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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Neuroshima Hex has known three previous editions, each ultimately widening the pool of available factions and improving on what was already a very good design. Now, on the occasion of its 20th anniversary, publisher Portal Games has rebooted the line again. Blessed are we who live to see such times. Finally, you can own a base set of Neuroshima Hex with a box that doesn’t look like absolute butt. Aesthetics was never the point of all this, but goodness.

Inside that box, you’ll find four factions’ worth of tiles with which to play this marvelous game. Do the tiles look better? Listen, there are limits to what you can manage when designing a game that has to convey a large amount of information in a small amount of space. Do the tiles look good? No. Do they look bad? No! They’re a miracle of legibility. Don’t worry about it.

The basic idea is pretty straightforward: on your turn, you draw up to three tiles, discard one, and then play, discard, or save the others. Your tiles are a mix of Troops that attack and hinder your opponent, Modules that provide buffs and debuffs to the pieces on the board, and Actions, which can do all variety of things depending on the faction. As the game progresses, the board gets…

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I spent a measurable percentage of my childhood doing puzzles. If we were in the car, I was probably doing a puzzle. Visiting one of my mom’s adult friends? I was doing a puzzle. A long flight? Oh, you better believe there were puzzles, though they were interrupted by bouts of reading. A short flight, though, that was puzzles all the way up and all the way down. The puzzles could take many forms, be they crosswords, logic puzzles, or ThinkFun (née Binary Arts) toys, but they were a consistent mainstay of how I spent my time.

That’s still true today. I adore a good puzzle. Sign me up for an escape room. I spent much of the first year or so of COVID getting into advanced forms of Sudoku. For months now, I’ve been dutifully starting each day with Clues by Sam. When Blaž Gracar’s LOK hit a couple of years ago, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it, and my excitement was well-rewarded. That puzzle book was like nothing else I’d ever seen. The puzzles were satisfying…

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I couldn’t tell you when I first heard about Neuroshima Hex, which was originally published in 2006 and predates my time in board games by just about a full decade. At some point, though, Michał Oracz’s tactical tile-layer set up camp on the periphery of my awareness, built a large fire, threw on a stew, and did the only thing it had to do: wait.

My interest in Neuroshima Hex was inevitable. The only trick? I couldn’t find a way in. There are several editions, and oodles of expansions, and it all made the game a bit daunting. Publisher Portal Games seems to recognize that themselves, so for the game’s 20th anniversary, they announced not only a new edition of the base game, but Neuroshima Hex: Battle, a starter box for two that lets the curious among us give the game a try without going all-in. $25 isn’t much in exchange for scratching a perpetual itch, is it? I couldn’t say no.

The sum of Neuroshima Hex takes place in a post-apocalyptic world in which various factions are at war for resources and supremacy. You know, that kind of thing. Each player chooses a faction and its corresponding deck of tiles, then goes about attempting to systematically obliterate their opponent. The decks are made up of varying combinations of…

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I’m a big fan of weird dueling games—Ortus Regni is one of my all timers—and if they allow for multiplayer silliness, all the better. Etherstone manages to be a complete product, thoughtful, novel, and at times, surprisingly clever. If nothing else, it gets props for not just being a blatant money-grab, instead offering a self-contained and compelling game that has a lot of depth.

The conceit

The lore of Etherstone is not that compelling, mainly because the art is so expressive that I don’t really end up caring much about whatever the story is. It’s evoking druids and biopunk—wild and crazy characters collecting various blobs of mana and using them to bring in more characters so you can battle shared threats, etc., etc.

Mechanically, at the beginning of the game you’ll select a leader card from two that you’re dealt randomly. This will give you a starting distribution of resources. From there, you’ll draft seven cards from a large deck. Once you’ve done both of these things, it’s time to duel.

Etherstone captures one of my favorite underutilized mechanisms in gaming—the point buy. Though it’s a standard card draft that you see in many games, the fact that you’re only getting seven cards to play the entire session with…

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When I saw Xenology, I was immediately piqued because it reminded me of a friend’s prototype, a game about studying humanity from the perspective of an alien race. I wanted to see the track a different design mind might do with a similar idea—one of my favorite pastimes.

Unfortunately, Xenology doesn’t capture the weirdness of my friend’s game, nor does it capture the magic of the foundational eurogame elements it deploys across its own design. It’s a “do A so you can acquire C so you can do B and score some points” sort of game, nothing more, nothing less. It has the trappings of a much more interesting game, that resolves into something whose end result feels arbitrary and mushy, and ultimately just fades in with a broad swathe of other games in spite of the unique setting.

Alien bureaucrats demand RFPs

In the game, you’re an alien trying to advance in the alien hierarchy by studying human beings. The process by which you do this is reasonably straightforward.

In the center of the board there’s an action cross of sorts, at the intersection a center action (Mission Control) with four actions that are arranged around it in an offset cross. You start with three alien meeples (cute)…

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My Nucleum journey has really been on the upswing.

When I reviewed the base game—released in 2023 by Board&Dice, designed by Simone Luciani and David Turczi—I had a lot of good things to say, but I wasn’t sure Nucleum was on the list of all-time classics. Now, about 15 plays in, I’ve landed on higher ground: this is some of the best medium-heavy strategy gaming out there, particularly perfect for fans of games that combine the best of Euro-style asymmetric power titles and route-building extravaganzas such as the Brass system (Age of Industry, Lancashire, and Birmingham).

Nucleum is something else. My love affair has only grown since late 2025, when the base game appeared in alpha on Board Game Arena. While a solo mode was not included in the first pass on alpha, it’s been easy to find multiplayer games with others who love the Nucleum system.

“I’ll make Nucleum expansions as long as [Board&Dice] keeps letting me,” Turczi told me during a conversation I had with him at SPIEL Essen 2025. “I love Nucleum.” Turczi, along with a team that includes Borys Bielaś and Andrei Novac, designed the latest expansion, Nucleum: Energy Research Institute. It’s an expansion that keeps things simple: Energy Research Institute is for Nucleum superfans, or those who think they…

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When I chatted with the team at Studio H during last year’s SPIEL Essen show in Germany, I was surprised when we ended the conversation with a throw-in game called Space Lab. The look, the feel, the pitch…all of it screamed “average fare.” (Maybe “screamed” is the wrong word there.) I took a copy, had a lovely conversation about Studio H’s stellar two-player abstract Leaders, then went on my way to the next meeting.

Just before I got Space Lab to the table, the game also appeared in alpha on Board Game Arena. This gave me the chance to load up a couple of async games with strangers (all of whom, like Studio H, were based in France) while also doing two plays of the game with my team in Chicago.

Across four plays (solo, two, and four-player counts), I know this much: Space Lab is at least average fare. It’s actually better than all right. The solo puzzle is something I enjoyed quite a bit, and the puzzle is just addictive enough to keep players coming back thanks to the very short run time.

Mission: Possible

Space Lab is a set collection, hand management, tableau building game for 1-4 players. Players are racing to complete…

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4X games have come a long way since 2011, when Space Empires 4X was released, and while many of these games contain deeper backstories, more complicated systems, and elaborate plastic miniatures, for me the pencil, pad and cardboard counters of Space Empires remain the gold standard of 4X. With GMT Games sending me the final expansion, fittingly titled All Good Things, I was excited to get the game back to my table to see if it still holds up after all these years.

Don’t Fix what isn’t Broken

There’s been a recent trend to update older titles with more modern elements, beyond just artwork and theme–games like Skymines and Brass: Lancashire come to mind–and that can sometimes be a mixed bag. Caylus is a masterpiece but was in desperate need of a visual refreshment. Caylus 1303, while it looks great, also fundamentally changed how the original game plays, for the worse in my opinion, in its attempt to cater to a broader audience.

GMT and designer Jim Krohn understand what makes Space Empires 4X special and are able to revamp while avoiding these kinds of pitfalls with each new expansion. Much like the previous expansions, Close Encounters (which added variable player powers) and Replicators (introducing co-op…

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Oh, the back half of this adventure was heavy, my friends…heavy!

After playing Perseverance: Castaway Chronicles—Episodes 1 & 2 in 2024, I reached out to the team at Mindclash Games to get a review copy of Perseverance: Castaway Chronicles—Episodes 3 & 4. The box was predictably massive and showed off everything Mindclash is known for as soon as I opened the box.

If you are new to the Perseverance adventures, check out my previous review to get a feel for the series. We aren't doing a massive rules explanation here, because that would take hours!

I’m also not going to spend much time here telling you about the ridiculous components in the box. It’s a Mindclash game, so IYKYK. Suffice it to say that Mindclash produces bits as fancy as anyone in the tabletop business, and that trend line continues with the Perseverance sequels. I will say this much–I didn’t think the world needed board games with dinosaur saddle pieces…and, I was wrong.

Let’s dive right in: is the back half of the Perseverance saga worth your time?

Episode 3: It’s Hard to Saddle a Thunderhorn

Perseverance: Castaway Chronicles—Episode 3 picks up after the events of Episode 2. Perseverance is now a decent place to live, and…

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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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Training Montage

I struggle to get excited when someone says “train game.” The moment “18XX” hits the table, my brain checks out. I’ve enjoyed a few—Chicago Express, Age of Rail: South Africa, Iberian Gauge, and currently Ticket to Ride: Legends of the West (okay, not really 18XX but still a train game!)—but my bias remains: they all feel the same. Learn one, learn them all, right?

And while that may be true, it takes more than a new map to get me on board. I’m not great at market speculation or company valuation, which already puts me behind. But dress the system up with a new flavor, and I can be coaxed to the table. Dinosaurs in Cretaceous Rails? Bag-building in Lightning Train? A fresh spin goes a long way for non-train gamers like me.

Space Rails

Enter Stellar Ventures, a spacefaring economic game from newcomer designer Pontus Nilsson. At a glance, you might think you’ve sat down at Gaia Project, but look closer: this is an investment-and-network puzzle that tests your galactic bookkeeping.

[caption id="attachment_327002" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Stellar Ventures at PAX Unplugged.[/caption]

Crack open the Corporate Handbook and you’re greeted with midcentury-style product ads hyping expansion, investment, and tech development. Then comes the twist—aliens.…

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