# Game request: Speakeasy (Vital Lacerda)
I would like to request **Speakeasy** for a Board Game Arena implementation.
## The game
- Title: Speakeasy (2025)
- Designer: Vital Lacerda
- Artist: Ian O'Toole
- Publishers: Eagle-Gryphon Games, with CrowD Games, Delta Vision Publishing and Korea Boardgames handling localised editions
- Players: 1-4 (a solo mode is included)
- Playing time: 50-180 minutes
- BGG page:
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/375459/speakeasy
## Why this game fits BGA particularly well
Speakeasy is a heavy, long, deeply interlocked euro set during Prohibition. That is exactly the profile of game that is hardest to get to the table in real life: it asks for a long uninterrupted evening and for three other people who already know the rules. Turn-based play on BGA solves both problems at once, and the site's real-time mode covers the group that does have those evenings.
It is also a game whose complexity is mostly bookkeeping that a computer handles for free. Tracking the state by hand is the main barrier to playing it more often; an implementation removes that barrier entirely and, in my experience with other heavy euros on BGA, roughly doubles how often people are willing to start a game.
Finally, the designer's catalogue is almost absent from the platform. Vital Lacerda's games are among the most requested heavy euros in the hobby, and every one of them shares the same problem described above. Speakeasy is a natural place to start, and a successful implementation would make the case for the rest of his titles.
## The designer has already said publicly that he is open to this
This is the important part, because the usual assumption in these threads is that Lacerda blocks online implementations. He has stated that this is not the case.
In a BGG thread from January this year, Vital Lacerda replied in person (his account is flagged as Designer on the site). His answer was that the game is not on BGA "simply because no one has proposed or taken on the work" of programming it there. He added that Mercado de Lisboa is already available on BGA, which in his words shows that he does support the platform, and that the only platform he does not support is Tabletop Simulator, because implementations appear there without asking permission from the publisher, the artists or the designer.
The full thread is here, and I would encourage anyone evaluating this request to read it rather than take my summary for it:
https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/365112 ... his-on-bga
So the position is not "the designer says no". It is "nobody has started the work yet".
## What is actually missing
Two things, as I understand the process:
1. A developer willing to take the project on. Speakeasy is not a small implementation - the board state is dense and the rules interactions are the whole point of the game - so this is a serious commitment rather than a weekend project.
2. Formal approval from the publisher, Eagle-Gryphon Games, since licensing runs through the publisher rather than the designer.
Worth noting for anyone considering it: in that same BGG thread several people explicitly offered to pay a developer for the work, and others said an implementation would make them subscribe to BGA or play there far more than they currently do. There is clearly an audience waiting for this.
Thank you for reading, and thank you to the BGA team and developers for everything already on the platform.
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Sources:
- [Any chance for this on BGA? - BGG thread with the designer's reply](
https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/365112 ... his-on-bga)
- [Speakeasy on BoardGameGeek](
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/375459/speakeasy)
