The Imposter Kings reminds me of a game I created as a kid. That probably sounds like a slam. Kids of six and a half aren’t known for making the deepest games.

But it isn’t that. It’s the way the game loops in on itself.

In my game, there were cards numbered one to ten. On your turn, you played a card on top of your dad’s card; on your dad’s turn, he played a card on top of yours. No matter who played, the card had to be higher than the one under it. If ever you couldn’t play a card, you lost and your opponent won. Halfway into our first play, I realized that high cards were infinitely better than low cards. So I made up a new rule on the fly. You could play a one on top of a ten, looping back around to the start of the sequence.

There’s more to The Imposter Kings. Lots more. The game’s designer, Sina Yeganeh, was too sharp to think that numbered cards would be interesting enough on their own. So this is one of those games with plenty of special abilities and triggers and the occasional reaction that plays out of sequence. At core, though, it’s a game about playing the right card so that your opponent can’t follow it up with something better, about knowing when to double down with a high card and when to loop back to the beginning. Exactly like my own game. Just, you know, interesting. I’ve played it more than once, for example.

On the whole, though, The Imposter Kings always comes back to that one central idea. Either you play a card or you lose. Very quickly, this becomes much harder than it might first seem.

Here’s the obvious conundrum. Let’s say you’re holding a nine. The highest rank. The number of royalty. If you were a six-year-old Dan, that would be the best card in the entire game.

But playing a nine is a fraught proposition. First of all, there are two nines. In The Imposter Kings, you can play any card that’s higher than the one currently seated on the throne. Higher or equal to. So a nine can beat a nine. The Princess comes along and deposes the Queen. The Queen puts that upstart brat Princess in her place. Whoops.

But even if that happens, other cards specialize in deposing royalty. The Elder, for instance, is a lowly three, but loves to swoop in and rap those royals on the knuckles. Or there’s the Oathbound, a bandaged character who can flip an enthroned royal face-down — a trick called “disgracing” — to take the seat and then follow it up with another card of any value. Spending two cards at once decreases the longevity of your hand, especially in a game about being the last person to play a card, but maybe your follow-up will hold the throne for good.

But there’s the question of everybody’s King. When the game begins, everyone is dealt a King. They then choose a card from their hand to place face-down next to the big guy. This is their successor. Once per game, you can flip your King and take your successor into your hand. Oh, and the card currently on the throne? Disgraced. Face-down. Value one. Boop de boop.

But flipping your King is dangerous, too, thanks to the Assassin. This is one of the game’s few reaction cards, and it kills a King the instant they’re flipped. So much for that once-per-game bonus.

But there are ways to out any would-be Assassins. The Judge and the Soldier both excel at revealing whether an opponent is currently holding a card, and both earn a tidy bonus if they’re right. Or there’s the King’s Hand, another reaction card, good for blocking an ability. Or you might make use of the Executioner and Inquisitor, both capable of stripping a card from somebody’s hand outright.

But you might need those abilities for something else. Or perhaps the Assassin is lurking as your rival’s successor, which would mean they could pick them up after you’ve spent the very courtier who could get rid of them.

But… well, there are answers to such a possibility as well, but I think we’ve drawn out this particular strand to its maximum elasticity. The point is that every decision in The Imposter Kings is unusually burdened, unusually dangerous. It isn’t unusual to spend a minute examining your hand. Even when — maybe especially because — there are only a half-dozen cards available at any given moment.

At best, these decisions feel like little masterstokes. There are elements of deduction, not to mention memory, not to mention yomi, not to mention hoping like hell your rival makes a big dumb mistake. That’s a lot of punch for such a little game. And make no mistake, The Imposter Kings is very little. With two players, you only use eighteen cards at a time. Adding a third or fourth player ups the amount, as well as injects some extra variety, but not by as much as you might expect.

At the same time, the entire process feels algorithmic. Like you’re playing through a flowchart. The Imposter Kings comes across as the sort of game a computer would excel at, its digital spreadsheet mapping the best possible option five, six, a dozen moves out, all those counters and counter-counters charted in advance. Depending on the player count, Yeganeh assuages his game’s near-perfect information sphere, sometimes by keeping a card or three hidden off to the side, sometimes by sheer dint of seating too many players to leave you certain about what anybody is holding.

But like six-year-old Dan deciding that ones can beat tens, these gestures still sometimes come across as patches. Even at the best of times, The Imposer Kings asks a lot of one’s short-term memory. What you’re holding, what you’ve seen played to the court and then disgraced, which cards you threw away when the round began. The player aids are helpful, listing every possible card at the table, but they stumble by not revealing which cards have a duplicate in the deck. Not that it takes a long time to recognize which singles are actually doubles. One benefit of only using eighteen to twenty-something cards is that there isn’t that much to hold in your head.

The bigger mitigating factor is that The Imposter Kings isn’t meant to be played once. Like card games of olde, it’s intended as a many-handed experience, players doing what they can to secure not just one win, but many wins of variable strength. Defeating a foe with cards still in their hand, or while your King is still hidden, or both, is better than eking out a victory through the barest margin. This ablates the luck of the draw, at least to some degree.

It’s also exhausting, requiring one hard-fought win after another to finally scratch out a full victory. In our experience, reaching the necessary seven points takes more time and energy than its slender exterior would indicate. Especially as players grow cannier to one another’s tricks, these sessions can sprawl outward in duration and bitterness — but also in how deviously they permit players to act.

Here’s the bottom line. Like the game’s cardplay, my feelings on The Imposter Kings are nested and complex, but ultimately they return to a few simple ideas. One, this is a handsome game that’s easy to play but devilishly hard to master. Two, in its efforts to overcome certain inbuilt limitations, it comes across as patchy and overstays its welcome. Three, even slightly different play counts produce radically distinct sensations. Where the two-player game is tight, sometimes even too constricted, and the four-player game devolves into an awkward team-building exercise, the three-player game is utterly perfect, cluttering the game’s headspace just enough to keep everybody guessing, but not robbing it of any of its devious excitement.

Until it falls apart, that is. Because, again, like the cardplay, The Imposter Kings isn’t only one thing. It’s an exercise in high cards trumping everything else, except for the low cards that beat them. Critically speaking, it’s a game where the good outweighs the bad until the bad outweighs the good. Back and forth it goes, never quite settling in one place.

And I’m afraid that’s as definitive as I can be. In the end, The Imposter Kings makes an imposter of me, too. With it on the table, I feel like a kid discovering cards for the first time. The highs. The lows. And everything in between.

 

A complimentary copy of The Imposter Kings was provided by the designer.

(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!)

I adore Martin Wallace’s A Study in Emerald. The first edition most of all, although even the second edition, with its overly pruned foliage, will do in a pinch. I’ve talked about these games, and their spiritual sequel, multiple times. In some ways, the original Study was one of my first glimpses into the strength of board gaming as fable, as serious historical examination made easier to stomach thanks to its drapery. Like clothes over a mannequin; like speculative fiction describing theory of mind.

Cthulhu: Dark Providence, co-designed by Wallace and Travis R. Chance, is a remake of Study’s first edition. It’s a very good game. An excellent game. As a design artifact, it improves upon Study in fascinating and crucial ways. I’d be happy to introduce it to anyone who wants a glimpse into what board games can accomplish.

And yet, I can’t help but miss the original. There’s some rosy nostalgia at play. Of course there is. But I’m also longing for that original game’s fangs. And no, I’m not talking about how this edition swaps out the vampires for red-eyed knockoffs.

Let’s begin with the basics. Cthulhu: Dark Providence is set across the eastern portion of the United States during the Great Depression. People are hungry. Jobs are scarce. Ancient monsters rule the country. Literal monsters, not the nativist politicians who historically used people’s poverty and fear to drum up power. And those monsters are doing their best to pry open portals to otherworldly dimensions.

There’s a certain madness to American politics, always has been, so the idea that overly-tentacled beings that are simultaneously phallic and yonic would prey upon that unique American desperation to bring about an emerald-hued apocalypse is, if not exactly realistic, not the most far-fetched piece of horror fiction out there. This segmented reality informs the design itself. Put another way, Cthulhu: Dark Providence is hard to sum up. It’s a deck-builder. It’s an auction. It’s a social deduction game. It’s about revolution. It’s about trying to go insane on purpose. It’s about concealing yourself from the world. It’s about becoming your fullest self.

In gameplay terms, it’s about taking two actions per turn and clawing desperately at any sense of progress. When Dark Providence opens, everybody receives a role. Broadly speaking, there are two sides: the investigators, who hope to shut the monsters out of our world, and the cultists, who labor to bring humanity into their sticky embrace. These roles are hidden, but not quite as social-deduction-y as newcomers might expect. Concealment is a useful tool, but not a crucial one. There’s a good chance that everybody at the table will understand the broad strokes of everyone else’s objectives within the first half-hour. Still, that uncertainty is helpful. It staves off direct action. If nobody knows which side you support in the “Should we welcome the ancient god who promises to have us sprout penises from our eye sockets?” debate, nobody is likely to have you assassinated.

Much of the time, this produces a multi-act structure. In the game’s early stages, everybody’s motions are tentative, exploratory. Your agent — the avatar of yourself — travels from city to city, spreading influence and gradually picking up cards. Maybe you expand your network of agents. Maybe you tuck St. Louis into your back pocket. Maybe you join the Freemasons or conduct experiments with electricity or come into possession of a book with strange runes stamped into the leather binding. These are added to your deck, albeit slowly.

From there, little vignettes begin to form. Sometimes these are explicit, drawn via the game’s abundant actions. Somebody closes a portal for good, signaling their intention to rid the world of outside influence. Someone else starts appointing fish-people to local school boards, tipping their hand that they listen to dodgy podcasts. At other times, the developments are more subtle, such as when somebody’s network of spies and anarchists includes labor reformers and undead magicians. Other times, the changes are structural, the fabric of our reality coming unstitched as the cult moves up a shared track that will award points to everybody on their team.

Team. That’s a funny word in Dark Providence. You’re on a team, always, but also not on a team. I mentioned investigators and cultists. It’s true that there are people who share your worldview and objectives, but this is an individualist’s paradise. Only one player will win in the end. That said, nobody can fully ignore the demands of their faction. Mechanically, the concept is simple enough. When the final tally is reached, the lowest-scoring player forces everybody on their team to lose, no matter how high their score. So while you’re always racing against your comrades, you’re also working to ensure they’re better-off than the peons of the opposing team. As in the original game, it’s deviously clever, forcing players to constantly evaluate their social standing in the absence of clear data.

But this rubric is even more tangled than it first seems. There are also dissidents out there, one of the game’s few additions to the original Study’s formula. Dissidents still occupy a team — they’re dissident investigators or dissident cultists, not true independents, sort of like how libertarians are conservatives who like to look at themselves in the mirror — but their scoring is slightly orthogonal to their faction. The main takeaway is that they lose or win on their own, ignoring the usual rah-rah teamwork portion of the game, but are also uniquely vulnerable to exposure.

These complicating factors make Dark Providence a bear to teach and an even grizzlier bear to learn. In that respect, it’s much like the original. Not that Dark Providence hasn’t undergone development. A few nips and tucks make it simpler, on the whole. For example, both games feature quite the cast of potential recruits, but where A Study in Emerald also included an entire pile of duplicates to fuel a double-cross system that was dramatic but also sometimes frustrating to trigger properly, Dark Providence just ditches the whole idea. Once you own an agent, they’re on your side. That is, unless somebody drafts the right card to switch an agent’s allegiance, but that’s a visible threat rather than the lingering face-down tokens of the original game.

On the whole, then, Dark Providence is more akin to a second edition than the actual second edition of A Study in Emerald ever was. Its cardplay is intact, with that trademark Wallace gumminess where cards stick around rather than cycling easily in and out of hand. Its social questions are intact, and indeed are even denser than before, requiring teamwork and competition and backstabbing all at once. The networks of agents and ruffians are back.

Even the original game’s surprising detours with zombies and vampires return, albeit with a fresh coat of paint. Still, the effect is the same. While you’re playing one game, merrily conquering cities and scrounging for points, suddenly the proceedings take on a dark turn as fish-folk begin conquering New York City or your best agents transform into red-eyed phantoms. Just as the original Study was playful and unexpected, so too is Dark Providence. You’re never sure how a session will shape up.

On its own, these strengths mark Dark Providence as a worthwhile successor to A Study in Emerald, especially given that game’s long absence from print, not to mention the, ah, squickier aspects of its provenance. While Neil Gaiman’s short story was an excellent companion piece to the original game, I doubt anyone is going to miss his name on the cover.

This isn’t to say it’s an entirely perfect production. The standees for holding the agent tokens are duller in color than they should have been, flimsy enough that I had to glue them together, and while their canted angle might be nice for a solitaire game, they’re hard to visualize from any direction but head-on.

As for the more structural changes to the factions… time will tell. The short version is that I’m eager to keep exploring what Dark Providence has to offer. Dissidents may well improve the game’s deduction, encouraging players to unmask one another more often. I have my doubts, as the penalty for being revealed as a dissident feels like a slap on the wrist, but with experienced players Study often featured rather slender scoring margins. Maybe it will prove enough of an incentive to shake up the original game’s dynamics. Either way, this is a (mostly) handsome and (largely) faithful recreation of the original.

Where it steps amiss for me — and maybe only for me, such is the pocket nature of this complaint — is in the game’s handling of its subject matter. A Study in Emerald arose from Wallace’s interest in anti-monarchical bomb-throwers, the anarchists and revolutionaries who took it upon themselves to punctuate the divine right of kings with sticks of dynamite. Smartly for the 2010s, Wallace reasoned that a game about blowing up the continent’s royalty might be considered in poor taste, hence the veneer of emerald paint. The game’s heroes weren’t trying to blow up Queen Victoria; their target was Gloriana, a god from beyond the stars. The pontiff of Rome was not the Pope, but Rhogog. Cairo had no shah, but rather, duh, the resurrected pharaoh Nyarlathotep.

Despite this veneer, A Study in Emerald played like a who’s who of 19th- to 20th-century social theory. One minute you’d recruit Emma Goldman and Élisée Reclus; the next you might watch as Leon Czolgosz assassinated an eldritch spider rather than President William McKinley; eventually, Peter Rachkovsky would lead the Okhrana in a crackdown against a revolutionary cell headed by Prince Kropotkin. That these historical figures rubbed shoulders with Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty only deepened the sense of place, giving the game the hue of allegory.

By contrast, the Great Depression of Dark Providence is thinly drawn. What few historical touchstones it levies are mostly limited to gangsters (Arnold Rothstein, a misspelled Stephanie St. Clair), lawmen (J. Edgar Hoover, Eliot Ness, Wyatt Earp), or entertainers (Harry Houdini and Lillian La France, also misspelled), among a few scattered others. Unlike the historical figures of A Study in Emerald, which were united by the dueling social movements of the time, Dark Providence instead leans into the tropes that often accompany Lovecraftian fiction.

There are references, but most of them are confined to the Cthulhu Mythos. Every slouching shoggoth and brain-stealing mi-go is present, of course, but so are figures like Herbert West, Henry Armitage, and the Whateleys. When it comes to the Great Depression in the United States, even as a fictionalized depiction the game is sanitized of, well, everything. There are no labor movements. There are no suffrage movements. There are no Italian immigrants becoming enthusiastic Galleanisti. There is no Harlem Renaissance. There are no veterans’ organizations massing into the Bonus Army. There are no businessmen flirting with fascism by forming the Business Plot. Even the Prohibition stuff is thinly drawn, absent the original game’s clever inversions, putting figures like Eliot Ness on the side of resistance. (Yeah. Sure.)

The effect is to withdraw Dark Providence from the realm of historical fiction and slip it into the same category as most Lovecraftian board games, where figures like Nikola Tesla might wander into the frame, but not with any sense for their lived perspectives or accomplishments. It would feel right at home alongside any number of Fantasy Flight’s Arkham Horror titles or their many derivatives, full of tommy guns and long overcoats and men whose cigarettes dangle precipitously from their lips, but also sharing those same titles’ disinterest in what those characters or symbols stood for. It’s like setting Shakespeare in 1920s gangland Chicago. Fine for community theater, but disappointing as a sequel to a historical drama.

Again, it’s fine. No, really. Dark Providence is still a heck of a game. It’s just that, sans any broader context, the entire thing feels less grounded than its granddaddy. The irony is that, given how the hobby has advanced in the intervening thirteen years, it would be possible to design a game about anarchism without the veil of allegory Wallace draped over A Study in Emerald. Dark Providence flees the other direction, dulling its teeth for the sake of… I couldn’t tell you. To make the game less political, maybe. To lean into the Lovecraft thing. Unfortunately, the main side effect is that the setting feels generic.

To be clear, however, even a blunted version of A Study in Emerald is sharper than any number of other Lovecraftian outings, and Cthulhu: Dark Providence is a formidable remake. It’s cleaner around the edges while still retaining the original game’s weirdness. In some ways I even consider it the better-rounded experience, especially where the deduction is concerned. The result is many things: a game out of time, a color out of space, an experience that still has yet to be emulated as widely as it deserves.

 

(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!)

Governance and Liberty — in translation, those are the titles of Shasn and Azadi, Zain Memon’s peculiar but timely board games about politics. Today, we’re joined by Memon himself to discuss both titles, plus the function of play as our most ancient form of education, the value of cynicism and evil in games, and what else the auteur has been working on lately.

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

TIMESTAMPS

00:50 — introducing Zain Memon, his work in film, and his transition to board games
13:30 — the “party game” of Shasn
21:45 — is there value in portraying cynicism or evil in games?
26:38 — games, one of our most ancient forms of education
31:22 — moving from Shasn to Azadi
42:49 — Macaraccoon
47:30 — representing resistance and revolution in Azadi
52:13 — Zain’s many forthcoming projects

 

(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!)

💾

I’m deeply suspicious of “cozy.” For much the same reason I’m suspicious of “nostalgia,” come to think of it. In the mouth of business executives, “cozy” becomes something we already own, or at least already have within our grasp, now repackaged and sold back to us as a subscription service. A monthly box of curated snacks. Ten ideas for cozymaxxing your nostalgia shelf. And that’s before we even consider the way institutions and politicians propose that coziness and nostalgia are the way things “used to be,” before someone came along to take away our picnics and crime-absent streets. What if we could go back to the Way It Was? What if all it took was getting rid of a few undesirables?

In other words, I am way too cranky to be Cozy Stickerville’s target audience. “More like Cozy Fascistville,” I probably frumped to myself. Then I learned it was designed by Corey Konieczka. Then I figured it might be a nice thing to play with my twelve- and six-year-old daughters. Then, as the undertow of commercialism swept my legs out from under me, it appeared in my shopping cart, one click away from arriving at my doorstep within three to five business days.

Then, those three to five business days later, it was winning me over.

Cozy Stickerville strikes me as a very Corey Konieczka design. Aesthetically, it bears so little in common with The Mandalorian, Star Wars: Rebellion, and Runewars as to make such a statement nonsensical. But I’m not talking about visuals. I’m talking about the maximalism of the thing. The maximalism contrasted with the sheer action economy.

I’ll explain.

Cozy Stickerville opens on a cozy not-yet-village. Gifted a tract of land by a distant and condescending father — hoo boy, does this game have daddy issues — you immediately take it upon yourself to transform this tract of riverland into a home. Or, in game terms, to affix eight stickers onto a grid, creating a pastoral scene right out of a Western. (Back when there was room for everybody, the cranky part of my brain intones. I tell it to shush. My kids are right there, man.)

From there, Cozy Stickerville slips into a comfortable routine. A cozy routine, one might say. Every turn consists of the metronome rhythm of resolving an event card and then resolving an action. These resolutions are steadfast in their simplicity. Events generally present a decision. Build this or build that. Answer A or answer B. Fulfill a need right now or put it off till later. The actions are more diverse primarily in their range. Some appear on the stickers as entries in a little storybook. Others appear on cards. Most of the time, they also present straightforward options. Gather wood from the ground or spend food to possibly gather some extra. Build a house for an eccentric inventor or build a house for some woodcutters. Plant flowers or pave a road.

Despite this simplicity, the actions very quickly display a wonderful range of possibilities. It isn’t only that stickers will be added, first to the board and then atop other stickers. It’s that their addition unfurls new adventures. Sometimes Cozy Stickerville turns into a hidden object search. Other times, it becomes a resource optimization game. There are branching paths to a spelunked cave, uncovered over many in-game weeks. An observatory on the hill becomes a chance to peek at celestial objects; a post office transforms into a test of how well we’ve come to know our neighbors.

That’s what I mean when I say it feels like a Konieczka design. It has that economy of action but maximalism of discovery that have always been the hallmarks of his design. It feels large inside, certainly larger than I expected of a game about putting stickers on a grid.

Even the format feels generous.

Over the course of ten sessions, each no longer than half an hour, your village takes shape. Some of that shape is more or less what you would predict from a game called “Cozy Stickerville.” In our town — Happy Riverside Valley, if you care to know the name my girls came up with — we opened a bird-watching tower and animal refuge, a pet shop and a newspaper. We ran for office. We flirted with capitalism, but in a way that wasn’t too destructive. Only two copses of trees were felled, and only one lump of trash came to occupy the area. We dumped it right next to the big golden statue we had erected of ourself, a statement on how it didn’t resemble the way we imagined our unseen avatar.

But at points, Konieczka presents challenges and setbacks. Cozy challenges, to be sure, cozy setbacks. But challenges and setbacks all the same. When we borrowed money from a shady lender, the interest kept coming due at exactly the wrong moment. When we encouraged one character to date another, we were reminded, gently, cozily, that we could instead pursue the romance for ourselves. “Ew!” my girls moaned. When we failed to build a fire station… well, that was the one moment that maybe struck a little too close to my six-year-old’s heart. In real time, we invented the myth of the Farm Upstate, where all ferrets go to live after their house burns down.

These aren’t spoilers, as such. Not really. Mostly, they’re emergent properties, the result of one sticker placed atop another. Or else they’re the common-sense outcome of taking shady loans, engaging in pranks rather than doing your yard chores, or chopping down all of a valley’s trees. Cozy Stickerville sticks to obvious morals, but at least it sticks to them. Is it a spoiler to say that things turn out all right in the end? That you will be vindicated of your father’s disdain? That you will place more stickers on this sticker-grid? The storytelling rarely deposits us in expected places. It’s the trails and switchbacks it travels that are the delight.

And then, when it’s done, the game permits a second outing. This one is more constrained than the first, flipping the board to its reverse side and using most of the remaining stickers. All those decision cards must be made in the other direction, building the inventor’s house rather than the cabin for the woodcutters, making dialogue choice B instead of choice A, pursuing the agenda you left by the wayside on your inaugural play.

For a legacy game, a format that is often rightly criticized for producing waste, Cozy Stickerville proves only marginally more wasteful than your average children’s stickerbook. I’m not going to pretend it has limitless miles in its soles. There’s no playing the game once it’s finished, unlike some legacies, and the hours contained within are relatively brief.

But those hours and precious ones. I rarely have any trouble getting my kiddos to play board games, but Cozy Stickerville swiftly became such a highlight of our evening routine that it eclipsed all other contenders. My children cooed over their pets, debated where to place every berry bush and flower patch, and quibbled over whether to establish a summer camp or a candy shop. They decoded secret texts with all the reverence of archaeologists and positioned inhabitants with an eye for the view from their bedroom windows. More than once, in between sessions, they discussed which story threads they would pick up next or asked me to open the box so they could study their town. Even before we had finished our first ten-year campaign, upon learning that we could only play the game twice, they asked if they could contribute some of their own money to buying a second copy. Now they insist we should frame the board, spaced halfway between their bedrooms so they can appreciate equal ownership over it.

On the one hand, this doesn’t exactly beat the accusations that Cozy Stickerville is commercialism in a box. But on the other…

Look. I know what our hobby is about for most people. We buy stuff and we sell stuff and hopefully in the middle we enjoy the memories and moments and messages these things create. There’s so much crass commercialism out there, all those boxes of miniatures with barely-developed rules, all the FOMO and churn and Cult of the New.

On the scale of worst offenders, Cozy Stickerville doesn’t even rate. It’s unapologetically cozy, but it also makes good on its word. This is coziness not as a symptom of a culture in decline, or not only that. This is coziness as a shared moment between families. This is coziness as something bespoke and human-crafted, as opposed to slopped from the mouth of the slop monster. This is the coziness of a six-year-old in my lap, eyes glittering as she debates whether to place her kitty near that berry bush or chasing the naughty goose in the lake.

I still don’t know whether we’ll buy a second copy. I hope not. Too much of a good thing can spoil its memory. But for those two campaigns, I’m grateful to have bought and played this thing. Because Cozy Stickerville is a reminder that “cozy” is a four-letter word — but so is “love.”

 

(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!)

Considering how hard Tigris & Euphrates rocks, it’s a shame the game always seems to be out of print. I’d even go so far as to call it Reiner Knizia’s finest creation, a statement that won’t go uncontested by the Good Doctor’s fans. To a lesser degree, the same goes for Yellow & Yangtze, Knizia’s hex-bound spinoff, although I suppose the remake, HUANG, is still floating around out there somewhere, board-obscuring standees and all.

What I’m trying to say, I suppose, is that I understand the inclination to make one’s own version of the hallowed civilization-builder, even if such an enterprise seems doomed from the start. Not that Rhine & Rhone, designed and self-published by Pax Illuminaten creator Oliver Kiley is doomed, necessarily. Its DNA is far too replicative of Tigris & Euphrates to be anything less than compelling.

But messy? At times inelegant? Awkwardly straddling the line between homage and plagiarism? All of those. More interesting to me, though, are the ways it quietly improves on Knizia’s formula.

To begin, it’s useful to zoom out to the bird’s eye view. Like Tigris, like Yellow, Rhine & Rhone is a civilization game in abstract. You can probably guess which rivers are the cradle of this particular culture, but the time period is what makes Kiley’s spinoff exciting. Set during the ascent of Rome, the nearby superpower looms over the proceedings like a schoolyard bully. The other inhabitants of this playground are clans of Celtic Gauls, pitiable in size compared to their neighbor with imperial pretensions, but still scrapping for a fight and eager to make their mark. Which is to say, they’re still looking for their Vercingetorix.

As in Knizia’s masterpiece, civilization in Rhine & Rhone is portrayed as a slow accretion of various bureaucracies. Here that accumulation is represented as “supporters,” four types of cards keyed to corresponding colors of points and leaders. The process is functionally identical to that of Knizia’s games. If I play a green card, it earns a green point for whichever player has their leader of that type situated in that area, whether mine or someone else’s. This was the crux of Tigris & Euphrates, the notion that a single clan might occupy positions of authority in multiple polities, creating an entangled and codependent realm, one where my druid might merrily inhabit a kingdom ruled by your nobles and someone else’s traders and farmers. Every color of governance is important, since only sets of points will score at the game’s conclusion, but they function differently at the table, some more readily gathered or hard-fought than others.

Does this accurately peg the governance of Gallic tribes? No idea. The administrative apparatuses of Ancient Mesopotamia and China were complex enough that modern theorists consider them remarkably state-like. But the rule of thumb is that the past was always more populous and complicated than we would assume from our modern pedestal, and it isn’t uncommon for that same pedestal to disregard tribal systems as more insular and, frankly, inbred than they actually were. For the Gauls, this was a period when foreign encroachment necessitated rapid confederation. Just as the tile-laying and dynastic struggles of Tigris & Euphrates suited the successive Mesopotamian proto-states, here Kiley’s somewhat more hasty approach approximates something true about the need to unify against a neighboring juggernaut.

Anyway, the underlying thematics won’t matter to most players. But it’s still interesting how readily Knizia’s approach can be applied to various periods of political upheaval.

As in those previous games, Kiley deploys the same touch to great effect. Each of the game’s four colors represents its own sphere of influence. As in Tigris, those colors correspond with slight variations in effect; drawing on Yellow & Yangtze, your clan leaders offer their own powers whether on or off the map. Gray is the color of nobility, producing kings that hoover up points whenever a lower-order leader isn’t present. Blue matches the riverlands, planting farms at a rapid pace. Green stands in for religious leadership, dictating who holds the right to rule. And yellow is the color of trade, offering a marketplace of cards for players to select at will rather than drawing at random from the deck.

So, too, does Kiley replicate Knizia’s conflict system, the same one that has bedeviled players since 1997. The gist is that there are two types of struggles, one mapped to internal conflicts of leadership and another for wars between two neighboring groups. These both require players to tally their support, wager some cards, and then, depending on the outcome, wipe out losing leaders and maybe a swath of one kingdom or the other for a heap of points. Yellow & Yangtze streamlined the process, some would say to the detriment of the original experience, and Kiley opts for the earlier approach from Tigris & Euphrates, with large clashes requiring multiple steps of resolution. There’s a sense of doom whenever somebody bridges the gap between two neighboring kingdoms, not only because there will be blood, but also because the card-based map is about to be thrown into disarray — both ludically and physically.

It’s a mess to handle all those overlapping cards, is what I’m saying, certainly more so than the sturdy tiles of Tigris or Yellow. And the mess doesn’t stop at the need to keep everything lined up just so. Taking a cue from his earlier Pax Illuminaten, itself a messy game, Kiley seeds the opening map of Rhine & Rhone with cards of various types. There are rivers, of course, which must be topped with farms. But there are also cards that are then drawn into your hand as new supporters, and oppida — forts — that bestow bonuses. These bonuses are all single-use, letting players deploy an extra card, move a leader, or perhaps add some oomph to a conflict.

They’re also frustrating as all hell. Simply put, the Tigris formula isn’t improved by letting some players take extra actions. Most turns consist of only two actions, so even a single bump represents a fifty percent increase in efficiency, and the problem only compounds once someone stumbles across a lucky series of oppida and performs four or five full actions at a pop. Meanwhile, somebody else might be stuck with a rinky-dink plus-one to a trade battle. It’s one more element of chance that pushes the system from its original grandstanding and uncertainty into erraticism.

At this point, it probably sounds like Rhine & Rhone is at its best when leaning into Knizia’s original design for Tigris & Euphrates and at its weakest when succumbing to Kiley’s impulses. That isn’t quite true.

For one thing, Rhine & Rhone is also weaker for utilizing some of Knizia’s developments from Yellow & Yangtze. Namely, the various abilities for your leaders. The problem isn’t the way they trigger abilities when deployed. I’ve already mentioned that nobles pick up unclaimed points, but the others get in on the fun too, with druids controlling shrines, farmers making it easier to chain card abilities, and traders gathering treasures that bolster your lower point tallies at the game’s end.

Again, this is all fine and dandy. Rather, the problem is the way those same leaders also add some bonus while sitting on your player mat. This acts as a rubber band, affording players who’ve recently lost their entire ruling class some ability to catch up. A noble ruler scheming at court makes it slightly easier to win wars; the same goes for a disgraced druid and clashes of leadership. The benefits for the other two leaders… well, I’d have to check the player mat. They’re just not very useful. Really none of them are all that useful when you get right down to it, becoming one more thing to track in a game that quickly becomes cluttered with information.

Okay, so even Reiner Knizia can over-design a game. But it’s far more interesting to look at the ways Kiley improves on Knizia’s masterpiece. There are two worth speaking about, both of them relatively minor adjustments that alter the trajectory of the system in exciting ways.

First, let’s return to those leaders. In both Tigris and Yellow, leaders were tiles like any other. Placed on the board, they occupied the same dimensions as any other tile, whether the squares of Tigris or the hexes of Yellow. This required an open space for any new leaders to slide into, and tended to leave some rulers quite cozy once their support had been shored up.

In Rhine & Rhone, leaders aren’t cards. They’re tokens. And instead of sitting on the table the way a supporter card does, occupying a few miles of river or farmland or village, they’re placed at the convergence of up to three cards. Their seats of power are intersections; one commands the nearby nobility, another holds sway over a court of druids. Maybe a third has decided to lord over a conglomeration of farmers, traders, and petty nobles. For local color, maybe. For variety’s sake.

Joking aside, this changes the tone of Rhine & Rhone compared to its predecessors. Sliding into power is a relatively simple affair. Basically, you show up. This triggers a leadership challenge, potentially booting a long-entrenched ruler from their position. Of course, such a coup still requires preparation. The right cluster of druids to bribe, the right cards in your hand. Or, sure, the right bonuses from oppida. But the possibility of danger puts leadership under constant threat. Even a ruler sitting pretty on a foundation of three druids might be deposed if a challenger catches them with their breeches down.

In terms of gameplay, this alteration is groundbreaking, keeping everyone on their toes well into the game’s final moments. It suits the setting, too. Zeroth-century Gaul is a little more Wild West than ancient Mesopotamia. A little more fluid. A little more prone to a ruler packing up their treasures and retinue and claiming that nice hill-fort in the next valley. The result is a game that’s always in motion, that feels migratory. Holding power is as challenging as taking it. And as for those rulers who’ve fully dug in like a tick, well…

…that’s where the Romans come in.

When I first heard about Rhine & Rhone, I treated myself to a sensible chuckle. No, not because Oliver Kiley had designed a riff on Tigris & Euphrates. It was the game’s subtitle that did it. I’ll save you the need to scroll up: the game’s full epithet is Rhine & Rhone: Resistance and Collusion in Ancient Gaul. “Who do you think you are,” I thought to myself, “a wargame?”

But as subtitles go, this one is appropriate. The Romans are indeed a clear and present danger — provided you remember to collaborate with them.

In contrast with how we tend to imagine the Gallic tribes today, the La Tène culture was wealthy and settled, if still more fluid than some ancient civilizations. The Gauls sacked Rome in the fourth century BCE, earning the Republic’s respect and fear. Eventually Rome began encroaching into their territory, culminating in Julius Caesar’s invasions in the 50s BCE. The Gallic Wars were unusually vicious even by ancient standards. And, as with many incursions throughout history, they likely would have been unsuccessful without the support of local allies, eager for revenge against dominant neighbors.

Rhine & Rhone captures that vengeful spirit. Every player begins with a few Roman invasion cards. As an action — and for a minor cost in matching supporters — these can be deployed to the map. In effect, your clan acts as scouts and local auxiliaries, producing the ancient equivalent of a carpet bombing. An entire supporter card is destroyed, along with any point-generating shrines and leaders situated atop it. Now the Romans sit there, unbeatable.

For a while, anyway. These Roman incursions simulate the brutality of Caesar’s historical invasions, but also their struggle to achieve long-term control. When the collaborator’s next turn comes around, the Romans break camp. Their card is flipped to the other side. Now that space can be settled again. This costs an extra card, but that’s not a big price to pay.

The problem is that collaboration is a drug. As soon as one clan scouts for the Romans, everybody starts doing it. This can quickly transform the landscape into a patchwork of Roman camps. Rather smartly, Kiley offers a fig leaf in the form of those gray supporters. When a neighboring leader is sent packing by Roman invasion, they can slide over onto a different portion of a noble card. In thematic terms, they’re leveraging their wealthy local connections. It’s a nice touch, making gray cards worthwhile as escape hatches the way green cards are useful for maintaining popular support.

Moreover, these incursions are dynamic in a way that overshadows Tigris’s catastrophe tiles and Yellow’s peasant rebellions. In a sense, they represent a merger of those two concepts, sticking around like a catastrophe, but only for a short duration like a rebellion. This fits the smaller map, not to mention the shorter timescale, fostering an atmosphere that’s always one collaboration away from disaster.

Put together, these elements add up to quite the chimera. Rhine & Rhone is not a perfect game. I’m not even sure it’s a good game. It inherits the tremendous authority of its predecessors. Their great expectations, too. To some degree, it comes across like the younger scion of a notable family; it has its father’s eyes and its mother’s stature, but it’s also messier, more cluttered, more idiosyncratic.

To its credit, though, Rhine & Rhone is never not interesting. It demonstrates that Knizia can not only be emulated, but in some ways improved upon. In this case, Kiley pairs those improvements with no small amount of dirty laundry, and the game would have benefited from the same professional development that its proximity to the Doctor’s most renowned titles makes a testy proposition. Still, it’s quite the sight, watching Tigris & Euphrates bear new fruit after all these years. With Rhine & Rhone, Kiley has created something truly strange, a title at once inferior, superior, and sideways to the games that inspired it.

 

(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!)

I like small games. No, smaller. Smaller. Small enough that I can fit at least three of them in my hand at once, comfortably, without even stretching. Today we’re looking at three such titles, all of which are, and I’m quoting my offspring now, “Huh! Not bad!” That’s high praise coming from a six-year-old critic.

Oh, and not a one of them is a trick-taker. Take that, tricksters.

Pizza Roles

Designed by Thomas Mathews, Pizza Roles is a game about dressing a pizza, debating toppings while your pal is on the phone with the pizza place right now, and trying to conceal that all you’re in the mood for is pepperoni. It’s maybe the most relatable a board game premise has ever been.

It begins with a secret. The titular pizza role, in fact. Everybody has a hidden set of preferences. Maybe you, as Fishy Fin, want to pack your pizza with anchovies, maybe with some sausage and mushrooms, but definitely anchovies. Oh, and absolutely not any pineapple or olives. Or maybe you’re more of a purist: Picky Pete, wanton lover of pepperoni, olives, and onions, but anchovies, ham, and mushrooms belong at the bottom of a composter, not anywhere near your Italian delicacy.

You can see the problem. Everybody wants something different. Sometimes those wants might overlap, but the chances of them aligning entirely are rarer than any syzygy. (Yes, this was all a ruse to use the word “syzygy.”)

What follows is an extended discussion. By which I mean a five-minute discussion, because like the pizza delivery place down the block, Pizza Roles is nothing if not speedy. Everybody has a hand of cards, each representing a different adjustment to the shared pizza you and your flatmates are ordering. Perhaps you’ll propose a topping, moving it on or off the pizza. Maybe you’ll double down on something, flipping it to its extra side. This doubles the points it’s worth, both positive and negative.

Doubling is the first of a few clever touches. The next is that certain cards encourage some minor social deduction even though this isn’t one of those hidden role games where you strictly need to figure out everybody’s stance on who to feed to the village werewolf tonight. For example, your demure pizza lover might instead select somebody else at the table to suggest a topping. If you have their preferences pegged, all the more likely that they’ll select something you also like. Or you might harbor strong feelings for somebody in the room. A crush. A grudge. Either way, these will net you points for fulfilling (or anti-fulfilling) that person’s needs. Or perhaps you just have social anxiety. These cards can’t be played at all, but they net an extra point at the end of the game.

Okay, anchovies first: sometimes these cards mean you won’t have much to do. It’s entirely possible you’ll begin with a hand that only favors other players, expresses deep apprehensions that really ought to become the topic of your next therapy session, or, sure, dominate the round with powerful moves like throwing a temper tantrum to ensure everybody has to endure limp mushrooms on the dish they’re cost-splitting.

But these cards also inject a tremendous deal of uncertainty into what is otherwise a fairly rote experience. There’s no guarantee anyone will use their entire hand! In fact, it’s pretty common to go around the table a couple times, then experience a certain degree of silence. Is the pizza done? Have we done the impossible by ordering the pizza in less time than it will take to deliver? Then, uh oh, somebody raises their hand. Actually, about those olives…

There’s a cooperative mode as well. Here the goal is to ensure that everybody gets something they want across two pizzas. It’s fine, as these things go, but Pizza Roles is at its sharpest when it’s forcing confrontations. Not open confrontations, mind you. Snitty confrontations. Suggestions and scowls. Little surprises and reversals. It doesn’t always work, to be clear. Sometimes it ends before anybody starts a back-and-forth over some contentious addition.

Most of the time, it works great. It helps that this is one of those multi-victor games that have been slowly gaining momentum around the hobby’s edges. As long as the pizza earns you at least one point, you’re a winner. Maybe not as much a winner as the next fella, but a winner still. Which is to say, yeah, the taste, mouthfeel, and delivery time of Pizza Roles are all in its favor.

Pyrotechnics

I don’t know why the inclusion of tokens makes me feel like Pyrotechnics is cheating. I noted that these were little games, not that they were tokenless games. But there it is. Tokens is cheating. Even if only in my head.

Designed by Michael Byron Sprague, Pyrotechnics is a race between two players to empty their hand of cards. Those cards, it so happens, are fireworks, while the tokens (the little cheaters) are the sparks that fill the rockets. Sparks? I know, I know, the sparks aren’t in the fireworks. That would be potassium nitrate and aluminum powder and other toxic accelerants. But maybe this is fancy fireworks talk. Just go with it.

Anyway, Pyrotechnics blends resource conversion and hand management. On a turn, I pick a card from my hand to use for its research value. Usually this earns a basic spark, one of the primary colors, or maybe lets me blend two basic sparks into an advanced color. Easy enough. But now I pick a firework from the center row. This I either also use for its income — using a different portion of the card this time — or exchange the necessary sparks to set it off. Either way, the card I played from my hand is now shifted into the marketplace, while the card that previously sat in the middle either goes in front of me as a finished product or shifts into my hand.

It’s simpler than it sounds, especially after one quick hand. The main takeaway is that everything is always in motion. Your sparks, which are always being alchemized into different sparks, or even stolen outright by your uppity firework rival, but the cards in your hand and/or market as well. Anything in the middle can be used by your opponent, but it’s inevitable that something you’re holding will eventually become more valuable in the middle than taking up space in your hand. Thus your cards move in and out of public circulation, in and out of safety.

There’s probably a chemistry lesson in there. Something about change.

Pyrotechnics is a tidy little game, especially once you realize it’s about managing your opponent as much as it is about swapping colors. Successfully becoming a Feuerwerksmeister means keeping an eye on your opponent: which sparks they’re holding, which fireworks they’re intent on launching, even the cards that circulate into their hand. This isn’t strictly necessary; it’s possible to play as poorly as you like. But since this is a race, every detail is valuable information.

Especially since there’s room for low-key sabotage. Extremely low-key, but still. There’s nothing stopping you from hoarding certain colors, picking up a card one turn before your opponent launches it, or leaning into the “steal a spark” powers. These become sharper as both players empty their hands, leaving more of the card-share on the table. These ever-tightening constraints turn the back half into a frantic dash for the last few essential powers.

If there’s any one problem for Pyrotechnics, it’s that the entire thing is too tidy, with exchanges that are a little too bankable to permit truly cunning plays. Sprague avoids the common newbie pitfall of making the game too balanced; here there are plenty of card effects that are twice as powerful as others. But the action economy is tight enough, and the actions similar enough, that most moves struggle to distinguish themselves from those sitting to their right and left. For a game filled with sparks and fireworks, it wouldn’t have been a bad thing to permit the occasional chemical reaction.

On the whole, though, Pyrotechnics is a successful two-player race. It’s colorful, pleasant, and encourages constant trade-offs. Also, the tokens are fine. (Shudder.)

Don’t Botch the Broccoli

Unlike the previous two titles in today’s steamer, Don’t Botch the Broccoli isn’t a freshman outing. I covered Mark McGee’s previous title, the perspective-altering Tether, just a couple years back. The unfortunate side-effect is that this particular batch of broccoli left me colder (and limper, and more sulfurous) than expected. Perhaps that isn’t fair. At a certain level, Don’t Botch the Broccoli is hyper-competent at what it sets out to do.

The idea is simple enough. This is one of those games where everybody plays a card hoping nobody will play its duplicate. The problem is that cards have a range of values, from a score-erasing negative one all the way up to positive four. Obviously, you’re going to play the four. Obviously. But then somebody else will also play the four, and that’s the batch botched.

Or, well, that’s how it would normally go. McGee is too clever for that. Instead, matching numbers are all added to your “steamer,” a face-up stack of cards in front of you. Then, and only then, the lowest remaining number finishes cooking, moving both that card and every single card in its owner’s steamer to their scoring pile. All other cards botch, moving them and their steamer’s contents back into their owner’s hand.

In other words, you want to get high numbers into your scoring pile, but you also want to play low cards in order to finish cooking everything. This encourages some interesting behaviors. For once, high cards are somewhat poisonous, at least when it comes to steaming. But the more you add to your steamer, the more information you’ve sputtered onto the table. Now everyone else can try to sabotage your cookery.

Does this have anything to do with broccoli? I don’t think so, and I’ve charred my share of the cruciferous bastards. But as a psychological game, Don’t Botch the Broccoli comes across as the Platonic Ideal of the form, stripped of every extemporaneous flourish.

Turns out, I like those flourishes. At least I like some of them. There’s a certain emptiness to Don’t Botch the Broccoli that prevents me from wanting to spend more time in its presence. Too often, I feel like the strongest play might as well be to select randomly from my hand. And, look, I know that isn’t the case. There are considerations to be made, inferences to draw, guesses that are better informed than ignorant. But it doesn’t always feel that way.

Or maybe that’s because my six-year-old keeps winning. To the game’s credit, everyone in my household can play with equal adroitness. To its diminishment, even the kiddos don’t think much of it. When I last dragged it out, both girls asked if we could instead play anything else. Those were their exact words: “Anything else.” Ouch. (Also, they’re lying. There are games they despise with white-hot rage. It’s just that I know better than to produce those games during family time.)

Anyway, that’s the final title in this particular steamer. Sadly, it’s a bitter irony that Don’t Botch the Broccoli was the one that got botched.

 

Complimentary copies of Pizza Roles, Pyrotechnics, and Don’t Botch the Broccoli were provided by their respective designers.

(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!)

Early in the rulebook for The Glasgow Train Robbery, designers Eloi Pujadas and Ferran Renalias — whose names you might recognize from fashion dueler The Battle of Versailles — clearly spell out their stance on the 1963 train robbery that is the topic of their game. “The Glasgow Train Robbery is a board game inspired by historical events,” the disclaimer reads. “It does not intend to glorify crime or violence.”

Look, I’ll just come out and say what we’re all thinking: Unlike Pujadas and Renalias, I absolutely intend to glorify robbing a train full of cash. That’s the coolest and most morally correct action a human being can take. Yes, people were hurt. Yes, property was stolen. But the only villain here is Monopoly. That’s right, the board game. Without it, the heist would have been successful.

When The Glasgow Train Robbery opens, we find ourselves in the shoes of those plucky gangsters during the early hours of 8 August 1963. It’s dark out. The nearby town is asleep. The tracks are beginning to hum.

The gang consists of roughly fifteen individuals, although Pujadas and Renalias limit their players to two roles. First up is the Coordinator. This player is tasked with running things from the safe house: tallying inventory, passing out equipment, minding how much evidence the crew leaves in their wake, keeping everybody on the same page. Next is the Operative. They’re out in the field, moving down the paths that run parallel to the tracks, ferrying tools and manpower from one place to another, handling problems on the fly.

Right away, the beauty of this particular cooperative system is that it doesn’t quite resemble anything that’s come before it. There are antecedents, of course, but they’re pleasantly muted. Unlike the world’s thousand Pandemic imitators, this isn’t one of those games that sees players responding to three fresh crises per turn; unlike our hobby’s countless adventure games, there are no encounters to resolve.

Instead, the core experience could be described as one of fragmentary communication. There are plenty of board games about that, too, but here the few garbled words spoken through commercial walkie-talkies are especially precious. Both players have their jobs to do, and they’re different enough that they only intersect at certain junctures. But those junctures are crucial enough that even the slightest misstep can result in mission failure.

Here’s what this setup looks like. At any given moment, both players are neck-deep in their own concerns. The Coordinator is running a safe house that’s been transformed into a temporary loading dock, crammed full of coiled rope and guns and masks and gloves. They have plenty of helpers — nine people in that little farmhouse when the game begins — but it’s still all they can do to pass out enough tools.

Outside, the Operative is playing their own game. They take those tools and head down to the tracks. There they use their limited manpower to access caches of equipment, quiet any passing patrols, and, above all, prepare for the train’s arrival.

In other words, while one person plays warehouse manager, the other is playing a movement game with a sprinkling of whack-a-mole.

But as the train grows closer, the game counting down its passage one sleeper at a time, those roles converge. There are five steps to the plan: stop the train, tie up the crew, unhitch the back cars, roll the mail car into position, unload the loot onto the waiting truck. Each step requires the players to get the right people into the right locations, not to mention bring along the proper tools. The details of those steps, however, are unknown when the game begins. Worse, once known, they can’t be communicated openly.

Instead of talking like mature adults, the Coordinator and Operative prefer to communicate solely through signals and occasional bursts of static. Toxic masculinity, am I right? This presents some unique conundrums. Perhaps the upcoming step will require the train to stop alongside the open field with the tractor, require an individual with technical aptitude to be nearby, and ideally provide some walkie-talkies and batteries for rejiggering the whatsit.

But as the Coordinator, how do you tell your partner what you need? As the Operative, how do you hint that you need an extra gun and some gloves to solve the problem over at the water tower? The easiest option is to call them up on the radio, but these opportunities are few and far between. Limited, too, with players only capable of speaking two or three words per card. So other possibilities appear. Maybe you can divide the tools in such a way that your partner realizes you need extra rope. Maybe you boot another smooth-talker out of the safe house for them to walk down to the tracks. Maybe, eventually, you thump the table or something. That’s probably cheating. But you know what they say. Ninety percent of all communication is cheating.

What begins somewhat sedately, that train seeming distant enough that there’s no need to rush, very quickly becomes a race to tackle the last few steps and get away free and clear. It’s a brilliant little system, capturing both the drawn-out tension of planning and the scurry of tackling a half-dozen problems at once. As new witnesses wander into the scene, as the evidence accumulates, as the train gets closer to passing in the night, the game starts to feel suitably close to any number of heists we’ve only watched on the screen or read about in thrillers.

After a few tries, the game’s limited communication becomes second nature. You and your partner in crime learn to divvy up tools like two hands of the same body, deploy gangsters to their proper posts at exactly the right moment, and handle your own troubles without making them the other guy’s problem. This is when Pujadas and Renalias suggest to begin mixing in additional modules. Now there are patrols on the tracks, or your insider on the train needs help overpowering the conductor, or there’s an all-new way to distribute tools that’s more powerful but also more dangerous. There isn’t unlimited variety here, but the game contains more to explore than I first assumed.

Along the way, perhaps the game’s one misstep is that the roles aren’t equally interesting to play. The Operative is the more challenging and dynamic job, always shifting between issues as they arise, while the Coordinator mostly feels like a glorified warehouse manager who’s sorting guns and balaclavas instead of crates of cereal and T.P. The distinction isn’t that great — both tasks are still challenging — but the Coordinator is given the lion’s share of the game’s intel while their partner gropes around in the darkness.

And then there’s Monopoly. The historical Great Train Robbery of 1963 very nearly got away with the crime. But while waiting in their safe house, they passed the time by playing the Parker Brothers ripoff that would compel multiple generations to associate board games with tedium. Even after the gang wiped the place down for fingerprints, and paid some bum to burn it to the ground (he ran off), Monopoly preserved everyone’s fingerprints. Most of them, anyway. Some members of the gang were never caught, and the money was never recovered. We can take some consolation from that.

(Yes, the game does include the Monopoly board! It’s the main component in what is basically a miniature rondel game for the Coordinator. Evidence piles up whenever anybody is left in the room with the game. It’s very silly. But like many silly things that seem too goofy for fiction, it’s also what happened in real life, so I’m happy to see it included.)

I’ve written before that Salt & Pepper is publishing some of historical board gaming’s most interesting titles right now. Whether they’re examining war criminals, papal conclaves, naval hunts, anarchist guerrillas, or Pujadas and Renalias’s own game of high fashion, I can always count on them to deliver a colorful, evocative, and capable portrayal of history. The Glasgow Train Robbery is no exception. It draws on familiar tropes while still feeling fresh, covers some surprisingly dense subject matter with a few clever turns of abstraction, and above all produces a kettle-tight heist unlike any other I’ve tabled to date.

 

A prototype copy of The Glasgow Train Robbery was temporarily provided by the publisher, but unlike some prototypes it was 99% finished, so I’m calling this a review.

(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!)

The ‘Enlightenment,’ which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.

That’s the most oft-quoted line from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, probably because it’s such an apt summation from an author who, let’s face it, preferred discursive barrel-rolls to punchy thesis statements. Liberty and discipline are the topics of Dan Bullock’s latest board game, a term I’m employing loosely but not unfavorably. The game in question is called Penitent, it’s about constructing and managing a prison in the early 19th century in the United States, and it’s either the second or fifth of Bullock’s provocations on the issue of justice, depending on how liberally we stretch the concept.

Back in 2021, Noralie Lubbers and Dávid Turczi revealed a collaborative board game project called Prison Architect, an adaptation of the 2015 Introversion Software video game about building and managing a private maximum-security prison. As the adaptation pursued funding on Kickstarter, the outcry from segments of the board gaming community was severe. Turczi apologized, noting that he and the rest of the game’s creators had been operating under the best of intentions, but also stating that he had come to believe that the topic was a bad fit for board games.

I never played Prison Architect, either the board or video game versions. Like many board game controversies, the announcement, pushback, and project cancellation passed at blink-and-you’ll-miss-it speed. From a distance, though, it struck me as overly gamey, too cute, to effectively communicate the nuances of such a loaded topic.

Penitent is anything but cute. It certainly isn’t gamey, at least not in the usual sense. But nuanced? It’s got nuance to the ceiling.

Your objective, as I stated earlier, is to construct and run a prison. Penitent is set in the early 19th century, a period of profound carceral transformation. Within the span of three decades, global society’s understanding of imprisonment and punishment would develop radically. Public punishment would go from the norm to unthinkable, at least in the sense that had reigned unquestioned since the Medieval period. Sanity would become a topic of public discussion, with reformers like Dorothea Dix founding no fewer than thirty-two hospitals across the U.S. and Europe for those suffering from mental ailments. Questions about racial, class, and gender justice were discussed openly in periodicals and congressional hearings. Bullock touches on every one of these issues and more, sometimes with a heavier or lighter touch, all within the span of perhaps an hour.

To regulate the game’s perspective, Bullock limits his examination to two systems of prison reform. The first is the Pennsylvania System, sometimes also called the “separate” or “silent” system for its strict solitary confinement of inmates and emphasis on moral reflection. The second is the Auburn System that evolved from it, which housed inmates separately but allowed them to work, eat, and exercise side by side, albeit often, still, in maddening silence. These reform projects existed side by side, often competing for attention and funding. Many of their fingerprints can still be found scattered throughout the penal system of the United States today.

As a game, Penitent is divided into two distinct halves. Right away, this bifurcation is troublesome.

In the first half, you draw a prison on a sheet of graph paper. The rules describe the necessary dimensions and chambers: cells enough for twelve prisoners, divided into at least two separate wings; exercise yards and workhouses to provide for your prisoners’ fitness and labor; kitchens, armories, laundries, and a warden’s office, their dimensions negotiable to such a degree that the rules effectively tell you to eyeball them; perhaps a chapel to see to the spiritual needs and moral rectitude of the incarcerated; cisterns and ventilation and observation posts, each of which you are told is essential, but for precisely what you do not yet know.

One of my pet peeves comes when a game’s setup instructs the player to make a game-altering decision without fully understanding its ramifications. Usually this means selecting one of two scoring cards, picking a faction you have yet to see in action, or selecting a bonus whose import remains obscure. In Penitent, it means sketching an entire prison.

Not only that. You’re also invited to select the policies that will dominate both the day-to-day operations of your penitentiary and its from-the-cornerstones construction. Will your prison operate under the unitary command of a single warden or the divided responsibilities of business operator and disciplinary keeper? Will punishments be meted out via the whip or the more “humane” method of dousing by freezing water? Will your inmates exist in unending silence, or only silence most of the time? These questions and more are posed directly, often without any guidance as to their significance.

This absence is frustrating. Systemic clarity is one of the great strengths of board games. Since a game’s rules can’t be computed, but must instead be held in the player’s head, this is a medium that excels at compressing complex ideas into their most digestible format. Penitent is the opposite case. Going in unprepared is a fraught proposition, but it’s also inevitable. Before you even set pencil to paper, you’re asked to make sweeping decisions, told that those decisions will have radical outcomes, but not told what any of those outcomes will be.

And those decisions matter. Oh, how they matter. The game’s second half is effectively an extended series of consequences. One by one, you draw event cards that put your prison, and by extension the bodies and lives housed within, through the wringer. Without enough cisterns, an outbreak of tuberculosis tears through the population. Housed multiple inmates to a cell, madness and brawls break out. A state inspector comes by for a looksie and comes away horrified. The locals in the nearby town go all NIMBY, complaining about how the prison’s barrel-hooping cuts into their home-grown business enterprises.

At times, these events present flashpoints. In the case of those business complaints, you might tell the locals to shut their yaps and keep your inmates hooping barrels as long as the margins are healthy. Or you could choose to divest the output of your workhouses, importing silkworms and training your laborers in spinning. Depending on which response you select, the event might present different outcomes. Sometimes it will shuffle back into the deck, threatening to come due at some future date. Maybe it will flip to its reverse side, growing more dire thanks to your inattention. At best, perhaps it’s thrown out of the game entirely. Consequences might come due. Or they might not. You can never know.

This uncertainty is at the heart of Penitent, for better and for worse.

For one thing, there’s Bullock’s entire approach to rules. In Penitent, it isn’t uncommon for the game to ask the player to use their own judgement. Is a horse thief a violent criminal or non-violent? How about a store robber? The bonneted abortionist on the board’s second row is surely a woman who ought to be housed separate from male offenders, but what about that effeminate-faced burglar on the bottom row? And what precisely is meant by “line of sight”? At least once per in-game year, an event will raise an issue that requires the player to settle a dispute that might go either way.

Bullock’s previous self-published title, The Gods Will Have Blood, asked similar questions about the uncomfortable distinction between justice and retribution. In that game, the player was asked to render judgement on accused royalists and collaborators, feeding some to madame guillotine and setting others free. Even more than that game, Penitent requires the players to make decisions on emotive and instinctual grounds rather than adhering to strict rules. The effect is often jarring.

But this absence of clarity is precisely what makes Penitent a worthwhile investigation. Something like Prison Architect may have proven a better game about moving cards and balancing a budget, but Penitent is the keenest possible study of the carceral experiment. Going into a session, one is provided only theory. The proper severity of punishments. Whether prison wings should contain washbasins. The nature of worship services. The physical dimensions of each cell. The placement of the institution’s watchmen. All that theory, all untested. So much theory you could choke on it.

Unlike the choice between two objective cards in some boilerplate eurogame, however, this tabula rasa is deliberate. It entrusts you with the drafting pencil of the reformers who crafted the modern prison system. You have no better idea of the outcome of one system over the other because you, like them, probably know very little about the distinctions between the Pennsylvania System and the Auburn System. Pop quiz: Which system proved more enduring? Which features are still present in modern penitentiaries? Here’s an easy one: which correctional facility is still in operation today that was built explicitly as an experiment in keeping prisoners in maximum isolation? It’s okay if you don’t know. For the most part, neither did the people who built them.

Not that this absolves those wardens and reformers of the role they played. If Penitent has anything close to protagonists, they are the prisoners themselves. Bullock has always imbued his work with a deep humanism, whether he’s asking us to consider the policies behind North Korean isolationism, revolution in Iran, or, sure, David Bowie’s artistic schizophrenia. As in some of his previous outings, Bullock puts the faces of the imprisoned on display. They quickly become cluttered with tokens: their injuries and illnesses, their fraying sanity from enforced isolation, their degree of penitence, the trades they’ve learned during their incarceration. All the while, their faces peer up from the board in daguerreotype. These are people who lived. They had dreams and aspirations. They suffered setbacks and failures. Now they are in your hands.

Very quickly, too, their statuses become statements about the way your institution’s incentives become bent and perhaps broken entirely. Sick inmates are more easily isolated than treated. Prisoners with trades are profitable, encouraging you to keep them under lock and key. Once, when one of my prisoners died before their madness compounded, I caught myself exhaling in relief. How’s that for ludonarrative harmony?

Speaking of which, your own role as this prison’s warden is never far from mind. Victory requires you to care for your inmates to some degree, but they’re a means to an end. That end is your influence, which Penitent is careful to tie to your capacity to actually pay for this stuff. That’s another of the game’s many entangled incentives. No matter how sterling your intentions when the game opens, it soon becomes clear that there isn’t enough funding for everything. On my first attempt, I tried to fashion a more egalitarian prison. (Exactly like most of these reformers, by the way.) When my palatial twelve-by-twelve cells proved too expensive — and my lazy bones proved unwilling to sketch the whole blueprint all over again — I added a notation in the margins: “1/3 size.”

While Bullock refuses to let his wardens and reformers off the hook, he also declines to indict them too harshly. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault argued that modern discipline was pervasive, a co-opting of Enlightenment values that served to regiment and order human bodies, but that this was still gentler and more evenly applied than what came before it, so defined by public torture, disease-ridden dungeons, and irregular justice applied at the whims of sovereign rulers. For all their corrupted incentives, their horrifying theories, their abuses, their tourist-trap viewing holes (no, really), these prisons were still fashioned to be more humane than what came before. They didn’t prove as Whiggish as the, um, Whigs intended, but as a warden you’re still expected to provide some measure of care to your incarcerated bodies, to encourage their rehabilitation, to course-correct when your structure proves insufficient.

Is this an improvement? The answer isn’t a simple yes or no. Most of us would probably agree that we’d rather spend a stint in a cell, even one as cramped as those at Sing Sing, than have our ears sawed off and our cheeks branded with the initials for seditious traitor, only to be clapped in irons anyway. Then again, that latter punishment is arguably what sparked the Age of Revolution. Public punishments were awful, but they were also opportunities for public dissent. One of the functions of the Pennsylvania and Auburn Systems was the removal of any such possibility. Bodies under punishment would be placed where the public wouldn’t have to consider them; minds under punishment would be wiped through sheer silence and tedium. This, too, is torture. What good are ears when there’s nothing to hear?

This, ultimately, is the real function of Penitent.

Not the examination of Foucault, although there’s always fun to be had in asking an incoming grad student what old baldy actually meant by this or that treatise. Not the examination of the Pennsylvania and Auburn Systems, with their strict quietude and felt-lined shoes and years of solitary confinement. Not the realization that you’ve grown so callous toward the faces on the table that it’s a relief when one of them dies rather than cutting into your bottom line. Not even the chilling parallels to the under-regulated detention facilities springing up across the United States, the ones that would fail even Penitent’s most basic checks.

Rather, the function is to ask us to think about the bodies under our care. To consider how a person ought to be housed when we as a society have decided we’d rather put some distance between them and us. Should they be punished? Reformed? Left to rot? Helped back to their feet? Penitent doesn’t offer trite answers.

But it does ask the right questions. I’ve spent some time in prisons. Not as an inmate, to be clear. As a volunteer, a few times. As a tourist, once, for a school thing. As a minister, usually to somebody’s irritation. And certain images are burnt into my memory. An inmate standing at the glass, hands clasped and shoulders squared, chin jutted in defiance, putting himself on display as an act of resistance. Another prisoner, crying with relief that we, that anybody, came to visit. The blank, slow gaze of someone in the halfway house, overawed at the bigness of the world outside. My own personal daguerreotypes.

Penitent is quite the thing. I’m hesitant to recommend it. The last time I said that one of Bullock’s games was essential, multiple readers informed me in no unclear terms that it was garbage. So let me be clear: Penitent is not a good game in the sense we usually mean when we say those words. It is awkward and wonky and full of moments that verge on role-play. It is frustrating. It lacks player agency, whatever that’s supposed to mean in this context. It made me draw a bunch of maps on grid paper. The nerve.

But it’s also a shockingly clear examination of some truly challenging subject matter. Sure, it’s educational. More than that, it’s an act of empathy, a witness, a dissection. In all regards, it is something like a surgeon, looking directly at one of our modern world’s hidden hurts, a rupture in the abdomen that we would rather ignore. “This might be infected,” it says, prodding uncomfortably at the reddened tissue.

As for the possibility of sutures… first, we’ve got to take a long hard look at the cut.

 

A complimentary copy of Penitent was provided by the designer.

(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!)