You can pinpoint moments where things change, where ripples meet ripples and creativity shifts. Dominion concocted deckbuilding. Love Letter gave the microgame sex appeal. The Crew pulled trick-takers from the ground like a necromancer. Now, Balatro is whispering in the minds of designers, calling forth Ace of Spades, Rolling Deep, and the subject of this…
Kasper Lapp, Voight-Kampff test, 10-minute social deduction game is the kind of pitch I hope to hear when riding the elevator. Lapp previously designed quirky hits like Magic Maze and That’s Not a Hat, so his brand of silly seems uniquely appropriate for this sort of nonsense. When it works the playful interrogation is both…
You’re stuck in a foreign place. It’s a prison of walls and darkness and fear manifest. Do you trust the unknown formless hand? Do you expose your vulnerability for a glimpse of truth? Do you recoil or do you meet The Presence? The Presence is a ghost story. It’s an indie work that draws obvious…
This review is based on a pre-production copy of the game that is expected to be nearly identical to the final product. I love MOBA games. My time playing League of Legends and DOTA are well in the rearview, but many of these games’ concepts work extraordinarily well on the table. Team play. Miniatures skirmish-like…
Releasing an album that consists entirely of cover songs is a risky proposition. For every Renegades of Funk there’s also a Thank You. IV Studio’s Realm of Reckoning is such a perilous venture, excising slices of ingenuity from some of the area control genre’s most prolific entities. The originality and expression exist in how these…
Tag Team was a noteworthy competitor in 2025. Its combination of smooth card play with the unpredictable drama of auto-battling forms a compelling build. So compelling in fact, that it seized my affection previously allocated to games like Unmatched and Dice Throne. Anyone with eyes could see this new Scorpion Masqué title was not a one-off.…
After a decade of work, Jenna Felli continues to evolve and shirk a single design style. One continuing trait that has stuck around since her origin is an embracement of the bizarre. But even that is possibly on the chopping block. From Shadows of Malice to Zimby Mojo to Cosmic Frog, I’d dare to say,…
Y’all know the difference between a bilge rat and a man-eater? I’m talking ’bout the bad fish. One that will swallow you whole. Roll you ’round in its jaws and squeeze the life out a ya. This cutter, in the year of our lord 2019, was a fierce gnawer. Still is! She’s among the best…
War is morally questionable, at best a compromise between inaction and horrific aggression. The societal and human costs are often extreme. There are benefits, however. Achieving independence. Ending tyranny. Freeing an enslaved population. Often, violence is the only remaining option. Rapid technological advancement is another benefit. One typically overlooked due to its insignificance in contrast…
Whenever people liberally throw around words like “innovative” or “unique” with recently published games, I can’t help but clench my jaw. It’s a difficult pothole to avoid, as the promises spat by titles in the crowdfunding era are necessarily braggadocios. We’re all guilty of this from time to time. It’s natural to pile on superlatives…
Geoff Engelstein was influential in bringing Takashi Ishida’s Magical Athlete to the United States in 2003. It’s unsurprising that Geoff, alongside his children Brian and Sydney, have tapped into the spirit of that phenomenal race game, pairing its traditional roll and move structure with several new flourishes. In fact, there is so much of that…
The instinct to build massive edifices, monuments, and works of art is primal. For animals like the Bowerbird, their elaborate mating parlors are practical. For humans like Jason Blake, their mind-boggling creations eschew practicality for ambition. The most honest assessment I can give of Cysmic is that it’s a boldly crafted reliquary to youthful mirth…
You’re stumbling through the labyrinthine streets of Old Angeles; your clothes soaked in rain and neon. The city is a mix of perpetual darkness and the unending belch of industrialization. But at least you’re not alone. Your private investigation firm is staffed by the other stiffs sitting around the table. All of you are working…
Barbarian Kingdoms is the kind of modest board game that comes in a standard sized box with a small selection of cards, a reasonable number of tokens, and a surprising absence of miniatures. While it is nearly two years old at this point, it actually appears more long in the tooth and weathered. I wouldn’t…
Rubén Hernández’s Dodos Riding Dinos was one of those games people talked about. The kind of nutty activity that combines a longstanding tabletop genre with silly dexterity elements. I mentally associated it with killer titles like SEAL Team Flix, PitchCar, and Space Cadets. These games marry the frivolous kinetic energy of flicking with a more…
Fantasy Flight Games launched the Living Card Game (LCG) format in 2008 with A Game of Thrones: The Card Game. It soon extended to a variety of lines, including Call of Cthulhu, Android: Netrunner, and Lord of the Rings: The Card Game. The promise of this exciting new format was an end to chasing rares,…
Tom Lehmann is one of the sharpest card game designers in the biz. Responsible for highly regarded engine builders such as Race for the Galaxy, Jump Drive, and Res Arcana, he has branched off to ply his trade in the somewhat creaky deckbuilding realm. The result is a mashup of traditional aspects riffing on Dominion…
One thing a board game will never formally have, is an overture. The three hour and 47-minute epic Lawrence of Arabia begins with a four-minute piece that encompasses a medley of themes pertaining to the film’s atmosphere, setting, and characters. It sets the stage for the powerful cinema you are about to experience. The closest…
Zurmat is a small Pashtun district south of Kabul. In 2007, It was a tense region with a fragile sense of order. The Taliban moved throughout the villages and roads at night, issuing threats to dissuade cooperation with the Afghan government. Zurmat is also a wargame. Some soldiers write about their experience. Tim Densham designs.…
There are few acts of violence more righteous than killing Adolf Hitler. On July 20th, 1944, German Colonel Claus Von Stauffenberg attempted to do just that. Not to spoil the 2008 Bryan Singer film, but von Stauffenberg failed thanks to the leg of an oak table. The 2016 board game Black Orchestra allows players to…
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