It’s been thirteen years since the original release of Jamey Stegmaier’s Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia. I would say it doesn’t feel like thirteen years, but I’d be lying. Between the pandemic and five or six successive generations of board game iteration, it’s been an eternity. Long enough for a retrospective, certainly.

Speak of the devil. Euphoria: Essential Edition is a remake of the original game, plus some of the stuff from the expansions, minus a few love handles and splotchy moles. Let’s see how the old dystopia has held up after all these years.

The new board, not quite the same as the old board.

Short version, there’s rebar showing through the concrete.

As before, Euphoria is about your efforts to thrive in a dystopian society. Relatable. Maybe that’s why the intervening decade hasn’t flown by. But I digress. In Euphoria’s case, that dystopian society is divided into four strata, each offering different spaces for your workers to run errands. There are the Euphorians, folks who generate electricity by marching on hamster wheels, Wastlanders who labor in orange groves, Subterrans who pump water through the cracked bedrock, and Icarans… Icarids? Icaruses? Whatever. These guys cook future-meth for keeping everyone’s workers drowsy and compliant.

The status of those workers is never far from mind. At the time of the original game’s release, rolling dice to determine the relative knowledge of one’s workers was a clever touch. If nothing else, it functioned as one of the hobby’s earliest meta-commentaries on the blank slate that was the worker-placement worker. Roll too high, and one of your workers gets wise to the situation and flees from your grasp. Roll too low, and…

… and there’s no penalty for rolling too low. What you really want is to roll doubles. That way, you can spend some morale to place an extra worker, earning two turns in a single go.

Euphoria: meek in the streets, freak in the spreadsheets.

At the time of the original game’s release — there’s a phrase I’ll probably say more than twice — it was easier to overlook the chanciness of the whole thing. Sure, rolling high means losing a worker, and rolling doubles means earning a twofer. But rolling low, I suppose, means you can send a worker to one of the game’s resource production zones without worrying about them learning the shape of their culture. Except, wait, that’s another benefit for rolling low. Darn it.

Okay, so Euphoria is full of luck. Always was, still is. The problem isn’t so much that luck is the sole determiner of whether you succeed, but rather that it’s just enough to prove frustrating. As a genre, Eurogames included more chance in 2013 than they do today. Personally, I miss a bit of chance. But in general, those earlier forms of chance were about mitigation. Even placing towns in Settlers of Catan was about spreading around the odds so that you’d always earn something. In Euphoria, the system feels out of place, and not only among the determinists of 2020s nu-euros.

But let’s set that aside. How has the rest of the game borne the timelapse?

Again, the short version is that it works perfectly well, but never quite eases its grandfatherly creaks and groans. Most actions are tit-for-tat resource conversions. First you send a worker to a resource generator to earn one or two commodities. Then you send them to a tunnel to spend a commodity for a building block. Maybe you spend a wad of commodities for an extra worker. Then you build special markets, which let you exchange commodities, blocks, and artifacts for stars, the game’s victory condition. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

“Runaway workers” sure is a loaded term.

It doesn’t help that the Essential Edition sometimes comes across as more of a Pruned Edition. The board is more legible, but has shed the original map’s sense of place. Just look at that perfect goofball illustration. The new map feels like a spreadsheet setup for a spreadsheet game. Which is fine, as those things go. This is a resource-conversion worker-placement game, after all. You could even make the argument that this new edition has shed the original game’s pretense, including the ethical dilemma cards that, let’s face it, didn’t always add much to the game systems-wise. But, again, they mattered to Euphoria’s sense of place, the notion that players were being forced to compromise their values in order to get ahead. Thanks to the intervening years, a few subtractions, and this updated visual design, it’s easier than ever to see the wires and mirrors behind the illusion.

The remaining good parts are still as good as ever. For example, those markets. As before, building a market means spending a bunch of building blocks, not to mention putting your laborers in a holding pattern until other players join in. This created a certain degree of cooperation, one that could be turned against you at a moment’s notice. Having even a single worker hanging around at a job site is a real sacrifice, fostering opportunities for players to bicker and cajole. That’s great.

Furthermore, the markets themselves are nasty little things. When built, every player who didn’t contribute to its construction is forced to suffer a penalty until they pay a penalty at the new market. Sometimes these are negligible; other times they pose biting impositions that must be rectified as soon as possible. Or even both at once. The Theatre of Endless Monotony reduces how many commodities you earn, but only to a minimum of one. The Institute of Orwellian Optimism treats all your 1s and 2s as 3s when it comes to checking your dice for thoughtcrime. The Courthouse of Hasty Judgment makes it harder to spend artifacts for stars. That sort of thing.

This guy is a cool dude.

There are some real whoppers in there, too. In one case, we revealed the Apothecary of Productive Dreams. This market prevents some players from sending workers to Icarus. At all. Which effectively locks them out of a full quarter of the board’s spaces. Worse, buying into an already-built Apothecary requires bliss, the very same drug peddled by the Icaroopsies. Not only were some players locked out of Icarus territory, this locking-out was effectively permanent. Was this a fair turn of events? Hardly. But it was interesting. Textured, we might call it. Abrasively textured, sure, but it was refreshing to play a game that would offer such overt penalties rather than ensuring everything ran smoothly all the time.

Between these and the heaps of recruit cards, there’s always something happening on the board. Some market being constructed (or ruining your day), some recruit tweaking the rules to your benefit, some haggling over at the construction site. That’s all great.

The downside is that it never quite breaks free of its shackles. Board games have largely moved on from worker placement, at least in such a straightforward cube-pushing sense. And Euphoria always feels like cube-pushing. Every segment of its dystopia is more or less identical to its peers. The same resources exchange rates. The same methods for hampering one another. The same costs at the artifact markets. And now those four segments are placed side by side so you can see just how closely they align.

In a sense, the Essential Edition is a worthwhile experiment because it highlights just how far game design has come over the past decade. But it’s only a worthwhile experiment for me, a total sicko for how board games change and develop over time. For somebody looking to spend their hard-earned cash, there are better options out there. If I’m going to place dice-shaped workers and suffer random consequences, I’d much rather play Connie Vogelmann’s Apiary, and that’s limiting our selection to titles from the same publisher.

E:EE is full of little textures. Some of them are abrasive.

Because Euphoria has been left behind. By board games as an iterative artform. By our hobby’s collective taste in the role of chance. By an Essential Edition that leaves some of its most interesting ideas in the dustbin. By a culture that’s grown weary of dystopias.

Speaking only for myself, I think it’s time to tunnel through to the other side.

A complimentary copy of Euphoria: Essential Edition 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!)

Battle Card is as apt as descriptions get. Designed by David Thompson and Nils Johansson, this is the fourth project in the Postmark Games lineup. Like its earlier peers — Voyages, Aquamarine, and Waypoints — this is a print-and-play title that can be produced with functionally zero budget. Unlike those projects, however, Battle Card is billed as a wargame on a single postcard-sized sheet.

That’s true enough. With a few dice and a smidgen of experience to help interpret the rules, Battle Card covers six engagements from the Second World War. And their format is indeed very small, highlighting some real resourcefulness on their designers’ part in compressing battles and even campaigns into ten-minute experiences.

But unlike those other titles, Battle Card is a mixed bag. I’ll give an example.

Rock on, Canada.

The second of Battle Card’s six scenarios sees Commonwealth forces waging a fighting retreat against Imperial Japanese troops shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Over the course of two months, these forces staggered their positions along the Malay Peninsula, gradually ceding ground in an attempt to withdraw a portion of their forces. Historically, the campaign was catastrophic for the Allies, revealing Japanese air superiority and rapid infantry. (Mounted on bicycles!)

In Battle Card, the situation isn’t much better. Dice represent the armies on both sides, with their pips indicating their current strength. These armies engage in battle — determined by the roll of another die — and shift positions along the twin roads along the peninsula.

Here, the situation is relatively static. As the leader of the Commonwealth forces, your options mostly revolve around when to retreat, whether to defend your position or mount a counterattack, and which units to gradually pull back toward Singapore. No matter the outcome of any individual roll, the game has been fixed, much as it was historically. It isn’t a question of whether the Japanese will overtake your position, but how swiftly.

The Market Garden scenario is ostensibly a demo, but it’s fiddlier than those that come afterward.

What follows is a strong indication of both the system’s strengths and weaknesses. Your choices, such as they are, are as bite-sized as the game’s footprint. Retreat or hold; defend or attack; withdraw a die along a road. The roll-offs are governed by small combat results tables that factor in whether one side has an advantage — meaning one side’s die has more pips than that of their enemy. As advertised, it’s fast. And, to its credit, the minimalist design does lend some sense of the geography and the central conundrums of the conflict.

In this case, your objective is to withdraw three pips to Singapore, and the way to accomplish this goal is closer to a puzzle than anything offering operational flexibility. Either you stick your troops behind the right line in the sand or you don’t. Either you withdraw in time or you don’t. Either you make high enough rolls or you don’t. No matter the scenario, this is more or less how Battle Card functions. There’s a solution here. That solution still requires the bulk of the rolls to go your way, but that’s the solution, and there’s no deviating from it. Perhaps most damningly, once you’ve uncovered that solution, there’s really nothing else to see.

Yes, yes, I’m the guy who wrote that replayability is overrated. But there are slender games and then there are slender games. Battle Card is the latter. Each play lasts between five and ten minutes. Scenarios are also compact, as befits a game called Battle Card, meaning there aren’t many subtleties to any given fight. If you don’t figure out the trick on your first play, you’re bound to have a strong suspicion heading into your second. After that, it’s really a matter of getting the right rolls.

Combat results tables! We got ’em!

This isn’t to say the whole enterprise is doomed. The best scenarios offer some wiggle room between maneuver and chance. As the Canadians make a three-pronged drive up the Italian boot in the Moro River scenario, they must pause to reinforce any divisions that took a beating. As the Germans plunge toward the Caucasus oil fields, they need to decide when to split their forces into smaller but more vulnerable columns. Choosing where to fire your artillery at Mortain is… well, it isn’t the most complicated decision, but it would also be inaccurate to call it straightforward.

Again, though, that’s about as much mileage as anyone will get out of these print-and-plays. I’ve run through the entire series twice now, and the second time I found myself growing weary. This stands in strong contrast to those other Postmark titles. As score-chasers, there was always a reason to return for another attempt. Here, the entire format feels too compressed, like a States of Siege game without the chrome-laden considerations that made that series so interesting. Mostly, it was a nice way to organize my dice by color and size.

Firing the arty.

In a way, Battle Card isn’t that far off from looking at an animated battle map. All those little arrows and company designators. The towns changing hands. The roads, the weather. The relative strength of any given column. Battle Card is that with some marginal interactivity. As a middle-aged white guy, that’s my ken. But the joke’s on Battle Card. I already own a book of WWII battle maps. This is one instance where pushing the pieces across the board — sorry, the card — isn’t enough of an improvement.

Access to the files to print Battle Card 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!)

Ever wanted to play a game that would make you feel strange feelings about your childhood religion? Heyo, Greg Loring-Albright’s Keep the Faith is the title for you! In this conversation, Greg joins us to discuss whether board games or role-playing games are better, our respective religious traumas and hopes, and how a board game might prove illuminating of historical forces. You know, light chit-chat!

Listen here or download here.

TIMESTAMPS

Honestly, there are no timestamps for this one. The conversation was rather stream-of-consciousness on my part, and I’d rather not break it into discrete portions. I’m sorry. =(

(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!)

Voyages, the first of Matthew Dunstan and Rory Muldoon’s single-sheet print-and-play roll-and-write games, used three dice. Aquamarine used two. Waypoints continues the trend by using a single die.

That’s cool in its own right. But that isn’t what makes Waypoints special. What makes Waypoints special is the way it handles the movements generated by its rolls. Where those other titles — and let’s face it, most board games — featured straight movements, point to point, A to B, nearly every move in Waypoints is the sort of move you might actually make while traversing an open space.

Here, I’ll show you.

A glimpse of the first map and the many places it might take you.

You’ve taken the Internet’s advice to touch grass. And with gusto, because rather than go to the park or something, you’re opting for a four-day wilderness expedition. Hopefully you aren’t prone to hay fever.

The gist behind Waypoints is that every turn you’re allotted some number of movement points. The number itself depends on the weather, and isn’t as simple as rolling the die and moving as far as it indicates. Instead, your roll shifts you forward along a track and reveals the current turn’s weather for everybody at the table. Inclement showers or storms might confer only a single pip of movement, while sunny afternoons offer a full five points. You also have a limited supply of water, which can be spent to stretch yourself to greater distances.

Every move begins and ends at a waypoint. When the game opens, that’s a campsite. Turn by turn, that might mean a wildlife site, a peak, a hot spring, a scenic overlook, or any number of other destinations. There are plenty to discover, and across the game’s five scenarios there’s a fair bit of variety. Along the way, you might swing by special features, like water sources or forests, but these aren’t waypoints, just side destinations on your way to the main thing. If you can’t reach another waypoint, that’s fine, but it means you’ll be stuck at your starting point pumping some extra water instead of moving anywhere at all.

As for those movement points, they’re spent by crossing lines. Latitude and longitude? That’s a point. Elevation? Another point. A long-distance trek involving multiple map segments and lots of hiking up and down ravines? That’s possible, but you’ll probably need a decent stretch of good weather. That or guzzle tons of water.

Each map prioritizes a different skill.

Very quickly, these inbuilt limitations give your movements a certain naturalistic beauty. Rather than dealing in straight lines, as the crow flies, Waypoints challenges you to think like a gravity-bound creature. You’ll scurry along ridges, stick to gullies between rises, find open stretches of flat ground for traveling long distances, march up inclines in short spurts.

Of course, saving energy is only half the game. You’re here to see things. And the things most worth seeing outdoors are liable to be hard to reach. There’s a balance to be struck, then, between conserving your strength and pushing yourself to see the best sights.

But the result is a creativity of space, energy, and distance that’s rarely expressed in a medium as literalistic and rules-bound as board games. Often, the best route will be circuitous, the one that loops the long way around a peak. Or one that swings down a hill to collect some water, across a meadow to investigate a forest, and then around and up an incline where you’ll deploy a hang glider to soar to your next destination.

Because of course there are special abilities. In the first map, you quickly avail yourself of hang gliders and kayaks for covering great stretches of the outdoors. On other maps, your tools might include climbing ropes, cable cars, bicycles, snorkel gear, dinghies, ski lifts, or ferries. This produces fresh conundrums for each scenario. More impressively, these differences are also visible in the lines you draw on the map. In the desert, you tend to travel in spurts, sticking to shade or rationing your movement around the great canyon bisecting the map. On the ski slopes, shuffling upward is more difficult than gliding downhill, resulting in sharp rises followed by sweeping, switchbacked movements that visit feature after feature before arriving at the turn-concluding waypoint. In Waypoints, your mode of transportation is written directly onto the page, visible in the sweep of each route.

Meeting wild animals confers a wide range of benefits.

Like the previous entries in Dunstan and Muldoon’s movement trilogy, Waypoints is heavy with scoring opportunities. Fortunately, also like Voyages and Aquamarine, the scoring is interesting at all points.

The main commonality between maps is wildlife. There are always three types to see, and apart from occasional oddities — on the coastal map, the majority of my dolphin sightings occur in forests — it’s rewarding to watch your appreciation tick upward, earning not only points but also additional tools to make traversal easier. Beyond that, maps grow more playful. In one, reefs earn additional points later in the day, creating a situation where you’re incentivized to visit them late, but not so late that you get stranded when the day unexpectedly comes to its end. In another, you parcel out slugs of whisky between visiting local breweries or slogging through lochs in search of monsters.

Perhaps the one sour note is yet another repeat: the solitaire mode is a letdown. As with Voyages and Aquamarine, this is one roll-and-write that’s far more interesting to experience with other human minds. The problem is that the solo objective is incredibly easy in a vacuum, asking you to ensure that you conclude each day at a campsite. When that’s your primary objective, it’s a thing easily accomplished.

With fellow trekkers, the real goal is to wring every last point out of an imperfect day. Some hikes will be cut short, the caprice of the dice only offering a small handful of turns before the sunset brings your trek to a close. Others might even go long, your hiker hovering around a natural concluding point, only to find themselves distracted by extra sights. Regardless, there’s something satisfying about facing challenge after challenge, feeling like everything is going wrong, only to look at a rival’s sheet to discover that, you know what, your journey was rather remarkable in the end.

That time I scaled the Grand Canyon eight times in a day.

That’s the last great thing about Waypoints. In the minute between scoring and erasure, you get to look back on this thing, this little journey, and behold what you’ve accomplished. The strange loops, the reversals, that time you got stranded at a lighthouse for the night. The stories this game tells are small and gentle, but that’s also what makes them worth tracing one last time. This is no battle. There are no foes to vanquish. Only you, a fellow player or ten, and the routes you penned onto a map.

It’s a rare game that lets its players be so expressive. That Waypoints does so much with a sheet, a pen, and a die is nothing short of wonderful. I liked both Voyages and Aquamarine; against all odds, this one outdoes both of them at their best.

Access to the files to print Waypoints 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!)

The original Fallout — the original original, the video game, the one from so long ago that they refused to sell it to me at the media section of my local grocery store because it was rated M for mature and as a twelve-year-old they suspected I didn’t qualify — it had a time limit. After a certain number of in-game weeks, the quest failed. Sayonara, Vault 13. Sorry about the terminal dehydration.

You know what else has a time limit? My life. Your life. All of our lives. I was once advertised a wall calendar that would count down the weeks in the average lifespan. It was perhaps the grimmest thing I’ve ever seen, one’s life scratched off week by week. Fallout: Power Play is that ghoulish product in board game form. It is a waste, the subtraction of every minute in its presence keenly felt. If the function of art, as Tarkovsky noted, is to harrow the soul and prepare it for death, then Fallout: Power Play is anti-art. It is a game that makes me unready for the beyond, incurious to receive the answer to the great mystery that awaits us all. It makes me resentful and crabby. It makes me want to claw those minutes back from the felt and stuff them red-nailed into the craw of whichever anonymous designer retched forth this slouching antichrist.

I do not recommend it. Not ironically, not for a sake of a lookie, not to release its carbon back into the atmosphere through combustion. Stay away. The radioactive skeleton has been thus mounted atop the dump, its meaning undeniable. If you enter here, you will leave poorer.

The distant appearance of a lane-battler.

Ostensibly, Fallout: Power Play has the outward appearance of a lane-battler. The wasteland is presented as a series of locales, theme-park destinations like the Brotherhood Airship, the War Camp, the Trading Post. Generic and safe, like every Fallout after the first two and New Vegas, strip-mined for maximum return on investment.

Into these locales you will deploy — you will maybe deploy, but we’ll circle back to that — the populace of your faction. There are four in all. Most familiar even to outsiders is the Brotherhood of Steel, those much-fetishized techno-cultists, in their iron suits that smell of piss and incense. They are matched by the Enclave, the baddies of the series, although only in the sense that they are slightly less nostalgically laden; the Super Mutants, greenskin crazies shorn of the cognitive internality that marked their earliest incarnations in the video games; and the Raiders, who one suspects were included because the designer was running out of ideas but had been tasked with shoehorning in loony-bin scavengers for the sake of marketability.

Ostensibly — there’s that word again — these factions go about the business of deploying their scientists and tin-can warriors and yellow-toothed scavvers and greenskin mooks into these locales, with the aim of securing influence and therefore victory points one pip at a time.

Only, as you might have guessed, this is not what happens. No sir. No ma’am. Not even close. Balance isn’t something I usually fret over. It’s a coward’s concern, the birthright of those mewled into comfort from infancy. Balance? I might as well bellyache about fairness!

But in Fallout: Power Play, we are reminded of just how good board games have gotten over the past decade. I speak not of the balance between decks, between factions, because it’s impossible to get that far. Rather, the issue is wholly internal. These decks are so lopsided that there are hardly any troops to deploy. Those boots that must be placed on the ground, which indeed are required in order for the game to function, are the exception rather than the norm. In place of manpower, all four decks are top-heavy with everything else. Missions, which seed little objectives that, surprise surprise, require the troops that you only occasionally have access to. Powers, which, what do you know, also riff on the troops you may or may not have deployed to the wasteland’s many sunny destinations.

Signs and signifiers, devoid of the soul.

As a result of this crooked state of affairs, most turns are spent waiting around. Passing. As in, literally telling the table “I pass,” like a kid who forgot their homework, only in this case the teacher neglected to hand it out yesterday, but has, in their cruelty, still insisted that their pupils collectively pass their papers to the front. “I pass,” you say. “Pass,” says the next player. Someone else dumps three troops into a location. Luck of the draw. “I think I will pass,” says the next player, and then, in an attempt to interject some levity into this torment, they add, “But I am choosing to pass. I am not passing because I don’t have any cards to play.”

They are lying. Lying to themselves that this experience could be buoyed. Lying to themselves that they might reclaim these misspent minutes.

Is this a commentary on the unfairness of war? Of how war never changes, parroting the catchphrase that has become self-parody? If only. I might stomach a game that wanted to teach me something, even if it were as badly done as this.

But Fallout: Power Play cannot keep its own story straight. The cards urge their players to trigger activities that are impossible. Bold keywords that go unexplained, their meanings only guessed at, peer back from the cardstock like the unblinking eyes of the abyss. Other cards sport instructions that the game declines to enable or explain, the equivalent of an apocalyptic warlord who amuses himself by playing games with his prey. When the player is told to “choose a quest,” how are we intended to denote such a thing? Memory? A nonexistent token? A tapped card? Do we announce the choosing, or leave it secret? Can we cheat? Can we change our minds? What if the quest is removed? What if upon its removal it reappears? Is there bluffing in this game? Is there a soul, some form-space version only accessible within the sulci of the designer’s mind? If so, how might we access it? Would a surgical drill suffice?

I adore games. Bad games, too. Like bad art — bad films, bad books, bad paintings — there is an earnestness that makes all of human endeavor worthy of investigation, even if only as a means to understand its impulse and methodology. I can play a bad game. I often do such, and have a wonderful time examining what makes the bad game bad, what makes it fall short of what-could-have-been. Even bad games are worth my time.

What I cannot play is a tossed-up wad of cardboard that has been struck before me with the intent to waste my time. I say “intent” because at least then Fallout: Power Play would have been produced with something like intention, something like deliberation, rather than this generated slopmess, this uneager unthinking unplay. I have been pranked by a trickster; that would be better than to have suffered so unwittingly. To unwit, then, the only object of curiosity in the entire package is the absence of the designer’s name. It is there. It can be found. But it is hidden, neither on the box nor attested on BGG. At least that speaks to some measure of dignity. A dignity denied to me, by the way, in the moments Fallout: Power Play has stolen, irrevocable and irretrievable, from the precious span of my life.

1 1000 51 6 500.

I want those minutes back. I am resentful, like the firefighters sent into Chernobyl, the authorities insistent that we are safe, this was a mere accident, the graphite on the ground has only charred our flesh because our lying senses are mistaken, now will we please whittle the oaken heartwood of our limited days on this bounteous Earth down to a flinty toothpick for the sake of somebody else’s error, somebody else’s neglect, and while the shavings pile up at our feet, minutes that will not be reclaimed, but will be stricken from those that might be shared with our children, their faces upturned to adore the parents whose lovemaking gave them life and who bounced them in their exhaustion until they could at last close their eyes and sleep, while those shavings mound to our knees, will this game forget that these objects are meant to be joyous reflections of our birthright as creatures who learn from our frolicking, who test gravity with leaps and who learn songs through atonal screeches that set our hearts afloat despite their assault on our eardrums, and this is life and what it could be, what it was meant to be, and this ungame, this hideous thing, should not be experienced by man nor beast, but consigned to the mulch of the soil until it enriches something for the first time since it was atomically the lignin of a great tree, now whittled to shavings, its compressed heartwood all in fragments on the floor, and there is no gluing together what was carved apart with sharpened iron and thoughtless conception.

Do not play Fallout: Power Play. I challenge you to never play it. I dare you to stay away. I beseech you, I beg thee. There are better ways to exhaust this one life you have been given by god or the universe. Write a poem. Draw a stick-figure. Design a game. But make it yours. Show me what you have made. It will be better than this, and I will receive it with eyes of joy.

A complimentary copy of Fallout: Power Play 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!)

Quinn Brander’s Rebuilding Chicago is one of the best polyomino-placement games I’ve ever played. That’s the lede, and I will not bury it. Even moreso than its predecessor, Rebuilding Seattle — not to be confused with Raising Chicago, which I do pretty much every time I say the game’s title aloud — this is a tight, smart, and addictive approach to city-building and competitive brinkmanship. The more I play it, the more I want to keep coming back.

The player boards are also where you build your district.

Lest this become a comparison piece with Rebuilding Seattle, let’s nudge the parallels out of the way. Yes, this is more or less the same system. But where Seattle had some baggy Ozempic skin wrapped around its bones, Rebuilding Chicago sees Brander screwing down every edge and flap until all that remains is a taut cable that bears so much more weight than its predecessor.

We begin with the usual tale. Chicago has burned down. Cow in the shed, fire fire fire, a hot time in the old town tonight. Now it’s up to you to transform the rubble into not only into a place people can inhabit, but one they might visit from afar. A World’s Fair city. A city that stands for a thousand years. Or at least a little over a century, barring any further catastrophe.

Right away, there’s a confidence to the whole thing. Your player board, festooned with trackers and laws only you can pass, also shows the first portions of your city district. Cleverly, this district is fragmented. There’s the main area, filled with food carts and gardens and public parks — a lot of rubble, too — where you will place the structures that govern your city’s progress. But there are also two smaller areas, way off to the left and right. You’ll bridge to these areas eventually, but until you do so they’re unavailable, just collections of spun-off decay that must be reached eventually lest they produce an eyesore from afar.

The card offer and scoring board is printed in base 17 for some reason.

Rebuilding Chicago, then, is a polyomino game in two layers. Underneath it all are suburbs, oddly shaped pieces that don’t always fit together easily, each providing the same icons that dominate your main board. Once adjoined to the rest of your city, these then provide the foundation for everything else.

It’s a little bit like building one jigsaw atop a different, mismatched jigsaw, with certain pieces you’d rather not cover because all those hot dog stands will provide income at regular intervals. But given how tight the game’s geography tends to be, sacrifices will have to be made. It isn’t uncommon, for instance, for your pitiless district councilperson to glean the benefit of those local hotspots, only to then immediately eminent domain them into new shopping centers.

There are seven types of structure in all, but three of them are given outsized attention: shopping, nightlife, and dining. These are your amenities, and unlike the banks and train stations and everything else, they’re given special trackers for both their quantity and quality. This is crucial, because at certain points someone, whether yourself or one of your rival district bosses, will trigger these amenities to score. When that happens, you check their position on your trackers against how many dissatisfied citizens are living in your district, subtract any shortfalls, and then earn victory points and hard-earned cash on the result.

Those gaps in your city are entirely legal.

In addition to your ongoing construction projects, Rebuilding Chicago contains a whole series of interlocking systems, but never so many that the game becomes complicated to cluttered.

To start, there’s the drafting. You select buildings, bonuses, amenity perks, and everything else via a market draft. Each card offers both structures and some other bonus, forcing players to make hard decisions almost every turn. Meanwhile, the market doesn’t refresh unless you pay some cash to do it. This can feel restrictive at times, especially when you’re scraping the till for every last nickel, but also prevents the table from churning through the decks — of which there are three, one per era of the city — until they get precisely what they want.

Overlaid atop everything else is an event system that’s purposely frustrating in all the right ways. Claiming an event awards some minor bonus to the triggering player, while also applying a broader effect to everyone at the table. In many cases, though, the best outcome is to let some other rube trigger them so you can benefit without having to spend the turn.

These events run the gamut: new suburbs, cash for hot dog stands, scoring checks, even occasional bids to ensure your city is visible on the world stage. There are subtleties aplenty to consider, especially since events tend to be scattered among the usual card-drafting and city-building, producing little windfalls that punctuate the action. The result is a circadian rhythm that propels the game through both ups and downs. Sometimes players are flush with cash, other times events provide necessary infusions. It’s significantly more organic than the systems found in some tableau-builders, where everyone has resources until they don’t. Here, everybody is involved until the last event has been claimed. Then it’s time for the next round.

Events are powerful, and dictate the duration of the round.

Perhaps best of all, Brander’s vision of a city on the rise is pleasantly nuanced. The amenities are the clear show-stealers, with their periodic checks and windfalls. But every project receives its due in some manner. Trains allow access to distant suburbs, making expansion all the easier, although at times the additional responsibility can prove overwhelming, especially in the game’s early stages. Schools reduce the number of grumpy citizens, making it easier to appease your population via amenities. Financial institutions make money, special landmarks trigger sweeping bonuses that can alter your approach to scoring, and even single-square monuments serve to beautify your urban landscape and pave over unsightly messes.

It helps, too, that each player is given control over their own district, complete with its own starting benefits and unique laws, the game’s term for special abilities you can trigger once per round. The Loop, with its easy access to transportation, tends to expand rapidly, while River North feels a little more scrappy and Lincoln Park is thick with cash potential. There are six districts in all, and rather than settling for my usual three plays I couldn’t help but give them all a try, observing how Brander invests his system with distinct puzzles despite making only the barest of tweaks. My personal favorite, Hyde Park, leans into the education strategy to quell its citizen-grousers, but there are other approaches, all valid, with their own advantages and drawbacks.

Which is to say, it’s a stunningly rich system for so few rules. Perhaps that’s to do with how it always returns to its core considerations: the draft and how your rivals can steal precisely what you were looking for, the events that might occur one turn shy of their maximal benefit, and above all those wonderful skylines, all Tetris pieces and larger landmarks and monuments spackled into the cracks. This is one of those rare games that asks to be looked at for a moment, to be beheld, before everything gets sorted back into the box.

Hey, I’ve been to there.

In the end, Rebuilding Chicago realizes the promise of Rebuilding Seattle and then some. Where that game played it loose with every detail, this one cinches up its suspenders. The result is a mighty fine game in every regard. As a drafter, as a race, as a series of accidental or snitty thefts between players, as a positional puzzle to use every last acre of a city in metamorphosis. Here’s to a second round with each of those half-dozen districts.

A complimentary copy of Rebuilding Chicago was provided by the publisher.

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