Blog

BLOG: One print era

A few weeks ago Lacerta, one of the publishers in Poland announced the list of recently released games they won’t reprint. It was a very clear message they send. “Hey, if you want one of these games, it’s now or never. We are not going to print them again.” It

BLOG: Better to lose than to draw

In one of his reviews, Tom Vasel once said that every game should have ultimate and final tie-breaker. He said he really is disappointed with: “In such case, both players share the victory.” I couldn’t agree more. I precisely remember my one and the only game of Power Grid that

Portal Games 2018 in review

The year 2018 was a rollercoaster for us. With the release of Detective, we had one of the biggest successes in the history of Portal Games. With the series of very unfortunate mistakes in our productions for the Polish market, we had a terrible year that will hunt us for

BLOG: Monolith Arena – Charge!

There are four factions in Monolith Arena. Dwarves, Elves, Demons and… The fourth faction in Monolith Arena is called Dragon Empire. I call them Knights, and I guess, everybody calls them Knights. They have horses, lances, they charge so who’d bother calling them Dragon Empire, huh? Charges Knights army has

BLOG: Monolith Arena – Bu-ha-ha-ha!

The theme of the evil army always is being not fair. You play Demons to be able to do this evil “Bu-ha-ha-ha” laugh in the middle of the game and piss off your opponent, right? Well, Michał Oracz knew that. He put some really mean tokens and abilities into this

GDJ Detective – Lone wolf

It’s late night and I am sitting at my desk. The place is finally quiet. Everybody sleeps. I have a cup with my favorite tea, a few pencils, notepads and my lucky set of dice. I bought them back then when I was in high school. Good old times. I

GDJ Detective – My game

Detective is another big game from Ignacy Trzewiczek. I spent countless hours on that game. I wish I had precise stats, I wish I could look it up and see the number. Would it be like 10k hours? 15K? It was an intense few months. I wrote the fluff for

GDJ Detective – The moment

Detective is sent to all the players who decided to pre-order it directly from us. Nearly 1000 groups will start playing the game in upcoming days. Another year, another game, another time I must say “It’s done. I did my job. It’s time to walk away.” This was a fascinating

GDJ Detective – Because we knew why

I always say, and I am dead serious here – Przemek could easily work for HBO writing scripts for shows like True Detective or Rome. He takes it seriously. Before we wrote all the Cases, before we sat to design all cards and paragraphs, Przemek wrote the whole big story.

GDJ Detective – A cop knows

A cop knows. A cop sees. Even the most casual thing he registers. Often you’ll remember to later on but then you look back you realize you knew it. This quote comes from the old Denzel Washington’s movie called Fallen. Released in 1998 it walked with me for the past

GDJ Detective – The Experience

by Ignacy Trzewiczek The rulebook for Detective is the first rulebook we published that besides rules of the game also covers advice on how to approach the game to enjoy it the most. Why would we do that? What differs Detective from any other game? Why care to tell you

Welcome to PORTAL GAMES

We are bookworms. Movie maniacs. Story addicts. We grew up reading Tolkien, Howard, Herbert, Dick, Lem… We were watching Willow, Blade Runner, Never Ending Story, Robin Hood…

And yet, we don’t write books… we don’t make movies. We don’t make those things, because we make games. We make games that tell stories.