He’s Z-Man: Catching Up with Zev Shlasinger and Z-Man Games

Knucklebones: November 2007This is a reprint of an article written in June 2007 for first publication in the November 2007 issue of the now-defunct Knucklebones magazine. Because of its origins, this article is more introductory and (hopefully) more polished than many of my online writings. Despite the original source of this article, this blog is in no way associated with Jones Publishing or Knucklebones Magazine.

November 2007 was also the first month that Knucklebones opted to accept two different articles for me; the other was an article on pirate games, which was featured on the cover. I wrote it a few weeks earlier, in May.


Z-Man Games has been publishing games for eight years, but with their early focus on collectible card games and roleplaying games, many board game players didn’t know about them. That should now be changing, because in 2005 Z-Man Games burst onto the board game scene with a collection of high-quality Eurogames and American originals.

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The Year in Review: 2005

Another year is behind us, and as January slowly dawns over the horizon of the twenty-first century, our ever-human instinct is to look back and reflect upon what the previous year brought.

It was, in general, a year of growth and change for the gaming industry. I’m not convinced that any true classics were produced last year. I think that Caylus will ultimately prove too long to support its continued rating as a top-10 game. However, there were a decent number of good, gamer’s games which I’m happy to own and which will continue to occasionally hit tabletop for many years.

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