Nippon: Zaibatsu—2026’s updated version of the 2015 original, Nippon—is so hot in my gaming circles that I had the chance to play the base game three times over the course of a week, and it seemed like the game was popping up at game nights all over Chicago for the first couple months after it hit the market.

After drafting my initial review of the game, I learned that the game’s first expansion, Nippon: Genro, is hitting crowdfunding in late June of this year. A couple prototypes were floating around the US, so I reached out to CrowD Games to see if I could grab a pre-production copy to play for about a week, and I’m excited to share that CrowD obliged.

Nippon: Zaibatsu is a relatively easy game to learn, but it is a very difficult game to play well. By that, I mean that the game’s high volume of timing decisions make for a tricky gaming affair, and I’m surprised how often I had a plan to get all my ducks in a row during each play only to have an opponent snipe end-game turn order, or mid-game area control elements, or the perfect worker color for my consolidation plans just before I could.

Nippon: Zaibatsu may come across as a cutthroat area majority experience. Moving…

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A new Earthborne Rangers campaign? You don’t have to tell me twice. It is hard to get me to play the same game more than a few times, but I will drop any and everything to spend more time in—or, in this case, under—the Valley.

While the base game of Earthborne Rangers—one of the greatest gaming experiences of my life, and an experience with which this review will assume you are familiar—takes place across a wide range of beautiful landscapes, Legacy of the Ancestors sends players into the depths of the Arcology, the ruins of a lost civilization that used to inhabit the Valley. This is the sensible choice, a natural development coming out of the first game. The first campaign leaves the Arcology, a consistent splash of harder sci-fi tech in a sea of solarpunk, barely explained, and the underground tunnels are as strong a contrast in setting as it’s possible to have. No more sweeping vistas for you, no no. Best you can hope for is a spot of bioluminescence.

“We Got Distracted by the Ooze”

The cornerstones of what make Earthborne Rangers great are still here. The caverns of the Arcology teem with life and discoveries. There…

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No upcoming expansion had me more excited than the arrival of Shackleton Base: Below. Within. Above., the first expansion for one of the five best games I played in 2024, Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon.

“Shack Town”, as it is known in my circles, has hit my tables a whole lot since the late summer of 2024, thanks to receiving an advance copy from the team at Sorry We Are French (from overseas, no less, in the Before Tariff Times). The medium-weight Euro is a crowded field, and Shackleton Base stood out because it does a lot of things right, thanks in part to the seven different corporations included in the base game.

Almost any number of extra corporations would spice up the base game for me. I’m not exhausted with any of the base game corporations yet, but the mix can always get sweeter with more set-up options that shake up the meta.

Let’s talk about the new stuff. (For anyone new to Shack Town, you can check out my review of the base game to learn more.) Also, please note: the new stuff barely—and I mean, barely—fits in the base game box, assuming you keep the cute tuckboxes that make setting up the game a cinch.

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SHASN: AZADI is a box full of gimmicks. Those gimmicks are equal parts corny and high-minded, clever and ham-fisted. The area majority mechanism that is used to tally points is, frankly, pedestrian and simplistic. But, in spite of it all, the game is ambitious, and I admire games that are high-minded, even when that highmindedness has flaws.

Hegemony this ain’t

And that’s a good thing. AZADI is trying for something explicitly political—it is about the construction of political blocs more than it is about forcing players to accept the roles and bounds of its simulation. From where I sit, Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory’s conception of political economy and class is at best misguided and ignorant. AZADI doesn’t presume to gamify and fragment class struggle, casting players as some fake-o thinktank concept of the “middle class” and the “state.” Instead, players are a political ideologue constructing their own ideology out of what will best get them into the big chair. More on this in a moment.

The way you win AZADI is by forming majorities. In the version that I’m reviewing, you have a modular dual-layered map with holes in it for player pieces. Each map tile has a crosshair hole  (volatile area) and a number reading something like 11/21. Players get points for having majorities, which…

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