Citizens of the Spark feels like it was custom-made with me in mind. It’s a tableau-builder (yes) designed by Philip duBarry and illustrated by Diego Sá (yes) seeded with a small selection from a huge pool of cards (yeeesss) that happens to be populated with anthropomorphic animals (eh, fine). Those animals, it turns out, are not your usual medieval-ish fare, but scientists, scholars, performers, and everything else, jumbled together to form a polis of intersecting interests and vocations.

Which is to say, it brought me around in the end.

It begins with a shuffle. Such a big shuffle, in fact, that my relatively broad hands ache at the strain of holding so many cards. There are thirty flavors of citizen in the box, a generous spread. Depending on your player count, you’ll take seven to ten of those sets, each set ten cards in size, and riffle them together until your knuckles crack.

And then you try to get them to work together.

Even in its earliest moments, there’s a tinge of something primal to Citizens of the Spark. Not primal in the sense of cavemen striving against the mammoth. Primal in the way the game asks you to create a society from these dissimilar peoples. This is the question that hovers over all of civilization. Can people who don’t see eye to eye live beside one another and strive toward a shared goal? It’s visible in Sá’s artwork. The Judge is a chicken. Not in the sense that she’s a coward hiding behind the bench and his robes. She’s literally a chicken. A hen. A producer of eggs. Tasty in peanut oil. She might share a city with one of her natural predators. An Agitator who happens to be a fanged reptile. A Soldier who is a bear. The tiger Scientist. To thrive, one presumes the city is governed by détente. No eating the judges.

As lovely as those illustrations are, duBarry encodes these dissimilarities into the cards themselves. In any given session, you might be presented with a society of Tyrants and Executioners. Yikes! But those dangerous creatures may soon prove paper tigers in the face of Traders and Politicians. Your task is to take these cards, measure their worth, and try to piece together something functional. There are natural imbalances, of course, but nearly any combination is playable, with the sole exception that you shouldn’t use more than a few underlined citizen sets at once. It’s impressive, both conceptually and as a way to ensure that every session presents a fresh conundrum for players to puzzle over.

For all that, the actual gameplay is snappy and rules-light. First you choose a few creatures to add to your incipient polis. These are offered three rows at a time, each containing two or three cards, again depending on player count. As rows go unclaimed, perhaps because they include cards that don’t boast the same natural synergies as their peers, they accumulate sparks, the game’s currency of victory points. After a while, even outcasts accrue enough value to make them tempting.

As your city swells with citizens, you might want to trigger their actions. There are quite a few of these, attacks and defenses and trades and swaps and conversions, but their one commonality is that every action grows more potent with larger numbers of citizens. Here’s a simple example. If you have a Merchant, you can trigger its action to gain sparks for every brick icon in your city. With only one Merchant, that’s one spark per brick. With the maximum of three Merchants, that’s three sparks.

The limitation, though, is twofold. First, that citizen will depart your city forever. So there’s an element of press-your-luck to the whole thing, a barrage of micro-decisions over whether to activate your citizens right now, or wait until you have a bunch of them to trigger their more powerful effects.

Second, everybody else at the table also gets the chance to activate that citizen type. Sure, maybe we’ve tapped out the supply of Merchants, so I’m eager to earn a few points. But if your city is housing three times as many of the guys, or more of the icons they score with, then it’s entirely possible I’ve just handed you a powerful opportunity on your off-turn. Tradeoffs, tradeoffs.

Cluttering this headspace even further is the fact that the Merchant is about as simple as citizens get. The Scientist functions similarly, earning increasing points with more duplicates. But they also force another citizen to abandon your city entirely. Controversial research, perhaps. The Warrior earns points, but only if your city has greater military strength than a neighbor. The Bandit steals points, but you need to have fewer bricks than your victim; as a complicating factor they also provide the very same brick icon they’re trying to have fewer of.

Put together, Citizens of the Spark is the sort of game that’s rife with imbalances, but those imbalances are the very thing that make it so riveting to explore. It’s almost unthinkable that any assemblage of citizens won’t come with at least one or two stinkers. Philosophers who don’t have anyone to philosophize to. Defensive Advisors and Diviners when there are hardly any attacks to defend from. Poets and Outcasts, the gummy citizens that steadfastly refuse to be put to productive use.

But that’s precisely when the game becomes interesting. Maybe everybody will squabble over the most valuable citizens, thus spreading them between too many cities to be valuable. Or maybe a few cards will sit in the offer so long that they become worth quite a bit more than their printed value. I’m already on the record as believing that “balance” is perhaps the most oversung element of board game design. In duBarry’s hands, the imbalances between citizens become the game’s most essential texture.

To be clear, Citizens of the Spark is a subtle game. It isn’t flashy. There are big swings, but they’re swings of points, a card moving from there to here, more points. There are plenty of turns that consist of grabbing cards, glancing at your tableau, and deciding that, y’know what, there aren’t any actions you want to take right now. Similarly, it’s a rather chancy game. Get ready to listen to that guy complain that no good cards are ever available on his turn.

Still, I can’t help but appreciate this one. I like its gentle ebbs and flows. I like how it feels warm despite its cutthroat tendencies. I like how it can wipe out a player’s city in the early stages, then still, more often than not, pave the way for a comeback with some grit and maybe some whining. I even like the solitaire mode, with its card-shifting and ability-triggering meanie of a bot.

Most of all, I like these dang cards. Their imbalances and chanciness, the way they reward focus and diversification at the same time. The fiction of them. They call to mind any number of successful cultures, from Persia to Star Trek to the Panspecificity, that fashioned functional states despite the vast differences between their subjects. Or maybe the most successful city on the table will be a government of predators. That’s how it goes sometimes. I like that, too.

Ultimately, Citizens of the Spark is a pleasant little thing, not groundbreaking or liable to show up in every game store, but still a quiet and compelling artifact of play that grows deeper and cleverer with each session. It’s the sort of game that feels like the beginning of something. More citizens? New modes? Another game inspired by this one’s muted success? Who knows. For now, it’s a game I’ll break out when I want to show somebody what can be accomplished with unassuming systems and some imagination.

 

A complimentary copy of Citizens of the Spark 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 my first-quarter update of 2026: the best board games, movies, books, and more!)

Here’s something you probably didn’t know about old Dan Thurot: I’m a scuba diver rated for search and recovery. There aren’t many of us here in the desert, which is probably why I receive unexpected calls to dredge the ponds of local golf courses whenever there’s a Silver Alert. Thus far, I have declined these requests. Those waters are, like, four feet deep. That’s a job for snorklers. Or a tall guy with hip waders.

Instead, I mostly use this as qualification to comment on scuba stuff. That cave rescue in Thailand? Legitimate. The roll-and-write shenanigans of Aquamarine? Um. Okay, look, Aquamarine isn’t the most robust scuba simulation. But as another print-and-play title from Postmark Games, it’s a worthy followup to Voyages.

Like Voyages before it, Aquamarine is a dice-heavy game of movement, positioning, and exploration by Matthew Dunstan and Rory Muldoon. Unlike that game, Aquamarine is played with two dice instead of three. What will those loony bastards think of next, a movement game that uses only one die?

(Since I’m late to the party, the answer is “Yes.” But that’ll have to wait till next time.)

As before, the gist of Aquamarine is elegant in its simplicity. You roll the dice, then use one of them to move your diver. Here those movements are represented as enclosed boxes. Enclosing something — some coral, a school of fish, a stinging jelly — means scoring it when the game ends.

Of course, it couldn’t be that breezy. Dunstan and Muldoon are all about encoding necessary and enlivening limitations into their print-and-plays.

In this case, the first of those limitations is that you only have access to one die out of that rolled pair. Bigger rolls mean bigger enclosed areas, but that also means depleting oxygen equal to the difference between the lower and higher die. So while it might be tempting to use that 6 rather than the piddly 2, covering the larger area means hoovering up four units of precious oxygen. Making matters tougher, deeper dives consume more air, adding time pressure right when the sea’s aquatic life is at its most interesting. Similarly, you’re constrained in which shapes you’re allowed to draw. Mostly long rectangles rather than jagged freeform polyominoes, although there are moments of squiggly liberation that emerge whenever doubles are rolled.

These triplet pressures are the shared system underpinning everything in Aquamarine. Much like the headings in Voyages, everything arises from those constraints. Travel too fast or linger too long at depth, and your waning oxygen will force you to start a new dive. Paint yourself into a corner with your shapes, and you might find your next move taking you in the wrong direction.

From there, the game’s selection of maps tinkers with the formula. As before, the inaugural outing sets the template. Schools of fish are worth increasing amounts of points as more of them are enclosed in a box; certain creatures only emerge during daylight or nighttime hours, requiring you to parcel out your time accordingly; special beacons and flags reward those who travel to the corresponding depths.

But there’s tremendous variety within that blueprint. My personal favorites are found on the second map and fourth map. In the former case, undersea caverns can be readily explored during daytime, but at night gradually deplete a limited stock of flashlights; meanwhile, researching sharks and giant squids ticks you up along a selection of bonus tracks. And in the latter, arctic ice threatens your air supply, but snapping pictures of frolicking penguins and icon-improving shrimp can net scores of points that keep ramping upward.

This time around, there are troughs to accompany the peaks. In particular, two of the maps — a double-sheet deep-sea excursion and a fossil hunt in ancient waters — are too persnickety for my tastes, asking the player to make minute adjustments that don’t always play well with the need to ration air or count spaces.

Some of that has to do with the inherent limitations of the game’s movement system. Where Voyages — and our next installment — are more freewheeling with their range allotments, maneuverability in Aquamarine is downright torpid. Unless you’re starting a fresh dive, each box must attach to the previous one. This makes total sense, but also keeps the game more snugly straitjacketed. If I were a generous man, I’d call it more bite-sized; but because these are aquatic adventures — and because I’m not a generous man — they instead come across as suffocating, at least sometimes.

But while Aquamarine is the flimsiest of Dunstan and Muldoon’s roll-and-move trio, it’s hardly a poor example of the form. If anything, it’s another testament to how much can be accomplished with a sheet of paper, a pen or pencil, some lamination or a plexiglass, and dead simple rules. When the game slips into its groove, it’s immensely satisfying.

Especially in multiplayer mode, it should be said. That’s another shortcoming imported from Voyages. Here, the solitaire rules are disappointing, asking you to reach certain depths. Child’s play. The real challenge lies in sitting across from one to ninety-nine partners and seeing who can wring the most out of those shared inputs. In that mode, there’s nothing quite like glancing smugly (or despairingly) at a fellow player’s sheet to see where your routes departed. Who veered parallel to the ocean floor to preserve oxygen, who ventured much on the outcome of future rolls, who spent their dive observing shockingly large schools of fish. Or, in my case, who got stung by a bunch of jellyfish because they thought they were pushing themselves to more rewarding depths, only to tap zero on their dive meter. I’ve never gotten the bends in real life, but I’m pretty sure my diver in Aquamarine has made some testy ascents.

In short, Aquamarine is a mixed experience compared to its peers, but to evaluate it solely as a comparison misses out on what makes it such a rollicking time. I prefer Voyages; I prefer Waypoints. But given the option between Aquamarine and nothing, this is still exactly what I want from a print-and-play game.

 

Access to the files to print Aquamarine was provided by the publisher/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 my first-quarter update of 2026: the best board games, movies, books, and more!)

Wombats are herbivorous solitary nocturnal mammals native to Australia, and — here’s the part you knew was coming; nay, hoped was coming — they poop in cubes. And stack them. Why? I dunno. Darwin was pulling a goof that day.

Now Wombat Poo is a stacking board game by Phil Walker-Harding. Why? We know why. Because poop is funny, that’s why. But is Wombat Poo funnier than its opening joke? I think so. A little bit.

On a surface level, Wombat Poo is about stacking cubes. There are three sizes included in the box: small, smaller, and smallest. Maybe that sounds like a complaint. To be sure, I’ve dinged certain dexterity/stacking games in the past for featuring such light components that their edifices collapsed at the slightest exhale, never mind a hand tremor. Fortunately, while the cubes in Wombat Poo are quite small, they have enough heft that the tower isn’t doomed past its first inch. Not right away.

But what makes Wombat Poo function isn’t its stacking. I mean, yeah, without the stacking there isn’t a game. But the stacking is really the backdrop for a compelling system of wagers. Basically, when your turn rolls around, you decide whether to poo or wipe. Each player even gets a double-sided card for announcing their position on the matter. If you poo, that means flipping a card from the deck to determine which size of poo you must stack. If you’re unlucky, maybe you’ll even need to stack two poos.

The other option, wiping, backs you out of the round, while also scoring a point for every cube in the stack.

This is unexpectedly clever for a game that might otherwise seem somewhat single-ply. The thing, you see, is that your fortunes aren’t entirely based on your own prowess at squattie-piley. The decision to stay in the round is also an investment in the other players at the table. If someone in your group suffers from the shakes — as does one of my oldest friends and game-night regulars — they might still remain competitive, building their score by surviving their occasional, um, movements, and letting others do the bulk of the hard work. Conversely, their natural weakness at dexterity games may well translate into everyone else’s natural weakness as well. When the tower topples, the player who did the toppling loses two points. A meager sum. Just enough to prevent somebody from overturning the tower out of spite. But when that happens, those who stayed in the round score nothing at all. It’s only by wiping in time that you’ll accrue a winning score. How’s that for a rule to live by?

This transforms Wombat Poo into a surprisingly forgiving experience. Its central question isn’t “Can you stack this?” so much as, “Can you stack this, plus can the next couple of players also stack their cubes atop your wonky-ass placement, so you can get out while the getting’s good.”

Which is a considerably more interesting question than those posed by most stacking games. For adults, anyway.

At the risk of sounding highfalutin’ — not to mention deeply unserious — Wombat Poo proved too subtle for my twelve- and six-year-old children. An unexpected outcome, given the game’s cartoon wombat and topicality. Those kids were cracking poop jokes literally the evening before we broke out the game for the first time. Then, somehow, overnight, they went from “Poop is the funniest thing in the universe” (juvenile) to “Poop is not funny at all” (adolescent), without quite reaching “Poop is funny unless it’s awful, then it’s even funnier” (mature).

There were other factors. The smallest of the cubes were a bit too light for the six-year-old’s fingers. Maybe it doesn’t help that the notion of playing with one’s fecal matter had been painstakingly ingrained as taboo for years by yours truly, lest this leaking ship we call a home tip over the edge into total disaster. And, yes, the scoring wasn’t quite as immediate as that of, say, Rhino Hero.

Look, I know how I sound. Arguing that Wombat Poo is a mature game for adults isn’t really what I’m trying to say here. I’m sure there are sufficiently advanced children who can also manage it, and some of them will have sufficiently arrested parents to stack poops with. I hope so. In my experience, though, Wombat Poo has become an adult filler, a strong contender for those moments when you just want to heap up some cubes, but with more to the rules than penalizing whichever player makes the tower plunge.

In other words, Wombat Poo is the thinking man’s poop-stacking game. Not David Hume level or anything. Voltaire, though? Yeah, Voltaire might stack some poops.

And that’s all there is to say about that.

 

A complimentary copy of Wombat Poo was provided by the publisher/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 my first-quarter update of 2026: the best board games, movies, books, and more!)

I no longer think of Volko Ruhnke as a man, but as a machine purpose-built for stamping out novel conflict simulations. COIN, Levy & Campaign, that older one where the terrorists have the efficacy of ’90s movie baddies, and now Hunt for Blackbeard, an unexpected romp that’s as much about setting the record straight as it is about blasting pirates with grapeshot. I now know more about Blackbeard than at any point in my life. Which is to say, I know a lot less, given the man’s outsized legend.

Almost everything we know about Blackbeard is wrong, or at least embellished from later sources seeking to cash in on the pirate’s notoriety. That he learned his trade under the legendary Captain Hornigold — unconfirmed. That he braided his hair with smoking fuses — not exactly the sort of fire hazard a man who worked with gunpowder would accept. That he murdered a swath across three seas — well, there was some murder, that’s true. But not as much as previously reported. Not when a pirate’s work required most crews to throw down their arms.

If anything, the Edward Thatch we come to know in Hunt for Blackbeard is something of a sad sack, at least when placed alongside his outsized legend. His great vessel has been stripped. His plunder has been sold down to its last few barrels and crates. His crew has been reduced to a couple dozen hands. Even his most infamous companions are on the outs; Stede Bonnet’s surviving crewmen are likely informers rather than allies, and Israel Hands, Blackbeard’s long-time second in command, may soon be sent on a doomed mission to allow the captain to claim his portion of their remaining goods.

Some of these details are relegated to the historical notes, and this, being a production from Fort Circle Games, provides excellent timelines and essays. But the diminished status of the infamous captain is on display right there on the board as well. For one thing, there’s the scope of the hunt. Confined to the sounds, towns, and islands of North Carolina, this pursuit is leagues away from the Caribbean waters that usually dominate pirate yarns. And then there’s the scale. Blackbeard’s fleet has become one ship, the Adventure, ill-fitted and undercrewed. His pursuers have only two ships, both of them relatively small, plus a band of hunters who travel by land to check the colony’s towns and inlets. These are, in a sense, an invading force, commissioned and outfitted by the governor of Virginia. But as invading forces go, sending bounty hunters from one colony into another isn’t an excursion into foreign territory.

For his part, Thatch behaves more like a cornered rat than a pirate king. Hunt for Blackbeard opens with the pirate standing at an intersection. Rather than expend the resources to hunt down every last offender, the Crown has offered a pardon to all who will renounce the pirate’s life. Most in the colonies have already accepted. Thatch, too, has taken the offer, only to return to the sea to seize some easy plunder. Now the hunters are coming for him, and while he has relative shelter in North Carolina thanks to his largesse with colony officials, the ensuing game of cat and mouse has the mood of a deepening sunset rather than a crescendo.

There are two sides in Hunt for Blackbeard, hunter and hunted, but Ruhnke’s virtuosity at game design clutters and blurs those roles.

Both sides, for instance, are gluttonous for information. In the case of the Hunters, that means Blackbeard’s location — whether that of the famed captain, his lieutenant, or the camp he might periodically visit to resupply or lick his wounds. But for Blackbeard, word of his pursuers’ deeds is every bit as precious. The Hunters are always visible on the map, but how far their reach has extended, where their informants have told them to search, or whether they have a particular stretch of the sea under surveillance, those details may be concealed or laid bare depending on context and choice.

The same goes for the question of which side is hunting whom. Nominally, the Hunters are, well, the hunters. As soon as they’ve outfitted their vessels, they depart from Virginia and begin the chase. But all the while, Blackbeard is laying preparations of his own. Looting vessels, preparing the Adventure, buying off witnesses. When the time comes for the spark to touch powder, it’s entirely possible that Blackbeard will sink the competition.

What Ruhnke produces, then, is a double-blind game of entrapment. First there’s the race. Blackbeard hurries to gain or spend his treasure, whether to reestablish himself as a great pirate captain or to secure another pardon. The Hunters hustle to outfit their vessels before the trail goes cold. But then, over the course of the ensuing rounds, the fierce dance between predators.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Hunt for Blackbeard is its speed. The game only lasts four rounds. And these aren’t the drawn-out bullet-point-ridden rounds of something like Here I Stand. While there are still bullet points to tick off, the phases pass at a brisk pace, bouncing between sides so rapidly that there’s hardly a moment of downtime. First, the Hunters interview informants, giving them a glimpse at Blackbeard’s potential location — a step that requires Blackbeard to avert his gaze, lest he learn what the Hunters have gleaned. Second, Blackbeard spends his time preparing his ship, sailing, and planning any piratical activities. Again someone must close their eyes, although it’s the Hunter player this time. After that, the Hunters take their turn proper, moving their ships and perhaps picking up their quarry’s trail. Only then does Blackbeard actually accomplish any pirating, a step that may well have been interrupted by the arrival of the Hunters.

Playing through these steps, a few thoughts spring to mind.

First, there’s an essential tactility to Hunt for Blackbeard. The actions themselves are brief, but the need to physically turn the blocks gives every movement a sense of growing unease. When I played digitally, the entire session took perhaps a third of the duration, but in its haste lost its sense of place. It’s one thing to click an icon; another entirely to hover one’s fingertips over the block, stomach knotted into a fist as you try to deduce whether an earlier clatter had come from here or there, or was perhaps your opponent shifting a few components as a ruse. This process elongates the game, but is necessary: touching the pieces, straining your senses for clues, seeing the shadows cast by those monolithic blocks and wondering whether they conceal a trace of your foe’s passage or a flock of passing gulls, these are as much components in the game’s telling as the rules or the wooden ships.

As much as Ruhnke excels at designing macro-level systems, he still has yet to create a compelling method for resolving combat. Perhaps the game’s biggest disappointment is the moment of battle, when, after all those preparations, both sides roll a couple dice to see who hits the higher number. It’s fitting, I suppose, given the chanciness of naval combat. The historical Blackbeard managed to rake one of his pursuers with grapeshot, effectively removing their ship from the fight, before the trap was sprung and he was overwhelmed during a boarding action. But after all those steps and countersteps — after that dance! — it wouldn’t have gone amiss to put some showmanship into the last struggle. What could have been a wall of thunder instead comes across as a puff of smoke.

Lastly, however, the game leaves me in awe of the way board game excel at representing history. I’ve read about Blackbeard. Not a lot. Just enough to know we don’t know much. But it wasn’t until seeing it rendered this way that I understood some of the words on the page. The intimacy of the space. The smallness of a man whose legend has outgrown him and now nips at his heels. The small invasion of a neighboring colony, one governor determined to rid himself of a pest that his peer next door has decided to indulge. Piracy was always caught up in the history of empires, and nowhere is that clearer than here, with official pardons and corrupt commissioners in the balance, populated by enemies and victims, but also imperial troops crowding into spaces that were once open, with safe havens where an infamous pirate acted as a patron rather than a danger to be cut out with the point of a saber. To play this game is to grasp the history a little more tightly.

Is it disappointing that Hunt for Blackbeard operates better as history than as a plaything? Oh, maybe. A little bit. Especially when the game concludes with a wet fuse rather than a discharged cannon, I can’t help but feel some letdown.

But I’m impressed with the trappings that surround that climactic battle. Once again, Ruhnke has created a system that will hopefully earn emulation; once again, Fort Circle has crafted an enviable representation of American history, one that complicates and deepens its subject matter rather than frocking him in smoking fuses.

 

A complimentary copy of Hunt for Blackbeard 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 my first-quarter update of 2026: the best board games, movies, books, and more!)

I would describe my feelings toward Regicide as “appreciation,” despite it finding dedicated fans all around me. For years it was in regular rotation on my wife’s phone; my sister-in-law bought the fancy custom deck rather than just using a generic deck of playing cards. My own interest had more to do with the game as an act of repurposement: the clever casting of face cards as mad royals who needed to be put down, the suits transformed into character classes for blocking attacks or repairing injuries.

Regicide Legacy, designed by the same trio as the original — Paul Abrahams, Luke Badger, and Andy Richdale — is very nearly the exact opposite of the original game, at least in terms of form factor. Where the previous Regicide could be played with any old deck scrounged from a vacation bag, this edition is something of a throwback. It’s a genuine legacy title, for one thing: torn cards, stickers, micro-expansions, all of it. Its cooperative/solitaire campaign is generous. Moreover, it’s hard, significantly harder than is the norm in our current obliging hobby. It isn’t uncommon for a chapter to take two, three, half a dozen tries before your band of mercenaries is permitted to move on to their next target.

Now that I’ve wrapped it up, I can squarely say that the ordeal was thrilling, brilliant, and exhausting.

If you haven’t played the original Regicide… first, maybe give it a try. The rules are freely available, and as noted earlier you can play with a deck of cards that costs five bucks at the supermarket. That’s if you don’t have one handy already.

Regicide Legacy begins with Regicide. As in, its first chapter is the base game with only the slightest of modifications. Your crew, a band of adventurers, comprises the forty non-face cards of an ordinary playing deck, plus perhaps one or two goblins depending on player count. Their strength ranges from one (for an ace) to ten, across four classes that have been given their own iconography rather than repeating the regular French suits.

The face cards, meanwhile, become a deck of targets. First you’ll face the jacks, then the queens, then the kings, ideally lining them up for the guillotine. This is no easy feat. Each royal has a sturdy pool of health points, and punches back after each attack, requiring you to spend cards from your hand to absorb the blow.

The cardplay is impressive. Depending on your chosen attacker, your crew avails themselves of an ability. Warriors deal double damage to your target. Paladins block return damage. Clerics cycle discards back into your deck, which Bards then use to refill everybody’s hands. There’s a life cycle to this process. Some cards can be paired, such as aces, here styled as animal companions, or duplicate ranks whose strength would sum to ten or less. Success demands a delicate balance, between offense and defense, between healing and aggression, between risk and caution.

It’s pretty much inevitable that you will lose.

That inaugural failure, though, demonstrates the ways that Regicide Legacy intends to depart from its predecessor. Rather than shuffling the cards and giving it another try, you’re invited to open the first of the set’s many boxes. Within, you discover mercenaries: multi-rank cards that can be readily paired with more of their peers than usual, heavy hitters, maybe an extra goblin or two. Each merc has a cost in its corner. One loss means you have one gold to spend.

So you buy a card, add it to your deck, and take another stab at toppling the divine right of kings.

Again, failure is largely inevitable. It’s just a little less inevitable than before. Second loss, two gold. You grab a couple new fighters. Shuffle. Again.

Another loss. That’s three more gold. Now your company is becoming noticeably tougher. Maybe you were struggling with damage output; some extra Warriors will make up the difference. Or perhaps you found it difficult to manage your hand; that’s where Clerics and Bards come in. Whatever your particular weakness, there’s a patch for it.

At some point, the odds turn in your favor. Inside the first chapter box there is a sealed booster pack with its own instructions. Your mercenaries depart. New cards are introduced. Another chapter presents a new set of bosses, each tougher than the last.

Along the way, a few things become apparent.

First, Regicide Legacy wants you to succeed. Even if only belatedly, after spending heaps of gold on up-powered mercenaries who round out your company’s deficiencies. Where the original game bordered on the misanthropic, booting you back to the beginning at even the slightest trip, the ability to pad your deck with repeat failures is a wonderful tool. Some make it easier to pair cards, or add wild aces, or, eventually, strip even the toughest bosses of their natural immunities to your character abilities.

Next, Regicide Legacy earns that second ligature. This is a legacy game through and through. In its earlier stages, this means variable card sleeves. To offer only the lightest of spoilers, the members of your company can become corrupted, adorning themselves in the thorn-framed sleeves usually reserved for royals, and incurring a penalty when played. Not long after that, you’ll encounter more transformative effects. Stickers that dual-class cards, minigames for randomly determining which character succumbs to a story beat, and, yes, eventually the dreaded moment that was so transgressive back in Risk Legacy, the command to rid yourself a card for good.

Go ahead. Tear it up. Don’t let your squeamishness show. Don’t let your fingers tremble. Don’t check how much the reset box costs. Uh oh. You looked. That’s as much as, like, fifteen decks of playing cards. But who would buy that many playing cards? You’re here for the drama, baby, and there’s no drama quite like drama that inflicts lasting damage.

The main highlight is the procession of new character classes that are added to your ever-expanding band. To the original four — the original six if you count animal companions and goblin jesters — there’s enough to more than double the roster. I won’t spoil the surprise, but the way your deck morphs from one thing into something else entirely is quite the sight to behold. There’s wild magic to be uncovered, risky operators who might help or hinder your goals, heroes who always seem to show up in the nick of time, and complicated figures who require constant reminders.

Because Regicide Legacy, already a tangled, difficult game, only grows more tangled and more difficult as additional chapters are unlocked. More complicated, too. Sequencing matters. The subtle distinctions between two defensive classes matter. Whether cards are discarded or banished, which abilities a boss blocks, how cards are shifted across the board in this particular scenario — everything matters.

In our case, we played nearly the entire campaign four-handed. There was me, of course, plus my wife and sister-in-law. I doubt I would have survived by excluding the fanatics. We were also joined by my mother-in-law, a veteran of countless trick-takers. Her inclusion highlighted both the game’s strengths and its weaknesses.

Strengths first. Across the duration of the campaign, Regicide Legacy held our interest. Even my mother-in-law’s interest. Even when we were tired from battering ourselves against a particularly difficult chapter. (The worst offender, we discovered, had been nerfed post-release.) At our weekly dinner, the group was eager to see what came next. Not so much in the story, which is the usual fantasy muddle of proper nouns. But in the interplay of cards and abilities. In the composition of our deck. In which sticker would be appended to which character. In the developing shape of the thing.

But these strengths are attended by problems. Foremost, that Regicide Legacy soon gets too big for its britches. My mother-in-law spent the back half of the campaign showing her hand to whichever daughter was seated beside her, effectively requiring someone to play two hands simultaneously. She recalled the starting classes well enough, and even remembered a few of the later outliers. But as for the distinction between a Mage and a Reaver or between a Druid and a Chanter, no player aid was sufficient to fill every gap.

Perhaps this sounds like an issue of age. To some degree, it was, as my mother-in-law would freely admit. But even those of us inured to modern hobby games and RPG classes and this particular brand of cardplay sometimes found our minds snowed in by the game’s avalanche of intersecting triggers. It isn’t only the character classes; there are also the bosses to consider, plus the special rules that govern this chapter, plus, often, the lingering rules from last week’s session, finally cemented in time to be discarded with the previous tuckbox. Most of the time, I had to run the turn-by-turn action, and even then it wasn’t uncommon for someone to stab back that my reminder necessitated a counter-reminder because of such-and-such character or some lingering effect from the scenario instructions.

Is it too much? We finished the campaign. We survived. We succeeded. But we also stumbled along the way. Sometimes we realized two rounds later that we’d flubbed a rule earlier. More than once, we restarted a session altogether, the rules suddenly clear where previously they had been opaque.

Personally, this process was many things. Frustrating at times; exhausting at others.

But it was exciting, too, and exciting in a way that very few games have been before. We developed favorites — dual-classed Elashor, Vegarian the Vegetarian, my crush Lierin — and groaned at the appearance of others — Dinky, may you be damned to the underworld for eternity for how often you have betrayed us. We laughed a lot, especially when a new boss crushed us to powder, or when somebody stared at the problem before them, eyes glazed over, only for someone to recall the exact rule that would save us from a doomed situation.

The remaining question is whether we’ll return. Some of us already have; my sister-in-law has launched her second campaign with another group, spreading the good word to unwitting converts. There’s an entire post-game to tackle, justification for the potential waste of a discarded core box, and I can confirm that it’s a smart system, randomly doling out enemies and modifiers and boons that will test the hardy company that was forged over the previous thirty battles.

So. Will we? Return, that is?

I don’t know. Maybe someday. I plan to keep the box, despite my doubts that we’ll remember the class abilities if we go more than a month without a session. Even if we don’t, I can’t help but regard Regicide Legacy with fondness. I can’t remember a single story beat from the narrative. But the stories it told above the table — the way our deck transformed along with our aptitude as players, the inside jokes we developed, the characters whose named we pronounced five different ways — those are worth keeping around. That’s the real legacy here. That’s what makes me consider Regicide Legacy such an unlikely success. Torn cards? Stickers? Psh. I’m only interested in the stickers of the soul. The torn cards of our feelings.

And with those strained metaphors, I think that’s enough Regicide Legacy for one sitting.

 

A complimentary copy of Regicide Legacy was provided by the publisher.

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