Leacock’s Lab: Forbidden Legacy Announced

Plus: Fate of the Fellowship Availability Update, The Four Doors Design Diary, and more

In this Update

1. Forbidden Legacy Premiering at Gen Con 2026

2. The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship Due to Return to Retail in March

3. The Four Doors Design Diary Posted

4. Flickering Stars Update

5. Upcoming Conferences and Appearances

6. Recent Media

7. Daybreak in Real Life

Forbidden Legacy Premiering at Gen Con 2026

On the tail of a mysterious, ancient people, you and your band of adventurers have escaped Forbidden Island, crashed in Forbidden Desert, and blasted off from Forbidden Sky, only to step into a mysterious portal in Forbidden Jungle. This fall, you emerge from that portal—back in time—into the ancient floating city that is the setting for Forbidden Legacy. Will you be able to finally meet the people you’ve been seeking?

Rob Daviau and I have teamed up again to deliver the latest installment in the Forbidden series. The game includes an innovative chronicle—a sturdy comic book that tells a seven-episode story that has you traveling through time as it unveils new surprises, hidden panels, stickers, and more.

The game will premier at Gen Con 2026 with retail availability slated for September 30th.

Soon you won’t have to travel to New Zealand to get a copy!

The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship Due to Return to Retail in March

“A product is never late... it arrives precisely when it means to.”

Due to high demand, Fate of the Fellowship has been out of stock since late 2025. I’m happy to report that it will be returning to retail in late March!

The Four Doors Design Diary Posted

Prototype player cards illustrating the evolution of The Four Doors. Left-to-right: The Goonies: Adventure Card Game, Pandemic: The Card Game, The Clockwork Initiative, Forbidden Island: The Card Game, and finally The Four Doors.

Matt Riddle and I take a trip down memory lane and recount the long, strange journey that The Four Doors took prior to its publication. Depending on how you count, the game had five different themes, four different potential publishers, and four different designers. Read more about it in the diary.

Flickering Stars Update

It’s with a heavy heart that I share that Flickering Stars has been canceled by Friendly Skeleton due to the publisher’s financial troubles. Friendly Skeleton assures co-designer, Josh Cappel and myself that they will be working to get refunds to everyone who pre-ordered the game.

Josh and I will be looking for a new partner to publish the game in the coming months. This game is a favorite in our household and I’d love for you all to get a chance to try it somehow. If you’re a game publisher (or know of one) looking for a fully-developed, toyetic, joy-generator, please get in touch!

Upcoming Conferences and Appearances

• Game Market West, San Jose, March 22
  I’m a special guest and will be signing games from 10am–12pm.

• Minicon 59, Minneapolis, April 2–5
  I’m a guest of honor, attending panels and playing and signing games.

• The Gathering of Friends, Niagara Falls, April 17–26
  Pitching, playing, and playtesting.

• Gen Con, July 30–August 2
  I’ll be signing Forbidden Legacy at the Gamewright booth, Friday 1pm–2pm.
  (More Gen Con events to come.)

Recent Media

• I gave an interview with BoardGameWire where I talked about Pandemic, game development, and the Tabletop Game Designers Association.

• I spoke with Danielle Reynolds on Game Design Unboxed about game development.

• Lisa Towell recounted her story of becoming an animal rescuer and her experience with Animal Rescue Team on PETA’s website.

Daybreak in Real Life

I often check climate news against Daybreak’s simple model to see how things are progressing in the real world. It’s imperfect to be sure, but it does help bring a sense of scale and a framework for understanding all the disparate pieces of news.

Daybreak has two opposing dynamics that gave the game its core tension. First, it shows how the accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere leads to an increase in global temperatures and how this increase leads to tipping points that further accelerate heating in a vicious cycle.

But we also showed how various technologies and policies can feed into each other to create virtuous cycles. For example, as the price of solar and batteries goes down it becomes more attractive solution. This drives more adoption, which in turn, makes it easier to roll out more solar and batteries which further reduces costs, and so on.

These two cycles: vicious and virtuous are playing out right now before our eyes. They’re evident in two dramatic graphs that I came across recently. Each of them illustrates one of these dynamics.

I encountered the first in Bill McKibben’s substack, The Crucial Years:

The slope in this graph showing global temperature is continuing to rise… and I don’t like that it’s headed well past 2.0°F. It’s not bending in the other direction; it’s getting worse at an increasing rate. If we started our game of Daybreak in 2020 and each round took about five years, the above graph has us losing the game at the end of round four.

But while you hold that in your mind, also check out the following:

This graph, based on data from the IEA and BloombergNEF, is all the more stunning, largely due to all the investments made by China. It shows the number of solar installations each year and how they’ve consistently beat expectations. In Daybreak terms, you could achieve this effect by rolling out a Major Solar Program with a lot of supporting solar tags.

Meanwhile, the US player has decided not to play anymore and has stepped away from the table.

“President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.” — The New York Times

There’s so much going on right now in our news cycle. But I’d like to encourage you to see how so much of it is connected. The fossil fuel industry is working very, very hard to ensure that the US player stops playing the game.

If you’re in the US, every little bit you can do to help defend our democracy will help get us back to the table and playing our turn. It’s very hard to win a 4-player game of Daybreak when one of the players is sitting out.