Another day, another cube-rails-adjacent title — although Gold Country, being designed by Reiner Knizia, is decidedly crisper and more rules-light than yesterday’s Stellar Ventures. This one is based on Spectaculum, a game about traveling circuses. I’ve never played Spectaculum, so I can’t comment on how the game may or may not have changed; but in this format, Gold Country offers a slick presentation and some crystal-clear speculation. It’s far from my favorite Knizia, but it’s such a buttery smooth experience that it’s hard to imagine turning a session down.

When Gold Country kicks off its private gold rush, there are four mines at opposite ends of the shared valley. Their value is five coins per share. Everyone at the table holds one share per mine, plus a secret share that won’t pay out until the end of the game, but which serves to ensure that no one mine gets abandoned entirely. At least not in the four-player game.

Right away, the appeal of Gold Country makes itself known through a certain clarity. The valley is packed with tiles — four types on the base map, a few more on the advanced side of the board — and despite being seeded at random they’re all visible from the very beginning. Some increase the value of the mine that places a claim on them; others do the opposite, turning up empty pans. Some show a pair of nuggets that will pay out two dollars for every held certificate. Their opposite is a collapse, which costs two dollars per share. Woe be unto the player who can’t pay.

Turns are simple. You have three claim tokens to place on the map, inching across the board to raise or lower those mines’ values, or perhaps pay out or charge the owners of various shares. The wrinkle is that your claims are drawn at random from a sack. Even if you hold five shares of Bidwell’s Bar, well, too bad, you might only draw orange and purple this turn. It’s possible to swap out a claim with one sitting aside the board. This is the “hardware store,” and it’s easy to forget it’s there. Don’t do that. Forget, I mean.

So you place your claims, thus adjusting share prices. Eventually mines will collect gold veins, higher-valued spots that also add bandits to the sack. These function like wild claims, although they don’t award the token to any particular mine, instead dumping it off to the side of the board. This establishes them as both excellent claim-jumpers for blocking a rival’s favored mine from growing too fat, and hired goons who preempt any negative sums or cave-ins from affecting your own preferred digs.

And then, of course, there are the stocks. Under normal circumstances you’re only permitted to purchase or sell two shares a turn. With enough players at the table, this puts some fear into each purchase. Let’s say you buy two shares of Yuba Mine at four dollars per, a reasonable sum thanks to some sabotage. You hope to zip over to a cluster of rich takings nearby, doubling your value before selling off the shares.

Except this is where the game’s social portion comes into play. Knizia has always been a master of contrasting simple rules with entangled social spaces, and Gold Country is no different. Before your next turn comes around, everybody else at the table gets their say. Like you, they have only partial control over their claims. Maybe they’ll focus their energies elsewhere, massaging stock prices to their own advantage. But it’s also possible they’ll lift their paper shields to reveal bandits and race Yuba Mine to that nearby vein. Or even the requisite purple claim tokens, but rather than securing the gold, they instead send the company on a wild goose-chase in the other direction. Maybe even straight into some collapses. Now the shares you bought at four dollars have come to cost you quite a bit more.

The result is a game that can be played in silence, but thrives once everyone realizes they can get rowdy. It’s like some of Knizia’s other titles in that respect. Ever sat in on a boisterous session of Tigris & Euphrates? Hollered in somebody’s face over a draw in Ra? I’d recommend it. There are no provisions in Gold Country for players to interact directly, apart from your God-given right to inform the table that such-and-such deserves to have those four shares diminish in value, and, oh look, there’s the perfect place to do it. And with those exact tokens you just revealed! What a thing to see.

Like I said earlier, Gold Country is slick. It goes down smooth. Which isn’t the same as saying it’s a perfect game.

Most of my hangups have to do with the advanced side of the board. This one is bisected by a large river, although in practice this isn’t much of an impediment, since you can tunnel under it or ferry over it. Meanwhile, some of the new token types are more hassle than they’re worth. Gems award five dollars apiece when the game ends, giving players cause to hurry over to certain spots. Dynamite awards additional claims to whomever picks it up, threatening the rest of the table with much larger turns that don’t quite match the measured pace of the game.

My larger reservation has to do with the back half of the game, when those four mines have staked out territory and are now mopping up the last few veins. This is always something of an anticlimax, especially when there isn’t much left over for some of the companies to do. I don’t want to oversell this as a major problem, but those wide-open early moments tend to grow muted, even hurried, as the game wears on.

But that’s a small thing. Even though Gold Country isn’t my favorite Knizia, or anywhere in the top twenty, it’s lovely to see another lost gem get dredged out of the muck and given a good rinsing in the river. This one may not be the largest gold nugget out there, but it’s a nugget all the same. Between the game’s clear stock appraisals, social uncertainties, and crisp language, this is one of those stock games I’d be happy to play more or less any time — and with hardly any need to brush up on the rules.

 

A prototype copy of Gold Country 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 about which films I watched in 2025, including some brief thoughts on each. That’s 44 movies! That’s a lot, unless you see, like, 45 or more movies in a year!)

The forthcoming Stellar Ventures is nothing if not wildly ambitious. Its creator, Pontus Nilsson, has designed both cube rails and 18xx titles, and is now mashing those systems together — along with the faintest whiff of 4X space opera — into a game that sees joint-stock firms crisscrossing entire star systems with logistical networks.

Also, the space shuttles sometimes rust. Just in case you were wondering what you were getting into.

For those who haven’t played cube rails or 18xx, first of all, STAY AWAY FOR YOUR OWN GOOD. Thanks to train games, I’ve seen families bid farewell to spouses and parents, attended game groups in open bewilderment at the disappearance of old friends, and witnessed youngsters develop a twisted sense for how capitalism operates.

But if you must persist, Stellar Ventures represents a slender crossover in a brand-new Venn Diagram. The first circle, cube rails, is a genre of sky-high abstractions about nascent train networks that tend to play quickly, feature lots of auctions, and obviously include a zillion cubes. I’ve even written about a few over the years. 18xx, on the other hand, is a series of dense five-hour-plus simulations that transforms people into their worst selves. I’ve declined to write about the things mostly out of consideration for my family’s safety, although if we’re ever in a secure location I’d be happy to share my misadventures trying to tackle the genre.

Stellar Ventures is a blend of the two, although I’d put it 80/20 in favor of cube rails. The gist is that players adopt the role of investors and managing partners in interstellar corporations. These corporations are principally interested in transit and extractive mining, enterprises that go hand-in-hand, just like here on Earth. At any given time, you can hold shares in many companies, either doubling and tripling down on the fortunes of a single company or building a diverse portfolio that accrues smaller but less risky payouts. Meanwhile, holding the most shares in any given company will confer a managing stake, letting you choose the placement of its stations and colonies.

For aficionados of cube rails, this probably sounds like business as usual. The considerations are warm in their familiarity. Each sector can only accommodate so many stations, making it prohibitively expensive for second- and third-comers to build over already-occupied territory. At times, the proceedings take on the tone of a race, everyone rushing to push their favored companies onto high-value planets. There’s even some room for sabotage, especially if you snag a company share on the cheap and build a few stations to nowhere. But for the most part, you want your companies to thrive.

It’s the details that set Stellar Ventures apart from its terrestrial peers. For example, it isn’t enough to establish networks. Colonies and stations establish your company’s mining score, an overall tally that sets their base value. But they also need to move their goods to other worlds. This is where ships come in. By ordering rockets, a company’s shipping tally also ticks upward. When dividends pay out, it’s the lower tally between mining and shipping that sets the amount.

Okay, that doesn’t sound too bad. But this simple binary between mining and shipping can be deceptive. The ships themselves are volatile. Over time, those single-digit shuttles give way to two-points shippers, then three, then five, then eight. But at regular intervals, the invention of a new ship will obsolete a lower-value ship. Just like that, all the ships in your hangars are scrap metal. Devotees of 18xx will recognize this as “locomotive rusting,” an idea mined in multiple titles. When spacefaring technology leaps forward, it’s entirely possible that some companies will get swept into the dustbin, their older ships disappearing entirely and their shipping score bottoming out. At least until they scrounge up some investment money to upgrade their fleet, anyway.

At times, these moments are painfully punitive. Stellar Ventures is a rather phase-laden game, with companies and then individual investors each taking a turn. It’s entirely possible for one company to engineer a revolution in rocketry that tanks the dividends of the next company in line. This is nothing new to either cube rails or 18xx, as both systems are built on letting players live with their errors. Rather than offering catch-up mechanisms or rubber bands, the rich get richer and missteps send players tumbling into a debt spiral. Still, this lands differently in a two-and-a-half-hour title like Stellar Ventures than your usual single-hour cube rails game.

But this brings us to some of the game’s more interesting innovations. Because while it’s still possible to find oneself in command of a failing company, here there are a few avenues for attaching zero-g suspensors to one’s bootstraps.

The first is the idea of alien tech. As your companies explore the sector, they’ll come across many alien worlds. Some of them belong to an ultra-advanced race that offers The Agreement. The Agreement — which should always be invoked with due gravity so that everyone at the table can hear its capitalization — is a devil’s bargain that awards significant advantages but also threatens to rob your company of any value upon the session’s conclusion.

First, the advantages. There’s an immediate cash payout for every share in the Agreement-making company, and that payout only gets higher if you’ve made additional contacts with the alien race before shaking their tentacles. This imbues a company’s expansion with real tension, especially if its profits are tapering off and investors are hoping for an immediate buyout. As the managing partner, declining to sign The Agreement, whether because you have other plans for the company or out of hope of reaching yet another alien world to increase your share value, can be met with jeers from your fellow stakeholders.

And then there’s the aforementioned alien technology. These are green cubes that are awarded to the players who explore alien worlds — and to be clear, I’m speaking about individual players rather than the companies they control. Alien tech can be traded for all sorts of benefits. Up to two cubes can be invested into a company to increase its shipping value, declawing the threat of rusting shuttles. Or they can invent wormhole technology to allow a company to warp across the map rather than paying for every intervening space. It’s even possible to upgrade your settled worlds, doubling their mining value, or launder them for cold hard cash.

The tradeoff, naturally, is significant. When the game concludes, the final value of everybody’s shares is calculated for one big payout. These are highly lucrative, the sum of a company’s shipping and mining values combined. But if a company that signed The Agreement failed to best the alien race on the mining track, their shares are directly claimed by the aliens — and pay out for a single measly credit instead of their usual value.

Frankly, this is a stroke of brilliance. The Agreement quickly becomes one of your most potent gambles, weapons, and looming threats all at once. The alien race is always on the move, ticking upward on the mining track at regular but unguessable increments. An over-leveraged shareholder might sign The Agreement for an infusion of cash that can be spent on more lucrative investments, or a tycoon might bet it all on a long shot. Either way, it provides high drama even in the later game.

Other elements lean into the game’s sci-fi setting, although with some squinting you can make out the railway ties. There are large “mega-earths” that welcome multiple companies and grow in value as they attract more investors, tax zones that encompass wealthier worlds but demand periodic payouts (i.e. dopey libertarian “state violence”), and, of course, the fact that a company might learn how to travel through stellar nebulae in order to bypass the competition.

Of course, the other side to this coin is that Stellar Ventures is denser and more complicated than most cube rails titles, not to mention it takes twice as long on the table. Personally, though, I find the whole thing energizing. Nilsson does more than blend genres; in some ways, he shores up the chinks in their armor. It always feels like there’s something squirrelly to get up to. Is a company not putting shares up for sale? Engage in some boardroom politics to force their hand. Even better if you aren’t the one to pick up the latest stock. When it sells for a pittance, you can smirk as your target corp shifts from privately-held to minor status, the value of each individual share diluting substantially. Oopsie. Did I just ruin your dividends for the foreseeable future? I’ll make it up to you by seizing a controlling interest in your other company.

Did I mention that Stellar Ventures is a game for vultures and rats? No? Okay: Stellar Ventures is a game for vultures and rats. And it rocks.

For the most part, anyway. I already mentioned the game’s phasiness and complexity and playtime. Personally, those are minor compared to the shenanigans it permits. As a game about putting cubes on hexes, it’s intriguing. But as a game about making half-understood treaties with technologically superior aliens, shafting your competitors with turn orders and negotiations alike, and not having to look at a single train engine, it’s unparalleled. Even if your shuttles keep rusting in the absence of oxygen or moisture.

Stellar Ventures launches on Kickstarter tomorrow.

 

A prototype copy of Stellar Ventures 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 about which films I watched in 2025, including some brief thoughts on each. That’s 44 movies! That’s a lot, unless you see, like, 45 or more movies in a year!)

On an intellectual level, I understand it would be terrifying to attend a cinema where all the projections have pushed through the big screen to consume the moviegoers. But as an intellectual there’s some appeal to the prospect, because in preparation for such an occurrence I now only attend exhibitions of Brian De Palma’s erotic thrillers. Rawr.

Sadly, the mortals of Spooktacular were in attendance at a B-movie horror festival on Halloween night. Now they’ve been reduced to cheap theater snacks. And not the sexy kind of snacks.

The first thing you should know about Spooktacular is that it’s a big capricious romp. Entire handfuls of guests are moved at once, precluding even the pretense of a plan. Monsters are sent ping-ponging through corridors and theaters, transforming each new turn into a fresh conundrum. Pieces you’ve never seen before will appear on the board, signaling some goofball outcome you can only guess at. Or request clarification about, I suppose, although that’s boorish behavior for such an event. Just go with it. Let the tides carry you where they listeth. If that holds no appeal, maybe seek fairer pastures.

But the second thing you should know about Spooktacular is that it was designed by D. Brad Talton, Jr., creator of such titles as Millennium Blades, Exceed, BattleCON, and Pixel Tactics. And what do those titles all hold in common?

Erm, yes, anime babes. But what else? Okay, sure, a heaping of nostalgia for arcade cabinet fighting games. And? There we go: lots and lots of characters.

True to its heritage, Spooktacular positively brims with characters. Also character. There are twenty monsters in the box, each freshly Ring-girled off the big screen, and each sporting their own approach to cinephile cuisine. For your first session, you’ll probably select one of the simpler characters. (Rated E for Easy.) Such as Doombox, a sentient boombox straight out of a white-flight Blaxploitation flick, with a tusked mouth in place of a cassette deck and various tracks that whir into tune when it snacks on guests of the correct color. Or the wandering Outlander, his hapless victims pressed into service as a murder posse. Or my favorite of the easy characters, Remover the Fitness Demon. Her special power is a weight-loss plan. Only the way she sheds those cottage-cheese thighs is by viciously dismembering the people trapped in her room. Nine pounds in two seconds! Beat that, Ozempic!

Because this is a Talton game, part of the beauty of Spooktacular is that all of these characters make use of the same rules. Even as you progress through trickier characters (Rated I for Intermediate) and into the game’s upper reaches (Rated A for Advanced), the bump in difficulty has more to do with how much combo-building your monster will have to pull off rather than an actual linear increase in complexity.

Consider Hell Chef. He’s a chef from hell. His special power revolves around the preparation and serving of special dishes. These are effectively time-delayed landmines he can scatter in his wake. But because he serves dishes at the beginning of his turn and prepares them at the end, there’s an entire round between courses. Rival monsters have plenty of time to duck out of the way before his Tentacle Tartar steals a wad of their points. Hence, much of his strategy has to do with cornering or locking down those opposing monsters. He isn’t more complicated to understand. His moves are just tougher to pull off.

How about the Beasts of Business — sorry, the Bea$t$ of Bu$ine$$. These jerks place their tokens not on the main board, but on the scoring track. Now when any monster reaches the corresponding tally, they become “scareholders” in this gang’s twisted game. Sometimes that means losing or gaining points. Other times it means chowing down on multiple theatergoers. Point is, there’s something new and inventive around every corner, the work of a master designer reveling in every single corner of his creation.

At the same time, these monsters all function according to the same logic. Most of their cards are identical. They all scare guests to rearrange the composition of adjacent rooms and score points. They all move between locales to pursue the juiciest morsels. And they all devour guests to create sets that can be exchanged for point-winning movie tickets. Those sets, by the way, are red, pink, blue, green, and yellow meeples, but we told our twelve-year-old they were children, teenagers, horror aficionados, long-suffering spouses, and grandparents who are probably only in attendance because they bought a moviepass subscription and they’re going to wring every dime out of the deal. She made quite the exclamation of disgust at that, then directed her animatronic guest show host to chow down on three of them.

Spooktacular, in case you hadn’t already guessed it, functions best when everybody works tooth, nail, and claw to win, but doesn’t invest much emotional energy into who walks away from the buffet with the tallest portion. It’s the kind of game where you can lay painstaking plans, maneuver everything into position, and then watch as one errant move from an oblivious opponent throws a wrench into your clockwork, and scores twice as many points in the process. It’s light and fluffy and not especially filling. It’s theater popcorn with so much butter that it soaks through the bottom of the bag and stains the knee of your jeans.

Which isn’t to say it’s a perfect experience. It’s a little long-winded, especially at higher counts, and its more involved turns can stretch on once it gets going. The same capriciousness that keeps the rules light and strategy distant also prevents players from evaluating their turns in advance. Each new turn requires a fresh assessment of the playing field. This can nudge its massacre into more of a torture session.

(If you want a really niche quibble, one that I must preface is absolutely not serious, I also wish it had been a little more based on mancala! Spooktacular would have to change very little, and there are even a few monsters like the Killer Car and the haunted pinball table Devil’s Game that approach it with mancala’s sowing sensibilities. With a firmer unifying mechanism as its foundation, it would probably move more rapidly, not to mention feature fewer underutilized corners. But, again, this isn’t an actual critique, just a brief fantasy, and a fantasy that has nothing to do with Brian De Palma erotic thrillers.)

Even with a few scattered problems, Spooktacular stands out as a strong contender for a beer-and-pretzels evening. It’s the little touches that make it so good. The references behind the monsters. The texture to how each one acts and moves and snacks on human tendons. Even the way the scoring track is presented as cop cars wheeling around the block to respond to the theater’s distress call. Brad Talton has always been a master of creating wild casts of characters, and Spooktacular showcases him in his element. This is the sort of game I could see myself settling down to play every Halloween.

 

A complimentary copy of Spooktacular 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 about which films I watched in 2025, including some brief thoughts on each. That’s 44 movies! That’s a lot, unless you see, like, 45 or more movies in a year!)

Now here’s something I haven’t seen before: a collection of six scratch-off board games designed by puzzle master Zach Barth. That’s a sentence that keeps getting more intriguing as it goes, especially after The Lucky Seven proved one of the most reliable single-deck solitaire games on my shelf.

What I didn’t expect was the smell. I don’t know how scratch-offs are made, especially scratch-offs as nice as the ones in this pack. These are hardly the state fair scratch-offs from my childhood. They still produce a royal mess — I’ve had to play with a little rubbish can next to the table — but that metallic scent has proven strangely addictive. Is this why people gamble away their life savings? Maybe I’d be tempted to do so as well, were the minigames in the state lottery this compelling. Let’s run through all six.

Danger! In the Temple of Malice

The first title is a nifty press-your-luck ditty that keeps the rules light, marking it as a perfect entry point to the collection. It’s basically a roll-and-move, except in place of rolls there are scratch-off boxes. You reveal the three numbers in a box, take those moves in any order — while potentially skipping any digits that strike you as unwise — and hopefully reach the end with as many medallions as possible.

That’s more or less the entire thing, although of course there are a few dueling considerations to keep in mind. The first is your own mortality. Stepping on three traps will spell an early end for your delve, and of course they’re everywhere. Some are duds, which is always a relief, especially near the end of the temple where it isn’t uncommon to see them clustered together. Meanwhile, you also need to reach the end of the track, navigate the occasional branching path, and take calculated risks to secure as much loot as possible.

Danger! is a simple thing, but it sets the tone for the entire collection. On the positive side, these are bite-sized puzzles that use familiar systems in fresh ways, often putting the limitations of their medium — laminated scratch-off pads — to work in interesting ways. It’s impressive to see how far afield Barth is able to wander within these constraints.

But there are more frustrating points as well. Danger! sets a precedent that will crop up more than once throughout the collection. Namely, the possibility of concluding a pad before it’s been exhausted. The box contains ten sheets per puzzle. That’s more generous than I expected, but it still turns them into a precious commodity. While the sheets’ limited quantity provides some additional motivation to consider each step before committing dime to ink, it can still prove deflating when an early misstep threatens to waste the entire puzzle.

Fortunately, that possibility is fairly remote in Danger! thanks to some eminently clear stakes. The ability to decline a move ensures you’re never cornered, even as it threatens to leave you a few steps short of the exit. On the whole, a solid opening gambit for the collection.

Task Force ’86

And then there’s the deep end of the pool. Also known as the ocean. Task Force ’86 is an homage to Battleship, but it understands that having too many empty spaces is boring, so instead it fills the sea with not only enemy ships to pick apart with long-range strikes but also a very good chance that every move will result in total disaster.

Your goal is to hit every segment of every enemy ship. There’s a rubric for these things: the enemy fleet contains one battlecruiser, which must be situated entirely in deep water, four shallow-water frigates, and a handful of cruisers and destroyers that might be scattered between the sheet’s halves. Missiles appear around these vessels’ edges, both hinting at their position and threatening to strike your fleet.

Speaking of your fleet, Task Force ’86 introduces a concept that will be present in nearly every other entry in the collection: a small number of bonus resources that can be spent at watershed moments to turn the tables in your favor. While you’re free to scour the ocean for enemy vessels however you see fit, this objective is made easier by your fleet of five friendlies. Your destroyers provide helicopter sorties, which reveal a bunch of cells in a line but stop as soon as they encounter a missile or submarine, while your aircraft carrier holds strike fighters that blow up an entire 3×3 square, and your missile cruiser packs a pair of counter-missiles. This last option is crucial. When revealed on the map, enemy missiles sink your ships, by extension stripping away your bonus powers. That is, unless you knock down the incoming attack.

The inclusion of these limited resources is what makes Task Force ’86 one of the collection’s most gripping puzzles. It’s a big leap from Danger!, complexity-wise, but the tradeoffs are significant. Every space feels dangerous, and it takes real contemplation to choose between launching an air strike or another reconnaissance mission. As puzzles go, this might even be my favorite entry in the whole package, a perfect blend of Minesweeper and the tension that comes from having to physically reveal each cell. This is the good stuff.

Max Midnight: Better Dead Than Never

Blending bad puns, Roger Moore-era James Bond, and aesthetics that remind me of nothing more than Apogee’s Secret Agent, Max Midnight is all about diving into an evil mastermind’s evil lair to undo their evil plot before a bunch of people are killed, evilly. He’s the hero we need in this day and age, that Max Midnight.

On the surface, Max Midnight is one of the collection’s chancier titles. You progress through the lair one floor at a time, scratching off doors to reveal what lies inside. The mission is to find enough punchcards to deactivate the control panel on the bottom floor, although this is complicated by henchmen and robots that first raise the floor’s suspicion and then shoot you dead. Early fails are a real possibility.

Except the inclusion of a few critical tools makes Max Midnight a fairly easy puzzle overall. Your agent has a limited number of bullets for shooting henchmen, plus a laser pen that can tunnel deeper into the base. Oh, and some X-ray glasses. This latter tool is my favorite, and it’s complemented by secret plans that can be stumbled upon as you search the base. Their effect is identical: you scratch off a door’s “window,” revealing what’s hidden inside without actually popping the hatch. This allows Max to perform some light surveillance before committing to any given door.

Meanwhile, there’s another rubric to consider. No two adjacent rooms contain the same feature. While an early misstep might see you bumbling into a henchman, this also proves a learning experience, since the doors up and down the hall are guaranteed to be secure. Until you reach the floors with the killer robots, anyway.

On the whole, Max Midnight is one of the more throwaway titles in the collection. It’s cute and whimsical, but lacks the dense thinkiness of its peers. Then again, it gets serious bonus points for the whole “look through the window” feature, which Barth will repeat in a later entry. I appreciate any game that leans into its inherent strengths, and letting players peek at a space without revealing it entirely is a very cool way to use the scratch-off concept.

Signal to Noise

Ah, more Minesweeper. Fortunately, I like Minsweeper (and nonograms). Also, it helps that Barth knows how to tinker with the formula to produce a puzzle that invokes the familiar while also feeling entirely new.

Signal to Noise is a digital heist. Most spaces contain cash; the rest represent ICE that threaten to trace your location. In Minesweeper terms, these are the bombs. But in a total inversion, only bombs reveal the adjacency of other bombs. Cash itself is only useful for scoring. When it comes to data-mining, they’re effectively blank.

The solution lies in the game’s limited resources. Here these are Data Miner and ICE Breaker programs, both of which allow the player to string together many reveals of either cash or ICE spaces, but only until they hit the other type. To once again use Minesweeper terms, it’s as though you could switch into “bomb mode” to click as many bombs as you want, but only until you accidentally hit an open cell again.

At the same time, you’re provided hints as to how many bombs are located in each row and column. Often, this is scant information. Most of the sheet’s grids are wide-open spaces, forcing some exploratory scrapes before the process of deduction can begin in earnest. This poses some interesting questions about how to manage risk and your programs, but it also reminded me of a crummy version of Minesweeper on an old TI-86+ where the first click wasn’t a freebie, often resulting in more frustration than anything.

Still, Signal to Noise is a strong option thanks largely to its final data vault. This is where Barth cuts loose with the odds, presenting a box that’s stacked with ICE on one side and cash on the other. This allows for some truly devious deduction, especially if you’ve preserved enough ICE Breakers to pick through the static. It’s a strong crescendo, although I was left wishing the entire sheet had leaned into that format rather than saving it for the very end.

Dragons Over Dunkirk

In a very nerdy collection, Dragons Over Dunkirk is the sheet that feels most like a thirteen-year-old boy’s mashup of two different sets of toys. It’s commandos versus dragons. Oh, and the commando squad includes a Playmobil firefighter.

This time, Barth adds some time pressure to great effect. Your squad has three days to wipe out six dragon nests, at least half of which are concealed in a cave system, using, you guessed it, some Minesweeper/Hexcells adjacency deduction. That three-day limit is the real highlight, refreshing each squaddie’s health and kit, but not their mortal coil if they happen to have shuffled off it.

And your tools are essential. The Commander carries an infrared scope that peeks at tiles — shades of Max Midnight! — while the Grenadier and Gunner decrease how many injuries the squad takes from a dragon attack. The firefighter, meanwhile, lets you skip over a space, useful for when you don’t want to weather an obvious ambush in between you and a target.

This time around, the cell-scratching is complicated by the fact that your squad absorbs the damage from any dragons they reveal. At the same time, only the most dangerous dragons will lead you to their nests. So the game quickly becomes about measuring how much punishment you can take before you start losing men.

It’s clever stuff, but this is also where the scratch-off gimmick starts to show its seams. There’s more clutter than in previous titles, and the logic puzzle isn’t quite as clean as its peers. In theory there’s an interesting tension between resting or pressing on, except it’s pretty obvious when your squad has taken enough of a beating. Still, it’s an honest-to-goodness squad management game on a scratch-off sheet. I’m less inclined to revisit this one in the future, but there’s still something impressive about how many systems Barth has folded together.

Capital Offense

Finally, there’s Capital Offense. Like everything else in Zach Attack!, this one contains fifty shades of press-your-luck, but its more notable inclusion is shape-building. As a corrupt stockbroker, you’re here to uncover various stocks and then scratch their shapes into four grids. Fill them in to get rich quick. It’s the American Dream as a scratch-off, which is as close as the collection gets to commentary.

Along the way, you might stumble across a baggie of coke or a rival broker. Those rivals turn the game over to a shootout minigame, where you reveal cells on a shot grid based on how many weapons you’ve purchased with your ill-gotten gains. This ups the pressure to fill in one of those scoring boxes early rather than spacing out your stock-shapes in a more sensical manner. As for the coke, it exists to let you fill in a box without worrying about the consequences. Because it’s coke.

My problem with Capital Offense has entirely to do with how its shapes are arranged. Rather than using polyominoes or other common shapes, these ones are all over the place. It feels like I should chart out their possible arrangements before playing, or as if there’s a prescribed optimal solution. I recognize how the sheet wants you to accidentally preclude the possibility of not filling in every square, but it winds up feeling overly restrictive and finicky. It’s also the tonal opposite of the coke-snorting rival-shooting madhouse that marks the rest of the puzzle.

Whatever the reason, Capital Offense is the entry I liked least. It probably doesn’t help that its drab white aesthetic doesn’t capture the sheer vibrancy that’s on display elsewhere. Every time I’ve completed it, I’ve immediately wanted to circle back to one of the other sheets for a refresher.

All told, Zach Attack! is a worthwhile experiment. Half of the puzzles are excellent, only one of them left me cold, and there’s no denying that they’re inventive and clever. Barth has a long history of crafting solid solitaire games, and this collection demonstrates why he’s a master of the field. Operating under the strangest of self-imposed limitations, he’s created six distinct puzzles that each leverage the concept of scratch-offs-as-board-games to their utter extreme. I would love to see another set in the future. For now, I’ll be merrily scratching away at Task Force ’86.

 

A complimentary copy of Zach Attack! 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 about which films I watched in 2025, including some brief thoughts on each. That’s 44 movies! That’s a lot, unless you see, like, 45 or more movies in a year!)

Hi! My name is Cate. This is my selection of my favorite ten games from last year.

#10. Katmai: The Bears of Brooks River

Katmai is about these bears that you get to put in different places, and they have to survive and catch fish. The bears can compete for territory and food. With the bears your goal is to put them in places to make a pattern to score points. And all the bears have these fun little names that I like, and they’re all real bears from Alaska. I think it is a good game for all nature lovers.

#9. Hot Streak

Hot Streak is a good funny game that kids can play. It’s really funny because the characters fall down while they’re racing. The game is about these silly characters that are mascots for different restaurants or stores, and they’re racing to compete to see which mascot is best. You don’t exactly control the characters. Instead, you have cards you draw to see which one falls, which one is ahead, and which one travels the farthest. You win by voting which mascot you think will win and if that mascot wins you will earn money. There are three main races in Hot Streak and whoever has the most money from voting on their favorite mascot wins the game.

#8. Magical Athlete

Like Hot Streak, Magical Athlete is a racing game. But instead of moves played by cards, the characters walk by rolling a die. We do a big snake draft to see which characters we’re going to get. There’s a very big variety of characters. A normal round is four races. There are also these things on the racing track that can move you up a space, give you a point, or move you backward. There are some characters that have good abilities like an extra roll or moving an extra space, but there are some who are not as good, with defaults such as not being able to land on the finish space unless you get the right roll. It is a good game to play with a big group and see how this silly race turns out.

#7. Thunder Road Vendetta

Thunder Road is about these racing cars. Sometimes they run into difficulties on the road that slow them down or crash them. You play as the cars themselves, and the racetrack is different almost every time. Some racetracks are hard and some are easy; there’s one racer that is a helicopter that flies over the cars and drops bombs on them to slow them down, and there’s a car that’s so long, and that’s both an advantage and a disadvantage. There’s a lot of action and excitement, and cars that have a bad course on the tracks won’t make it through.

#6. Tic Tac Trek

Tic Tac Trek is like Tic Tac Toe, but once you score the game isn’t over. Instead you place a campfire. Oh, and instead of a board that’s just normal Tic Tac Toe, there are tiles you put out. Tiles can be stuff like forests or mountains. It has to touch another of its kind, and it can’t go diagonal. Rivers are rare and can touch anything. They don’t even have to touch other rivers, they can touch anything and anything can touch them. But if a token cannot touch one of its own kind, you can place it anywhere, but if it’s possible to touch a river, then you have to make it touch a river. Scoring isn’t about how many lines you make with the tokens, it’s how many free spaces are around your campfires. That makes it kind of tricky because you might be good at scoring points in Tic Tac Toe, but you might not see your opponent coming to block your free spaces. I like the little campfires and the cool little nature spaces.

#5. Ichor

Ichor is about these battling Greek Gods and Greek Monsters, like a minotaur or Aphrodite. They each have special powers that make them unique, and the goal is to go really far on the board. Whenever you move on a space, you place a token to show that the space is yours. But whenever someone else goes over your tokens, they replace them with one of their own tokens. Whoever places all of their tokens first wins. A lot of special powers can mean jumping over opponents, or blocking them, or mimicking them, so you can place the most tokens. I really like Greek myths so it’s fun to play to see the monsters and gods fighting like that. The game doesn’t end with death or execution, but is just a quick little game about their rivalry.

#4. Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders

Tidal Blades is this fun game about these characters that are half-people half-animal. They live on floating islands on the ocean. The game is based on what might happen in the future. It has different dimensions, a big world, and monsters to beat, many missions, and portals to different worlds. And it is a really fun game for people who like imaginative things. There is this one big monster at the very end [minor spoiler] that you fight with everybody, whether you are them or not. It just has a lot of character and fun in it. It isn’t only about the heroes’ adventures, it’s also about them relaxing in their hometown and stuff. I really like that it’s this big adventure that people can go on.

#3. Agent Avenue

Agent Avenue is basically this small little board with these small little spaces that the characters go on. Whoever catches the other person’s character wins. There are little cards that show how much you move by. There are even these little mice [in the expansion] that can go either way to catch your rival for you. It has very many tricks and a lot of things that you might not see coming. For your turn, you will put out two cards, one face up and one face down; your rival takes one card and then you take the other. It’s hard because you don’t know which one your rival will take, and some cards can be things that make you win or lose the third time you get it. So whatever cards you pick out for yourself or your rival, they can either defeat you themselves or make it really easy for you to win. I like the little animals that we play as in Agent Avenue and all the twists and turns.

#2. March of the Ants

March of the Ants is about these little ants and you can create your own type of ant with these different cards to see what will be best for you. It is all about taking over territory and finding different dens, finding worm holes, and beating centipedes. The ants in the game must spread popularity, find food, and keep pressing forward and laying eggs to survive. There is a winter in this game and it’s all about how the ants have to survive through it, and how they prepare for it. Whoever has the most points through all the winters in the game wins. I like the different species of ants you can make up, and I just like the game, because that’s normal nature, to learn to survive.

#1. Tag Team

Tag Team is about these different sides that are fighting. You pick two characters and they have these different powers and abilities they can use against your rival. They have hit points, and you have these planned attacks in your deck. New cards have to slide into your deck; you can’t swap your deck’s order. It is hard because you kind of know what attacks are coming, but not exactly, and we each do our attacks at the exact same time, so you can block them or defend yourself, which makes it really tricky but really fun. It makes me feel smart because I always beat my daddy.

Those are my favorite games from last year! Daddy said I couldn’t pick Compile because he didn’t write about it last year, but I have the new Compile, too. It’s my favorite game.

 

(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 about which films I watched in 2025, including some brief thoughts on each. That’s 44 movies! That’s a lot, unless you see, like, 45 or more movies in a year!)

It’s hard, maybe impossible, to not put yourself into Keep the Faith, the latest board game by Greg Loring-Albright. Going in, I always tell myself the same thing. This time, I say, the religion I create is going to be something different from the one I grew up in, the one I’ve spent a lifetime studying, the one that got me to learn a bunch of old languages in order to prove its connection to a millennia-gone church only to accidentally disavow itself in the process. And then, like this opening paragraph, somehow I find myself circling back, like a star trapped in a slow orbit around a black hole, hydrogen distending into that event horizon.

Okay, so perhaps I have feelings. Surely that’s a sign that Keep the Faith is a success. But if that’s so, then why is it so difficult to write about? Why has it taken me seven hours to get this far?

Keep the Faith opens with a new religion. (Already I want to quibble. Religions never begin at a concrete moment. Especially when they claim they do.) It begins with a series of values, six in all, arrayed like the spokes of a wagon wheel so that opposing traits are clearly delineated. Perhaps one of those values will be “Guard the Gates,” in which case its opposite value will be “Welcome the Outsider.” Or perhaps the dichotomy will be “Spread the Word” versus “Protect the Secrets.” Or “Be Set Apart” and “Be in the World.” “Recall the Old” and “Reveal the New.”

These aren’t contradictions, to my understanding, although someday this timeline’s New Atheists will insist that they are, probably with Power Point slides festooned with scary red arrows drawing attention to every self-rebutting verse. But that isn’t how I think about them, at least not necessarily, not always. They’re the creases and folds that occur whenever a human institution examines itself, points that aren’t in conflict, not even two sides of the same coin or two expressions of the same face, but varying applications of friction and heat and pressure.

Take Christianity. (Uh oh. Here we go. The black hole latches in its hooks.) Early in the religion’s life, after some emperor or another had declared a period of persecution that led many believers to lapse out of despair or convenience or terror, only for that same emperor to die a few years later and leave his dictates in the dustbin, believers were faced with an existential question. Should they welcome the lapsed back into the congregation or extract some display of contrition? And if so, what was that contrition’s proper severity? The lapsed had, after all, betrayed their faith and might pose a danger to the community. But forgiveness and long-suffering and turning the other cheek were essential traits of the faith. For one to deny a penitent their relief was to become oneself unfaithful. It was a pickle. But a contradiction? Eh. Ask the faithful. Ask the penitent. You might receive two very different answers.

To these contrasting values, everyone at the table populates their nascent faith with a handful of aspects, always narrating the meaning behind each pairing. If I play the card that invites me to think about “Food,” I choose one of our values and explain how it’s reflected by this aspect. Recall the Old? That’s easy: our food is flatbread and bitter herbs, a reminder of our time in bondage. Accept Our Fate? That requires a little more thought. Perhaps we aren’t meant to think too hard about preparing our meals, instead taking what we can get as our religion expands to new continents and cultures. Shape Our Destiny? Food becomes an act of defiance, as prepared and dressed-up as possible. Eventually, we restrict ourselves to only the most enriched flours and mummifying preservatives, all the better to stave off the entropy that claims us all. Ironically, these highly processed meals shorten our lives. Is this a contradiction? I’m sure somebody has a Power Point for that.

This is the setup. But it’s also the play. Much of the time, Keep the Faith is about pairing aspects and values and then explaining their relevance. It’s also about shifting those aspects between values. At some point, maybe Food will be severed from Shape Our Destiny and move over to Wielding Power. We narrate the change: somebody has persuaded their coreligionists that the former use of food was a contradiction; now it’s a sign of dominance. The wealthy eat everything while everybody else fights over the scraps.

(Again, the black hole pulls at me. We’ve reinvented trickle-down economics and the fabled Needle Gate of Jerusalem and every other false justification of the wealthy that they deserve not only to eat well, but also the untouched extras as well. Is my brain the trap here, or is humanity bound to a turning wheel from which it will never quite wriggle free?)

These aspects are presented without oversight from Loring-Albright. Like the ecclesiastical positions of Amabel Holland’s Nicaea, there are no icons stating that one aspect is more valuable than another, or even valuable in a distinct way, or that there are resources tied to these concepts of Media and Social Conformity and Hierarchy and Esotericism and everything else. They are offered as blank slates. (No. Not quite blank. Because, again, there’s no escaping the black hole, no breaking free of the wheel. It’s just that their value isn’t encoded within the game’s rules. Instead, it’s encoded within us, the players.)

At multiple junctures, every time I play Keep the Faith, I balk at this blankness just as I balk at my incapacity to frame the game’s nouns in a novel way. I have my own hangups with role-playing games, and I grow frustrated when board games are presented as imaginatively inferior to their more improvisational cousins. In one sense, the absence of a stance — that “Animals” and “Gender” and “Ancestors” are presented as equivalents within the game’s ludic rhetoric — strikes me as a dereliction of duty on Loring-Albright’s part. It’s a thought I always shake off, but before long it sneaks back in again. If we, the players, aren’t willing to share some part of ourselves whenever we pair an aspect to a value, the cards might as well be blank. Physically blank, not only blank of icons.

However, there is a governing logic behind these assignations. While the moment-to-moment gameplay depends entirely on the players’ willingness to narrate their choices, there is an underlying drive. When the game begins, we receive a core value that our particular sect holds dear. Maybe I care most about Recalling the Old, while you’re all about Welcoming the Outsider.

But we also each receive a hidden goal. Perhaps I’m Righteous, in which case I want to protect my core value at all costs. We will Recall the Old, forging a religion of calendars and feasts and constant observances. In game terms, this translates to me keeping as many aspect cards tucked under my core value as possible. But in that same session, you might be Steadfast. Even if it means abandoning your core value, you intend to achieve stability in our faith, ensuring that one half of the wheel is filled with as many aspects as possible.

What’s interesting is that these objectives can be entirely complementary. There’s a world where my single-minded zeal and your spineless centrism go hand in hand. But what if one of our co-players is Rebellious? Their goal is to slap as many aspects onto non-dominant values as possible, driving our faith into a period of schism. These objectives push Keep the Faith into more familiar territory, games-wise, but make no mistake, they function foremost as narrative devices. Every round, the clock shifts forward. A century passes, some new question or crisis arises, and the landscape of our faith shifts out from under our feet. Our overall goal remains firm — unless we opt to alter it, a possibility provided by the game — but our sect’s relationship to its core beliefs is always in flux. (Of course, there’s no such thing as a community that maintains exactly the same values over centuries. Today’s rebellion becomes tomorrow’s centrists, as they say. But like every other parenthetical in this review, this isn’t a critique as such, just a note.)

If you couldn’t tell, I’ve had a complicated response to Keep the Faith.

As a board game, it’s rather plain. The entire thing lasts maybe an hour and a half, give or take a few minutes depending how stridently people decide to chase their individual objectives. I mentally sort it into the same box as Jenna Felli’s deduction games, especially Bemused, where the incentives are opaque enough that newcomers are often left unsure of what they’re actually meant to do here. One can attempt deduction, trying to suss out what their fellow players hope to accomplish, but those energies are better spent elsewhere. At root, it’s about shifting stacks of cards from one place to another; beyond that, there simply isn’t enough scaffolding to produce much in the way of classic gameplay.

As a role-playing experience, it suffers from the same problems that harry other RPGs with heavy topics on their mind — namely, that everybody brings their own expectations to the table and must navigate the collaborative process to the best of their abilities, and even one awkward or uncomfortable moment can turn the whole thing to rubble. This is also, naturally, the game’s strength, provided everyone agrees on some ground rules. It can be funny, sad, traumatic, cringey, or dramatic. Sometimes it is all of those things within the same few minutes. Because the tale it tells is more institutional than personal, it also encourages a certain distance from its subject matter. Given its closeness to so many lived experiences, this is a huge relief.

As a historiographical toolkit, it’s without parallel. Just flipping through the cards is a useful exercise, demonstrating how faith and religion can intersect with things both large and benign. One card is titled “Prophets & Gadflies,” emphasizing the highest and lowest reaches of its cultural landscape. But that’s an obvious example. One is invited to consider symbolism, clothing, gestures, plants, sacrifices, figures of speech, weather and seasons, music, language, beverages, gifts, and so much more. Where modern study tends to put religion in a box, Keep the Faith breaks it out again. I would recommend it to students of religion in a heartbeat.

As a personal experience, it splits some raw nerves. I expect I won’t be alone in that. My own faith tradition, Mormonism, argues that it is a direct descendant of Christianity as it appeared in the first and second centuries, before the Catholics and Romans came in to mess it up. It’s an argument that’s made by pretty much every Christian sect. We are the original. Our values are Jesus’s values. These practices are pure and untainted by the world. Never mind that our own practices and values have changed within lived memory, let alone the centuries.

Keep the Faith puts such a sadness in me. Because it’s hard, maybe impossible, to not bring myself into this thing. It’s impossible to not see the kid who fled into religion because of abuse, even when that religion was also the cause of the abuse. It’s impossible to not see the idealist missionary who was let down by the institution. It’s impossible to not see the young scholar, learning that everything he had been taught was an excuse rather than good information.

That’s healthy, in its own way. (Yes, it is.) But it hurts, too. (Yes, it does.) If I had to stamp my own thesis on the experience, I would say that Keep the Faith is about how religion is every bit as contingent and changeable as every other human creation, but that, paradoxically, it displays one true constant in its overriding need to always pretend it has always been this way, to chart its roots to the beginning even as it’s constantly born anew, to insist that it honors its heritage even as it spills buckets of whiteout and ink across its own pages. The result is a complicated, textured experience, one I intend to use in the classroom but will probably avoid for personal consumption. Along the way, the wheel keeps turning, the black hole keeps pulling me inward, and the faith keeps being kept. Here is the note of hope and the note of despair, hand in hand: It will change. And then it will pretend it never did.

 

A complimentary copy of Keep the Faith 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 about which films I watched in 2025, including some brief thoughts on each. That’s 44 movies! That’s a lot, unless you see, like, 45 or more movies in a year!)

Aaron Weissblum’s Celestia is one of those games I’ve wanted to play again, if only out of curiosity. Cloud 9, the title it reimplements, originally hit shelves way back in 1999, the toddler era for modern board games, and although I prefer more recent expressions of press-your-luck like Deep Sea Adventure or MLEM: Space Agency, there’s no denying that Celestia manages to feel distinct from its peers despite some significant similarities.

Let’s start with the big parallel: like those other titles I mentioned, Celestia takes place on a perilous track filled with increasingly tasty rewards but also greater odds that your vessel — in this case a wooden airship that looks great on the table but shouldn’t be considered airworthy — will plummet to the ground in a shower of fire and splinters. There’s an even greater proximity to MLEM in that players take turns as the ship’s captain. Everybody is invited to gaze into their eyes and ask that most crucial of questions: “You got this?”

Yeah. I got this.

Or so the captain pro tem will reply, because Celestia is something of a bluffing game. Where most press-your-luck games are all about playing the odds, Weissblum’s is… well, also about playing the odds, but there’s some Boy Scout’s motto mixed in for good measure. To put it another way, players best come ready to lie their butts off and pray to the aleatory gods that their rolls will tumble aright, but it helps to bring the right cards along for the voyage.

Round by round, Celestia looks like this. On each leg of the journey, you check the odds of making it to the next port. Early on, this means two dice; by the end of the line, you’ll be chucking four. These dice present a number of threats: bad weather, different bad weather, carnivorous birds, or sky-pirates. There are blanks as well, which could transform even early hops into deadly charybdes or the last leg into little more than a summery jaunt.

At this point, everybody makes a choice. Either they stick with the current captain, believing them capable of facing whatever dangers appear along the journey, or they jump ship then and there. In most cases — a strong 90% of the time, if not more often — you’ll want to ditch the voyage well short of its final destination. This will earn a treasure from the current island. Naturally, these become more valuable with each passing landmass, tempting everyone to stick it out for just a little longer.

Anyway, the dice are cast and everyone chooses their fate. The captain then spends cards to face the current challenge or the blimp goes down. Either way, this process continues with a new captain, everyone rotating around and around until the voyage is finished one way or another. Then you go again. Eventually somebody obtains enough prizes to bring the session to its conclusion.

As I noted a moment ago, what makes Celestia interesting is that it’s strictly more than a press-your-luck game. It’s also about discussion, and assessing the odds that the captain is holding cards that can rise to the moment, and sometimes tricking people into staying in the boat so they can share your fate. Or maybe wincing a little. Just enough to persuade people that you can’t really sail past all those murderbirds, but not so much that they know you’re fibbing. Your goal, after all, is to earn more points than your fellow passengers.

Of course, there are special abilities, like jetpacks for ditching the ship at the last moment, acts of sabotage that reroll any blank dice, or jeweled spyglasses that are worth points but can be broken to usher the ship to its next port without incident. In some cases, these items can prove as frustrating as they are worthwhile, especially when some people keep drawing all the good stuff. Knizia balanced MLEM around the idea that everybody at the table had every special ability, but they were presented as astronaut abilities that had to be committed to a mission in advance. Here luck plays a double role, affecting both the results of its dice and what everyone pulls from the deck.

Still, it’s notable how much of a role deception plays in Celestia. Because players see the results of the roll before making their decision, it’s necessary to test the captain a bit. And because the role swaps so quickly, it isn’t long before everybody starts to take the measure of one another’s hand. In our last session, my wife was quick to remind the table that I’d failed my last outing as the captain because I wasn’t holding any storm cards. Fortunately, I’d drawn one in the interim, letting me race forward after leaving everybody marooned at the last port.

Which is to say, Celestia may feel undirected early on, but as the game develops those decisions become more and more informed. It’s never quite as focused as I would like; the bluffing and the chancier elements hover in tension with one another rather than fully blending together. But it still stands apart from other games of its ilk by trying to have it both ways. If anything, it could have afforded to lean into its two-faced nature even further. As it stands, I don’t foresee myself returning to it, but it is an interesting example of how a system can feel different with even a few small adjustments.

 

A complimentary copy of Celestia 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 about which films I watched in 2025, including some brief thoughts on each. That’s 44 movies! That’s a lot, unless you see, like, 45 or more movies in a year!)

Fred Serval, one of wargaming’s great rabble-rousers, has a new game out. It might not sound like a new game, since I covered it a year and a halfish ago, but that was a convention freebie that required scissors and some buttons from your bottom drawer to play. A Very Civil Whist is now an actual game you can buy and play and push around, or maybe even press into service as a doorstop if that’s your thing.

I like it even more now than I did the first time.

Even as an exercise in minimalism and design limitation, A Very Civil Whist is quite the thing to behold. Like the original one-sheet version, the game is largely playable with a single deck of cards that fulfills four different purposes at the same time. There’s an actual map board now, plus chunky cardboard counters for everything, and some chess pieces for tracking the fronts and foreign support in its ongoing English Civil War, but the highlight is still that deck of cards.

As you can probably tell from the game’s title, this is a trick-taker, although there are some wrinkles that prevent it from feeling too much like anything else out there. Like German Whist, there’s a drafting phase, in which both players deploy a small hand of cards in order to secure other cards, and some combination of your original hand and those later additions then serve as your tools for the battles, domestic and foreign support, and reactions to come.

The deck is really something, both visually, thanks to the old woodblock prints that are their illustrations, and as a mechanical showcase. Most of the time, only the 4-9s get used in the trick-taking, tightening the scope in a way that’s even easier on card-counting, or at least card-vibing, than the form usually permits. The 10s serve as power-ups that unlock when your faction reaches a certain threshold: securing enough foreign support as the Royalists, say, or seizing some good ground in the northern war as Parliament. This basically confers an insta-win in that particular suit, although of course one should be suspicious of anything that seems like a sure strategy.

The remainder of the cards still matter. The lower suits, those 1s through 3s, function as a casualty check. When an attack fails, you draw a pair from this deck and see whether they sum to a higher number than your commander’s resilience; if so, he atones for his dishonor by falling on the field of battle. This is, to put it lightly, a bummer, especially when one of your better leaders bites it early. In one of my more bruising sessions, I managed to bring out Oliver Cromwell only to watch as he tripped onto his own sword in his very first fight. Let’s call that a good outcome for the Irish Catholics.

Meanwhile, the face cards become events. A Very Civil Whist is a brisk game, only four hands long at maximum, which requires two events per round. But they’re high-impact things, not to mention load-bearing tendons in the game’s connective tissue. Queen Henrietta might appear to call upon a burst of foreign support from her home country, or new counters might enter play to provide a one-time boost to your odds in battle. My least-favorite event — and I mean that in the complimentary sense — is the one that allows Parliament to examine every pair of that round’s drafted cards in advance before hiding one of them face-down, turning the draft into a nasty bluffing minigame.

With the cards pulling so many duties, it may not seem like there’s enough to keep players engaged. Nothing could be further from the truth. A Very Civil Whist is nasty, brutish, and short, all qualities Serval leverages to the game’s benefit. The military fronts are seesaws, their tracks kin to States of Siege’s lanes, always under threat. Shoring up your domestic support is necessary to declare victory, but requires players to discard their most precious cards. Unlike some trick-takers, there is never a moment that feels foreordained; there’s always something to do, some weaselly advantage to be clawed over on your rival.

Which brings us to a larger question: is A Very Civil Whist worthwhile as more than a plaything? As a trick-taker, it’s very good. As a visual production, it look fantastic. But what about as an expression of its historical conflict? We are, presumably, interested in these games as portrayals of their conflicts, not merely as vague nods in their direction.

There will be some variance here. Between its approach to events and the way its verbs relate to its card-play, there’s no denying that this occupies the far end of the CDG wargaming spectrum. In other words, it’s profoundly abstract. With some imagination, one may imagine the cards as stand-ins for broader considerations: some diplomatic tact here, the New Model Army there. But I doubt anybody would argue it doesn’t require the aforementioned imagining.

Where A Very Civil Whist excels, I think, has less to do with the invocation of specific occurrences, and more to do with the closeness and acrimony of its conflict. One doesn’t gain a sense for the progression of the English Civil War so much as for its unprecedented and brutal nature. Like the term “civil war,” the game’s title is a bitter irony. There is nothing civil about it. The war’s actors may speak the same tongue, may wear the clothes of noblemen, may speak in lofty dialogue. But here they are, grubbing in the mud for advantage over their closest peers. Nobody will emerge from the game any closer to having memorized the war’s important dates or understood its underlying causes. But they may grasp some of its proximity, some flicker of the reverberations it will send down the centuries. This is the true starting point for the Age of Revolution. Some may mark its date later, up to a full century after these events. But, no, it is here, in these very English debates over the ultimate source of sovereignty, over which taxes are justly imposed and which are unfairly extorted, over questions of which kingdoms should be accepted to rule over others, over the framework of constitutions and who deserves to benefit from them, that the great upheavals mark their beginning.

In any case, it’s hard not to be drawn to A Very Civil Whist’s sheer audacity. It’s a single-deck game that prizes playing cards for their versatility as much as for their ubiquity, and deploys both traits to great effect. It’s a hybrid of trick-taking and wargame that manages to emphasize the strength of both forms even as it forges its own identity. It’s even another investigation of revolutionary history, making it the rightful partner of A Gest of Robin Hood and Red Flag Over Paris — and, in many ways, their superior.

 

A complimentary copy of A Very Civil Whist 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 about which films I watched in 2025, including some brief thoughts on each. That’s 44 movies! That’s a lot, unless you see, like, 45 or more movies in a year!)

Sometimes one card makes all the difference. When I played Agent Avenue last year, I found it sharp but perhaps a millimeter thinner than I would like, resulting in an affinity for the four-player mode over the usual two-player duel. Now that I’ve added Division M to the mix, I can safely say the expansion functions like a shim under a chair’s mismatched leg.

I say “one card,” but rest assured that Division M includes more than a single card. This is no depot expansion to The Lucky Seven. Which isn’t to say it’s exactly sprawling. There are six copies of the new card, plus fifteen black market cards for the advanced mode. Still a slender expansion, then, but it’s not like it ships in one of those singlet baseball card sleeves.

As before, players take on the role of rival secret agents who have moved into the same suburban community and are now enlisting their neighbors in a race to corner their opponent, a conceit that speaks to high drama without requiring more than a sentence of introduction and a few furry illustrations. The stakes are immediately clear: the board is a clockwise circuit, and whichever agent catches up to their rival delivers a presumable double-tap that concludes the session.

Similarly, the poison-pill gameplay returns wholly intact. Turns are simple: one side presents two cards, one visible and the other face-down, then their opponent picks which card both sides will receive. It isn’t quite as involved as the antics of my preferred divide-and-choose title Pacts, but that’s also the point. With only a handful of options in circulation, the possibility space is constrained, which only makes the decision space all the more deadly.

But where the base game’s cards fell into two broad categories — those that moved pawns and those that could, once enough copies were gathered, win or lose the game outright — Division M’s addition makes everything else more fraught. It’s an assassin. A mouse assassin. When first played, this adds an extra pawn to the board. As further copies are acquired, that assassin shifts its position like a shadow version of your main agent. If ever your rival shares a space with the great mouse assassin, it’s lights out for them. And vice versa, of course. Because there are six copies of Division M in the deck, it’s entirely possible for both sides to chase their rival while also dodging pint-sized bullets.

What this adds to Agent Avenue is an essential landmine. It has always been possible to “checkmate” one’s opponent, offering a pair of cards that will both cause them to lose, or, barring that, to weaken their position. With Division M in the mix, that’s a little more likely, but in both directions. It isn’t uncommon, for instance, to see a Division M card put up for offer right as you approach your rival’s side of the board. By claiming the concealed card, you might move right into the freshly-spawned rodent killer. Or is that what your opponent wants you to think? And so forth.

This makes matches punchier, which is exactly what I wanted. Despite my affection for the base game, I’ve suffered through the occasional match that ran a little too long for its own good, both agents circling again and again until one of them lost out of exhaustion more than maneuvering. Those days are over.

It helps, too, that the new black market cards are stellar. Nothing has changed in the advanced mode, rules-wise. Landing on a corner space still lets you select one of three offerings, and those cards are still nasty little things. It’s just that they’re a little more barbed than before. There’s the Turncoat, which lets you recruit a card from your opponent’s hand at random. Will you get something they’ve been hoarding for the right moment? Or maybe an ill-timed saboteur? Some of the new options even manipulate your new pawn, like Call Backup, which lets you move your mouse up to three spaces. That one’s counterpart is Secret Passage, which gives you a one-time dodge when your diminutive killer would put you on ice. Those fifteen extra cards double the size of the black market deck, ensuring that each session now has its own set of considerations.

Still, the real draw is the Division M card. The short version — short, geddit? — is that I already liked Agent Avenue, but Division M shapes it into an all-timer. It’s a perfect game for filling ten minutes, which includes when the kiddos want to play something quick before bed or we’d like to cap off an evening with something that’s still pleasantly thinky. I can’t foresee a time when I won’t want it on my forever shelf.

 

A complimentary copy of Agent Avenue: Division M was provided by the publisher.

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