In Q4, players take the role of board game publishers, trying to make a name for themselves in the competitive world of hobby board games. The objective of the game is not necessarily to make the most money – although it helps – but to get the most satisfaction out of your career as a publisher by releasing the kind of games that you love.
Over the course of a game players will seek funding and take out loans in order to license games from designers, hire artists and sell their games; boring parts of the process such as dealing with printers, shipping, warehousing and losing your house are abstracted away, but release deadlines are not!

Each game design a player licenses (a Contract) is placed onto that player’s production schedule – the player must then source enough artwork to make that game before it hits its release date, as games which cannot be released on time get bad buzz and won’t make them so much money. There are a limited number of artists working on board game art, however, so competition for art in particular styles can be fierce, and players will have to outbid their rivals to include it in their games.

In a game turn, players take turns to place their company's workers (discs) on the action spaces around the board. Some spaces function as traditional worker-placement action spaces and can be occupied only by a single disc at once. Other spaces - such as the artists or the game-design contract spaces - act as auctions; players place their discs on top of the stack of other discs already on the space, and once all discs have been placed, the players take turns from the top down to pay money equal to the number of discs in the stack if they want to commission art from that artist, or contract a game design from the submission queue. Players who place late pay the highest price but get first choice; players who place early could get a bargain, but only if nobody else outbids them for the thing they wanted.

At the end of each turn, each player's catalogue of completed games sell to distributors and give him some income, but only a small number of games can be kept in print at any one time, and if a player's company has too much money in the bank the directors take the excess in dividends and blow it all on a weekend in Vegas.

At the end of the game, players score each contract they've completed, getting bonus points if it aligns with their company's goals.

Games