Winter is over, and now you can chill outside on a warm night with a few rounds of Monopoly: House of the Dragon. Hasbro has a version of Monopoly available for seemingly every fandom, and for Game of Thrones fans, this newly launched $35 edition focuses on the prequel to the hit TV series.

Like the show–which is a Game of Thrones spin-off set nearly 200 years in the past–House of the Dragon will see you battle your friends for control of the Iron Throne. It combines art, storylines, and characters from the series into a good-looking board game, and perhaps the nicest touch are the game tokens each player will use. Instead of a top hat or a race car, these are golden zinc pieces that represent one of the six major houses of the show; House Targaryen, House Hightower, House Velaryon, House Lannister, House Strong, and House Royce.

On the game board, you’ll find key locations throughout your journey across Westeros and Essos. As usual, the main goal is taking control of as many strongholds as you can. Plastic dragon eggs and dragons replace houses and hotels, and the board game comes with 102 themed cardboard coins. Once you accumulate enough strength–dragons certainly help–rival houses will hopefully bend the knee. Or perhaps Westeros will be invaded by the hungry beings (kids) from beyond the wall (their room) and no house will win (because you need to stop playing).

If you’d prefer to bankrupt your friends–metaphorically–with a different fantasy-themed game of Monopoly, there are lots of alternatives to choose from currently. It’s getting harder to find Monopoly: Game of Thrones at a decent price these days, but Amazon has the collector’s edition available for $50. You can also pick up The Witcher, Lord of the Rings, and Dungeons & Dragons Monopoly games right now.

For younger members of the family, everyone’s favorite genetic experiment from the Disney vaults, Stitch, has received his very own edition of Monopoly.

Monopoly board games

Brian Helgeland (Man on Fire, A Knight’s Tale) was writing the Game of Thrones spin-off 10,000 Ships, a series that author George R.R. Martin signed off on, but the show was never made. Helgeland has now shared more insight into the project and what it was aiming to be.

Speaking to Inverse, Helgeland said his script “came out great,” but the powers that be believed the idea for the show was “too far removed from the pillars of the original,” he said. While HBO never moved ahead with 10,000 ships, that doesn’t mean it’s dead and buried for good.

“Nothing is ever dead,” Helgeland said.

The story would have focused on Queen Nymeria, and the narrative would have been similar to the Biblical story of Moses, Helgeland said. The series would have taken place 1,000 years before the events of Game of Thrones.

“Her country gets ruined and her people are forced to live on the water, which is why the show was called 10,000 Ships,” he explained. “They end up having to leave and find a new home like the Israelites leaving Egypt. She’s leading all these people, trying to hold everyone together but things are always in danger of falling apart as they travel around a fictionalized version of the Mediterranean, looking for a new home to settle in.”

As Helgeland envisioned it, the show would have featured characters living a nomadic life on a “raft city,” or a “big floating city.” Sometimes, characters would go ashore, but they would eventually get driven off the land and back to the ocean to find “their version of the promised land.”

“I met with George R.R. Martin to pitch him the idea, which he signed off on. Sadly, I didn’t work with him closer, but I would have done if the show was picked up,” he said. “It was kind of like Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad films mixed with The Odyssey. In a way, Nymeria is Odysseus, but instead of a 12-person crew, she’s responsible for every citizen in this floating city-state. My work is still there if HBO wants to pick it up. I enjoyed my time developing it, and you just never know.”

10,000 Ships sounds somewhat similar to another Game of Thrones spin-off idea, 9 Voyages, which takes place at sea and focuses on the Sea Snake character. This show is moving ahead, although it has shifted from being a live-action show to an animated series due to cost issues.

Martin said a live-action version of 9 Voyages could have been “prohibitively expensive” to make. That’s because a good portion of the show takes place at sea and the rest would be set at a different port each week, Martin said.

While 10,000 Ships and 9 Voyages might never get made, HBO is moving ahead with House of the Dragon Season 2, which comes out this June. Another spin-off, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight, is coming in late 2025.

The studio behind 2019’s Gloomhaven, Flaming Fowl, announced its new game today. It’s a deckbuilding strategy game called Ironmarked but while it has a Steam demo out, the studio has already delayed the full release indefinitely.

In a statement to VGC, CEO Craig Oman said that Flaming Fowl had been working on Ironmarked for over a year before its publisher unexpectedly dropped it last summer. The studio has been self-funding Ironmarked since August, and now had to stop production and lay off more than half of its developers.

Unfortunately, Oman explained that he’s been pitching the game to various publishers since then, but hasn’t been able to secure any deal. He points out that the most likely reason is that Ironmarked is a mid-tier title, as he was asking for around $6 million USD. However, publishers were only looking to sign games that cost a couple hundred grand or around the high end at $20 to $40 million.

“As soon as we finished Gloomhaven, we signed Ironmarked,” he explained. “We had multiple offers. But then a year and half later, we’ve gone back to a lot of the same publishers and they say they’re no longer looking for projects like this.”

Oman encouraged those who enjoyed the demo to wishlist Ironmarked on Steam so that Flaming Fowl can take the numbers and present it to publishers in the future.

Some studios have been forced to either lay off employees or shut down entirely due to financial issues. Despite being one of Steam’s most-wishlisted games, the studio behind The Day Before recently shut down as the game failed financially and had poor reviews.

Before developer Epic decided to switch gears and build a battle royale mode for Fortnite, there was an Uber ride to Disney in 2017. That drive led to the decision to alter the game’s course and arguably the video game industry as a whole.

Donald Mustard, former chief creative officer at Epic, revealed to Game File (via Kotaku) when the company ultimately agreed to a battle royale mode in Fortnite. “It was Tim Sweeney [founder and CEO of Epic] and Paul Meegan, who was the president of Epic at the time, [and] Kim Libreri, Epic’s CTO,” Mustard recalled. “The four of us were in the back of an Uber in California, headed to a meeting at Disney… We were already toying with this [idea that] we need to do a battle royale. We should do this. And what if we did it in Fortnite?”

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