I like weird games (derogatory) almost as much as I like weird games (complimentary).

Belinda’s Big Bonus is a weird game (weird).

Having your game designed by Amabel Holland sets certain expectations, despite any difficulties in pinning her down to a single genre or register. Similarly, basing a game on an erotic novel series, in this case Belinda Blinked by Rocky Flintstone, also sets certain expectations. Yet Belinda’s Big Bonus isn’t especially erotic. I wouldn’t call it funny, either, although it’s possible I’m just not in on the joke. Neither does it strike me as “so bad it’s good.” Mostly, it’s twice as complicated as one would expect from a licensed game. It reminds me of nothing so much as one of those business guys whose entire life is conducted through Google Calendar invites.

First of all, we should open with a disclaimer. I know very little about Belinda Blinked. I considered reading the first one as research for this review — “research,” I say — but decided against it. Sometimes knowing less is knowing more. That’s our motto here in the United States. It’s written on our dollars and everything. While scant few people are going to play this thing sans foreknowledge, I happen to be one of them, and if there’s any one quality a critic requires, it’s the resolute belief that one’s experiences are valid no matter how uninformed. Here I stand.

Which is to say, perhaps Belinda Blinked is about managing one’s schedule, suffering from jet-lag, and mixing up which actions cost which payment. Maybe. In which case, may I offer my deepest apologies to Holland, Flintstone, and Belinda herself. Forgive this prude, for he knows not what he do.

At the game’s outset, players step into the not-yet-broken-in business shoes of interns at Steele’s Pots and Pans. Their task is to earn some millions of pounds for the company. They do this by…

Look, this is the first problem with Belinda’s Big Bonus, and it’s a doozy. As any gaming evangelical knows, it’s hard enough describing a board game to newcomers, and Belinda’s Big Bonus is no board game for newcomers. There are mechanisms aplenty in this trunk, packed together like someone mixed the first-aid kit with the snack bag. There’s a calendar timekeeping system, the kind popularized by Martin Wallace titles, and cards that may exist either in a market, your hand, or a tableau, with interactions dependent on their current source — except sometimes they can be spent from two of those places, and the rulebook is conversational and, although it’s amusing, this doesn’t lend itself to learning the damn thing.

Here’s the short version. Turns are variable, conducted by whomever is farthest back on the calendar. On those turns, you spend some amount of time to make connections — which is to say, put cards into your tableau from either the market or your hand — do spy stuff — gain cards into your hand, from the deck this time — rest to refresh the cards in your tableau, make a business deal by throwing away the cards you painstakingly contacted or spied upon — and, in the process, try to persuade your fellow players to spend some of their cards instead, because these business deals are often collaborative and dole out benefits to multiple players — or perhaps visit a calendar event on the appointed date to gain some advantage.

If that sounds confusing, try teaching it. I’m no stranger to Holland’s more tangled designs, but this one found the most uncomfortable spot on the seesaw between complexity and anticipation: the fulcrum. Belinda’s Big Bonus feels like it should be a light game, looks like a light game, has that licensed light-game air to it, and then, kapow, but a kapow more like a punch to the schnoz than something erotic, it smacks you with a clutter of ideas.

For all that, there is an interesting game in here. The gist is that you need to build out your tableau and hand in order to spend those same cards to make business deals. Along the way, your characters provide something like an engine.

There’s even a narrative to the whole thing. Sir James Godwin makes it easier to attract Bella Ridley to your work group. Meanwhile, James Spooner, the Laird of Gretna Green, brings Cosmo Macaroon into the fold through some act of espionage. Later, your connections to Bella and Cosmo will help you make a deal in Texas, USA for nine million pounds sterling. Unfortunately, that same deal enriches a rival intern by five million pounds, so you try to squeeze some contribution from so-and-so at the table rather than merely handing the commission to whichever competitor is sitting in last place.

Those are genuine dramatic and narrative beats! Along the way, though, Belinda’s Big Bonus is burdened by bloated bits. It’s easy to paint oneself into a corner, for instance, by spending too many cards on an eager deal. This can leave one player sitting around with very little to do but play catch-up. And, hey, that’s their fault, right? If we were playing one of Holland’s cube-rail games, such a possibility would act as evidence of the game’s forthrightness. But here, the possibility comes across less like an honest appraisal of the perils of betting everything on some bad stock tips, and more like an unexpected heel-turn on the game’s part.

Here’s another example. Belinda’s Big Bonus includes the possibility of a traitor moment. When the game concludes, the player in last place might reveal that they now hold the majority of connections to Steele’s rival firm, Bisch Herstellung. This turns them into “the special one” and wins the game in a sudden coup. Cool!

Except, like everything else in Belinda’s Big Bonus, the rules governing the reveal are so text-heavy that it doesn’t feel like an amusing capstone. It’s closer to checking a technical manual to see if you’ve successfully told a joke. It isn’t hard, exactly. Nothing in the game is hard. But it’s less fluid than it ought to be, keeping everybody’s attention on these mismatched processes rather than on the parade of characters and situations strutting across the table.

Then again, maybe I’m not in on the joke. Maybe a Belinda Blinked game should be more complicated than most licensed titles. Maybe it should buck common sense by being an erotic game with no eroticism, a business game with no head for business, a whimsy with lots of rules printed on the board. Maybe it should be a big meta-joke at my expense. Maybe this game doesn’t exist for anyone but me, and it was sent to me solely so that everybody could point and laugh and say, ha ha, you took our prank earnestly, you big stupid fool, you moron, you lame-o.

That would be okay. I don’t mind. In the game’s cast of characters, I feel most like the guy anxiously cleaning a stain from his tie. I don’t need to get everything. Sometimes, I even revel in how little I understand. For example, I’ve had a lovely time not understanding Belinda’s Big Bonus. Maybe you’ll have a lovely time not understanding it as well. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

 

A complimentary copy of Belinda’s Big Bonus 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!)

When I play Inkwell, I think about other games. That isn’t a slight on Inkwell’s quality, necessarily, nor a reflection on my fidelity to whichever title happens to be on the table at the moment. It’s just the sort of game that sets the mind to wandering. I have yet to play it without somebody mentioning Azul, for instance, and Sagrada isn’t a distant touchstone either.

The big one, though, is Alf Seegert’s Illumination, an overlooked quip from five years back that also dressed up its players as monks illuminating manuscripts under the stern eye of a passing abbot. And while it might seem like the parallel is entirely in the setting, it’s really the gentleness that does it, the warmth, the do-no-harm-ness of the whole thing. As a game, Inkwell isn’t only about monks; it’s downright monkish.

It begins with a page. Not quite a blank page, although one imagines the parchment fresh. For the sake of gameplay, the page is scrawled with the outlines of what will soon become vibrant illustrations: saints and angels, wreaths and knots, lions penned by someone who has clearly never seen a lion, scenes of Eden, holy babes that appear twice of age of the Lord at his crucifixion. Touching these illustrations are squares, each the size of a small wooden cube. Sometimes these squares appear in other spots, too, free of any illustration, but still ready to accept daubs and brush-strokes.

Your goal is to fill that page with color. Reds, blues, yellows, greens, deep charcoal blacks. Maybe some gold leaf. Gold is wild, capable of making up a shortfall elsewhere — because it’s gold, obviously — but it’s also sometimes required in special circumstances. Some spaces are blank, beckoning for leftovers. That or scoring multipliers.

These cubes must be drafted from the central mat, itself represented as a swirl of ink-pots. There are three types to draw from. Circular pots hold the most ink, three cubes at the beginning. Star spaces hold gold, but usually only a single cube’s worth, marking them as a tradeoff between quality and quantity. Diamonds are the most interesting, offering a meager two cubes, but also technique cards, special abilities that gradually hone your monk’s abilities.

One turn at a time, players go around and select which inkwells to draw from. There’s some potential for blocking, but it’s a relatively remote concept here, especially in the page’s early moments when any color will serve. The effect is trancelike, meditative, as close to multiplayer solitaire as design collective Jasper Beatrix has gotten thus far. The most burdensome restriction is that you aren’t permitted to draw from an inkwell unless you can actually use every last drop and employ every technique card. This makes blocking even less likely, instead reinforcing the game’s gentle proceedings. It’s possible to grab as many cubes as possible, but that might make the page difficult to fill. Better to proceed steadily, like the proverbial tortoise.

There is some pressure, however light. Whenever one of those varieties of inkwell is depleted — circle, star, or diamond — the abbot marches one step across the mat. He’s here to oversee your work, and at various points he may force the table to turn the page. This scores all those illustrations and color cubes, potentially leaving some work undone. It’s better to turn the page of your own volition, at the time of your choosing, but it’s hard to say exactly when the abbot will peek into the scriptorium to ensure the commissions are being fulfilled.

Over time, your accumulated techniques produce little engines, to use a game-word that would have meant something very different to our monks. But there’s some spark of the Latin gignere to these flashes of talent, reflected in the way they speak to an artistry now long displaced. Some techniques bestow extra cubes, perhaps when a specific color is drawn or the abbot marches down the hall, evoking the scribe, bent over his masterwork and taskmaster at once, carefully measuring every drop to its uttermost potential. Others let you claim cubes as a one- or two-time bonus, the medieval equivalent of double-dipping. Others still let you store a few cubes to the side, or rearrange them on the page, saving your palimpsest scrapings for reuse elsewhere.

In some ways, Inkwell is also itself a palimpsest. There are traces of other games here, possibly better or more interesting games. The most pronounced is Azul; it’s impossible to look at the circular inkwells and not see that game’s rounded factories and Starburst-sized ceramics. There are other traces, too, impressions on the parchment that can still be made out despite the game’s clean presentation. Playing Inkwell, it’s hard to escape the feeling that we’ve gone through these motions before.

Of course we have, if only because nothing under the sun is new. None these actions are wholly novel. But Inkwell feels a little closer to its peers than some games. Especially Jasper Beatrix games, with their penchant for novelty and mechanical introspection. Inkwell is no Pacts, with its dissection of I-split-you-choose gameplay, no Here Lies with its decoupling of detective games from rigid logic, no Signal and communication, no Scream Park and tableau-building.

But for all its similarity to other games, there are still reasons to recommend it. For example, I appreciate the open-ended nature of its conundrum, one where each selection feels like another window into a broad decision-space, rather than a binary best or worst pick. It’s rare that a single inkwell feels like the answer to a puzzle so much as one more question. Another brushstroke, perhaps, another inlay of gold. Those other games use artistry as their backdrop; Inkwell, by contrast, feels like artistry. More specifically, it feels like that slender space between commercial reality — deadlines and managers, limited resources, coworkers who sometimes take the pigments you need without meaning any harm — and the aspiration to fashion something that will endure the centuries.

Where does that put Inkwell, in the end? It’s hard to say. As a game, it occupies a peculiar middle ground. It lacks the brain-tickling nature of its heavier inspirations, the emphasis on puzzling and position, but ventures a little closer to its source material than those games have ever managed.

More than that, Inkwell is reassuring. It feels like a weighted blanket, the game equivalent of a movie like The Taste of Things, all soft sensation and creamy sunlight and lulled senses. The outcome is neither the strongest nor the weakest of Jasper Beatrix’s collective output, but offers a lovely and gentle visit to a faraway time and place nonetheless.

 

A complimentary copy of Inkwell 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!)

Gods & Mortals, designed by William Borg Barthet and Artyom Nichipurov — the latter of whom brought us the excellent Trick Shot and even excellenter Guards of Atlantis II — happens to be one of my favorite things: a total theological dumpster fire. There’s a purity to Graeco-Roman Polytheism, with its wild gods that are best placated or avoided. It isn’t until Hebrew and Christian religion start bellyaching about God’s goodness that the pantheon’s previous badness became — clap your hands between each letter — P R O B L E M A T I C. What does it mean when the Creator places a wager with his court prosecutor for a man’s soul? It means a problem for how we understand the universe. A big spoiled amphora of a problem.

In other words, Gods & Mortals is Greek myth by way of the Book of Job. As you might expect, it’s incredible.

When Gods & Mortals opens, we receive a vision of the Aegean that’s half history and half myth. Humankind has split into four factions, each dominating roughly a quadrant of the known world. Proud Troy rules over one side of the sea, the Achaeans hold the opposite shore, the Minoans are doing the seafaring thing down south, and the northern land are ruled by the Amazons.

Don’t worry about keeping them straight. To you, an immortal, they’re yellow, blue, red, and green. You might as well distinguish between one species of beetle and another. The only reason you care that much is because the entire pantheon has gotten together and decided to wager some of their divine essence on the outcome of mortal affairs. Basically, you’re playing Age of Empires for money.

What follows is a freewheeling contest that plays out in two separate realms. On the table, mortal empires vie for control of territory, erect temples, and sometimes murder each other. Above it, the gods hoot and holler about their preferred sports team, trading wagers and nakedly calling for a rival’s star player to get benched. Betrayal is common. So is cooperation. Often those two go hand-in-hand, swapping places within seconds of the previous state of affairs.

It works like this. When the round begins, every god is allowed to invest a portion of their divinity into the insect human dramas playing out below. The rules are strict. Only two kingdoms can hold your favor at a time. These increments are slow, only permitted one or two ticks at a time. Only one god can hold each level of favor within a kingdom, making it possible to block the interests of their fellows.

Perhaps most crucially, increasing your favor with a kingdom requires a proportionate investment of your divinity. If the Achaeans have been driven back to their city-state while the Amazons control a map-spanning empire, well, you’re presented with a conundrum: either buy Achaean favor at fire-sale prices, or cough up a premium for the Amazons.

Or betray them entirely. The strategy of Gods & Mortals is one of tactical investment and withdrawal. In essence, human factions are the joint-stock companies of your average cube rails title. Buying into a faction requires more divinity as they grow more prosperous. But so does your god’s potential buy-out. It’s tempting to bestow your godly light on a faction in ascent, but that could prove costly; on the flipside, spending too much time on a failed empire might prove catastrophic. We could render this as folksy wisdom. Buy low, sell high. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Don’t date crazy.

And then, bets placed, the gods shift their attention to the mortal realm. You didn’t expect the gods, of all beings, to place a wager without leaning their thumbs and/or lightning bolts on the scales, did you? Even in the Book of Job, the foremost text on deities with compulsive gambling disorders, the spurned Creator sends a whole whirlwind to browbeat the poor guy into recanting his frustration.

This phase occupies the bulk of a round. Going around the table four times, each god takes turns manipulating the mortal wars, expansions, and offerings of the Aegean. As with the previous wagers, there are stark limitations. The short version is that you can manipulate mortal events quite broadly, but only provided you’re holding the right cards, the desired action is still available, and, if you’re going for one of the more powerful options, have enough sacrifices on-hand.

In practice, this strikes a tight balance. On the one hand, it’s exhilarating how transformative your powers can be. Some of this depends on your divine identity. Artemis can guide the bowstring of an anointed hunter to slay rivals in multiple foreign lands. Ares likes to sack rival temples, turning unprotected holy places into recruiting grounds for entire armies. Hades chews up souls and disgorges them as half-rotten Odysseuses. Most actions are smaller — troops marching from one space to another, a temple providing sacrifices to its patrons, a duel that kills both participants — but with the right timing and preparations, human affairs can prove surprisingly malleable.

But the other portion is social. Given the game’s stock-broker core, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that success often requires a deft touch with your immortal relatives. Control over the human factions is entirely shared, making it possible to meddle in surprising ways. I remember the white-hot fury that resulted when a carefully stocked military campaign entered a distant land only to, at the very beginning of the next round, turn around and march home before they could erect their intended temple.

More than that, it’s important to think about the long-term implications of each move. Will building that temple in Thebes lead to a long-term rivalry with Zeus? Is a volcano in Sparta a good way to ensure compliance with your plans, lest the little bondage-geared goofballs scream “This… is… ARGHHHH THE FIRE!!”? Or are there opportunities to trade favors? One session I won on the strength of collaboration, working with another player to reform the Achaeans from a measly two-territory kingdom into a sizeable empire. Theirs wasn’t the biggest faction on the board, in the end. But it had undergone the best growth, which meant the best total increase in our divinity. In my divinity.

All told, Gods & Mortals is a hoot. It’s a stock game, there’s no disguising that, but it’s direct and combative in a way that, say, cube rails is not. It would be tempting to say that this blunts that genre’s subtleties, but the more accurate summary is that it moves the concept in a new direction. The result is flashy but still measured, every god bending the rules in their own manner, but only after careful preparation and in clear sight of everybody else at the table. While it’s distinct from Nichipurov’s previous designs, it carries a few strands of familiar code: the emphasis on human drama, the tightness of a few outlandish actions, the sheer exuberance that comes from discovering each god’s inner workings.

As a bonus, yeah, it’s got that train wreck theology going on. How do we respond when the gods throw our lives into turmoil? Not much, apparently. Maybe, at best, we can place some bets on the outcome.

Gods & Mortals is on Gamefound right now.

 

A prototype copy of Gods & Mortals was temporarily 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!)

Food trucks, like roll-and-write games, went from unknowns circa 2013 to oversaturated by 2021 to fresh all over again in this the year 2026. At least that’s the hope behind Chicken Fried Dice, a chuck-and-scrawler and food truck simulator from Ashwin Kamath and Rob Newton.

How does it perform? We’ll wait in line together.

When Chicken Fried Dice opens, you have a food truck not unlike the rolling disaster from Jon Favreau’s Chef. In the language of dice, that means your options are limited, confined to a few rerolls, the ability to “chop” a die to divide a large number into two smaller numbers, and dousing an ingredient in sauce to make it seem like something else entirely. Ah, the secrets of the trade. I always suspected that if I slathered a bread crust in non-gluten barbecue sauce, I could legally label it GF.

Those tools are essential. On the surface, Chicken Fried Dice is another roll-and-write. You roll some dice, you write down their digits.

But what sets it apart from the competition is how thoroughly you can knead those rolls. For one thing, this is a simultaneous game. Everybody begins by chucking a handful of dice into a shared pot, then fishing them out one at a time. It’s possible to work fast to secure the best ingredients for yourself, but this is rarely easy. See, for instance, the aforementioned methods for altering your rolls. Getting what you want is often possible, but may require some trimming and/or a dash of luck.

Even more persnickety, though, are the customers lined up outside your truck. I hate them. Everybody hates them. At their most basic, each customer has a list of ingredients they want in their meal. Say, peppers, broccoli, tofu, and more peppers. The first problem is that these represent portions. Each color has to match, of course — bring on the sauce — but each successive digit must also increase, or at the very least match what came before. This turns every order into its own ramen bowl of competing portions, ingredients, and custom instructions.

Naturally, providing customers with their desired meal is how you score points, but there’s so much more to it than that. Customers are willing to stick around between rounds, but the point-earning stars they’ll award your truck diminish over time. Worse, the picky jerks may leave a tip, but only if certain spaces meet their approval. Sometimes this isn’t such a bad thing, like when a number near the bottom requires a low digit. But what about when the bottom-most space demands a 4? And the order is five stonking ingredients long? And the customer doesn’t intend to stick around for more than a few minutes?

As with the best roll-and-writes, Chicken Fried Dice very quickly becomes a game about identifying and enacting one’s priorities. Not every customer will get served, so choosing the best clientele is a must. Those meager tips likely won’t let you improve every station of your food truck, so it becomes necessary to shore up your weak points. Depending on who you feed, little bonuses become available. Free ingredients, various flavors… I’m not sure what’s happening here, because it seems a lot like we’re carving haunches out of satisfied customers to feed the next group, but it does make for some nice combo-building. As your food truck transforms into the renovated sandwich wagon from the latter half of Jon Favreau’s Chef, it becomes possible to serve more and better meals.

The whole thing is a delight. The race to nab dice works in part because it’s harried but not overly punitive. Barring the occasional bonus, players are only allowed to grab four dice, so it’s rare to find yourself under too much pressure. Upgrading your work stations offers tangible improvements, and we have yet to play without someone showing off the name they invented for their truck. The complexity level can be adjusted, with two modes for using the bonus “flavors” provided by customers, whether a simple cluster of four tracks or a more open-ended picnic minigame. The dice-chopping has even provided a nice way to get my twelve-year-old to think about algebra beyond the confines of her math class.

Oh, and the solo mode is nice. Every truck has a reverse side that shows a different puzzle boss to beat, sort of like the uppity food critic from Jon Favreau’s Chef. I haven’t seen them all yet, in part because the prototype wasn’t content-complete, but the ones I’ve tackled have struck a nice balance between putting up a challenge and affording the player a measure of control over the rival trucker’s moves.

Is it a perfect game? Oh, I dunno. It’s a little airier than I prefer, a little more limited, especially when it comes to things like the upgrades. More often than not, it’s possible to upgrade the entire truck in those five rounds, making the game feel more boxed-in than some of my favorite exemplars of the genre. Chicken Fried Dice is a light game, but not so light that there isn’t some crunch mixed into its rice bowl.

The short version is that Chicken Fried Dice is something I would play with my sister’s family. They play plenty of games, but require a curated middle ground, neither too light nor as brain-burny as The Anarchy or Fliptown. This is that sort of game: silly but not off-putting, cutely thematic, mathy but not frustratingly so, breezy without zoning me out. To sum it up with a quote by John Leguizamo from Jon Favreau’s Chef: “I’m putting a little corn starch on my huevos, man.”

 

A prototype copy of Chicken Fried Dice was temporarily 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!)

There’s a problem with most hidden movement games, and I say that as the mechanism’s greatest devotee. Namely, they’re slow. So slow. Maybe it would be kinder to call them “deliberate,” but even that doesn’t quite transform the ding into a compliment. Stealth, in theory, can be deliberate. Stick insects are deliberate. But it can also be harried, adrenal, instinctual. Like a panther. Like an owl. Like me ducking out of a Super Bowl party before the uncles start complaining about the halftime show.

Burned occupies the untapped middle ground between those two poles. Designed by Jon Moffat, who gave us last year’s top game about poop carts, Burned is neither Mind MGMT nor Captain Sonar. Instead, it’s the closest a board game has ever gotten to making me feel like a highly-trained secret agent picking off mooks in broad daylight. Usually right before they tackle me to the ground and stomp me to death.

Picture with me, if you will, the moment in any spy thriller when the baddies are stomping up the stairs. Go ahead, close your eyes and picture it. Close them. Now open them. This ain’t no radio drama. You, the secret agent, can hear them coming. They’ll be on you in seconds. Not minutes. Certainly not hours. Seconds. They’re at the door. The wood is splintering. They sweep into the room, and you’re

gone.

Burned is about those split seconds. A session takes ten minutes, maybe fifteen at most, and comes across as no longer then five.

Which makes it all the more impressive that it isn’t real-time. Nothing explicitly hurries you along. The Burned Asset takes his turn. Then the Agency pursues him. Back and forth it goes, back and forth, until one side or the other has been planted.

Along the way, Moffat deploys considerable tricks to sell the illusion that the entire encounter is measured in heartbeats. For example, there’s the map. Unlike many other hidden movement games, which deploy geography in the most literal sense, the space in Burned is more impressionistic. Depending on the layout, the entire area might be confined to the square footage of a hotel. And not an especially large hotel. One card will be a courtyard; another, a terrace. One space is just “steps.” Another is a fountain. Stealth, then, is a matter of ducking out of sight, not putting miles between pursued and pursuer.

This sensation of proximity extends well beyond card titles. Both sides move the same way, either walking or running from one card to another. Walking means moving to a card that matches the color of the one you’re standing on; running means moving anywhere — literally anywhere at all — but incurring a penalty, whether announcing the color of the destination if you’re the Burned Asset, or putting your mooks at risk if you’re the Agency. Meanwhile, some cards show multiple colors. These are crossroads, spots one might pass between colors without having to tip their hand.

The effect is thrilling. Because every spot on the map is within reach of every other spot, there’s no such thing as outrunning your opponent. You can buy time, sure. You can duck away from a fight that’s getting too hot. But Burned is a chase scene in a confined space, not an entire cat-and-mouse flick. It’s like that moment in A History of Violence where one character outfoxes another by shutting a door in their face, or the single-take fight scene from Atomic Blonde that rolls through a single apartment block, or every other scene in a Bourne movie.

Of course, this wouldn’t work without Burned’s unusually high body count. Most hidden movement games offer a certain asymmetry of vulnerability, where the one being pursued is in danger of losing their life while the greatest risk to the pursuer is the loss of some time. I’m thinking of the Hunters from Specter Ops, who can be stunned but never put down for good, or even the shark from Kelp, for whom failure means missing out on dinner.

Here, nothing could be further from the truth. The Burned Asset is uniquely vulnerable because he’s alone. But the Agency, despite being the better-staffed half of this equation, is almost assured to suffer the greater casualties. When the scene opens, they have seven agents. Most of these will probably be run-of-the-mill operatives. Mooks, in other words, there to chase the Burned Asset and, in all likelihood, give their lives in the attempt. One or two might be spotters, relatively peaceful mooks who are better avoided than assaulted directly, or even canine units that are experts at sniffing out traps.

But the Agency isn’t untouchable. Their principal aim is to kill the Burned Asset, but they’re playing a double game. This entire shebang began as an ambush. So the big guy is here, the Director of the whole rotten apple pie, along with his body double. If the Burned Asset takes down the Director — and possibly the body double as well, depending on the order things shake out — then it’s curtains for the Agency.

The result is a chase in both directions. A highly lopsided chase, to be sure. A chase where one side is doing the bulk of the chasing and the other is usually the chasee. But it’s also a chase where the hunted can very rapidly turn the tables and become the hunter. With the application of a few bullets, a grenade, maybe a bear trap, anything is possible.

I suppose it bears mentioning that the Burned Asset is the harder role to play. Manpower counts for a lot, and seven to one makes for formidable odds.

In a game this kinetic, this cinematic, and this brief, however, it’s hard to consider that a shortcoming. I have complicated thoughts about balance in the first place — foremost that it’s overrated — and it strikes me as fitting that a contest between one man, no matter how well trained and outfitted, against seven other killers, should be a little tipsy on the scales.

More than that, though, many of my favorite moments in Burned were those that saw me failing to accomplish my objective. One instance in particular stands out. After setting up the map, I positioned myself at an intersection, an obvious hiding place with ready access to two major areas. Right away, the Agency zeroed in on my position. Within a single action, I had been injured. We’re talking twenty seconds into the game here.

But I had planned for this. All according to plan. I popped some tear gas, a single-use tool that stunned every agent at locations of my color. This just so happened to be every single agent in the game. And while two agents had fanned out to secure the area, the rest were clustered atop a single mezzanine.

That gave me a free move, completely unharassed, to do whatever I wanted. That’s an eternity in Burned. So I chose my next move carefully. I took careful aim at the mezzanine. Five agents in my crosshairs. And then I sprayed lead.

Hits in Burned resolve according to a simple deck draw. One by one, we went through the agents. The first one, an operative: DEAD. The next, the body double: DEAD. Third, another operative: MISSED. Who cares, my target is the big bastard. And there he was. The Director. It was entirely plausible that I might win the match within one minute of completing setup. We flipped the next card, and

MISSED.

Dammit. The other agent got away, too. I’ll type it out for consistency’s sake: MISSED. But, hey, that was fine. With so much of its manpower already bleeding out, the Agency was in a bind. I ran. Hid. Tried to regroup.

It didn’t pan out. A little while later, another agent found me and inflicted my second wound. I killed him back, but the exchange left me on death’s door. On the next turn, I shot the wrong guy. He turned out to be a spotter. Which meant whatever sniper was covering his location popped me next. Blammo. Lights out for the Burned Asset.

But the takeaway from this anecdote isn’t that I failed. It’s that Burned produces moments of effortless kino. Every duel feels close. Every shot, every flipped card, every knife duel, every booby trap, every reveal. Sure, the outcome was more The American than John Wick. Sometimes, that’s how the cookie crumbles. When I missed the Director after shooting his body double, I shouted. Yelped, more like. Woke up my friend’s dog. That’s how invested we were in that moment.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been excited about a tiny stealth game. I’m thinking about Fugitive, another box that can squeeze into your average jeans pocket. (Or slip comfortably into a cargo pocket, if you happen to be a person of high fashion and leisure.)

But what makes Burned remarkable is not only its size, not only its duration. It’s the way the game conveys cinematic action rather than deductive logic. This is one of those rare hidden movement games that’s about motion instead of movement ranges. At no point does anyone count spaces. There’s no fretting over doubling-back rules. In place of the mechanism’s usual trappings, one finds pure animation, pure punch, pure heft. Which is to say, it evokes feeling more than analysis, a rare strength in such an analytical medium.

In more straightforward terms, it handles like a weapon. It feels heavy and dangerous in my hand. It incites to deeds of make-believe violence. I missed my shot at the Director this time. Next time, and the next, and the time after that, the bastard is going all the way down.

 

A complimentary copy of Burned 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!)

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!)

Ah, solipsism. It’s always appreciated when a board game demonstrates that we exist in shocking isolation, our comprehension of the universe siloed from every other human being, loved ones and enemies alike, by an unspannable gulf. Usually it’s Dixit or Mysterium that performs the winnowing, but there are no shortage of titles for transforming everyday people into miniature versions of René Descartes.

But then there’s The Vibe. Crafted by Jacob Jaskov nearly a full decade after he exploded onto the scene with Fog of Love, The Vibe is… how shall I put this… it contains some really great public-domain artwork. Joseph Ducreux, history’s finest self-portraitist, was a wonderful choice for the cover.

Really, I cannot applaud the art enough. The Vibe’s sixty-plus cards tour a virtual gallery, covering such works as Jacobus Doyer’s “Jan Van Speijk Debating Whether to Set Fire to the Gunpowder,” Eastman Johnson’s “The Pets,” and Unknown’s “Lover’s Eyes.” Actually, I think Unknown may be over-represented in this set. Give everyone else a chance, Unknown! Point is, opening the box presents the greatest hits from the postcard stands of a dozen art museum gift shops, drawing breathless exclamations of “Ooh, I think I remember this one!” from everyone at the table who took A.P. Art History twenty years ago.

On the back of each card, the art is titled, attributed, dated, and located in its modern museum or collection. There’s even a little barcode that promises to share more info, although at the time of writing they all lead to a generic page announcing that further details are forthcoming. Still, it’s a lovely collection. Poring over each image is a delight, and as a bonus it probably beats out any tourist shop in the world at per-postcard price. The last time I visited the Louvre, each one cost over a euro. What are the odds they’ve gotten cheaper?

But then I have to play the dang thing.

Picture this. In addition to the image title and author name and all that, the back of each card reveals a concept. Justice, perhaps. Loss. Passion. Surprise. On the table, you array five images, plus five more cards face-down to reveal a smattering of those concepts. Rebellion. Constipation. Transformation. Now somebody selects one of those ideas — in secret, mind you, in their brains, not aloud — and arranges the images in the order of how much they embody that idea. Left to right for all to see, from most to least. Grief. Relief. Justice. Oops, we’ve done that one. Shuffle it back into the deck. Betrayal. That’s better.

Now everybody else hems and haws and theorizes. Maybe Katsushika Hokusai’s “The Ghost of Kohada Koheiji” symbolizes anger? I mean, of course it does, but I mean right now, here, according to the five concepts on the table. But then we glance at the next image and it’s Brueghel’s “The Children of Planet Mercury.” Not very anger-y, y’know? Unless, perhaps, the arranger is struggling with their childhood faith, so any scene with a rooster-drawn chariots has certain connotations. Anger, then? Or maybe wisdom? The wisdom of the dead, the wisdom of rooster-drawn chariot-riders? Hmm. Humm.

It’s fine. Nothing incroyable, to pretend I know French. Too often it’s painfully obvious what the arranger intended to say; the rest of the time, it’s hopelessly obscure. Dixit was competitive, which ensured there were penalties for either extreme, the vague or the obvious. Mysterium was cooperative but muddied by the contrast between abstract images and concrete player actions. Here, the play is too straightforward to muster the necessary ambiguity.

Sure, there’s some of the usual apprehension that arises whenever we try to draw a box around things, to neatly cluster disparate ideas and images under shared headings. Is One Battle After Another just a social justice Star Wars? Is The Force Awakens just A New Hope for those who’ve misplaced their childlike sense of wonder? Is Star Wars just Vietnam? Are we just the Empire? Yes. I think so. Yes. I think I’m having more fun being discursive than actually talking about The Vibe. What I’m really trying to say is that the game wants to say something profound, only it doesn’t. It mostly prompts the occasional chuckle because somebody didn’t notice a detail when they examined the paintings.

There are sparks of brilliance in this game. Especially in the advanced mode. This sees the arranger making two rankings instead of just one, this time exhibited in cruciform. Now two of those five concepts are superimposed over the images, one of them situated so that it fulfills both criteria, but only as the middle spot in both rankings. This gives the enterprise a greater density, allowing for wider interpretations and broader misunderstandings. It isn’t enough to remake the game into something smarter, more like the artists it admires than the observers who flock to see their work, but it does nudge it a little closer to becoming an engaging plaything.

Sadly, The Vibe isn’t going to redefine the party game as we know it. I wish it would. I wish it had revolution in its bones. That way, we’d be guaranteed another few boxes of sixty postcards adorned with perfect examples of human creation. Instead, The Vibes is one of the finest packs of postcards ever assembled — and a weak imitation of better titles about the wiggly nature of perception and interpretation.

 

A complimentary copy of The Vibe 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!)

No need to bury the lede: as of this morning, The Old King’s Crown is now in funding for its second printing. If you haven’t read my review, the short version is that Pablo Clark’s debut design was a stunning achievement on every level.

Except, ambush!, there’s a second game afoot, and that’s the real target of my interest today. Included as an option for the crowdfunding campaign, Annulet is a card game that ostensibly exists within the broken realm of The Old King’s Crown. What is an annulet, you might ask? Short of being a legal way to divorce one’s spouse without God getting frumpy about it, an annulet is a little ring one might stick on a coat of arms or a pinkie toe. Exactly the sort of paraphernalia you might expect from the well-garbed folk of Clark’s faraway kingdom.

But is Annulet the sort of card game those selfsame weary warmongers would actually splay atop a knife-scored tavern slab? That’s the pressing question.

At a glance, Annulet, like everything else in the world of The Old King’s Crown, is downright gorgeous. Also illustrated by Pablo Clark, even the prototype calls to mind a plate from a favorite childhood book of myths and tall tales, all enigmatic figures and crumbling aqueducts and mossy forests. Sure, it takes all of ten seconds to realize the game must have been designed with a regular deck of playing cards, given its four suits and face cards. So what? I can buy the notion that everything in Clark’s universe is just like ours but better illustrated.

To Clark’s credit, Annulet doesn’t play quite like anything else out there. At core it’s a market selection game. Every round begins with a few cards on offer, from which the players will draft some number into their supply.

How many cards? That’s surprisingly hard to answer thanks to the way Annulet morphs according to player count. While the rules don’t undergo any substantive changes when swapping from two players to three or four, its underlying ethos is so transformed that it becomes something fundamentally different. We’ll circle back around to this question. For now, the answer is “two cards with two players, but only one with three or four players.”

All right. So you take either one or two cards. These are added to your supply. From there, cards can be installed in your kingdom, which swiftly shapes into a three-by-three grid of lands and characters. In the short-term, cards in your kingdom are secure. Unlike those still in your supply, they cannot be stolen by upstart rivals. Thinking ahead a bit, your kingdom is also the basis of your scoring. At some future moment of your choosing, every row, column, and diagonal may form points-earning sets. The rarer the better.

As befits Annulet’s heritage, it manages to feel simultaneously old and new. Old because it doesn’t stray far from any number of card-gathering and set-forming games of yore. There’s a comforting familiarity to its percentages, that instinctual understanding that a straight flush is rarer and therefore deserves more coins than three-of-a-kind. Unlike The Old King’s Crown, which was sometimes burdened by keywords and concepts and special abilities, Annulet holds its cards closer to our shared cultural vest.

But it feels new, too, thanks to more modern flourishes that make its cardplay more dynamic and open-ended than most tavern games. There’s the game’s currency, river stones that must be spent and even exchanged between players in order to install additional cards into one’s kingdom or swipe juicy offerings from a rival’s supply. There’s the way face cards are arranged atop lands to alter their values. In the case of magicians and knights, this means adjusting their host land’s suit or rank. Monarchs are even more potent, increasing the scoring value of any set they’re part of, and all the better if you can score them in multiple directions at once. At absolute best, a single monarch in the middlemost space of a kingdom can score four times. That’s rare, but it’s hardly impossible.

Crucially, these flourishes tell something of a story, or at least they gesture at the outlines of Clark’s fantasy world. Just as different trick-takers might speak to the sensibilities of those who played them historically, whether as domestic parlor games or the pastimes of naval officers padding their peacetime income, Annulet speaks to a kingdom that’s always reshaping itself. Monarchs come and go. Treasures are gathered and plundered. Violence is so matter-of-course that the apex of a kingdom is also its dissolution.

The smartest of Clark’s inclusions are the tale cards. Each session opens with players selecting a pair, whether by choice or at random. At a gameplay level, these are modifiers. Textually, they’re regional variations. One session might feature “the People’s Game,” scoring extra points for sets that sum to a small number, while the next revolves around “Border Reaving” that adds junk cards to opposing kingdoms. The effect isn’t dissimilar from the many small variations in trick-taking or shedding games, leaving the core rules intact but tweaking the game’s breadth. The result is a title that feels as large as the world Clark penned to contain it.

This isn’t to say that Annulet escapes wholly unscathed, either as a plaything or within its internal fiction, and those scathings are largely interrelated. The short version is that the game is simply too permissive — in one sense, too modern — to pass muster as something that might appear in a military camp or dimly lit roadhouse.

First of all, the scoring is tremendously intrusive, often requiring an extended pause to sum up every one of a kingdom’s angles. On its own, this isn’t such a bad thing; we share a reality with Germans who play Schafkopf, so it isn’t as though real-world tavern games haven’t ever belabored their scoring to the point of madness. But where Annulet slips is through the inclusion of special cards called fates. Everybody begins with a few of these and can purchase more for a heap of river stones. From there, fates pull multiple duty. They potentially add to one’s score at the conclusion of the game, and can be spent to place trash into a rival’s kingdom, seize the all-important initiative marker for yourself, or enter your own kingdom as a wildcard.

It’s this latter function that gives Annulet its bagginess. A fate can function as anything: any card, whether land or nobility. But in scoring, it must adopt a single posture — not always the easiest thing to visualize when there are a full eight sets that might be assessed at any given moment — and the problem only compounds in kingdoms with multiple fate cards fulfilling many roles. Too often, Annulet hinges more on how permissively one employs their fates than how sharply they draft their kingdom.

This is a small complaint, but it’s small the way a pebble is small when caught inside one’s shoe. Annulet is too broad, failing to quite capture the sensation of playing and mastering a truly great tavern game, one defined as much by chance and limitation as by the range of things a player might accomplish on their turn. It’s like playing a trick-taker with a bunch of wilds; thrilling the first time you steal a trick, obnoxious when everybody’s doing it all the time.

Perhaps more pronounced, the game is a different beast depending on player count. It will probably surprise nobody to hear that it’s strongest at two players, which affords greater numbers of drafted cards and a tighter focus all around. Higher counts clutter the decision space a bit, especially where initiative and drafting are concerned, but three-player is charming in its own way. Annulet is at its strongest when it presents that razor-wire choice of which cards to draft and how to use them. With each additional player, that sharpness is blunted.

Apart from that, however, Annulet is quite the production. Even at its flimsiest, it’s lively and exciting. More importantly, as a diegetic artifact it speaks to the breadth of this place Pablo Clark has envisioned, something Baron Cuttlefish might splay atop the camp-table on the eve of crushing the Speakers of the Wood. With one finger he traces the rim of his goblet, heedless that the Vial Sect has already dusted the brass with their bitterest toxin. By the time the Ornithopter Club swoops down from the hills, his pulse will have already stilled.

Ahem. Look, it’s good stuff, even when it doesn’t hang together quite as tightly as I had hoped. For a follow-up to what was perhaps last year’s most exciting debut title, that’s no small thing. The result is an imperfect game, but a lovely and evocative experience nevertheless.

 

A prototype copy of Annulet 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!)

It hasn’t been all that long since we took a look at Re;ACT: The Arts of War, an intriguing but imperfect game about various artists manifesting their crafts into the physical world in order to determine which medium is the most artsy of them all. It’s like Bloodsport but with calligraphy versus spray paint versus film stock.

MingYang Lu’s forthcoming followup, Re;MATCH, isn’t exactly a sequel, although its peculiar capitalization and errant semicolon might lend one that impression. Instead, it’s something even better: a match-three game in which one must never, ever match three.

Okay, it isn’t only that, although I’ll confess I find that part amusing.

Like Re;ACT before it, Re;MATCH begins with a settling of accounts between two careers, although this time the jobs are even more disparate. That’s right, no more squabbles between artists. Instead, one match might see an axe-wielding firefighter squaring off against a disc jockey. Perhaps that seems one-sided, but no, this is a competition of the minds.

Still seems one-sided? Okay, let’s leave the minds in the drawer. How about a battle of marbles?

The big visual draw is the marble tower. The closest touchstone is the box from Potion Explosion, which, if you’re in the mood to suddenly feel old, came out a lengthy eleven years ago. The marble tower in Re;MATCH is even simpler than that game’s, producing three lanes of balls in three colors. It’s marble-matching so simple a baby could do it, right before trying to eat the marbles.

But the matching is simple for a reason. For one thing, you aren’t permitted to use all three of those lanes. Instead, you’re always limited to two: the one closest to you and the shared middle lane. The decision space is compressed, but in such a way that even a fourth color would cause no shortage of problems.

And then, of course, there are the fighters.

The gist behind Re;MATCH is that every fighter comes with their own arcade cabinet, complete with a standee — whose function, it must be said, is principally aesthetic — a few special tokens, and a fold-out broad displaying a unique set of moves.

Those moves are the important part. By making color-coded matches in the marble tower, your fighter triggers various effects. Each color permits three levels, one that triggers when you utilize a single ball, another for two balls, and a third that skips over three balls to instead trigger when you manage to string together four marbles at a time. It’s simple, but not as much as it initially seems. Sometimes you’ll want to forego a powerful move for the sake of setting up an even more potent combo later — or because you desperately need to block a move coming down your rival’s lanes. It feels surprisingly close to the fighting cabinets it strives to evoke visually, despite the turn-based limitations of its medium.

Now comes the tricky part, because I can’t give examples without delving into the fighters themselves. This will come as no surprise to anybody who played or even glanced at Re;ACT. In that game, the duelists were so different that they often used entirely distinct mechanisms. Bag-building versus card management, for example. The contestants in Re;MATCH boast a more robust shared foundation, in that nobody leaps away from the marble tower to shuffle a private deck or anything like that. But the breadth of their personal expression is still quite the thing to behold.

Maybe I can limit myself to only one or two examples.

I wasn’t joking when I said there was a firefighter. That might sound silly. That’s because it is silly. But at the same time, this is a firefighter with a possessed axe that makes her take deadly risks, which pushes the character from silly to excellent. At various points, the firefighter’s moves might cause self-damage. This flips the axe to its other side, gains an “ironblood” token that can be spent to empower her moves, and changes how the firefighter operates in battle. Basically, she shifts between damage mode and defense mode, healing her injuries and destroying any combo-making balls in the marble tower before her opponent can pounce on them.

And this is reflected in those color-coded movesets. For instance, her red moves are all about dealing damage. One red marble deals three damage to her opponent and one to herself. Two marbles means she deals two damage, or else spends one of those ironblood tokens to deal twice as much. Four marbles deals only one damage, but does so to every color.

Did I mention that health is color-coded? It is. Both fighters have three health dials, one per color. Bottoming out a dial will “break” it, forcing its owner to spend a coin to stay in the game. This alters how the whole thing is played. Now the injured player can’t make matches with that color. Instead, it changes function for a bit. Instead of building matches, the broken color operates as a connector, letting its player trace through those busted marbles to connect other ones. This has the benefit of gradually ticking the broken dial upward, eventually restoring it to its healthy side.

In other words, as your moveset becomes more limited from suffering damage, your remaining colors grow even more formidable. At the same time, though, you’ll want to restore your broken dial as soon as possible, lest a second dial succumb. When that happens, it takes two coins to stay in the game. That’s bad. Coins are your “real” currency, you see. Lose all of them and it’s game over.

Okay, so the firefighter is all about tempo, switching between blasting both players and nursing her wounds. Let’s contrast that with another contestant, the D.J.

The D.J. loves to make noise. Her kit comes with a turntable and a selection of discs. Every so often, she’s allowed to drop a beat, physically taking one of those discs and placing it on the turntable. This might attract fans — a shared currency both players are grappling to control, and which increase the potency of every move in the game — or deal damage, or whatever. This also places a beat token on the marble tower. Row by row, the beat will advance. When it finally ends, another power triggers.

Naturally, the D.J.’s moveset includes normal stuff. She wins over fans. She deals damage. The usual. But her real abilities revolve around dropping, advancing, and killing beats. Her entire setup is one cacophonous wall of sound. Like the firefighter, she’s all about tempo. But the way those tempos function couldn’t be more different. The firefighter is all about managing two very different modes. The D.J. is the board game equivalent of a Shepard Tone, always ascending, always building momentum.

The other fighters tweak the formula in their own ways. Some, like the dancer and the chef, lay little traps on the marble tower, penalizing anyone who selects balls on the booby-trapped row. Others, such as the psychic and the trickster, are all about predicting and preempting their opponent’s moves. Like the firefighter and D.J., they share some similarities, but there’s an initial sense of discovery to seeing how they function, followed by the joy of figuring out how to leverage their strengths against an opponent with tricks and traps of their own.

The effect isn’t all that dissimilar to something designed by Brad Talton, like some lighter marble-drop version of BattleCON or Exceed. Or, sure, Re;ACT, although Lu is in stronger form this time around. Unlike that earlier effort, which was full of sticky rules and questionable matchups, the fighters in Re;MATCH are sharply crafted — and I say this despite playing a prototype, with all the small tweaks and imbalances that always entails. Even so, my twelve-year-old was more than capable of figuring out the fighters’ intricacies. At the same time, they weren’t so breezy that she didn’t have to wrestle to overcome their various deficiencies, learning to mitigate a fighter’s shortage of healing or accurately predict my moves.

Are there depths here to plumb beyond the learning phase? I think so, although it’s hard to say after only a half-dozen matches with an in-progress prototype. I will say that I’m excited about the possibilities. Where Re;ACT was interesting to discover but also something of a chore, Re;MATCH doubles down on its strengths. Its systems are simpler, more tactile, and easier to master, but still reward clever combo-building. In the process, the randomization of the marble tower prevents it from feeling quite as process-bound as its predecessor. While some of the fighters still sport ambitious attacks, the game feels less like a race to trigger their two apparent combos.

Or maybe I just really enjoy fiddling with those balls. The game’s kineticism is admirable. Claiming marbles, studying your future options and those of your opponent, even jostling the prototype tower when the balls got caught within, everything about the production felt hefty and enjoyable. The game is pleasant in a way that Re;ACT only attempted.

But enough with the comparisons. Re;MATCH is one of those titles I’m excited to keep exploring. It’s colorful and diverse in its gameplay, fast-paced and hard-hitting, and above all, a pleasure to discover.

As a bonus, it made my kiddo go “wokka wokka.” I had no idea she’d ever seen a turntable. The more you know.

Re;MATCH launches on Kickstarter tomorrow.

 

A prototype copy of Re;MATCH was temporarily 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!)

Remember when every other game was a roll-and-write? That was living proof that even golden ages come with cloudy linings. Flip Pick Towers, designed by Rob Fisher and Adam Porter, benefits from its release a few years after the slew of samey writing games. It’s an unrepentant flip-and-write, is what I’m saying, more in the vein of Cartographers than the form’s more mathy alternatives. Some artistic talent won’t go amiss.

For those of us who can’t even sketch a convincing stick figure, however, it’s still charming, albeit not perhaps as compelling as some of the options out there.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Every round, three cards are flipped. Everybody at the table picks one — different ones, the same one, it doesn’t matter — and pens it onto their personal sheet of paper. Once the deck is out, it’s time to score.

There are a few little distinctions that set Flip Pick Towers apart from its peers, and no, I’m not talking about how the game’s title is a literal description of its phases. For one thing, the game cleverly triggers its scoring phase twice. This potentially pushes you through the deck twice, which is nice for those who are still learning its composition, but also encourages players to hustle toward scoring goals early rather than waiting for them to come together at the last moment. It helps, too, that it’s entirely possible for somebody’s failed castle to end the game a few rounds early. So much for that last tower you were hoping to stretch heavenward.

The constituent parts of your castle are simple enough. Most cards represent floors. These you stack like LEGO blocks, always keeping an eye on their stability number, which must tick downward with each successive level. Eventually bridges can span the gap between floors, providing foundations for further building and bypassing the usual stability rule for a moment. Look, it’s basic architecture. If you lean two crumbling minarets against one another, you can pile another few hundred tons of hewn blocks between them. Everybody knows that.

There are also magical creatures who provide special abilities — like, say, ignoring a floor’s stability, easily the most potent ability in the game — rooftops that can earn a few points but conclude a tower’s upward trajectory, and royalty who occupy all those empty rooms to score points. More on their majesties in a moment.

Finally, every card also provides a material of one kind or another. The format for these is simple enough, adding new features to your castle whenever you complete a material’s column. Hence glass introduces windows to your castle, bags of gold eventually fill entire floors, and banners hang from on high while magic beanstalks creep up from below. In fine flip-and-write fashion, these soon jostle for space. There’s room for planning, but remaining inflexible is a surefire way to get nothing done at all.

The last type of card is a dragon. Argh, the dragon. There are two of these in the deck, meaning you might see four of the winged pests in a sitting, and they’re as unwelcome as it gets. Whenever one of the sky-rodents appears, you either place it atop one of your towers — blocking further construction, which can be a real nuisance if they appear in the game’s early stages — or scrawling out one of your hard-earned bags of gold to buy them off. Thankfully, they are not sexist dragons, and no sacrificial princesses are required.

Speaking of princesses, the most interesting offering by far are the royalty cards. Each session assigns an objective to your queen, king, and princess. As their chambers are added to your towers, their points tend to compound. And compound. And compound. It isn’t uncommon for a single royal member to score as much in the endgame as a player earned at the midpoint tally.

In the best of instances, these transform the game’s sometimes obnoxious placements into significant opportunities. Remember those dragons? Well, if your king prefers occupying towers with dragons perched on them, now you can keep your gold and take care of the old man at the same time. All the better if you manage to erect a single tower with a single dragon atop it, then fill the place with four or five stacked kingly quarters. The same goes for the other elements. One session might feature a queen who yearns for escape, encouraging you to place those magical beanstalks next to her chambers rather than doing the normal thing by squirreling them off. Or, heck, a princess who just really likes living near bridges. Don’t we all appreciate a nice bridge?

Not every objective is similarly worthwhile. For every goal that enlivens the game’s placements, there’s another that’s plain uninteresting. After a couple plays, our group reached the point where we would keep drawing through the deck until we found something that felt sufficiently energetic.

Even then, the overarching puzzle doesn’t change much from one session to the next. On the whole, there’s enough to keep everybody engaged, at least for a session or two. But the gameplay is simple enough that, barring the pleasure of scrawling a little castle, with little banners that look like banners and not whatever my castle’s banners look like, there probably isn’t much to keep anyone coming back time and time again.

It is, in other words, a flip-and-write. A very good flip-and-write, a charming flip-and-write, a flip-and-write with plenty of little considerations to account for. But it doesn’t stand up there with the finest of them.

Maybe it doesn’t need to. I’ll admit I’ve enjoyed looking at my friends’ creations, and even letting them laugh at mine. To go with my perfect face for radio and outstanding voice for text, I have excellent penmanship for a keyboard. Once, I wasn’t even sure whether a room’s occupant was a Q, for the queen, or a bag of gold with a little knot cinching it closed.

Anyway. Flip Pick Towers. It’s cute stuff. I’ve had a nice time with it. I suspect I’ll strain to remember it by year’s end.

 

A complimentary copy of Flip Pick Towers 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!)

It’s in my nature to appreciate wallets. I own a couple dozen of the things. One for carrying money and eleven-year-old gift cards to defunct smoothie chains, the rest for microgames from Button Shy.

This latest batch includes something experimental, something from a designer whose previous work I’ve loved, and something that’s really just a bigger board game compressed to fit into a wallet. That’s gotta be a home run, right?

Right?

Downtown Las Palmas

I appreciate a surfaceless game now and then, especially on long flights or while sitting in hotel rooms with tables that barely fit their obligatory lamp. In theory, Erica Pinto’s Downtown Las Palmas is one such game. You’re building a city in the palm of your hand, stretching those finger-webs to maximize real estate. The more cards you stuff into your mitts, the better, earning points not only for volume of cards, but also for every highlighted feature. Along the way, there’s some variability thanks to objectives printed on the back of every card. Stuff like “Traffic Jam: +2 points per vehicle” and “Urban Sprawl: +10 points if there are 7 or more cards with visible ground.”

Sadly, it doesn’t work.

I have wide hands. Not as wide as my friend Chris’s — everybody in our high school group called him “gorilla hands,” they were that massive — but big enough to comfortably reach an octave plus three on the piano. And I can barely hold these things. Maybe it’s the linen finish. Maybe it’s the game’s directives, which require ground-level streets to align and the sky to not intrude like some dimensional rift in front of another structure. These are necessary rules; to function as a society board game, you’ve gotta have rules. Or maybe it’s just my slippery fingers. But whatever it is, the entire thing slides to pieces the instant I’m holding more than four or five of the things.

There’s an alternate way to play. Cards can be arranged on the table, spaced between your session’s chosen objectives. This allows some glimpse of how Downtown Las Palmas is meant to function. The buildings that sprout from the concrete jungle, punctuated by slants of blue sky. The signs over the signs, the awnings and cats perched in impossible places. It’s a lovely thing to see come together.

Playing this way, though, I can’t escape the notion that this isn’t how Downtown Las Palmas should work. Probably because it isn’t. Sure, this is an official variant. But there are other small games about overlapping cards, many of them also published by Button Shy.

In the end, the game remains a lovely concept. Maybe I’ll get to try something else from Pinto before too long.

Phantasmic

Phantasmic is the smallest of Marceline Leiman’s games, which is saying something when the others are High Tide and Heavenly Bodies. It’s the smallest in terms of rules footprint as well. The game is dead simple.

Picture a magical duel. That can’t be hard; heaven knows we’ve witnessed a bazillion of the things. One player is the Leader, a face-up spell before them on the table. The other is the Rival; their card goes face-down. At this point, the Rival announces whether their concealed spell is stronger or weaker than the Leader’s. A spell’s strength is a changeable quality, dependent on its rank and its spellbook’s position in relation to two others. The Leader declares whether they believe the Rival is lying or telling the truth. The hidden card is flipped. Everyone oohs and aahs.

Like I said, Phantasmic is simple. Perhaps too simple. At first brush, it feels almost like a coin flip. I say something, you determine whether I’m lying.

But if Phantasmic is a coin flip, it’s a heavily loaded one. The placement of those spellbooks, the various rankings, even any previously played cards, all add to the game’s texture. A coin flip comes down to 50/50 odds; here, the likelihood that my spell is stronger than yours might be rather slender indeed. It helps that certain cards alter the outcome by swapping those spellbooks before the duel is decided.

So it’s a game of probabilities and bluffing in equal proportion. Given the game’s 18-card format, it helps that the card pool is knowable. Button Shy always offers little expansions, in this case a fourth set of spells; it isn’t enough to throw the calculations into disarray, but it does loosen up the probability a little bit.

Okay, so it isn’t quite as vacuous as a coin flip. But is it any good? Perhaps the best way to describe Phantasmic would be to say that I don’t mind it. I might almost use it as a five-minute tiebreaker, rather than a game’s default “whomever has the most leftover resources” or whatnot. But it’s so slight that I struggle to foresee any reason to nab it off the shelf rather than any number of other titles. Wallet games included.

Dustbiters: Pocket Edition

I remember being curious about Dustbiters a few years back, that collaborative design by Robbie Fraser, Jan Willem Nijman, and Terri Vellman, in no small part thanks to Vellman’s lovely pink-hued trashheap illustrations. It’s basically the sandstorm scene from Fury Road, all those cars gunning their engines and puffing propane-jelly, while being ripped apart by a duster wider than Texas.

To my delight, Button Shy’s Pocket Edition is Dustbiters, albeit in a smaller package and minus only a few cards that are immediately replaced by the expansion. When the original game hit the scene, I had no idea it was functionally a microgame itself, tallying a slender twenty-one cards. I might have even been irritated at seeing its contents floating inside a too-large box.

Right away, Dustbiters excels on multiple fronts. The artwork is perfect, of course, those little road-freaks guffawing as they tear across the wasteland. The gameplay is also no slouch. Six cards begin on the table, three oriented toward me and the rest facing you. Every turn offers three actions, whether spent moving vehicles up or down the line, triggering abilities, or deploying reinforcements to the melee.

From there, it’s a bloodbath. The goal is to be the last player with any cards on the table. Every turn will result in multiple casualties, and that’s if you’re shirking your homicidal duty. Thanks to the storm bearing down on your position, at least one car will be demolished at the conclusion of each turn. The only path to survival is sheer forward propulsion.

What a great little game. There’s some wonderful overlap between the vehicles’ appearance and their function, breeding a certain irradiated logic. There’s a Jammer with an old satellite dish wedged atop its minivan frame; it cancels the abilities of both adjacent cars. A repurposed steamroller can crush its neighbor, but only if its victim is sandwiched by another of your vehicles. A Ramp Truck lets you fling your car haphazardly to the front of the line. The blood-bag Max tethered to the front of the Martyr car may absorb any other hit.

Here’s something that tickles my fancy: quite often, designers stretch the microgame’s 18-card limit by pressing their cards into multiple duty. Each card has two sides and many orientations, after all. Dustbiters doesn’t need the help. All it takes is a conga line of murderous gas-guzzlers, some nasty time pressure, and a few simple rules. Five minutes is all it takes to play, but there’s more drama compressed into those five minutes than… well, than in certain nu-euros about flinging tourists into outer space.

Of the trio, Dustbiters is the clear frontrunner, which means it is the sole title to not be shredded by the wasteland storm of my judgement. Dustbiters, I verily witness thee.

 

Complimentary copies of Downtown Las Palmas, Phantasmic, and Dustbiters: Pocket Edition were 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!)