It’s rare to get an opportunity to review an organizer, and I’m a sucker for a good organization system. Half the appeal of games like Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy for me comes from the insanely sleek storage trays. When PlayMode asked if we’d be interested in covering their new inserts for the Dune: Imperium games, I immediately jumped at the opportunity. Readers may recall that I was very high on Dune: Imperium - Uprising in my review.

The box arrived from PlayMode and took up space on my shelf for a month or two while my busy travel schedule kept me from digging into it. It is, after all, quite the behemoth of a box at first glance, and even starting to figure out how everything fits together is a tall task. Finally, I found myself free on a recent Sunday, and my husband and I sat down. We dumped the contents of both Dune: Imperium - Uprising and its Bloodlines expansion out on our game table and tossed the included cardboard inserts.

Let’s tackle this thing.

Buy the PlayMode Dune Imperium Uprising & Bloodlines Playsystem.

Building the Stronghold

Fresh out of the box, the PlaySystem can definitely take your breath away. We pulled out roughly two dozen individual components, which made the process feel…

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What’s on the Menu?

It’s been a long time coming.

I remember when I first encountered Chicken Fried Dice way back at PAX Unplugged 2024. At the time, I gave it the award of “Game That Made Me Fall in Love With a Mechanic I Thought I Hated” (roll and write) and promised a more in-depth review once it hit Kickstarter in a few months. Then those few months turned into more months, and then tariffs wrecked our industry, and then more delays… but FINALLY, I was able to catch up with designer Ashwin Kamath at TantrumCon 2026, where he handed me an almost-final production copy of the game. Later that evening, I gathered some friends, and Ashwin walked us through our first play. Puns were flying, people were giggling, and everyone at the table was having a great time.

Since then, I’ve sat down with friends to put the game through its paces. The concept is cute and simple - you’re trying to become the Top Chef at a food truck competition by serving your customers delicious meals. The more complex their order, the more points you stand to gain. However, the longer you take to finish their order, the more stars they dock you on their review. The better you do, the quicker…

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War, Trade, and Extremely Long Evenings

For some board gamers, Twilight Imperium (TI4) is a bucket list game. Not because it’s rare or expensive, but because reliably gathering six busy, willing, and able adults for 9 to 12 uninterrupted hours already feels like an achievement. Add in a sprawling space opera full of political intrigue, shifting alliances, and the occasional spectacular betrayal, and you start to understand the mystique.

I had been in the board game hobby for years before a friend invited me to play TI4 for his birthday. I was giddy at the chance to sit down with the behemoth finally, and I’ve been lucky enough to get it back on the table many times since. I enjoy Twilight Imperium a lot, but I don’t live and breathe it. There’s another kind of TI4 player: the kind who plays in rated leagues, travels for tournaments, and can recite every faction’s abilities and tech paths from memory. That’s not me, and that’s not the perspective this review is written from.

[caption id="attachment_327184" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Please ignore the precariously placed Coke Zero.[/caption]

With the Prophecy of Kings expansion, Twilight Imperium already feels remarkably complete. It’s one of the best examples I can think of of a lavish expansion retroactively improving a…

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Excelsior, heroes, and welcome to a Meeple Mountain preview for Marvel: Crisis Protocol! The box we have today is one of the last ones in Atomic Mass Game’s old release format with two models per box. Moving forward, they’ve stated all boxes will be designed to have at least three models, meaning less space on the shelves and more value for the customers. That being said, they certainly picked a fine duo to go out with in the form of Spectrum and Blue Marvel! Let’s dive right in.

Anti-Matter of Fact: Blue Marvel Swoops Into MCP!

Blue Marvel is a 5-threat powerhouse that’s comfortable brawling up close and personal or taking shots from far away. Anti-Matter Blast is a heck of a builder, letting him blast people at range 4 with six dice. Oh, and did I forget to mention that he always gets to count skulls/failures in his rolls? That means he punches harder than Black Bolt, who was the go-to 5-threat meta menace for most of 2025. And, to top it off, every time he rolls skulls, he gets to power up. He can handle business just fine from far away, but if he manages to get up in the middle of everything, he has a pretty costly…

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Opening the Dossier

The year is 1960. Well, no, it’s 2025, but play with me in this space. Spies and secret agents are gathering intelligence on heads of state, technology, military operations, and anything else of value. However, as is the case with most spy stories, the risk of intel leaks runs high, and all one agency needs to get a leg up is the right piece of information. This sets the stage for Shadow Network, a 1-5 player worker placement game from the team at Talon Strikes Studios. Each player will take turns deploying their workers around the world to various sites to collect intel pieces, which can be combined to create cases against high-profile targets and earn influence. It’s all dripping in sexy spy novel pastiche, which makes for an alluring theme.

On your turn, you will send one of your four agents to a location where you do not already have an agent. You’ll have your choice between your two on-call agents, who must be deployed each round, and two optional agents who can be deployed, but can also be saved for end-of-round bonuses. Then, your agents will collect any data at the location where they’ve been deployed. Every time an agent moves to a location…

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