cards, for example, you'd draw one more card than you should, then discard one.) Under "Gain 1", you can place the designated pair of workers to gain one of the depicted items — and yes, by placing workers, you can get more workers, thereby fueling your office to maximum activity.

To the right of "The Break Room" are three spaces filled by (somewhat) random tiles each game. The "Safe" is worth 7 points at game's end if you place three medium-level plastics on it. That's it — a one-shot effect. But with "Loading Docks", once you activate it with two level-3 plastics, you can then place a level-3 worker (a panda, in honor of manufacturer and co-publisher Panda Game Manufacturing) on that tile to move two of your forklifts back one segment.

Workers stay in place until the warehouse rotates to the reset segment, at which time all your workers return to your break room.

Tiles come with 1-3 octagons linked together, and you can use them as components or add them to your assembly line. The tiles depict one type of resource, and if you make a line of three identical resources — as with the workers above, you then have a discount when completing contracts. When completing Keyflower, for example, I could use a panda as depicted or I could use a level-2 worker (meeple with a tie, from Bézier Games' TieBreaker); whichever I choose, I'd also need to discard a level-3 tile from my components.

The only game at Gen Con 2025 played on a pallet being held by a forklift
Dice can be used as components or rolled to serve as marketing, with the red level-3 die having values from 3-6, the yellow level-1 die having values 1-3, and the orange level-2 die falling in the middle. After rolling, you move one or more of the colored marketing cubes up their tracks a sum of spaces equal to the sum of what you rolled.

Marketing is important because each column is a modifier for one of the four card types (colors) or for trees, which are a separate thing we'll get to in a bit. The base modifier is x0, so if you don't advance your red marketing track to at least x1, which takes five moves, then your red cards are worthless, so don't bother collecting them. The same goes for trees and each other card type. In a one- to three-player game, yellow cards have a base value of 1 point per column on your 3x4 finished project board that includes a yellow card; with the modifier, they're worth 0-5 points per column — but cards might have separate scoring conditions as well. Once again, an example:


Above is my completed project board from the Gen Con 2025 demo game. At any time, when you have the components necessary to complete a project — six cards for Tichu; a level-2 worker, level-2 tile, and level-3 plastic for Niagara; etc. — you can discard those components, then move the project to your board. When someone fills every spot on their board, that triggers the end of the game.

Some cards give you an immediate bonus upon completion, such as Niagara giving me a level-1 plastic and a tree. Other cards feature a scoring condition you want to maximize, with Tichu giving me 1 point per project on the right half of my board that required cards — 5 points in this case. Tichu is also a purple card, so it will score points separately based on my purple marketing modifier.

Niagara gave me a free tree that I place on one of my game board spaces. Which one? Well, sometimes you get trees for free when you meet a listed condition, such as having six completed projects of a certain color or one project of each color. At other times, you receive them from cards or tiles; another player in my demo game had a tile that let him gain a tree each time he activated it, so he had a virtual forest by game's end.

The Garden Center is a tree factory
(In the wheel image at top, you'll notice trees next to one of the segments. This segment is a wild one, so you get a level-1, level-2, or level-3 item of your choice depending on which level of item you're allowed to take thanks to your forklift placement.)

As you can tell, The Game Makers has a lot going on, with all resources having two functions and with individual scoring conditions that you try to overlap strategically while also boosting marketing for what you're collecting.

I'll confess that I was somewhat lost during the demo, partly due to the pace of the game, but also due to its solitaire nature, which meant I had no downtime to watch others and learn. I didn't know exactly what would earn a tree; I neglected to build a worker-filled break room to earn constant goodies; I overlooked marketing for most of the game; I never learned how you acquire Tweenies — you can see one on my opponent's game board in his assembly line — but I guess they provide a one-shot bonus; I don't know what the Game Room tile does on my gameboard; I can't explain how purple cards score; I misread the scoring condition on Flourish and other such cards, thinking I needed level-3 tiles to trigger the scoring condition, not just tiles of any level — and the pace of the game was such that as soon as we emptied one segment and grabbed our stuff, we'd jump into the next turn and go, go, go.

Bézier Games was recording the demo game and taking lots of pics, but I'm pretty sure I provided no usable footage as I likely had a sour or baffled expression in each shot.

Yes, I could have kept asking our demo person for repeated instructions, but my fellow players seemed to be having a blast, and I was fine just rolling along with a general idea of how to play. The Game Makers is very much not my style of game, but it seems ideal for the Bézier Games audience — or at least for Bézier fans of games like Suburbia, Subdivision, and Castles of Mad King Ludwig, games in which you are rewarded for focusing on lots of tiny details to maximize every move.


In a callback to the aforementioned TieBreaker, which Bézier Games described as "the definitive method for determining who wins a tied game", The Game Makers includes a tie-breaking rule in the unlikely event of a tied game.

Using either an app or a web-based tool, you can use your phone to scan each player's board and see the current BGG ranking of each game that you have manufactured. Whichever tied player has the best-ranking game wins.