Ah, Captain’s Chair. I’ve already logged my appreciation of Nigel Buckle and Dávid Turczi’s remapping of Imperium into the Star Trek universe. Like that series, now sadly defunct thanks to the shuttering of the board-gaming side of Osprey Games, this is an information-dense deck-builder that absolutely revels in its moreishness. Quite literally. It features more icons, more decks, and more chrome-laden rules per cubic micron than any other deck-builder I can recall.

Now there’s a second-wave box, To Boldly Go. If you’ve played the original, you know what to expect. Seriously, newcomers can just read my previous review.

Kirk out here Kirking.

I really wasn’t bluffing. I’m not about to spill anything new. OR AM I? Look at me, playing like Q.

For the most part, To Boldly Go repeats the accomplishments of that original set, featuring six new captains who can either be commanded in one of the game’s default duels or faced as an opponent in the (excellent) solitaire mode. As with Imperium, these decks are what make Captain’s Chair Captain’s Chair. Like an unassimilated technological and biological lifeform, they’re distinct.

How distinct? Distinct enough that there’s good news and bad news.

First, the good. The captains in To Boldly Go are even more dissimilar than those in the base box. Even the ones that are relatively “baseline,” like Soval, Philippa Georgiou, and the long-awaited James T. Kirk feel different on the table. Having served as an ambassador to Earth, Soval fuels his abilities by dismissing them as a species — in game terms, by literally chucking them out of his hand. Which is a bit of a double-edged ability, since he wants to fill his deck with enough exemplars of mankind to keep his better abilities churning. Kirk, meanwhile, is an all-rounder, forced to emphasize the game’s various flavors of influence equally. The flipside is that, as the grandfather of this galaxy, he’s more likely to draw encounters, the ultra-powerful scoring cards that most captains only see one or two of throughout an entire session.

The other captains are wackier, and I mean that entirely as a positive. Khan breaks the game’s usual rules, dispensing with the customary science/diplomacy/military track to instead mind-control a diverse crew and start shouting Moby Dick quotes at his enemies. No, really. He has Moby Dick quotes. Archer, being the flashback character, starts with a deck that fits in his starting hand and nearly no away team tokens for conquering planets. Instead, he has to rush to form the Federation from scratch, giving him some incredible early-game momentum but the testiness of having to forge synergies from first principles. And then there’s Rebner. I haven’t seen a single episode of Lower Decks, so I have to trust Buckle and Turczi when they inform me that Rebner’s whole deal is that he’s a total moron. He draws only three cards per turn, can’t utilize science or diplomacy at all, and his cards get stronger as they find and don big hats.

Aha, a card market!

Actually, Rebner has become my object lesson for To Boldly Go at large. He’s a total hoot to play, and moreover he’s forced me to embrace a portion of the game I’ve always tended to overlook. Returnees to Captain’s Chair might already know what I’m talking about. In the market, there are four main decks that players can freely recruit from. Three of those decks — people, ships, and allies — offer immediate utility. The fourth, the one called “cargo,” has always been a little trickier to use. These are special items that… well, they do all sorts of things. Which is both the value and the drawback of cargo. You’re never quite sure what you’re going to get. Most function as attachments, things you can merge with other cards to bestow new abilities. But they aren’t always that, and sometimes their wilder effects can be more trouble than they’re worth.

Rebner, with his crew’s emphasis on securing and wearing fancy hats, makes cargo a necessity. His starting deck has a bunch of hats, both in its starting pool and for later recruitment, a stark contrast with most captains who might have one or two tucked into their reserve. What’s more, a couple of additional hats can be found in the cargo market deck. They get a “helmet” tag and everything.

But that reveals an issue with To Boldly Go. More specifically, an issue with merging To Boldly Go with the original Captain’s Chair and any forthcoming sets.

In short, the original game didn’t contain any helmets. Which means that poor stupid Rebner is going to have a heck of a time finding any hats for his crew when using the original Captain’s Chair market, whether on its own or blended with the offerings from To Boldly Go.

Of course, the issue is broader than a shortage of hats. It’s that each captain has their own objectives to pursue, and these objectives often require them to dive through the market for specific keywords. Some of these tags are standardized across sets. Roughly half the card pool has been duplicated from the original box, and there are always plenty of humans, Vulcans, and Klingons. For captains who need specialized tags, merging or crossing-over sets just became a testy proposition.

As before, the icons are nice and crisp, but also… there are tons of them.

This isn’t to say the issue is a dealbreaker. Nor that it presents an intractable problem. There have always been tools for rifling through the decks of Captain’s Chair, in particular the “scan” ability that allows players to search through a certain number of cards — even multiple market decks — to mine a specific keyword. It’s pretty rare that you’re beholden solely to whichever cards are currently on display.

But it highlights a certain jankiness to the system. Turczi has compared sets to drafting cubes. Captains function best with the cards in their box, not necessarily when merged across sets. Which, to some degree, makes the whole thing a little less appealing, at least to this guy. I’d much rather rest assured that I could have Kirk face down Koloth or Picard take on some theoretical third-wave Borg Queen without worrying about the composition of the market introducing its own subspace turbulence.

Because, yeah, Captain’s Chair is good enough, even with these bumps, that I want to keep exploring what it has to offer. Even at its most maximal — frankly, thanks to that quantity-is-quality — there’s a thrill to seeing how Buckle and Turczi can mine their deck-building system for new ways to express this particular setting. I loved the diversity of cultures in Imperium, that it was possible to have something sprawling like the Roman Empire throw down with the Olmec and the Inuit, each with their own cultural focuses, and still function at all, let alone present such a compelling contest.

Here, decks are even more distinct. Combined with the additional flexibility of a system that stretches further than its predecessor, the result is a game that keeps me coming back. Even when, on occasion, it frustrates me with its avalanche of icons, a lane-battler core that sometimes gets lost amid everything else, and now the persnicketiness of sets that don’t effortlessly merge.

Captain’s Chair is also a lane-battler. Sorta.

Maybe this was always inevitable. As Imperium grew, that system faced similar aches and readjustments. Any growing pains are only compounded by the sheer enormity of what’s contained in each box. So much for balance; then again, it was always a remote possibility with decks as varied as these.

Either way, here’s to another Captain’s Chair. Going forward, I think I’ll boldly shuffle everything together, consequences be damned.

A complimentary copy of Star Trek: Captain’s Chair: To Boldly Go 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, my third-quarter newsletter is open to all.)

It’s almost too obvious to state aloud, but there’s a lot to be said for the games we actually play. Case in point, Enchanted Ivy, the solitaire game by Sarah Joshua. When I sat down this morning to begin writing this review, I went through the usual steps. Picking and editing the images. Uploading the template and arranging everything into logical order. Glancing through a few notes.

But then I thought to myself, maybe I don’t understand this game yet. Even though I’ve played it well over thirty times. One more session. In endless mode with randomized guests. Just one extra play to make sure I know what I’m talking about.

And then, with such inevitability that I’m not sure why I ever thought differently, I played it twice. That’s Enchanted Ivy for you.

Some of these guests are fighting. Perfect for playing my mandolin!

Enchanted Ivy is about building an inn. It’s a magical inn, always shifting, and covered with ivy and blossoms. The arrangement of that ivy is the first layer of the game’s challenge. The more interconnected the ivy — the fewer gaps in its protective foliage — the more points you score.

But Enchanted Ivy isn’t only about the structure. It’s also about the guests who will inhabit it. Every card can be flipped over. One side shows the ivy growing along the plaster and brickwork. The other shows the same, but with the addition of a balcony. These are the spaces for your guests to inhabit.

Turns are simple. You draw two cards and two guests. Both cards will be placed: one on its bare side, the other for its balcony. Onto the balcony you’ll place a single guest. Then you draw back to two cards and two guests. Simple.

Picking which fussy goofball to welcome into the inn.

Except the only simple thing about Enchanted Ivy is its turn structure. Your guests are the real challenge. To a one, they’re fussy. Fussy and wonderful. And since most sessions require you to balance the needs of ten or so guests, whether you’re tackling one of the game’s ten scenarios or tinkering with the randomized endless mode, their needs clash almost immediately.

For example, today I was faced with some tough conflicting imperatives. Some of my guests were all about proximity. Such as the Dog, who wants to keep his three heads affixed to as many guests as possible, and the Gift Giver, a Santa knockoff who can only be bothered to walk in two straight lines through the inn, but scores quite a few points for every room he leaves a present at. Others, though, wanted room to spread out. Like the Adventurer with his grappling hook, ready to swing across gaps to say hello, or the Washer, needing another window somewhere across the way to suspend her clothesline from — the farther all the better for hanging additional wet underthings — or the Firebreather, determined to regurgitate flames against empty diagonals.

At times, the sheer bulk of these needs — having to house an Astrologer who wants an unobstructed view of the night sky next to a Cat that intends to wander from sill to sill — can seem overwhelming. Especially when you first reveal all those guests. Ten! Ten! How am I going to keep ten people straight?

Each guest has their own scoring objective.

To its credit, this is where Enchanted Ivy really shines. The scenarios, which present a lovely little tale about coming to accept one’s changing identity (I smell a metaphor!) introduces guests steadily but not so quickly that they become overwhelming. And really, the whole thing is brief enough that it usually demands a second session to see how many extra points can be wrung from a set now that you know your guests’ peccadilloes.

Very quickly, I developed favorites. The Fighters, paired guests who must be kept apart at all costs. The Raven Keeper, observing the comings and goings from above. The Architect and his invisible lines across the way. Of course, there were also those guests for whom my welcoming smile was more of a rictus. The Fool and his juggling. The Mystery Knight insisting that his bath demands privacy. The Justice’s demand for absolute symmetry of guest placements. That hag.

No matter the combination, though, there’s a fairness to the process. Sure, it’s possible for a bad draw to smash your plans. I’m speaking in a more holistic sense. Before Enchanted Ivy jumbles the pieces together, it shows you the parameters. The guests who must be housed. The shape your inn will take today. Who’s going to be a problem. If you’re playing a scenario, which optional challenges you can tackle. And then you take those pieces and make something beautiful.

I always take a moment to look over my completed inn.

Lots of board games are about making something beautiful, whether visually or mathematically. Enchanted Ivy lets you do both. But more than that, it asks you to linger. To spend an extra minute. To observe the flaws in your creation and appreciate them.

Which is to say that even after all those sessions, even after learning how to manage the game’s thirty-odd guests, after checking off every scoring goal and special objective in the campaign, I keep coming back for one more visit. This is one of the finest solitaire games I’ve played in… well, in ever.

A complimentary copy of Enchanted Ivy 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, my third-quarter newsletter is open to all.)

There’s undoubted utility to a bag of holding, but I always imagine everything jumbling together like loose chicken parts. Magical tomes next to tavern dinners next to razor implements, sloshing around to produce a pulpy slurry.

Designed by Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, and Shawn Stankewich — best known for Point Salad and Verdant, although my course of choice would be the excellent TEN — Satchel Quest might be the first game to really understand the problem. This is a bag-builder only slightly in the vein of The Quacks of Quedlinburg, featuring hints of that title’s press-your-luck gameplay, but really emphasizing the disorderly nature of a magical burlap sack where one’s potatoes are stored beside mana crystals and radioactive artifacts. For example, you’ve decided to hold not only an entire arsenal in your satchel, but also a whole bunch of monsters.

If that sounds like a bad packing decision — and I’m saying this as someone who grew up schlepping a half-dozen hardbacks on any given weekend trip — then rest assured there’s a reason for all those odds and ends.

Exploring a dungeon, one chip at a time.

The centerpiece of Satchel Quest is an extended puzzle. Provided a dungeon mat, complete with a few enforced spaces like stairwells and maybe a monster or artifact, you draw chips from a bag and place them somewhere on your current floor. Often, these chips give you opportunities. Gold! Gems! Artifacts! Weapons! Whole suits of armor!

However, chips often present dangers as well. Or, if we’re in a sunny mood, opportunities. Chests double as traps, while monsters whittle away as much of your health as possible. It behooves any adventurer to tread carefully. While death doesn’t end the game outright, the penalties for bottoming out your health track are severe. This is excellent design, by the way. While there’s some rubber-banding in Satchel Quest to prevent errant players from falling too far behind, it’s hard to recover from a botched dungeon.

What soon becomes apparent is that Satchel Quest is as much about placement and foresight as stretching your luck to its absolute limit. Every type of chip presents its own conundrum. Gems only unlock their potential when placed next to as much gold as possible. Artifacts like to be clumped together for maximum returns. Chests are a whole mini-puzzle. When bordered by exactly the right chips, you crack them open without harm. Too few and you take damage; too many and you break them open through sheer brute force… but still take injuries from their protective trap.

Of course, the most impactful type of chip is the monster. You can dull their attacks by positioning shields and armor nearby, while slaying them requires careful arrangement of your own swords, bows, and staves. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Swords only hit adjacent monsters. Bows and staves smack entire lanes, but only along diagonal or orthogonal lines respectively. In general, this requires you to produce little defensive clusters around shields, while weapons produce fields of damage.

Hopefully this one won’t go extinct.

But this is where your satchel comes into play. Only rarely will things go according to plan. It isn’t uncommon to place a shield exactly where it needs to go, ready to block damage from three monsters at once, alongside an empowered staff for blasting the beasties. Only then you’ll draw a bunch of gold tokens, a sword that isn’t needed at the moment, and a gem that would pair nicely with the gold, if only that’s what you were trying to do right now.

It pays to pivot. It also pays to learn the tools of your trade. There are items, tools like keys for breaking past a sticky chest or torches that serve as extra draws from your satchel. Each hero also gets their own set of abilities, like the Dodo Alchemist’s taste for potions or the Pangolin Fighter’s layers of armor. It helps, too, that chips are double-sided. If you can’t possibly tackle that monster right now, there’s usually something helpful, or at least benign, on its reverse face.

This puzzle phase is Satchel Quest at its best and brightest. Everybody plays simultaneously, a barbed blessing if one player happens to be slower than everyone else, but considerably pacier than taking turns. And while most players will usually use every last chip in each dungeon, somewhat undercutting the game’s press-your-luck ethos, this puzzle is always engrossing. That goes double when things are going wrong. Johnson and company have done a solid job of ensuring that their game is at its most interesting when nothing is quite going your way, forcing you to use every tool at your disposal to come out of the dungeon alive.

Shopping for new chips.

If you detect a Ginormous But lurking around the corner, you’re only half-right. For the most part, the remainder of Satchel Quest is similarly polished.

Consider the shopping phase, which uses the game’s double-sided chips to its advantage. Letting everybody check the reverse face of each chip would have been a horrible time-sink. Instead, everybody is allowed to “browse” one chip per turn, peeking at its reverse side before buying something — and that purchase might be a different chip entirely. This ensures there’s still an element of surprise, but also lets players wield some control over their destiny. No endless token-checking required.

Or there’s the way new adventure cards vary the puzzle from round to round. One dungeon might be rotated ninety degrees, requiring you to venture down a shaft with little room to maneuver, while the next is filled with placeholder gold that makes gems more valuable but combat unusually claustrophobic.

If anything, the Lesser But is that Satchel Quest overstays its welcome. Five dungeons is a lot to tackle, especially when you’re only adding one to three chips per round. This isn’t enough to mix up your bag’s composition, at least not quickly. While your bag will hold a different mishmash of weapons and monsters between the first and fifth dungeon, its changes are incremental, and therefore the puzzle feels samey from one delve to the next. This gives the game a fatiguing sensation, especially with additional players necessitating pauses while adventuring or shopping. Unsurprisingly, the solitaire mode sees the problem evaporating.

Every round has its own wrinkles.

On the whole, then, Satchel Quest is an admirable effort. It isn’t as varied or as punchy as it could have been, but its central puzzle is well crafted, with plenty of smart touches that ensure every draw presents its own attack of anxiety. I would file this under the “play a few times and pass it along” category — much like this bag of holding. Curse my stars for thinking I could store my good adventuring boots next to these vials of beholder pollen.

A complimentary copy of Satchel Quest 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 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.)

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.

The heroes we need. And deserve. And got. Cool.

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.

There’s nothing quite like an event deck.

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.

The Designer Edition’s biggest change… dice.

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.

Want to ambush a zombie horde?

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.

“You’re under arrest, Dr. Mabuse!”

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.

(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.)