Fred Serval, one of wargaming’s great rabble-rousers, has a new game out. It might not sound like a new game, since I covered it a year and a halfish ago, but that was a convention freebie that required scissors and some buttons from your bottom drawer to play. A Very Civil Whist is now an actual game you can buy and play and push around, or maybe even press into service as a doorstop if that’s your thing.

I like it even more now than I did the first time.

Even as an exercise in minimalism and design limitation, A Very Civil Whist is quite the thing to behold. Like the original one-sheet version, the game is largely playable with a single deck of cards that fulfills four different purposes at the same time. There’s an actual map board now, plus chunky cardboard counters for everything, and some chess pieces for tracking the fronts and foreign support in its ongoing English Civil War, but the highlight is still that deck of cards.

As you can probably tell from the game’s title, this is a trick-taker, although there are some wrinkles that prevent it from feeling too much like anything else out there. Like German Whist, there’s a drafting phase, in which both players deploy a small hand of cards in order to secure other cards, and some combination of your original hand and those later additions then serve as your tools for the battles, domestic and foreign support, and reactions to come.

The deck is really something, both visually, thanks to the old woodblock prints that are their illustrations, and as a mechanical showcase. Most of the time, only the 4-9s get used in the trick-taking, tightening the scope in a way that’s even easier on card-counting, or at least card-vibing, than the form usually permits. The 10s serve as power-ups that unlock when your faction reaches a certain threshold: securing enough foreign support as the Royalists, say, or seizing some good ground in the northern war as Parliament. This basically confers an insta-win in that particular suit, although of course one should be suspicious of anything that seems like a sure strategy.

The remainder of the cards still matter. The lower suits, those 1s through 3s, function as a casualty check. When an attack fails, you draw a pair from this deck and see whether they sum to a higher number than your commander’s resilience; if so, he atones for his dishonor by falling on the field of battle. This is, to put it lightly, a bummer, especially when one of your better leaders bites it early. In one of my more bruising sessions, I managed to bring out Oliver Cromwell only to watch as he tripped onto his own sword in his very first fight. Let’s call that a good outcome for the Irish Catholics.

Meanwhile, the face cards become events. A Very Civil Whist is a brisk game, only four hands long at maximum, which requires two events per round. But they’re high-impact things, not to mention load-bearing tendons in the game’s connective tissue. Queen Henrietta might appear to call upon a burst of foreign support from her home country, or new counters might enter play to provide a one-time boost to your odds in battle. My least-favorite event — and I mean that in the complimentary sense — is the one that allows Parliament to examine every pair of that round’s drafted cards in advance before hiding one of them face-down, turning the draft into a nasty bluffing minigame.

With the cards pulling so many duties, it may not seem like there’s enough to keep players engaged. Nothing could be further from the truth. A Very Civil Whist is nasty, brutish, and short, all qualities Serval leverages to the game’s benefit. The military fronts are seesaws, their tracks kin to States of Siege’s lanes, always under threat. Shoring up your domestic support is necessary to declare victory, but requires players to discard their most precious cards. Unlike some trick-takers, there is never a moment that feels foreordained; there’s always something to do, some weaselly advantage to be clawed over on your rival.

Which brings us to a larger question: is A Very Civil Whist worthwhile as more than a plaything? As a trick-taker, it’s very good. As a visual production, it look fantastic. But what about as an expression of its historical conflict? We are, presumably, interested in these games as portrayals of their conflicts, not merely as vague nods in their direction.

There will be some variance here. Between its approach to events and the way its verbs relate to its card-play, there’s no denying that this occupies the far end of the CDG wargaming spectrum. In other words, it’s profoundly abstract. With some imagination, one may imagine the cards as stand-ins for broader considerations: some diplomatic tact here, the New Model Army there. But I doubt anybody would argue it doesn’t require the aforementioned imagining.

Where A Very Civil Whist excels, I think, has less to do with the invocation of specific occurrences, and more to do with the closeness and acrimony of its conflict. One doesn’t gain a sense for the progression of the English Civil War so much as for its unprecedented and brutal nature. Like the term “civil war,” the game’s title is a bitter irony. There is nothing civil about it. The war’s actors may speak the same tongue, may wear the clothes of noblemen, may speak in lofty dialogue. But here they are, grubbing in the mud for advantage over their closest peers. Nobody will emerge from the game any closer to having memorized the war’s important dates or understood its underlying causes. But they may grasp some of its proximity, some flicker of the reverberations it will send down the centuries. This is the true starting point for the Age of Revolution. Some may mark its date later, up to a full century after these events. But, no, it is here, in these very English debates over the ultimate source of sovereignty, over which taxes are justly imposed and which are unfairly extorted, over questions of which kingdoms should be accepted to rule over others, over the framework of constitutions and who deserves to benefit from them, that the great upheavals mark their beginning.

In any case, it’s hard not to be drawn to A Very Civil Whist’s sheer audacity. It’s a single-deck game that prizes playing cards for their versatility as much as for their ubiquity, and deploys both traits to great effect. It’s a hybrid of trick-taking and wargame that manages to emphasize the strength of both forms even as it forges its own identity. It’s even another investigation of revolutionary history, making it the rightful partner of A Gest of Robin Hood and Red Flag Over Paris — and, in many ways, their superior.

 

A complimentary copy of A Very Civil Whist was provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read about which films I watched in 2025, including some brief thoughts on each. That’s 44 movies! That’s a lot, unless you see, like, 45 or more movies in a year!)

Sometimes one card makes all the difference. When I played Agent Avenue last year, I found it sharp but perhaps a millimeter thinner than I would like, resulting in an affinity for the four-player mode over the usual two-player duel. Now that I’ve added Division M to the mix, I can safely say the expansion functions like a shim under a chair’s mismatched leg.

I say “one card,” but rest assured that Division M includes more than a single card. This is no depot expansion to The Lucky Seven. Which isn’t to say it’s exactly sprawling. There are six copies of the new card, plus fifteen black market cards for the advanced mode. Still a slender expansion, then, but it’s not like it ships in one of those singlet baseball card sleeves.

As before, players take on the role of rival secret agents who have moved into the same suburban community and are now enlisting their neighbors in a race to corner their opponent, a conceit that speaks to high drama without requiring more than a sentence of introduction and a few furry illustrations. The stakes are immediately clear: the board is a clockwise circuit, and whichever agent catches up to their rival delivers a presumable double-tap that concludes the session.

Similarly, the poison-pill gameplay returns wholly intact. Turns are simple: one side presents two cards, one visible and the other face-down, then their opponent picks which card both sides will receive. It isn’t quite as involved as the antics of my preferred divide-and-choose title Pacts, but that’s also the point. With only a handful of options in circulation, the possibility space is constrained, which only makes the decision space all the more deadly.

But where the base game’s cards fell into two broad categories — those that moved pawns and those that could, once enough copies were gathered, win or lose the game outright — Division M’s addition makes everything else more fraught. It’s an assassin. A mouse assassin. When first played, this adds an extra pawn to the board. As further copies are acquired, that assassin shifts its position like a shadow version of your main agent. If ever your rival shares a space with the great mouse assassin, it’s lights out for them. And vice versa, of course. Because there are six copies of Division M in the deck, it’s entirely possible for both sides to chase their rival while also dodging pint-sized bullets.

What this adds to Agent Avenue is an essential landmine. It has always been possible to “checkmate” one’s opponent, offering a pair of cards that will both cause them to lose, or, barring that, to weaken their position. With Division M in the mix, that’s a little more likely, but in both directions. It isn’t uncommon, for instance, to see a Division M card put up for offer right as you approach your rival’s side of the board. By claiming the concealed card, you might move right into the freshly-spawned rodent killer. Or is that what your opponent wants you to think? And so forth.

This makes matches punchier, which is exactly what I wanted. Despite my affection for the base game, I’ve suffered through the occasional match that ran a little too long for its own good, both agents circling again and again until one of them lost out of exhaustion more than maneuvering. Those days are over.

It helps, too, that the new black market cards are stellar. Nothing has changed in the advanced mode, rules-wise. Landing on a corner space still lets you select one of three offerings, and those cards are still nasty little things. It’s just that they’re a little more barbed than before. There’s the Turncoat, which lets you recruit a card from your opponent’s hand at random. Will you get something they’ve been hoarding for the right moment? Or maybe an ill-timed saboteur? Some of the new options even manipulate your new pawn, like Call Backup, which lets you move your mouse up to three spaces. That one’s counterpart is Secret Passage, which gives you a one-time dodge when your diminutive killer would put you on ice. Those fifteen extra cards double the size of the black market deck, ensuring that each session now has its own set of considerations.

Still, the real draw is the Division M card. The short version — short, geddit? — is that I already liked Agent Avenue, but Division M shapes it into an all-timer. It’s a perfect game for filling ten minutes, which includes when the kiddos want to play something quick before bed or we’d like to cap off an evening with something that’s still pleasantly thinky. I can’t foresee a time when I won’t want it on my forever shelf.

 

A complimentary copy of Agent Avenue: Division M was provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)

Yubibo exists to reveal which member of your group has selfish proprioception, a sentence I never could have conceptualized until I experienced a friend, with a dozen sticks poised between his fingers and those of four peers, suddenly rotating his wrist all the way around to arrive at a more comfortable position. Six other players were sent lurching in response, doing everything in their power to maintain the pressure on those sticks. It didn’t work. Foam balls and wooden sticks clattered to the table. Everyone laughed.

Yubibo feels like a game invented, playtested, and marketed in a dumpling restaurant. The gist couldn’t be simpler. You draw a card — very quickly itself a feat of balance — to reveal which player you must balance a stick with. Which player and which finger. Your brother-in-law’s ring finger. Your daughter’s thumb. Your own birdie finger, which means anybody’s birdie finger of your choosing.

Early on, this is a simple ask. Two people can hold a stick between them. No problemo. Kein problem. Mondainai. Another stick? Sure. How about a third. What is this, a game for children?

I’ve tried Yubibo with children, and let me tell you, it takes some willpower to keep more than a couple sticks above the table. My older daughter can manage alright, although her wrist gets tired after a while. My six-year-old? Forget it. She has the greediest proprioception I’ve ever seen. This isn’t something I could have known about her until she tossed an entire handful of sticks onto the table, noping out of the game after three minutes. Was her hand hurting? “I just don’t like this game,” she insisted.

Even with adults, it only takes one go around the table, maybe two with a smaller group, before you start to feel it. Not only the burn, although Yubibo excels at finding the muscle groups that have atrophied from disuse. No, it’s the sheer jittery tension that comes from coordinating with other human beings, but not quite touching them. The sticks become power cables. Tension bridges. Bonsai wires. When someone in the group shifts — even when it isn’t someone you’re holding a stick with — you feel every movement, transmitted like a message through multiple intermediaries. Someone rolls their finger to accommodate a second stick and the entire collective vibrates.

At its easiest, Yubibo is just about balancing sticks. In case you’d like to try out for your country’s gymnastics team, you can also try to stuff foam balls in between the sticks. Why would you do this? Because it transforms you into Mr. Miyagi trying to honk a clown nose. A hivemind Mr. Miyagi who, if you’re anything like us, lacks basic coordination and couldn’t beat up a gang of skeletons if his life depended on it.

I think strange thoughts while playing Yubibo, which is undoubtedly bad practice when it comes to focusing on all those sticks. I look at that shifting forest and wonder if this is what the connections in our brain are like, tensing and flexing as they produce consciousness. I see human society, this magnificent construct barely held aloft through faith and determination. I see a family. Then I lock eyes with someone across the table and the spell breaks, and more often than not I feel the tremor in my knuckles and the whole thing begins to come apart.

Yubibo is a quick game. It’s an easy game to teach. Unlike some balancing games, I have my doubts that it’s quite winnable. Oh, the rules provide a metric. A certain number of sticks. In my experience, those are best ignored. The game shines when you play it with all the stuff. When there’s no purpose but the cascade at the end. Not every game needs to end in victory. Sometimes, just holding it together for one more go-round the table is enough.

There isn’t much more to say about Yubibo. This once, that strikes me as a good thing. Ten minutes, lots of laughter, lots of failure. The sticks clatter, the foam balls bounce away. So, too, goes whatever was cluttering my headspace only a few moments ago.

 

A complimentary copy of Yubibo was provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)

For all that board games thrive on taking us to new places, exploration is surprisingly hard to do well. Explorers of Navoria, designed by Meng Chunlin, is a prime example. Set in a colorful world redolent of Root’s woodland or Oath’s turbulent empire, and populated by critters who wouldn’t draw much side-eye in either setting, Explorers of Navoria is nominally about pushing the frontier ever outward, but more accurately about shifting one’s position on a number of slightly differentiated tracks. In the proper mode — a persnickety combination of player count, expansion, and headspace — it’s a tasty and visually appealing course that feels good going down even as it leaves the stomach rumbling minutes later.

To describe Explorers of Navoria is to divvy it into two halves. Think of them as expansion and contraction. In the first phase, players are asked to push outward, assigning discs to various decks to acquire cards in the market; later, they will reassign those discs back into the heartland that birthed them, earning resources and other sundries.

Each of these phases has its own appeal. The exploration phase is immediately rewarding. Either you draw a pair of those discs from a bag and select one, or else claim one of the previous discards. Either way, your… troupe? guild? I’m not sure, but whatever their role, they’ll nab a card from the market and put it into practice.

These cards, in addition to being easy on the eyes, are simple little things. Some move your explorers along tracks, one for each of the desert, jungle, and mountain, in order to plant flags and earn farthest-place bonuses. Others build outposts along those same tracks, pushing your starting space outward for future rounds. Those are the most dynamic; others are more straight-laced, earning resources that can be distributed across your player board’s three spaces to be cashed in for bonuses and points later, or perhaps building combos for later. There are suits to consider for end-game scoring, various species to monopolize for the same function, and the not-occasional coin or three. Coins are victory points, by the way, so don’t go expecting something more engaging.

And then, once the exploration is complete, Explorers of Navoria transforms into an ultra-light worker-placement shindig. Those same tokens return home, only this time the earnings are less tableau-ish. You earn a few more resources, a few more coins, and maybe turn in some of those resources for an extra few bonuses.

The secret to the game’s success isn’t really much of a secret. Everything is rewarding. Everything feels good. It’s like a casino where every slot machine is guaranteed to dump cherries and coins and colorful bits of ribbon in your lap. Never mind that the cherries are plastic and the coins hold no value. Explorers of Navoria is a masterwork at saying something loudly and often, but with very little meaning.

To be fair, that isn’t such a bad thing. At its best, Explorers of Navoria could hardly be described as a poor hang. It feels good to move up those tracks. It feels great to build an outpost and start a little farther out than last time. It feels nice to bring home a wagon full of crystals and swords, and even better to trade them in for some extra coins-slash-VPs.

Little by little, though, the sameness of the linoleum starts to show through. There’s the way every card sticks more or less to the same formula, maybe plus or minus a point, but never coughing up anything all that exciting. Or the way every combo looks like every other combo; there are those that reward coins for particular races, or those that trigger only at the end of the game for outposts, with very little room in between. This isn’t exactly a game that allows the player to discover something new, let alone forge their own way in the world. At least there’s some frisson of randomness there, courtesy of the draw-bag and the way the market populates with cards. It isn’t much. It isn’t enough. I’d call it a gesture in the right direction. But two plays is enough to realize you’ve already seen what Explorers of Navoria has to offer.

It doesn’t help that some of the game’s best ideas are hidden away behind the expansion. Like actual rewards for moving along those tracks. Actual rewards apart from coins, I mean, such as bonuses for collecting the previously underwhelming warfare cards. Or like the faction draft that sees each player building their own opening combo, with starting cards and little abilities, complete with an extra resource that can be gathered on the map and churned into a new approach to the gameplay. Or like the addition of a sixth deck of cards in the market. This makes it possible to play with five players, but more importantly it allows the game to actually function at four.

Okay, I’ll back up. With the base game, each round sees players gathering four cards. Unless you have four people at the table. Then you only gather three. That’s the difference between nine and twelve cards at the end of the game. Playing with four means everybody is too pinched. It’s hard to move along any of those exploration tracks, let alone build a functional combo. With the expansion, however, now there’s enough to go around. Unless you bump the count to five players. Then you’re stuck gathering those three cards per round again.

It’s a weird way to gate a package’s content. Urp. Content. I hate thinking about board games like that. But in this case, it’s hard not to default to that way of thinking. The base game works well enough, but it works less well without the expansion. Despite all the color and the fanciful characters and the moment-to-moment lizard-brained pleasure of accumulation, it feels thin, like the precise number of cards were doled out to make the game playable but also a bit lean, just enough to leave everyone hungry for more.

Which leaves Explorers of Navoria in an odd space. Like I said earlier, it feels good to play. It’s tight. Players will likely wind up with comparable scores, borne of fifty trickles that sometimes contained a drop more or less than the others. But it’s still the equivalent of licking a damp cave wall for nourishment. It’s just that there are pretty pictures to look at and some technically serviceable levers to pull while your tongue laps at that smoothness.

What’s left is a board game that looks nice and feels nice, but never really does anything more. Which, look, is sometimes precisely what I want. This is an easy game to converse over, even if the variable turn order makes it a little more hostile to beer-and-pretzels than it might have otherwise been. But there are other options out there. Some of them feel less like hamster wheels. You’ve got better things to do with your time than march up and down the same featureless tracks.

 

A complimentary copy of Explorers of Navoria was provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)

Another turn of the Wheel. 2025 was a banner year for board games, which by extension means it was a banner year for Best Week. Down below, you’ll find an index of the year’s picks. Click on any of the images to be whisked to the corresponding article. To the old year! To the new year!

Day One! Picture Perfect!

Day Two! Heart of Darkness!

Day Three! Beatrixmania!

Day Four! The D.T.R.!

Day Five! All My Children!

 

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)

In those now-unreachable years before my daughters came along, I remember balking at certain statements. “Some things you simply can’t understand until you have children,” someone would say. Now that I’ve had kids, I’m adult enough to admit they were right… but still juvenile enough to believe they were drafting their offspring into props to prove a point.

And what, exactly, have my daughters taught me? The unnamed emotion of putting an infant to sleep on my stomach. The mind-blanking terror of sitting beside a hospital bed. The way even the simplest of board games can become profound shared experiences. What follows is a list I never thought I would write: the games that transformed my year not because they were innovative or philosophical, but rather because they let me pass a few meaningful minutes with my girls.

#6. Tic Tac Trek

Designed by Trevor Benjamin and Brett J. Gilbert. Published by Alley Cat Games.

The third in Alley Cat’s line of mint-tin games, Tic Tac Trek initially seemed like the afterthought of the group. For one thing, unlike its predecessors Tinderblox and Barbecubes, it isn’t a stacking game. For another, it’s a riff on Tic Tac Toe, the worst way to pass time in church. (Besides actually listening to the sermon, obviously.)

I should have known better than to doubt Trevor Benjamin and Brett J. Gilbert. Tic Tac Trek is as smart as they come. Your goal is indeed to make three in a row, but here your marks are tiles drawn from a bag, injecting tension and doubt into every move. What’s more, you hope to ignite your campfires on the edges of the play space, earning points for every uncharted territory around them, but risking subtractions as the game progresses. It’s a masterclass in shared incentives and painstaking blocking — but on a more relevant level, you should have seen me beam when my elder daughter absolutely swept my dad with a series of clever placements.

Review: Fire Hazards

#5. Ichor

Designed by Reiner Knizia. Published by Bitewing Games.

Look, I agree that Iliad, Ichor’s companion title, is the stronger of these Knizias. But Ichor is the one my elder daughter fell in love with, and by extension the one we played time and time again, her monsters sweeping across the foothills of Mount Olympus. As a game, Ichor feels tailor-made to appeal to chess-loving children. It’s basically the answer to the question, “What if every piece could move like a rook?” The answer is silly at times, especially when somebody leaves a lane unattended.

Of course, Reiner Knizia knows better than to let one of his games fall apart just for the sake of some silliness. Ichor stands apart because its objective isn’t to capture opposing pieces. Indeed, most pieces can’t capture at all. Instead, you’re here to scatter all your tokens across the board, a task made all the harder because your opponent also has a stable of their own rooks for replacing your tokens with their own. It’s only through careful play, including cautious use of your team’s special abilities, that you can get ahead. My daughter can beat me over half the time now. I couldn’t be prouder.

Review: She’s a Grisly Monster, I Assure You

#4. Magical Athlete

Designed by Takashi Ishida and Richard Garfield. Published by CMYK.

The surest sign of a board game’s success comes when my parents, relative agnostics for the form, ask excitedly if I brought it to Christmas brunch. Magical Athlete is one of the best board games ever designed, and I say that without reservation. Low player agency? Fart noise. Who cares. This is one of those rare games that can be played by four-year-olds and octogenarians with equal delight.

And the recent CMYK edition is more or less the game’s platonic ideal. Everything has been touched up: the character abilities, the extra racing circuit, the way racers are drafted, even the wooden miniatures. Ever seen a giant baby take up an entire space? The game is packed with little jokes, some ludic and others visual. I have yet to encounter a bad play of this thing. Or, crud, even an average play. My kids now insist we pack this thing to any sufficiently large family gathering. It’s that good.

Review: Chariots of Frickin’ Fire

#3. A Gentle Rain

Designed by Kevin Wilson. Published by Incredible Dream Studios.

Designed during the doldrums of a global plague, A Gentle Rain technically released in 2021. But in a testament to the format’s timelessness, it emerged as a household regular only this year. As a game, I was initially reluctant. The play consists of matching tile edges to create blossoms. Not much to it. There’s a win condition, but it’s squishy. To be frank, the entire project initially struck me as indulgent and patronizing.

I was wrong. Oh, so wrong. My younger daughter has always struggled with the largeness of her emotions. Being able to sit and undertake simple, soothing, repetitive actions has been a blessing. She cheats at the game; since it’s cooperative, nobody cares, and she also insists I cheat as well. It’s short enough that we can squeeze it in before school. And it’s calming enough that it has been become a reliable staple for helping her gain some space from an overwhelming task. As an exercise in mindfulness, A Gentle Rain exemplifies the strengths of tabletop games.

Review: A Mindful Rain

#2. Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders

Designed by Tim and Ben Eisner. Published by Druid City Games.

Over the past year, we’ve tackled a number of campaign games. Most of them have quickly proved tiring. I won’t list examples; Best Week isn’t for downers. But the one title that consistently brought us back to the table, charmed us with its bright palette and upbeat characters, and kept us turning pages despite some rather, ah, expressive writing, was Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders.

What are Unfolders? I could tell you, but it wouldn’t make any sense. Like most board game adventures, Tidal Blades 2 is a bit of a mush. But it’s a lovely mush. Even the monsters are worth seeing. We spent many nights poring over the game’s scenarios, my older kid tinkering with her character while my younger one perched on my lap for a side battle between her own hero and some spare creatures. This is the first board game that my kids could tell you about the lore. It helps, too, that I was also invested, not only because of the kiddos, but because the game’s world is so vibrant that even this weathered sack of bones found something worth defending.

Review: Wet Behind the Gills

#1. Hot Streak

Designed by Jon Perry. Published by CMYK.

It’s unthinkable that two goofball racing games came out this year, both with limited player agency, wacky characters, and broad appeal, and that the best of them wasn’t Magical Athlete. In our house, we were already Jon Perry fans. Between Spots for the kids and Scape Goat for the bigguns, there’s no denying his range and talent. Hot Streak bridges the gap with a Golden Gate of remarkable craftsmanship. Also, it’s a useful inroad to the topic of gambling. Look at what DraftKings did to these poor addicts, now reduced to wagering on the outcome of underground mascot races. Is this the future you want for yourselves, kids? Betting your life savings that a hot dog will eat asphalt?

Maaaybe. Above all else, Hot Streak is a scream. It captures the thrill of spectation, breaking down the barrier between play and passive observance. But, look, that’s grown-up talk. The real takeaway is that this is a perfect game because you can bet big on an angler fish running backwards across the finish line. We love it.

Review: Ready Set Brat

There you have it! Don’t hesitate to go all mushy on me. What were your favorite family/kid/dog games of the year? Share them below.

 

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)

Do people still D.T.R.? When I was a youngling, the acronym stood for Define The Relationship, that belly-clenching moment when two people would sit across from one another, lock eyes, and hold a serious discussion about whether to go steady. Nowadays it probably stands for Do The Rhombus. What is the Rhombus? I couldn’t tell you. Too old, me.

Something was in the air this year. Love, sex, breakups, and awkward situationships, to be specific. Weird, I know! For whatever reason, 2025 was the year we decided to actually get squishy for once. What follows are the year’s strongest exemplars.

#6. Conviction

Designed by Xoe Allred. Published by Lunarpunk Games.

It was deeply tempting to feature Xoe Allred’s Persuasion, as it remains one of the finest board games about relationships ever designed, and moreover now has a shiny new release from Hollandspiele. But I featured its print-and-play version back in 2022 — the topic of the day was “trauma,” take from that what you will — so instead this seemed like a good chance to talk about Conviction, the spiritual sequel to that game.

Conviction is the morning after of relationship games. The dream couple has been sealed in holy matrimony. Hooray! Only now it seems they didn’t discuss something important during the trial period. Oh no! Blending role-play, card counting, and all of ten minutes, Conviction is Allred’s portrayal of what happens when a couple quarrels, thus beginning either their reconciliation or the end of their mutual journey. With some investment from both players, it’s a striking meditation on… well, pretty much every adult relationship, to be honest. Mine, anyway.

Review: Lovers’ Quarrels

#5. We Need to Talk

Designed by Brendon Fong. Published by Skeptical Otter Games.

Trick-taking and shedding represent two sides of the same coin, a statement that surely won’t get in me trouble with the purists. We Need to Talk bends that coin into a möbius strip, tasking its duo with both winning tricks and pruning uncomfortable memories. That’s because they’re going through a bad breakup and are now trauma-dumping their shared reminiscences, good times along with the bad, awkward, and in-between.

We’ve all been there. Most of us. Not the dream couples, I guess. They’re stuck in the entry above this one. What makes We Need to Talk shine is the way it merges its conceptual framework with its gameplay. The illustrations capture the moments that make up many relationships, only to fade into the background or linger intrusively in the back of your character’s mind. Will you press onward to something new, or remain trapped in a memory prison? That’s up to you.

Review: Eternal Sunshine of the Trick-Taking Mind

#4. That’s the Spirit!

Designed by Connor Wake. Published by Always Awake Games.

“So, which of our friends killed us?” has got to rank up there as one of the most awkward questions one spirit can ask another while awaiting reincarnation. Especially when it’s the fourth time your group has been killed by an embarrassing shared accident. Did we explode this time? Get poisoned? Were we swept away by a tornado while watching Twisters, despite ample warnings that a storm was bearing down on our location and that we might be trading our lives to view a cinematic catastrophe?

Whatever the reason, whoever the culprit, it’s our job to figure them out. Or conceal them, if you were the one responsible for our fellowship’s untimely demise. That’s the Spirit! is as peculiar a social deduction game as they come, chock-full of strange abilities and uncomfortable social circumstances, both on the table and above it. It’s an extended conversation about who screwed up this time. Don’t expect anybody to take responsibility for free.

Review: Afterlives

#3. Adulting

Designed by Eric Dittmore. Self-published.

Not many board games are as charming as Adulting, a title about surviving a hectic weekend full of chores, anxious screen time, and maybe, just maybe, some self-improvement. The core concept is deck-building, but in the most fluid fashion imaginable, cards bouncing in and out of your hand with nearly every action.

But Adulting is also a relationship game almost entirely thanks to its multi-tiered objectives. Everyone at the table must work together to avoid burnout, caused by the pileup of too many chores. At the same time, everybody has a different idea for what they hope to get out of their weekend, and is given free rein over how to pursue that goal. While some players work together to tackle the chores, others are free to irritate their housemates by pursuing their objectives at all costs — or even mark themself as the self-sacrificing parent willing to absorb the group’s stress. The result is an affectionate portrayal of cooped-up group dynamics.

Review: Joy in the Burnout

#2. The Hedgehog’s Dilemma

Designed by Scott King. Self-published.

I’m not actually sure how to describe The Hedgehog’s Dilemma in a snippet. Part fable, part exposition on a philosophical metaphor by Arthur Schopenhauer, and part marriage proposal, this trick-taker covers quite a lot of ground. As in Adulting, the victory conditions provide much of the context. If everyone’s pieces occupy the same space, everybody wins together. If they’re all apart, everybody loses. More likely, if some are together and others are apart, the game kicks over to a scoring phase that grows increasingly desperate and/or thrilling with each successive tally.

There are other wrinkles, but that’s enough to set the stage. Often, all it takes to flip the switch between magnanimous and petty is the reveal of a single card. It feels like a parable in game form, drawing out social behaviors through simple rules and clear incentives. I can safely say I haven’t played anything quite like it.

Review: A Prickle of Trickers

#1. Molly House

Designed by Jo Kelly and Cole Wehrle. Published by Wehrlegig Games.

There’s a warm heart at the center of Molly House; a warm heart that beats in spite of moralizing cruelty, and which might be stilled by fellow hearts that have succumbed to panic. As a “molly” — a queer person in Georgian England, one whose identity likely strikes most of us today as foreign — your task is to find joy among the arcades and drinking-houses of London. This is a fraught business. Almost assuredly a doomed business. But a business worth pursuing nonetheless.

Over the past year, I’ve had the privilege of introducing Molly House to a wide range of players. Some have been like myself. Others have been queer in varying shades. In nearly every case, the response has been a surprising wellspring of empathy. Molly House is, among other things, full of parties both riotous and sad, fidelities and betrayals, and surprises both great and small. Every so often a board game comes along to succeed where every other medium has failed, investing us in a time and place that would otherwise go overlooked. Molly House is that game.

Review: Love and Heartbreak in Georgian London

Whew! That’s a lot of board games about relationships. Did you play any such titles this year? And if so, what were your favorites. Come along now. D.T.R. for me. (Define The Recreation.)

 

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)

I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a publisher have more of a bottle rocket year than DVC Games. Home to the design collective Jasper Beatrix — which thankfully avoids the pitfalls of the now-defunct Prospero Hall by offering actual attribution — DVC Games has established itself as a cradle of innovation. Even when their individual titles riff on the familiar, they’re undoubtedly riffs, jazzy little grace notes that bring their own interpretation to the genre.

Which is to say, this is the tightest focus ever featured in Best Week. These folks deserve the plaudits. Just take a look.

#6. Karnak

Designed by Jasper Beatrix. Published by DVC Games.

Like a lot of the titles on today’s list, Karnak is sorta many things. Sorta a stacking game. Sorta an area control game. Sorta a cutthroat contract game. It’s all of those things and none of those things. It’s what you get when a child-pharaoh demands a cool plinth with a rockin’ statue, then changes his mind and instead wants a bunch of sideways pillars over a river. Why? Because the brat is nine years old, that’s why.

In practice, Karnak is a little uneven, although its unevenness is also no small part of its charm. What, you expected the god-king to be consistent? Pshaw. Stacking together strange monuments, only to repurpose some of them into new edifices while others are ossified thanks to obnoxious priests, that’s just how it goes when you’re an ancient architect. No aliens required.

Review: Most Select of Board Games

#5. Medusa’s Garden

Designed by Phil Gross and Jono Naito-Tetro. Self-published.

The only title on this list not strictly published by DVC, Medusa’s Garden was nevertheless crafted and developed by the Jasper Beatrix crew. I suspect the form factor — a deck of cards and a hand mirror — prevented its inclusion as a boxed release. Picture this: a social deduction game, but with none of the pressures that accompany most social deduction games. Instead, it’s presented as a duel between two players: Perseus, who wants to deliver a swift chop to Medusa’s neck, and the famous gorgon herself, lurking among a garden of stone statues, determined to crumble them before Perseus can ruin the party.

A perfect convention game, then, one that sits halfway between performance art and logic puzzle while never once failing to be hilarious. And all that when over half of its participants have the simplest goal of all: stay very, very still.

Review: Nebulae, Medusae… Crownae?

#4. Scream Park

Designed by Jasper Beatrix. Published by DVC Games.

I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to tableau builders, but I contend that ninety percent of the things have no idea why players want to build these spaces in the first place. It isn’t only the brain-tickling pleasure of arranging icons in proximity; it’s the possibility of exploring that space.

Scream Park is a love letter to seasonal haunted houses, and what it understands is that we don’t only want to build the things — we want to get scared silly along with their visitors. That’s why each round concludes with a VIP guest, somebody we as curators must fear in our own right: a fire marshal, a gang of birthday brats, an internet influencer looking to dunk on our subpar effects. We build the space for maximal fright, rejiggering the components from last year’s leftovers, and try to sell this season’s guests on the illusion. It’s silly and satisfying as only a perfect tableau-builder can be.

Review: Fear Factory

#3. Pacts

Designed by Ben Brin. Published by DVC Games.

Pacts is emblematic of this publisher’s whole deal. Designer Ben Brin takes a concept, in this case “I divide, you choose,” jettisons what makes the mechanism tired in every other setting, and gives it new life. There’s nothing here we haven’t seen before, strictly speaking, but every edge has been polished to its finest shine. Or sharpened into a stake, perfect for driving through your opponent’s skull.

Set in Ireland of legend, Pacts has it all. Strange creatures, devil’s bargains, and a surprising number of ways to get ahead. With all the cruft subtracted from the design, what remains is a pared-down but rich experience, a fantastical conflict that occupies less than half an hour but contains enough drama for a game five times its size and duration.

Review: Cutting the Cottage Pie

#2. Signal

Designed by Jasper Beatrix. Published by DVC Games.

If you’d asked me back in March, I would have insisted that Signal would be one of Best Week’s #1 games. Based on first contact fiction — squint a little and you can see the grainy target-cam footage of Arrival — Signal is a cooperative effort between one alien and a crew of translators. Between those two groups and a whole lot of failed experiments, the rules of the alien’s language emerge one line at a time. It’s translatorpunk, to fall back on the trope of slapping -punk onto the back end of an otherwise ill-suited descriptor.

What makes Signal work so well, though, is the sheer variety on display. There are dozens of aliens in the game, each with their own rules. Some want pieces placed in relation to one another; others stack pieces, or use pieces that shove other pieces, or deploy pieces that transmogrify into different colors. The rules are myriad and ever-changing. And it’s up to you to deduce their meaning.

Review: A Desire for More Cows

#1. Here Lies

Designed by Jasper Beatrix, Jakob Maier, and Bobby West. Published by DVC Games.

At a glance, Here Lies is perilously close to Signal. One player takes the role of an aging detective recounting decades-old cold cases. (In one scenario, a millennia-old cold case!) Everybody else gathers round to try and figure out the solution. It’s a blend of locked room mystery, Encyclopedia Brown short stories, and Sherlock Holmes serials.

But what sets it apart from every other detective game is that Here Lies refuses to present one more logic puzzle. Instead, it’s a chance to get creative. You’ll play hangman, draw a picture, summon a snippet of dialogue, or test your vocabulary with some word association. As new evidence trickles onto the table, you’ll draw unexpected conclusions that bring the group inexorably closer to the truth. It’s perhaps the most striking of the Beatrix collective’s titles, a brilliant summation of a design ethos that evokes the game’s literary inspirations while sidestepping the tropes of every board game that came before it. When I first sat down to dig into the box’s contents, I had no idea I was holding a quiet revolution in my hands.

Review: Here Lies Every Other Detective Game

Okay, so there’s a real problem on our hands, because I want you, the reader, to give me your own recommendations. But this is the narrowest topic ever featured in Best Week. So perhaps share your own top publisher of the year, complete with examples? Who opened your eyes to new possibilities over the past twelve months? Go wild.

 

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)

This will surprise absolutely nobody, but I am sometimes accused of being a big old bummer. A downer. A morose feel-bad baby. Nietzsche said that if you stare into the abyss it’ll gaze back, and I’ve found that to be true, but in locking eyes with the abyss I also find we come to an understanding. We’re poorer in spirit if we don’t lock eyes with the void now and again.

There were a number of void-locking titles this year. Today is a celebration of the best of them. Take my hand, abyss. It’ll be all right.

#6. Night Soil

Designed by Jon Moffat. Published by Grail Games

Poop! Night Soil begins with a joke, keeps on giving that joke, and then sneaks up on you with a point about the hidden work that keeps civilization chugging along while everybody sleeps. Set in a Tudor London that’s packed to the gills with human filth, players adopt the role of gong farmers and mudlarks, the dirty workers who muck out the gutters and cart it to the river. It’s grimy, greasy work, made all the grimier and greasier for Jesse Gillespie’s rancid card illustrations.

But what a game. Most human lives have gone overlooked, but not all of them have gone quite this overlooked. Which makes Night Soil not only a rollicking title about the dawn of sanitation, but also a work of social history that ought to be taught in science-starved classrooms. How do we keep civilization running? By carting the poop to the sea. Oh, and by the way: Poop!

Review: I Don’t Wanna Do Your Dirty Work

#5. Chicago ’68

Designed by Yoni Goldstein. Published by The Dietz Foundation.

If you have no right to protest, you have no rights. This truism is at the heart of Chicago ’68, a game that feels all too timely five decades and change after the events portrayed, when right-wing violence has been so normalized that masked thugs kidnap citizens and non-citizens alike in the streets without repercussion while every act of disagreement gets labeled the end of civilization by a complicit corporate media.

But that makes Chicago ’68 necessary. It’s a reminder that conscientious people have always struggled to craft a better world, have always marched uphill through teargas, have always founded awkward coalitions, have always, sometimes, suffered setbacks and loss. There’s more to say about the game — for instance, that it’s a good game — but for now, its potency as a reminder is enough.

Review: The Whole World Is Watching

#4. Fate of the Fellowship

Designed by Matt Leacock. Published by Z-Man Games.

The Lord of the Rings has long been the modern world’s parable of resilience, a detail that sometimes gets overlooked in our hurry to strip-mine it for monsters and elves and general aesthetic. That it still retains its power is a testament to Tolkien’s skill as a writer.

Fate of the Fellowship understands that legacy. It’s a game about hope: its loss, its tenuousness, the way it stands firm or crumbles in an instant. Every time I play it, there’s at least one moment where I’m not sure we’ll pull through. The wraiths have backed Frodo and Sam into a corner. The hordes are descending on a beleaguered haven. Gondor can’t get its poop in a group. But then, a miracle. Reinforcements. A lucky roll. The horde blundering along the wrong path. When that happens, those prickles run up my legs, just like they did all those years ago when I read the trilogy for the first time. I’m a kid all over again, learning that I can slay dragons.

Review: Legend Became Tabletop

#3. Corps of Discovery

Designed by Jay Cormier and Sen-Foong Lim. Published by Off the Page Games.

Corps of Discovery is a strange game, in no small part thanks to the strangeness of its source material. One part critique of the American colonial project, another part distasteful male gaze for Sacajawea, the comic series is an unsettling portrayal that sometimes doesn’t know where its head is at. The board game adaptation lingers in that headspace. Are we here to kill monsters? Yes. But also, we’re here to bend this land to our will. To remake it in our image.

Okay, some of this stuff is basement-level subtext. I don’t think the game fires on all cylinders without first reading the material it’s adapting. But in its proper context it hits many of the right notes, providing plenty of grisly work for its alt-history Lewis and Clark expedition. It’s grimy in a way that most board games never manage, with a wilderness that feels appropriately hostile and enemies that would rather eat us than become us. Heart of Darkness, indeed.

Review: Manifest Sudoku

#2. Purple Haze

Designed by Bernard Grzybowski. Published by PHALANX.

There’s a mode Purple Haze excels at, one where the player is invited to do terrible things and have terrible things done to them, one which leaves a sick feeling in the stomach, but does so without moralizing or offering an easy escape. As a squad of U.S. Marines, your troops are a tough match for their opposition. They’re well equipped, well trained, and have the advantage of artillery. But they’re also expendable to the machine that has sent them here. That expendability, both of body and spirit, is never far from mind. As the injuries accumulate, as hidden hurts become all too real, as the inability to tell friend from foe becomes uncomfortably present.

Like the rest of the titles on this list, the result is an imperfect game that still has a lot to say about our imperfect natures. Call it synchronicity, because I’m not sure a perfect game would fit in this company. Whatever the reason, Purple Haze is one of the most gripping and personal portrayals of infantry warfare ever put to cardboard.

Review: Don’t Know If It’s Day or Night

#1. Onoda

Designed by Francisco Gradaille. Published by Salt & Pepper Games.

Board games don’t often truck in obscurity. In a media ecosystem where ambiguity is already an imperiled species, this simply isn’t the strongest medium for muddy waters. Under normal circumstances, anyway. Francisco Gradaille’s Onoda asks us to inhabit the shabby boots of Hiroo Onoda, the second-longest holdout of WWII. Along the way, Onoda commits regular war crimes, steals and bullies and kills, and steadfastly refuses to face the reality that his empire has been shattered and his cause is futile.

Is this denial? Insanity? A last-ditch attempt to avoid prosecution? Gradaille doesn’t offer an answer. Instead, he walks us through Onoda’s daily life and the passing decades. Unlike many of the titles on this list, the landscape is bright and cheerful rather than overcast. It’s you, the protagonist of this tale, who falls like a dark cloud to steal a radio or hold villagers at gunpoint. As an examination of a man who insists he embodies manliness while fleeing from his responsibilities, Onoda provides a clear-eyed portrayal of a real-world horror story.

Review: On Banditry

Whew! What a big bummer we were today. What were your annual bummers, dear reader? Share all the bummers below. Let us become bummers together, and in being bummed, dispel the bumminess.

 

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)

What a year. Best of times, worst of times, that’s what we’re supposed to say. For board games, though, 2025 was a banner year, full of tremendous titles both big and small.

As ever, Best Week is a celebration of the board games that struck me the most roundly, and today I’d like to cover the games that won me over thanks to their beauty, at least in part. These are the games that transported me to new places, that showed me wondrous sights, or that used their visual design in such a way that I found an old topic illuminated in a manner I hadn’t considered before.

#6. Skara Brae

Designed by Shem Phillips. Published by Garphill Games.

I have a thing for the Neolithic. Mesolithic, too. Chalcolithic, Paleolithic, Bronze, Iron, you name it, if it’s about humans I’m probably at least a little bit interested in what we were getting up to. Skara Brae is the tale of a human settlement that was old long before the period it covers. That’s the point. Its homes are dug into the midden left by centuries of human activity, that sediment of shells and bones becoming the foundations and walls of something new.

And it’s a looker. Not only for Sam Phillips’ illustrations, although they’re lovely. But also for the layout. Skara Brae is an inventory management game, your stockpile filling with tools and food but also waste. Everything has a use, if you bother to search for it. The result is a particular interpretation of human settlement that’s optimistic and vibrant, a counterpoint to more hard-pressed titles about human survival under harsh circumstances.

Review: Stuck in the Midden with You

#5. Nature

Designed by Dominic Crapuchettes. Published by North Star Games.

There’s a hint of sadness to Nature, at least in my reading of it. As the natural world retreats mile by mile, as microplastics crowd into raindrops and highways enclose the wilderness, the biomes and food chains that are the domain of Crapuchettes’ masterpiece recede like my hairline until all that remains are the fringes.

I’m being morose. Nature isn’t about such things. This is a card game, one descended from the competitive scene of Magic: The Gathering and a hundred other titles, worked and reworked until every card interaction is perfect, gorgeously illustrated to evoke a realm most of us will never get to encounter. Calories and population are the objective, evolution is the method. As your creatures develop more traits, hopefully they emerge better suited to tackle the challenges arrayed before them. Not often does a game leave me in awe of both its mechanical and visual purity; this is one such design.

Review: Apex Card Shark

#4. Vantage

Designed by Jamey Stegmaier. Published by Stonemaier Games.

Have we exited the phase of Vantage’s discourse where it’s cool to rag on this thing? Vantage is a shocking accomplishment, arguable weaknesses included, offering a multilayered world that unfolds like a map only to unspool like a ball of yarn only to peel apart like a sticker book. Every nook and cranny has something new to see, to touch, to taste. Sometimes to kiss. If those wonders should prove a little… undirected… well, that’s how actual adventures turn out sometimes. Even the principal criticism of Vantage reveals something wonderful about it.

And what a place. Part science fiction, part fantasy, all colorful dimensions, Vantage is both an illustration and a solution to the “map problem” that hounds pretty much every other adventure game. By offering a space you can actually get lost in, Stegmaier pulls the best trick of all: letting you find yourself.

Review: Life in First-Person

#3. Battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars

Designed by Paolo Mori and Alessandro Zucchini. Published by Ingenioso Hidalgo.

Somebody’s going to insist this is the mismatch of the list, but hear me out. Battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars is a revelation. Not so much of individual illustration, but of what a hex-and-counter wargame can accomplish. Rather than stacking its chits to the heavens, Mori and Zucchini limit each space to two pieces, their arrangement providing a visual shorthand for the unit’s capabilities. Two chits beside one another make a firing line; arranged in a square means a column; splayed apart communicates a broken unit in need of a good smashing.

It isn’t long before the battlefield, in all its complexity, lays itself as bare as a color-coded chart. By making its space legible, the game gives the player command of its shifting lines and flanking horses; in turn, it isn’t long before clever maneuvers and risky feints become possible. This isn’t how Napoleon saw the battlefield — it’s far too vertical for that — but in its own gamey way, it feels like it.

Review: Hex-and-Counter Meets Its Little Boney

#2. Harmonies

Designed by Johan Benvenuto. Published by Libellud.

In abstraction, clarity. Harmonies is another title about the natural world, albeit one where humans have some limited presence, their red houses sharing space with mountains, rivers, and forests. More than that, it’s a game about topography and elevation. Trees soon pile atop trunks, mountains crane upward, and rivers and prairies settle into their basins where they belong.

And into these niches wander creatures. Even represented as cards and cubes, Harmonies evokes a particular impression of nature, like seeing a model of the surrounding area at a natural park. Carving a river in between mountains in order to place otters in their proper habitat is its own sensory delight. Or maybe I just like stacking those wooden discs. They feel so good.

Review: Two Minds in the Wild

#1. The Old King’s Crown

Designed by Pablo Clark. Published by Eerie Idol Games.

I have a jealousy in me for The Old King’s Crown. It isn’t right that a single person be this talented. Pablo Clark designed, illustrated, world-built, balanced, you name it, and seems to have emerged on the other side with his sanity intact. Maybe he would say “relatively” intact. So now he’s humble and charming, too? What a world. What an unfair world.

More seriously, The Old King’s Crown is perhaps the densest lane-battler ever made, which makes it all the stranger that it was never intended as a lane-battler. Two to four factions jostle to rule a kingdom that’s coming apart in the absence of its ruler, and each of them presents its own culture in miniature. Whether you’re playing as the old guard, the barbarians at the gates, the revolution, or another completely distinct revolution, everyone brings their own story to the table. It’s a game of bitter reversals and successes that are very hard to not whoop about. If I didn’t have to write about other games on occasion, I would try to play it one hundred times. For starters.

Review: All for Freedom and for Pleasure

There you have it: my top six beauties of the year. What were yours? Feed me that engagement. Drip it right into my veins by commenting below.

 

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)

Transforming a work of literature into a trick-taking game is no mean feat, especially when that work is as influential as The Lord of the Rings. Today, we’re joined by Bryan Bornmueller, creator of the trick-taking versions of both The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. Listen in as we discuss our background with both Tolkien and trick-taking, the difficulties of adaptation, and what’s coming next.

Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.

TIMESTAMPS

2:44 — Bryan Bornmueller, Tolkien and trick-taking
15:11 — bridging those tangents
23:30 — the inevitable comparison to The Crew
32:06 — adaptation into trick-taking
48:45 — leaning into the genre’s strengths
54:21 — solitaire modes
58:14 — release and reception

 

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, you can read my third-quarter update on all things Biff!)

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