Layeth the Smackdown

Synthezoid Smackdown is the latest scenario pack building on the hero-vs-hero gameplay introduced in the Civil War big box expansion of the larger Marvel Champions: The Card Game system. Aside from having a name that could double as a WWE pay-per-view, it pushes the Superhuman Registration Act schism forward by pitting players against two “villains”: She-Hulk and Vision. They’re on opposite sides of the Civil War divide, and each comes with a customizable scenario plus eight new modular encounters you can mix into the larger Civil War ecosystem. More cards are also added for the PvP (Player vs. Player) mode which Civil War introduced.

Lore

During the Civil War storyline, She-Hulk (Jennifer Walters) and Vision (Jonas) were not spotlight characters in the conflict, but both occupied interesting spaces adjacent to it.

As a lawyer, Jennifer’s support of the Superhuman Registration Act was a natural extension of her faith in due process and the legal system, even if that system often lives in gray areas. Most notably, she represented Speedball in court following the Stamford Disaster, the event that led to the creation of the Registration Act. She was also hired by her father-in-law, J. Jonah Jameson, to sue Peter Parker for fraud after he unmasked himself.…

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I have more than once mentioned puzzle-maker extraordinaire Blaž Gracar's work in the same breath as releases from Rush Hour purveyor Thinkfun. I have rarely mentioned them together as a matter of direct comparison. These are different products for different audiences. Gracar makes pencil-and-paper puzzle books that are only for the sweatiest adults, while Thinkfun cranks out charming toyetic brain teasers that keep children well-and-truly occupied. The connection comes from Gracar’s gift for imbuing his puzzles with a sense of discovery that brings me back to my childhood, when I had a massive collection of Thinkfun games under my bed. With the release of Herd, Gracar’s publisher Letibus and Thinkfun now warrant direct comparison.

Rather than drawing lines or shading in boxes, Herd has you shifting Shepherds around a grid. These delightful, hollow black cones have wonderful neutral facial expressions and a pronounced indifference to your failures. It’s a good thing, because in trying to get them from a designated Point A to a designated Point B, you will fail often. And fail. And fail again.

Herd is a patient exercise, though I wouldn’t necessarily call it meditative. There is a flow state to be found in moving the pieces about,…

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Presentation is half the battle when it comes to tabletop gaming; I never follow the adage of 'don't judge a book by its cover' because it goes against the grain of any marketing textbook. Through the Hedgerow immediately draws attention thanks to its evocative, pseudo-woodcut artstyle, imparting its promise of rustic fantasy upon prospective readers. Will it stand the test of time like it requires of its characters? Let's find out.

Through the Hedgerow Overview

Information comes flying at you right from the jump when you open up Through the Hedgerow. Flavorful vignettes separate the mechanical rules so that you are constantly reminded of the setting. The game takes place over four Ages, starting with the Dark Ages and ending during WWII. Much of the game is centered around a singular location during one (or more) of these epochs, setting the table for your characters to watch how history and the magical world of Fay shape it.

Players have an array of Gentries to choose from when building their character: the headless, turnip-wearing Buggeber Fay, scarecrow-adjacent Flayboglin Fay, Light-driven Heathen Clerks, champions of the Light known as Hodkins, the Mortal Motley entertainers, bird-faced Ouzels, humanoid spiders called Tomnoddins, Mortal children protected through innocence known as Waifs, or Warlockes, Mortal wizards who internally struggle with their magic.

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What’s on the Menu?

It’s been a long time coming.

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

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

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In Lev Grossman’s novel The Magicians, young Quentin Coldwater and his classmates are transformed into geese as part of a graduation trial. The description of their journey from New England, all the way to the South Pole makes for good reading. But it also helps remind us of the effort that geese make in their instinctive need to fly thousands of miles, through perilous landscapes, only to turn around and do the trip in reverse just months later.

But we’re talking about board games right?

In the tableau building card game Flockers, from Mark Swanson, players take the part of a flock of geese making a similar journey, albeit one which takes just 30-45 minutes instead of months.

Geese is the Word

Gorgeous graphics and amazing components aside, Flockers is a racing game; the goal is to be the first to travel across 10 landscape cards arranged in a central tableau, called the flight path. These cards consist of one or more terrain types (mountain, forest, field, and lake). Some cards have only one terrain, while others can have all four terrain types.

In order to do this, players play flock cards from their hand into a traditional V formation. The first card is the lead goose, while  subsequent…

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Hello and welcome to ‘Focused on Feld’. In this series of reviews, I am working my way through Stefan Feld’s entire catalogue. Over the years, I have hunted down and collected every title he has ever put out. Needless to say, I’m a fan of his work. I’m such a fan, in fact, that when I noticed there were no active Stefan Feld fan groups on Facebook, I created one of my own. 

Today we’re going to talk about 2025’s The Druids of Edora, his 45th game. This marks his first team up with Alea Ravensburger since 2020’s The Castles of Tuscany. Remarkably, in that short time frame, Feld has added an additional 13 titles to his resume.

In The Druids of Edora, players take on the roles of druid clans competing for dominance and prestige against a mystical forest background ripped right out of a high fantasy novel. The forest is dotted with clearings, which contain shrines, and are connected to one another via a network of well-traveled pathways. Using their provisions, players will travel from shrine to shrine where they will perform various actions using their dice. It’s a Stefan Feld game so, it goes almost without saying, virtually everything you do is going to earn you prestige throughout the course of the game.…

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For many years, my dear friend and former roommate had a cat named Eilonwy. He —this may confuse some of you, but I promise that Eilonwy was a “he”—was a wonderful cat, with many admirable qualities, but he could not be left unsupervised with water. He could not be left supervised with water, for that matter. Any vessel containing water that was left on a surface he could reach would soon find itself right off. Had they ever met, Eilonwy would have provided Sir Isaac Newton with many an opportunity to raise his eyebrows, tilt his head slightly, and mutter, “See?”. We lost many a glass and many a mug in this way.

It was never malicious. He wasn’t making a statement, it wasn’t some sort of anti-Narcissus performance piece. Eilonwy simply could not help but bat at the surface of the water, and to do so with such vigor that its container would edge closer and closer to disaster. It became a part of the rhythm of the household: the occasional crash, the frantic dash of startled paws, a shouted, “Damnit, Eilonwy!”

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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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Mechanics are the engine of board game design. While many are straightforward and use limited or similar ideas to support the gameplay, more and more modern games are fusing together seemingly disparate mechanics in an attempt to create something fresh. In some instances, these mechanics wind up fitting together perfectly (the good), in others, the concept looks interesting but the execution just falls flat (the bad), and sometimes, it can feel like jamming two incorrect puzzle pieces into each other (the ugly). Today, K. David Ladage and Joseph Buszek each look at three games trying to mix it up, with varying results.

K. David Ladage

The Good—7 Wonders Duel (with both expansions)

Set Collection + Tug of War + Sudden Death + Once-per-game Powers + etc. = Awesome!

The first article in this series was The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly - Two Player Adaptations. I said that a good example of such an adaptation was 7 Wonders Duel. I was confident in my choice as I am in good company: my colleague, Justin Bell, agrees. I pointed out that one of the things that makes this game so amazing is the understanding that, with the shift from three plus players to just two, the game…

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