There was a run there, between the aughts and the teens of the current century, when Victory Point Games published multiple of the best solitaire board games ever. Banger after banger. Then it was sold and chopped up for parts.

Perhaps the best title to emerge from that golden age was Hermann Luttmann’s Dawn of the Zeds. This baby merged the strategic considerations of the States of Siege line with some cinematic flair. So much cinematic flair that its overstuffed third edition aped not only the dramatic beats of cinema but also the notion that it was a movie being directed by the player. A tonal mismatch if ever there was one.

Here’s the good news: Hermann Luttmann is back with a new version of Dawn of the Zeds. Dubbed the Designer Edition, and divorced from the vultures who gobbled up Victory Point, it’s a revamp of the system from top to bottom. It isn’t as good as I remember. It’s better.

Unlike any number of internet specialists, I have no idea what a “real” zombie apocalypse would look like. But the scenario presented by Dawn of the Zeds feels real enough, at least in the moment. It begins on the periphery, slowly, Farmingdale’s outlying communities stubbornly refusing to listen to reason. Then the levy breaks and the tidal wave comes all at once. Defenders panicking over the radio. Refugees crowded on the interstate. Infections concealed among the survivors, ready to bloom into a fresh horde of killers. It isn’t long before the bodies are piling against the barricades.

Drawing on its lineage from the States of Siege system, Dawn of the Zeds offers a bird’s eye perspective that lends it a certain credence. At a tangible level, you play as a specific group of survivors. There’s some wiggle room there, including a multiplayer mode, but the classic setup is four heroes selected at random from a generous pool. These heroes, to put it bluntly, are not created equal. One session might provide Professor Agee, already on the cusp of inventing an antidote, and Captain Piazza, the sniper whose ranged attacks and booby traps make her a force of nature at any range. Then the next will give you Pickles the dog. Poor dumb Pickles. He’s the best boy. Just not, you know, the best at zombie invasions.

But these inequalities — some might call them “imbalances” — are not only to be expected from Dawn of the Zeds; they’re the whole reason it works. Better get used to it, in any case. Every round begins with an event card that dictates not one but four phases. One of them, the RRRR phase, is really four phases folded into one, letting you usher refugees to safety, shove raiders across the countryside, and invite any passing Army Rangers to help your community. There’s a fourth R in there, but I’ll be damned if I can remember what it stands for. Compared to that, the actual action phase, which usually sees your characters taking a measly one action each, is often brisk. Certainly you’ll wish you had more time. What do you mean Emily Orozco, golf pro, can drive balls into an oncoming horde or shuttle defenders around in her golf cart, but not both?

The sense that you’re drowning in a rickety submarine, four new leaks springing each turn while you only have enough hands to patch three, has been the default state of solitaire and cooperative gameplay ever since Matt Leacock standardized it in Pandemic. But where Dawn of the Zeds excels is at making that formula feel more natural than elsewhere. Flipping an event card doesn’t merely present a problem; it hits you with a full-spectrum crisis. Whether refugees can retreat. The threshold for yet another outbreak that will bring new zombies onto the board. How far you can stretch your tins of beans. Whether your heroes can muster some extra oomph today, that little bit of extra effort to earn a more generous action allotment.

Not least of all, which lanes will come under assault today. This being a glorified States of Siege game, the entire map is divided into four lanes that spiral around and eventually terminate at Farmingdale. If any zeds reach the town, it’s game over.

So you play football. Or tug of war. Some calorie-burning metaphor is appropriate. Each lane has its own tendencies, not to mention spaces that are crucial to your survival but which will very quickly succumb to the horde. The suburbs are defensible but populated with noncombatants who must be protected lest they turn into zombie chow. The interstate is mostly open but for the town’s nuclear plant. The mountains and farmlands both feature zones where food and ammunition can be harvested more readily, if only you can hold them. It doesn’t help that zombie territory must be painstakingly reclaimed lest any future zeds spawn that much closer to your town center.

For the most part, this turns Dawn of the Zeds into a game of fire response. One of your outlying settlements’ defenders falls too soon, so you send loony old Mister Johnson and his shotgun to help bushwhack the zeds back a few steps. Supplies are dwindling, so it’s time for Big Wheels Carter to plow through the crowd with his big rig to bring a few crates back home. Injuries are piling up, so Agent Carter retreats from the front lines to help out in the hospital. Too many zombies are at the gates, so Pickles runs out and ignores the zombies, but also doesn’t really help behind the lines either. Good job, Pickles. Who’s the best boy?

Fortunately, there are plenty of tools to aid in these efforts. Barricades can be erected. Refugees can be rearmed and turned into zed-killing professionals. Antidotes and super-weapons can be manufactured. Indeed, it’s now pretty rare to not leave at least one hero back in town, at least for the first half of the session, just to keep a handle on the hospital and laboratory.

In the meantime, the underlying logic has changed somewhat from the game’s previous incarnations. Since its earliest days, Dawn of the Zeds betrayed its wargaming roots by employing old-school combat results tables. The dreaded CRTs. Anytime zeds entered a space with humans, you would compare their relative values, then check those values against a table that would tell you the outcome. It was a question of sums. My defenders have two strength, plus one for defending a named location, plus another for that supporting unit, plus two for Colonel Kingman’s enhanced barricade… against the combined zed strength of three plus four… now check the table… and that means we inflict two hits and the zeds retreat one space, but we take two hits in return. Wait, since Deputy Schmidt is on the scene, we get a positive shift on the table. Even better. Except, wait, we were looking at the ranged table when we were in hand-to-hand combat.

In other words, the combat system was functional, but not always very exciting.

It seems Luttmann has learned a few tricks in the years since the third edition, perhaps courtesy of experiments like The Plum Island Horror. The CRTs are out. And I mean all the way out. Nowhere to be seen. Instead, zeds now deal a static attack value — usually two to five — that can be blocked with shields, while human forces roll dice to inflict injuries or trigger special abilities.

The consequences are far-reaching. First of all, hero abilities are more manageable. In the third edition, heroes had half a dozen abilities each, all written in long-form text, all necessary for using them to their fullest capacity. Now heroes have two passive abilities plus perks that trigger when they get the right results on their dice. It’s tidy by comparison, preventing those obnoxious “oh shoot, I forgot to do this one thing” moments that were so common in previous editions, but also ensuring everybody feels like their own member of the team.

More importantly, combat is no longer something that can be summed out in advance. No longer can you park the right cluster of heroes and town defenders on a space and trust the CRT to provide. Sometimes you’ll roll five dice and flub the whole set. Other times Pickles will pounce on a pair of chits and somehow obliterate the entire stack with his lone yellow die. This can be frustrating, and there’s a whole optional reroll system in there for those who are, like me, little brats about bad tumbles. But this also pushes the game in a direction that’s more organic, more freewheeling, with unexpected twists and turns. It feels more like a series of triumphs and catastrophes and less like we’re pausing every thirty seconds to look at another dang chart.

It helps, too, that combat now includes little moments of player agency, especially where retreats are concerned. Previously, the CRT was everything. Injuries, retreats, the CRT might as well be God handing down tablets from Mount Sinai. Now it’s up to you whether to retreat from a space to ignore an injury or suck it up and hold your ground. This still won’t save a squad from a total overrun, but it’s a nice decision to leave in the player’s hands. Will you absorb a few extra losses to hold onto that important district, or cut your losses and hopefully outrun the zeds? It’s a toughie.

To be clear, Dawn of the Zeds is still a cluttered design in some ways. There are still tables, just not combat results tables. You check separate rubrics to see if your hero succeeded at foraging, healing, or researching the zombie virus. Chits still show little letter codes that designate their special abilities. Above all, there are still absolute heaps of special modifiers that might be applied to units. What’s the difference between flaming zeds, smelly zeds, and beta zeds? That isn’t the start of a joke. Those are actual traits that might be added to a chit to modify the threat it poses to Farmingdale’s defenders.

For the most part, though, the beauty of the Designer Edition is that it hits the sweet spot between complexity and ease of entry. It’s a little easier than before, both complexity- and difficulty-wise. But for all its streamlining, there’s still texture here. Flaming zeds are incredibly dangerous, but they’re also self-damaging. Smelly zeds repel your defenders if they share a space after combat. Beta zeds move faster and hit harder. Now that you know those ones, what about infected vermin, dirty zeds, smart zeds? Most of these traits won’t appear in a single session. But the beauty of this system is that they might. This is still a kitchen sink design, but it’s a kitchen sink design by a kitchen sink designer who’s come to really know his kitchen sinks.

And what a kitchen sink it is. After all these years, I had some trepidation going back into Dawn of the Zeds. Like its comrades in the old Victory Point Games catalog, it was a product of its time. That second edition, arguably the high-water mark for the old versions, shipped in a folio-sized ziplock. Its cutouts smelled of wood smoke from the workshop laser cutter. The rules were scattered and frenetic, a little homebrew. Opening the box for this edition, I wasn’t exactly thrilled to discover that that’s apparently how Luttmann’s brain functions.

But even after all this time, Dawn of the Zeds feels fresh. Fresher, actually, now that the States of Siege titles are a thing of the past rather than regular attendees of the alternative wargaming scene. The closest comparison from the past few years is The Plum Island Horror, but while that game has left a few visible fingerprints on this one, the two are more like cousins than siblings. All in all, this has the hallmarks of the same game Luttmann designed fifteen years ago. It’s still weathered and wild-eyed, the buttons of its overcoat still loose, but it’s every bit as indomitable as ever.

At least I hope it is. Some part of me wonders if Dawn of the Zeds has grown too far out of step with the modern hobby scene. It’s challenging and woolly and random. Even more random thanks to the dice combat.

But it’s also one of the most exciting and interesting solitaire games of its age. Once a week over the past month or so, I’ve sat with it in the evening, watching my defenders fail or rally, my heroes dart from one peril to the next. And it was perhaps the most relaxed I’d been in as much time. It felt like coming home. Not to the janky and over-stuffed version that I’d grappled with when I reopened the third edition last year. Instead, a version that was still expansive in what could happen, but more manageable and vivid in the moment. The past as I remember it rather than the past as it was.

Even when Pickles showed up only to promptly hurl himself into an unwinnable fight. Especially then. Good boy, Pickles. Good game, Dawn of the Zeds.

 

A complimentary copy of Dawn of the Zeds: Designer Edition was provided by the publisher.

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Thus it came to pass that Postmark Games graduated from dice to cards. After some of the finest print-and-plays in recent memory — after Voyages, Aquamarine, Waypoints, and Scribbly Gum — I suppose we were overdue for a title where the input isn’t limited to six sides.

How about fifty-two random numbers instead? Using nothing but an ordinary deck of cards, which surely you have lying around the house somewhere, 52 Realms: Adventures generates an entire dungeon dive. In a vacuum, it’s quite the accomplishment. If only vacuums weren’t so chilly.

It begins with a dungeon. Or maybe it begins with a menu of items. On the surface, 52 Realms: Adventures is about exploring a dungeon. Ostensibly, your objective is to reach the final chamber and slay the boss monster therein. Really, though, it’s to reach the highest score possible, accumulated one loot card at a time.

As with their previous titles, designers Matthew Dunstan and Rory Muldoon plumb their system to its maximum depth. It’s truly impressive how much mileage they cover with just a single deck of cards. The deck, you see, governs everything. A single card might indicate the monster you face when stepping into another room, tallying their health pool and type. As battle unfolds, additional cards become instructions for said monster: how hard it hits, whether it slinks away to heal, the amount your attacks are reduced by when it raises its limbs in defense.

Those same cards also become the tools your hero utilizes to overcome the dungeon. When placed to the side of your character sheet, a card’s suit indicates an item, whether a generic potion for the basic starting heroes, a vial of dragon blood for someone more masochistic like the Fell Knight, or ingredients in an Alchemist’s pouch. Beneath the sheet, the cards are instead transformed into “equipment,” a catch-all term for what are really your action cards and the closest thing the game has to experience points or leveling up.

The function of cards isn’t limited to enemies and equipment. It’s also the game timer, ticking away one card at a time, punishing your hero for every enemy they spend too many rounds grappling with and every detour on the path to the boss chamber. Aces become events, nasty surprises that exhaust your equipment or inflict wounds.

And, of course, there’s loot. Loot is dull on its own, a face-down pool that determines the lion’s share of your score. In a game that packs its corners with interesting tidbits, a scoring pile is almost surprising in its deficit of pizazz. Call it a necessary evil.

For the most part, Dunstan and Muldoon pitch their delves as miniature races. Your goal is to slay the boss while amassing a minor fortune, but the constant depletion of the deck means there isn’t time to dally. It isn’t actually that difficult to conclude a scenario, provided you beeline for the exit. But anyone who’s played even one video game can tell you that heading straight for the final room is a surefire way to miss out on all the stuff that makes these things worth experiencing. Hence the game’s core tension. Sure, it’s possible to race to the end and secure a safe but measly score. But it’s more rewarding by far to push yourself to the absolute limits, spending resources like crazy and never pausing for breath, only to watch in despair as your efforts are rewarded with the boss peeling a few too many cards off the deck.

Glancing at the ratings for 52 Realms: Adventures, one of the more common complaints is the system’s chanciness. To be sure, those fifty-two cards produce quite a range of outcomes. Unlike the and-then nature of Dunstan and Muldoon’s roll-and-move titles, where a flub means a lower score rather than a premature game over, it isn’t uncommon for a delve to terminate thanks to a few too many injuries. Which reminds me: Cards also represent damage values. Absorb too many hits and you die.

Personally, the game’s long odds aren’t one of its problems. If anything, the possibility of an early grave is a suitable nod to the game’s roguelike roots. Sometimes the first three monsters you meet are face cards. Sometimes the rewards they offer are barely worth collecting. Sometimes you draw two aces in a row. That’s the nature of the beast. It helps that a full session only lasts twenty minutes. That includes a stretch break. I can handle a loss that comes three minutes into a session.

What I miss, though, are those earlier games’ shared nature. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy solitaire games. But while Voyages, Aquamarine, and Waypoints included solo modes, they shone in multiplayer, everyone at the table utilizing those shared inputs to see where their private adventures took them. By its nature, 52 Realms: Adventures is solitaire-only. I’m sure someone could bash this thing into a shared mode, but it would be a wonky solution. There are simply too many card-flips, too many cases where a theoretical extra player would desynchronize with their partner.

Without that partner, 52 Realms: Adventures is nice for a visit, but doesn’t really compel me to return over and over again to maximize my score. The problem lies in the dungeons themselves. There are four in all, but the way they function lends them to feeling like two separate games that use a single system. The first two are linear with branching paths, your hero marching relentlessly toward the boss chamber, backtracking forbidden. This gives those dungeons a choose-your-own-adventure feel, choose A or B, left or right.

The latter two are more interesting, in no small part because they widen the one-way lanes to proper two-way corridors. One, a clockwork labyrinth, allows your adventurer to approach the central chamber only to boot them back out to the periphery. The other, a watery cathedral, is slowly flooding, its rising waters granting advantages but also empowering the local beasties. In both cases, the player is given more freedom, with little side objectives that might pad their score or beef up their hero for the final encounter.

Even so, 52 Realms: Adventures never quite feels as elegant or freeform as those earlier Postmark titles. The game’s innate chanciness means that one score is hard to differentiate from another. Sadly, the game declines to provide a target. Is 48 a good score? How about 67? It probably depends on the map, or maybe the hero. But where Dunstan and Muldoon’s earlier efforts allowed players to compare their outcomes, here I’m tabulating a number that exists only in that aforementioned vacuum. Barring many repeat plays, that is. And the core gameplay loop isn’t strong enough to bring me back for more than two or three wins per map.

This squeezes the game into an unfortunate corner. It’s interesting to look at, and I’m duly impressed by the system. But I also wish it had been a little more ambitious, whether by letting multiple players share a challenge or by producing a fuller-fledged adventure. Good for a delve or two, but for now I’ll keep my feet warm by the fire.

 

Access to the files to print 52 Realms: Adventures was provided by the publisher.

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Ready for a confession? I didn’t love Balatro, the roguelike poker deck-building game from a couple years back. Don’t get me wrong, the number-go-up part of my brain adored Balatro. But the rest, the foam of consciousness so certain it’s in control of the mammalian beast, the me suspicious of anything hypnotic, found the whole process incredibly off-putting. Which, of course, is why I played it for (oh no) 76.9 hours, about which I cannot tell you a single anecdote. Which, incidentally, is also why I hate it.

Rolling Deep is the forthcoming solitaire board game by Peter C. Hayward. Given his explicit efforts to emulate Balatro, which he’s detailed at length in a series of design diaries, one might suppose that Rolling Deep is not my jam. The Anti-Dan, as it were. But having played it a handful of times, I’ve come away with the opposite impression. Yes, this is more or less Balatro: The Board Game. But it’s so much more than that.

It’s better than Balatro, for one thing.

What so many people in this medium call “theme” is a funny old thing. Rolling Deep is the sort of game with a “theme,” in the sense of being this discrete veil divorced from and layered atop the game’s mechanisms. What is that theme? It doesn’t matter. I mean, it matters in the sense that it provides some context for the game’s actions, looks pleasant with its Cuphead-esque homage to early Disney and Fleischer Studios animation, and justifies a portion of the game’s budget. But it simultaneously doesn’t matter to the story being told by the artwork or the proper nouns in the rulebook. At no point did I flip a card and say, “Oh no! An evil mushroom!” Instead, the story is wholly mechanistic. At the card’s turn, I would say, “Oh no! How am I going to deal with this new probabilistic conundrum?”

That might sound like a bad thing, especially given my usual emphasis on the stories that arise when we play games. But, to be clear, this is a story. It just doesn’t happen to be a story about how three dice-headed adventurers reached the center of the Earth.

Instead, Rolling Deep is the story of how I transformed three meager dice into powerhouses that rolled seventy-nine in a single go. This moment was a triumph of careful resource management, broken combo-building, sly damage mitigation, and no small amount of luck. It was exciting, tangible, and, in the game’s sharpest departure from its inspiration, memorable.

Every round in Rolling Deep goes like this. You’re facing a challenge that happens to be a number. Say, twenty-three. Last round, the number was lower. Twenty. Next round, it will be higher. Twenty-seven. Steadily it climbs, round by round, increasing the pressure at a steady pace, like a numerical hyperbaric chamber.

You have three rolls, all summed together, to meet that number.

But there’s a problem. At the game’s outset, reaching those later targets is impossible. These dice, you see, have rather low digits. At best, you can roll a 2. More likely, you’ll roll a 1 or even a 0, albeit perhaps a 1 or 0 that also grants you a coin or a reroll potion. Over three rolls, that means you can maybe hit a target of eighteen. And that’s with some pretty extreme luck.

Fortunately, there are two solutions to this problem.

First, the faces of your dice have custom faces that can be swapped out. Picture the dice from Tom Lehmann’s Dice Realms, but way easier to handle, without the weird LEGO-breaker tool for prying faces away from the frame. Here everything clicks into and out of place with a breezy snap. Out with the 0, in with a 2 plus a potion. Click. Sayonara 1 with a pity coin, hello whopping 5. Click. Oops, now you’re rolling too high — yes, that might be a thing — so let’s turn that 5 into a 3 with a coin. Click.

Second, the way you purchase these new faces also offers a way to improve your performance by other means. By a lot of means. You could purchase an upgrade that gives a permanent +2 to every roll. That’s the easy stuff. You might also earn a wand that only triggers with a natural roll of 4-5, and awards +3 for every piggy bank ability. Now you have a synergy going. That wand, plus as many piggy banks you can afford from the market.

Thus the game’s irresistible tempo. You roll, perhaps spend potions or use your upgrades to massage the numbers, and add that total to your sum. If you reach the target number after three tries, you gain a prize, earn interest on any leftover cash and potions, reveal and purchase upgrades from the market, and then do it all over again with a higher target number.

Every third round, you face a boss with an obnoxious special ability. Like, for example, a cartoon bat who prevents you from scoring results that are even. Or a cartoon mushroom that makes it harder to spend potions for crucial rerolls. Or a different cartoon mushroom that destroys some of your upgrades. Nasty stuff, but nasty stuff you see coming for a couple rounds before it hits you. Nasty stuff you can prepare for.

If this sounds like Balatro — well, look, Hayward isn’t concealing Rolling Deep’s influences. The dice faces are your poker deck. The upgrades are jesters. The mushrooms that boost your sum before withering are… I guess multipliers? There aren’t actual multipliers in Rolling Deep, probably because the game’s numerical targets increase linearly rather than exponentially. The possibility of expanding how many upgrades you can hold are akin to Balatro’s spectral cards. It’s all familiar. It even has achievements and unlocks. Beat the game on easy mode, you earn access to tougher delves. Break the game in one way, you gain tools that are a little weirder than the starting kit. I won’t spoil the wilder unlocks, but they’re in there for the sickos.

But if this is all so familiar, why do I say it’s better than Balatro? I knew you’d ask.

For one thing, the medium itself demands a very different sort of attention from a digital game. Where Balatro hypnotizes, Rolling Deep focuses. Sure, I suppose I could zone out. But as soon as I’m asked to shift my tally along the target track, flip some upgrade cards, or shift resource tokens from one place to another, my feet are given purchase on solid ground again. If that doesn’t do it, sure as shooting the alteration of a die face will. Click.

This breeds an entirely different headspace. At no point did I awaken from a three-hour binge. Instead, the processes — the ones that are concealed behind the dazzling lights of Balatro — are entirely my responsibility. I must count the numbers or nothing happens. I must pay attention to my bonuses lest I lose them. There’s no option to glaze over and make number go up. Every upgrade must be considered, weighed against my tableau’s current strengths and gaps, and ultimately purchased or discarded. Very quickly, the physical actions that are automated in a video game become loci of concentration and even pleasure. It helps that Hayward has developed this game until it’s smooth as cream. But the remaining points of friction, some of them inherent to the medium, give me purchase in the real world.

And that extends to the gameplay itself. Because Rolling Deep is more grounded in the real, its challenges are presented as tangible, applied things, rather than wholly abstract. It’s the difference between being told some measurements and shown them against the wall or along the motor’s belt. When I assess my odds, I physically heft one of those chunky plastic dice and turn it around in my fingers. When determining where to slot an upgrade, I slot the card into a physical representation of where my rolls have aggregated. The medium becomes the gameplay and vice versa.

It helps, too, that Rolling Deep’s limited format gives it a more intimate edge. It never disappears into n-space, its numbers beyond intuitive human comprehension. My dumb animal brain grasps the gap between 23 and 41 better than that of 23,749,011 out of 41,000,000, even though they’re fundamentally similar. By scrapping the sky-high escalations of Balatro, Hayward turns Rolling Deep into a puzzle that doesn’t slide off the brain like so much oil.

And it is memorable. I mean that. Not as much as a story, not as much as something with characters or relatable confrontations. But thinking back on my sessions with Rolling Deep, I can remember specific problems and the solutions I forged to face them. I could never tell you what had happened in any given session of Balatro even a few minutes after it ended. Something about a banana? Getting a shiny joker? Opening a few card packs?

Rolling Deep is excellent. It’s a very particular kind of excellent, to be sure, a mathematical solitaire game that’s long on odds and probabilities and sums rather than story beats. But within that window, it not only matches the ambition of its inspirations, but exceeds them. Balatro who? This is Rolling Deep, baby.

 

A prototype copy of Rolling Deep was temporarily 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 the next installment in my series Talking About Games, this time tackling the topic of what makes a good list! Naturally, the piece includes a list.)

My odyssey through Postmark’s catalog of single-sheet print-and-play games continues. This week’s titles are none other than Scribbly Gum and Koala Rescue Club, both designed and illustrated by Phil and Meredith Walker-Harding.

You can tell we’ve reached the really good games when I’m covering them two at a time. Although this makes for a good twist, because one of them is pretty dang solid. For babies. I mean that in a good way.

Scribbly Gum

For those of us who slept through botany class — huh? this school offers botany? — Scribbly Gum refers to the Eucalyptus haemastoma tree, whose colloquial name is derived from the lovely “scribbles” left behind by the chewing of the Ogmograptis moth in its larval stage. In this one, you’re chewing this way and that through the tree’s soft bark to secure meals that will permit you to grow from non-lepidopterophobia-triggering larvae into the Ogmograptis‘s hideous adult form.

The concept couldn’t be simpler. You roll two dice, then choose one of the results to permit movement. The rubric is straightforward. A roll of one lets you move up, two moves you down. Three and four correspond to left and right. Five, meanwhile, lets you follow a rare dotted line, usually forging a shortcut. Sixes are dead rolls, but don’t worry about rolling two of the things, because any double is a wild move that lets you go anywhere.

Turns, then, consist of rolling dice, choosing a direction to move, and securing the nut, blossom, leaf, or water in the space you just reached. Little by little, you spread across the page, leaving behind cutesy scribbles.

There’s a little more to it than that, but not by much. Certain spaces on the food track permit extra moves, and there are optional scoring bonuses for meeting little thresholds. These vary by map, but they usually conform to “eat a certain number of blossoms” or “chew up every space on the left side of the sheet.” It’s simple stuff. Baby’s first roll-and-write.

That might sound like faint praise, but when I used Scribbly Gum in its intended fashion by plopping it in front of my twelve-year-old, she was so charmed that we played all four maps in a single sitting.

Now, she isn’t quite a baby, and this isn’t her first time around the block. She’s played a few games of this ilk before. Paper Dungeons is a favorite, and her official review of Flip Pick Towers was “It’s like Paper Dungeons but not as good.” Reasonable marks coming from her.

But Scribbly Gum caught on because its rules are so darn simple that they get out of the way almost immediately. Which in my daughter’s case, meant she could get down to the serious business of triggering free actions with alarming frequency. Oh, and making her scribbles nice and cute.

This is a minor offering from Postmark, especially compared to its opening trio by Rory Muldoon and Matthew Dunstan. But it’s a pleasant minor offering, a gentle experience that doesn’t burn brains or exclude the little ones. While I’d rather tackle the seas, whether above or below, or a scenic hike, it wasn’t as though I begrudged my time in the presence of these squirmy art-bugs.

Those koalas, on the other hand…

Koala Rescue Club

Koalas are horrible creatures, their natural cuteness belying some truly awful biological processes that I shan’t elaborate here. Koala Rescue Club dresses you into the high-visibility vest of a volunteer planting eucalyptus trees and rehoming the little guys, which would be a wonderful objective if the game weren’t so dull.

This is, once again, a game that opens each turn with a rolled die, although here that roll signifies which shape you can place on your sheet. It’s polyomino placement, in a sense, with the caveat that you’re really placing each shape twice. Once for the trees, another time for the koalas who will dozily munch their leaves. This results in tidy rows of circles: a big one for the tree itself, a smaller one within the tree for the koala.

As with Scribbly Gum, there are bonuses to be chased. Filling a column or row with koalas awards a perk. Extra trees and koalas are the norm, useful for filling in spaces earlier left blank. Volunteers allow you to adjust the value of the roll. Skybridges travel across the road to neighboring eucalyptus groves. And koala hospitals earn points. Or in the later maps, trigger bonuses of their own. Optional merit badges offer a few extra points for, say, planting all the trees in Grove C or building all the skybridges.

Koala Rescue Club is suitably cute, but the problem is that it isn’t very interesting. In the opening turns, before you have volunteers for adjusting rolls or extra groves for placing any larger shapes that won’t fit among your starting trees, you’re more or less beholden to the roll of a single die. This makes the early stages listless, like one of those games where everybody takes a matching move in the opening turn or two.

Affairs improve as more options are unlocked, but not so much that it often feels like you’re being confronted with hard tradeoffs. The shapes are so simple that matching them into a space is generally a trivial task. The merit badges are unexciting and nearly always repeat themselves. Even the possibility that this might be used as an educational game is somewhat let down by the two-layered shape placement. Where Scribbly Gum could pass for baby’s first roll-and-write, I harbor doubts about Koala Rescue Club.

The upside, I suppose, is that in solitaire it’s a nice enough way to kill a few minutes. Unlike most of the Postmark catalog, where the solitaire mode comes across as an afterthought, here it seems like the right way to play. Maybe that’s because my twelve-year-old declared it boring after one play and insisted we tackle Scribbly Gum again. Still, my few solitaire sessions were markedly more enjoyable than watching her put her head down on ink-marked plexiglass.

In other words, Koala Rescue Club needed rescuing. But who rescues the koala rescuers? I dunno. I just needed an outro.

 

Access to the files to print Scribbly Gum and Koala Rescue Club 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 my first-quarter update of 2026: the best board games, movies, books, and more!)

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call Steven Aramini one of our hobby’s finest designers of small-format board games. Whether we’re talking about microgames like Sprawlopolis and Ancient Realm, or Fliptown, still perhaps the finest flip-and-write game ever designed, Aramini has a keen talent for compressing big ideas into small packages.

Flip Voyage, then, is his followup to Fliptown by way of Nemo’s War — although in a rare Aramini miss, this one surfaced too quickly and contracted the bends.

If you’ve played Fliptown, the basic conceit behind Flip Voyage will be familiar, if perhaps also baffling in its pared-down nature. Like that game, Flip Voyage is a combo-heavy flip-and-write that sees everybody at the table — whether one player or fifty, with the box providing enough dry-erase boards for four — turning three cards at a time from an ordinary deck of playing cards. Everyone uses that trio according to their own individual goals and position, and then, after awkwardly signaling to one another that they’re done, moves onto the next set. For our signal, my group has taken to sticking up a thumb. That or asking Geoff whether he’s wrapped up his turn, because eighty percent of the time he’s the last one anyway.

In Fliptown, the template was straightforward enough, while still offering a range of options. You would choose one card for its suit, to indicate which of four activities your cowboy would undertake that turn. Another card offered up its rank, setting the strength and/or destination for that activity. The final card became part of a poker hand, an ongoing bid to earn extra points and cash at the conclusion of five flips. Since everybody knows poker hands, from movies if not from personal experience, the relative value of each splay was given an intuitive value.

This time around, the value of any given card is more wishy-washy.

For one thing, there are no poker hands. That’s fine. Fliptown was a cowboy game. Per contractual obligation, every cowboy game must feature poker. Flip Voyage, though, is about journeying under the sea in a submarine based on Captain Nemo’s / Jules Verne’s Nautilus, undertaking such anti-colonial activities as sinking imperial vessels and liberating captives from slaver camps.

As such, while two of each round’s three cards are spent undertaking those activities, that final card is instead used to travel across a simple grid map. These journeys are both critical, setting the tone for each trio of cards, and somewhat disappointing in their straightforwardness. Certain spaces award stars — points, basically, here called “notoriety” — while others incur damage to your vessel. Various lines can be crossed to earn resources, and there are ports where weighing anchor earns you a free action in one of the game’s four suits.

The gist is that you take your chosen card’s rank and travel that many spaces, generally steering across stars, avoiding damage, and ensuring you halt in a spot that will permit one of those free actions. Meanwhile, criss-crossing the map is a surefire way to earn extra resources, but you’re also lightly incentivized to keep your journey pacey thanks to a “most efficient” award doled out at the end of the session. Coal is expensive, I suppose.

Perhaps I would have felt more kindly toward Flip Voyage’s voyaging had I not recently played three different titles that handled navigation so much more cleverly, but the map is never as interesting as it could have been. Damage is easily avoided, while the ease of pulling U-turns and adjusting your current range with a spent resource both serve to eliminate any hard decisions. For the most part, the toughest part of navigation is remembering to tally how far you moved on the score track.

The activities, meanwhile, are considerably easier than those found in Fliptown. There’s a tonal quality to the distinction. In Aramini’s former game, each activity was pitched as a wager, requiring players to decide how far they wanted to press themselves in an attempt to secure greater rewards. By contrast, the activities in Flip Voyage are considerably blander.

As before, there are four, each corresponding to the deck’s French suits. Using a heart takes you to the science lab, where you must fill beakers in rank order. Next door is the warfare track, where spending cards will punch holes in imperial warships, either earning salvage or damage. Diamonds are for adventure on the ocean floor to retrieve treasure or damage. And clubs are for raiding slaver camps, liberating new crewmates or, again, taking damage.

If you couldn’t tell, there’s a lot of taking damage in Flip Voyage. Three of four activities will ding your Nautilus Jr. in some way or another, and there’s no skipping a turn to loot graves like in Fliptown. This has a flattening effect on the game. There are fewer peaks and troughs than before. Instead, you’re usually guaranteed some upside to go with your downside, or vice versa. A resource here, a scratch there, bit by bit, until the game concludes and everyone tallies their score.

There are upgrades to consider, little perks that adjust your activities. Some are formidable, like the serrated rakers that encourage you to steer into damaging spaces on the map or the super propeller and ramming prow that earn extra resources from their related activities. But a number of upgrades are surprisingly dull. Oh, the dredge lets me turn crew into salvage? The library turns salvage into research? Sorry, I nodded off. I hate to keep resorting to contrast, but these are a far cry from the shops and hotels of Fliptown’s tumbleweed town.

It’s possible to consider these alterations in a generous light. Fliptown had moments of profound chance, especially when two players attempted to, say, rob a stagecoach on the same turn, an endeavor that required both highwaymen to draw their own card to determine their success. Flip Voyage is less beholden to Lady Luck. Apart from the trio that opens the turn, there are no flipped cards here. I’m sure there are those who prefer their flip-and-writes to limit their luck to inputs rather than outputs, to borrow Geoff Engelstein’s delineation between flavors of chance.

I’m not one of those people. The beauty of Fliptown was its willingness to allow both modes. You could push your cash into the center of the table by sticking up trains, speculating on land, and chasing bounties. Or you could keep to safer trails by mining gold, riding duster, or robbing corpses. Even without the inclusion of random outcomes, there was so much to do that every session felt like a fresh adventure. After about one and a half plays, Flip Voyage has shown all it has to offer.

Still, the process of filling in the board is enjoyable enough. That’s some faint praise, I know, but it would be a lie to say that this game is devoid of its pleasures. Figuring out how to put those cards to use is still a strong core for such a game.

But twenty thousand leagues is a great distance to cover under such pressure, and this hull has sprung more than a few leaks. There are plenty of better options, including many designed by Aramini. To quote Captain Nemo, “Oh Almighty God! Enough! Enough!”

 

A complimentary copy of Flip Voyage was provided by the publisher/designer.

(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 my first-quarter update of 2026: the best board games, movies, books, and more!)

Battle Card is as apt as descriptions get. Designed by David Thompson and Nils Johansson, this is the fourth project in the Postmark Games lineup. Like its earlier peers — Voyages, Aquamarine, and Waypoints — this is a print-and-play title that can be produced with functionally zero budget. Unlike those projects, however, Battle Card is billed as a wargame on a single postcard-sized sheet.

That’s true enough. With a few dice and a smidgen of experience to help interpret the rules, Battle Card covers six engagements from the Second World War. And their format is indeed very small, highlighting some real resourcefulness on their designers’ part in compressing battles and even campaigns into ten-minute experiences.

But unlike those other titles, Battle Card is a mixed bag. I’ll give an example.

The second of Battle Card’s six scenarios sees Commonwealth forces waging a fighting retreat against Imperial Japanese troops shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Over the course of two months, these forces staggered their positions along the Malay Peninsula, gradually ceding ground in an attempt to withdraw a portion of their forces. Historically, the campaign was catastrophic for the Allies, revealing Japanese air superiority and rapid infantry. (Mounted on bicycles!)

In Battle Card, the situation isn’t much better. Dice represent the armies on both sides, with their pips indicating their current strength. These armies engage in battle — determined by the roll of another die — and shift positions along the twin roads along the peninsula.

Here, the situation is relatively static. As the leader of the Commonwealth forces, your options mostly revolve around when to retreat, whether to defend your position or mount a counterattack, and which units to gradually pull back toward Singapore. No matter the outcome of any individual roll, the game has been fixed, much as it was historically. It isn’t a question of whether the Japanese will overtake your position, but how swiftly.

What follows is a strong indication of both the system’s strengths and weaknesses. Your choices, such as they are, are as bite-sized as the game’s footprint. Retreat or hold; defend or attack; withdraw a die along a road. The roll-offs are governed by small combat results tables that factor in whether one side has an advantage — meaning one side’s die has more pips than that of their enemy. As advertised, it’s fast. And, to its credit, the minimalist design does lend some sense of the geography and the central conundrums of the conflict.

In this case, your objective is to withdraw three pips to Singapore, and the way to accomplish this goal is closer to a puzzle than anything offering operational flexibility. Either you stick your troops behind the right line in the sand or you don’t. Either you withdraw in time or you don’t. Either you make high enough rolls or you don’t. No matter the scenario, this is more or less how Battle Card functions. There’s a solution here. That solution still requires the bulk of the rolls to go your way, but that’s the solution, and there’s no deviating from it. Perhaps most damningly, once you’ve uncovered that solution, there’s really nothing else to see.

Yes, yes, I’m the guy who wrote that replayability is overrated. But there are slender games and then there are slender games. Battle Card is the latter. Each play lasts between five and ten minutes. Scenarios are also compact, as befits a game called Battle Card, meaning there aren’t many subtleties to any given fight. If you don’t figure out the trick on your first play, you’re bound to have a strong suspicion heading into your second. After that, it’s really a matter of getting the right rolls.

This isn’t to say the whole enterprise is doomed. The best scenarios offer some wiggle room between maneuver and chance. As the Canadians make a three-pronged drive up the Italian boot in the Moro River scenario, they must pause to reinforce any divisions that took a beating. As the Germans plunge toward the Caucasus oil fields, they need to decide when to split their forces into smaller but more vulnerable columns. Choosing where to fire your artillery at Mortain is… well, it isn’t the most complicated decision, but it would also be inaccurate to call it straightforward.

Again, though, that’s about as much mileage as anyone will get out of these print-and-plays. I’ve run through the entire series twice now, and the second time I found myself growing weary. This stands in strong contrast to those other Postmark titles. As score-chasers, there was always a reason to return for another attempt. Here, the entire format feels too compressed, like a States of Siege game without the chrome-laden considerations that made that series so interesting. Mostly, it was a nice way to organize my dice by color and size.

In a way, Battle Card isn’t that far off from looking at an animated battle map. All those little arrows and company designators. The towns changing hands. The roads, the weather. The relative strength of any given column. Battle Card is that with some marginal interactivity. As a middle-aged white guy, that’s my ken. But the joke’s on Battle Card. I already own a book of WWII battle maps. This is one instance where pushing the pieces across the board — sorry, the card — isn’t enough of an improvement.

 

Access to the files to print Battle Card 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 my first-quarter update of 2026: the best board games, movies, books, and more!)

Voyages, the first of Matthew Dunstan and Rory Muldoon’s single-sheet print-and-play roll-and-write games, used three dice. Aquamarine used two. Waypoints continues the trend by using a single die.

That’s cool in its own right. But that isn’t what makes Waypoints special. What makes Waypoints special is the way it handles the movements generated by its rolls. Where those other titles — and let’s face it, most board games — featured straight movements, point to point, A to B, nearly every move in Waypoints is the sort of move you might actually make while traversing an open space.

Here, I’ll show you.

You’ve taken the Internet’s advice to touch grass. And with gusto, because rather than go to the park or something, you’re opting for a four-day wilderness expedition. Hopefully you aren’t prone to hay fever.

The gist behind Waypoints is that every turn you’re allotted some number of movement points. The number itself depends on the weather, and isn’t as simple as rolling the die and moving as far as it indicates. Instead, your roll shifts you forward along a track and reveals the current turn’s weather for everybody at the table. Inclement showers or storms might confer only a single pip of movement, while sunny afternoons offer a full five points. You also have a limited supply of water, which can be spent to stretch yourself to greater distances.

Every move begins and ends at a waypoint. When the game opens, that’s a campsite. Turn by turn, that might mean a wildlife site, a peak, a hot spring, a scenic overlook, or any number of other destinations. There are plenty to discover, and across the game’s five scenarios there’s a fair bit of variety. Along the way, you might swing by special features, like water sources or forests, but these aren’t waypoints, just side destinations on your way to the main thing. If you can’t reach another waypoint, that’s fine, but it means you’ll be stuck at your starting point pumping some extra water instead of moving anywhere at all.

As for those movement points, they’re spent by crossing lines. Latitude and longitude? That’s a point. Elevation? Another point. A long-distance trek involving multiple map segments and lots of hiking up and down ravines? That’s possible, but you’ll probably need a decent stretch of good weather. That or guzzle tons of water.

Very quickly, these inbuilt limitations give your movements a certain naturalistic beauty. Rather than dealing in straight lines, as the crow flies, Waypoints challenges you to think like a gravity-bound creature. You’ll scurry along ridges, stick to gullies between rises, find open stretches of flat ground for traveling long distances, march up inclines in short spurts.

Of course, saving energy is only half the game. You’re here to see things. And the things most worth seeing outdoors are liable to be hard to reach. There’s a balance to be struck, then, between conserving your strength and pushing yourself to see the best sights.

But the result is a creativity of space, energy, and distance that’s rarely expressed in a medium as literalistic and rules-bound as board games. Often, the best route will be circuitous, the one that loops the long way around a peak. Or one that swings down a hill to collect some water, across a meadow to investigate a forest, and then around and up an incline where you’ll deploy a hang glider to soar to your next destination.

Because of course there are special abilities. In the first map, you quickly avail yourself of hang gliders and kayaks for covering great stretches of the outdoors. On other maps, your tools might include climbing ropes, cable cars, bicycles, snorkel gear, dinghies, ski lifts, or ferries. This produces fresh conundrums for each scenario. More impressively, these differences are also visible in the lines you draw on the map. In the desert, you tend to travel in spurts, sticking to shade or rationing your movement around the great canyon bisecting the map. On the ski slopes, shuffling upward is more difficult than gliding downhill, resulting in sharp rises followed by sweeping, switchbacked movements that visit feature after feature before arriving at the turn-concluding waypoint. In Waypoints, your mode of transportation is written directly onto the page, visible in the sweep of each route.

Like the previous entries in Dunstan and Muldoon’s movement trilogy, Waypoints is heavy with scoring opportunities. Fortunately, also like Voyages and Aquamarine, the scoring is interesting at all points.

The main commonality between maps is wildlife. There are always three types to see, and apart from occasional oddities — on the coastal map, the majority of my dolphin sightings occur in forests — it’s rewarding to watch your appreciation tick upward, earning not only points but also additional tools to make traversal easier. Beyond that, maps grow more playful. In one, reefs earn additional points later in the day, creating a situation where you’re incentivized to visit them late, but not so late that you get stranded when the day unexpectedly comes to its end. In another, you parcel out slugs of whisky between visiting local breweries or slogging through lochs in search of monsters.

Perhaps the one sour note is yet another repeat: the solitaire mode is a letdown. As with Voyages and Aquamarine, this is one roll-and-write that’s far more interesting to experience with other human minds. The problem is that the solo objective is incredibly easy in a vacuum, asking you to ensure that you conclude each day at a campsite. When that’s your primary objective, it’s a thing easily accomplished.

With fellow trekkers, the real goal is to wring every last point out of an imperfect day. Some hikes will be cut short, the caprice of the dice only offering a small handful of turns before the sunset brings your trek to a close. Others might even go long, your hiker hovering around a natural concluding point, only to find themselves distracted by extra sights. Regardless, there’s something satisfying about facing challenge after challenge, feeling like everything is going wrong, only to look at a rival’s sheet to discover that, you know what, your journey was rather remarkable in the end.

That’s the last great thing about Waypoints. In the minute between scoring and erasure, you get to look back on this thing, this little journey, and behold what you’ve accomplished. The strange loops, the reversals, that time you got stranded at a lighthouse for the night. The stories this game tells are small and gentle, but that’s also what makes them worth tracing one last time. This is no battle. There are no foes to vanquish. Only you, a fellow player or ten, and the routes you penned onto a map.

It’s a rare game that lets its players be so expressive. That Waypoints does so much with a sheet, a pen, and a die is nothing short of wonderful. I liked both Voyages and Aquamarine; against all odds, this one outdoes both of them at their best.

 

Access to the files to print Waypoints was provided by the publisher/designer.

(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 my first-quarter update of 2026: the best board games, movies, books, and more!)