I played a lot of games in 2023. The best of those games, by a sizable margin, was Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory, designed by Vangelis Bagiartakis and Varnavas Timotheou and released by the two men under the Hegemonic Project Games banner. A bold effort in almost every way, Hegemony did an excellent job of simulating a real-world environment and mixing that with a number of different gaming systems. The end result now resides on BoardGameGeek’s top 50 all-time games and has hit my table for nearly a dozen plays; as an event game, it’s tough to beat.

Those accolades put a big target on the back of Hegemonic Project Games’ second design, World Order. Varnavas and Vangelis were kind enough to send a review copy in advance of the game’s full release, and it was pretty easy to get the members of my review crew to line up for plays.

I tempered expectations a bit here. I thought Hegemony was a classic example of “lightning in a bottle”, an asymmetric negotiation game that really did play differently from faction to faction, which landed in a January dead zone after working through a big pile of games from the year before. Could Hegemonic Project Games do it again with World Order? My main hope was that…

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Cross Bronx Expressway, GMT’s third release in the Irregular Conflicts series, is not for the weak. It is exceptionally complicated, even by the elevated standards of a COIN title. A frequent refrain amongst the GMT faithful, and an accurate refrain at that, is that the rules aren’t all that complicated once you get over the hump of learning them. Not so here. For my first game, I gathered three of the finest gaming minds in New York City, all of whom had read the rules in advance, and it still took an hour or two to get things started. This is no doubt in part a function of the theme, the civic management of The Bronx across the latter half of the 20th century. It’s easier to keep rules in your head when they don’t use words like “coalition,” “partner organization,” and “Census Round Audit.” You may find yourself scratching your head and wondering why you didn’t go back to school to get an MB(oard game)A.

Work your way past the daunting exterior and you’ll find a game that is a fascinating mix of the exceptionally confrontational and the utterly inscrutable. Cross Bronx Expressway is a hard game to talk about as a game, in part because the gamic elements are relatively slight in view of the whole. Designer…

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About five years ago, I had the chance to play a friend’s copy of the game Arkwright (originally published in 2015 by Spielworxx.) My buddy Jason was a huge fan and wanted to show off his copy to our strategy gaming group, so we got a three-player game rolling at my place. About four hours later, we came up for air to talk through our thoughts: mostly positive, a bit too long, a lifestyle game that really needed to be played often to be truly fulfilling.

My favorite game of all time—then, and now—is City of the Big Shoulders, now known as Chicago 1875: City of the Big Shoulders. “City BS”, as it is known in my circles, is a special game for a lot of reasons. Its focus is on the city of Chicago, in a period where a somewhat shocking number of famous companies were born there: Oscar Mayer, Quaker Oats, Kraft, Florsheim Shoes, Schwinn, Swift & Co., and many more. It’s the only game I’ve ever played that successfully combined the stock manipulation mechanics of popular gaming systems (such as incremental capitalization of 18xx games) with a straightforward worker placement mechanic that drives the middle phases of each round. It’s also a knife fight, a game that has epic swings and great competition, in…

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I first saw Yokohama at Gen Con in 2024 when it was reprinted with updated art and dual-layered boards. My main turnoff was that it seemed quite fiddly with the smaller meeples and felt generally busy with the various worker placement locations. Enter Yokohama Duel which eliminates those issues and presents a similar gameplay wrapped in a convenient two-player package. The question remained: does it stand on its own merits amidst the evergrowing list of 'duel' games? I aim to find out.

Yokohama Duel Overview

Each player in Yokohama Duel assumes the role of a prominent merchant in the Meiji era of Japan, pushing themselves towards prosperity for themselves and the burgeoning port town. Through the acquisition of goods, fulfillment of orders, adoption of technology, and culturally mindful practices over four rounds, players compete to see who will come out on top.

The core of the game is the placement of 'workers' in the form of Power cards. At the start of the game, each player receives a set of Power cards valued 1 to 4. On their turn, a player selects the lowest remaining Power card in their hand and plays it to an unused location on the board. The value of the card played gives an increasing benefit such as more resources, a higher valued Technology…

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My Nucleum journey has really been on the upswing.

When I reviewed the base game—released in 2023 by Board&Dice, designed by Simone Luciani and David Turczi—I had a lot of good things to say, but I wasn’t sure Nucleum was on the list of all-time classics. Now, about 15 plays in, I’ve landed on higher ground: this is some of the best medium-heavy strategy gaming out there, particularly perfect for fans of games that combine the best of Euro-style asymmetric power titles and route-building extravaganzas such as the Brass system (Age of Industry, Lancashire, and Birmingham).

Nucleum is something else. My love affair has only grown since late 2025, when the base game appeared in alpha on Board Game Arena. While a solo mode was not included in the first pass on alpha, it’s been easy to find multiplayer games with others who love the Nucleum system.

“I’ll make Nucleum expansions as long as [Board&Dice] keeps letting me,” Turczi told me during a conversation I had with him at SPIEL Essen 2025. “I love Nucleum.” Turczi, along with a team that includes Borys Bielaś and Andrei Novac, designed the latest expansion, Nucleum: Energy Research Institute. It’s an expansion that keeps things simple: Energy Research Institute is for Nucleum superfans, or those who think they…

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War, Trade, and Extremely Long Evenings

For some board gamers, Twilight Imperium (TI4) is a bucket list game. Not because it’s rare or expensive, but because reliably gathering six busy, willing, and able adults for 9 to 12 uninterrupted hours already feels like an achievement. Add in a sprawling space opera full of political intrigue, shifting alliances, and the occasional spectacular betrayal, and you start to understand the mystique.

I had been in the board game hobby for years before a friend invited me to play TI4 for his birthday. I was giddy at the chance to sit down with the behemoth finally, and I’ve been lucky enough to get it back on the table many times since. I enjoy Twilight Imperium a lot, but I don’t live and breathe it. There’s another kind of TI4 player: the kind who plays in rated leagues, travels for tournaments, and can recite every faction’s abilities and tech paths from memory. That’s not me, and that’s not the perspective this review is written from.

[caption id="attachment_327184" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Please ignore the precariously placed Coke Zero.[/caption]

With the Prophecy of Kings expansion, Twilight Imperium already feels remarkably complete. It’s one of the best examples I can think of of a lavish expansion retroactively improving a…

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Training Montage

I struggle to get excited when someone says “train game.” The moment “18XX” hits the table, my brain checks out. I’ve enjoyed a few—Chicago Express, Age of Rail: South Africa, Iberian Gauge, and currently Ticket to Ride: Legends of the West (okay, not really 18XX but still a train game!)—but my bias remains: they all feel the same. Learn one, learn them all, right?

And while that may be true, it takes more than a new map to get me on board. I’m not great at market speculation or company valuation, which already puts me behind. But dress the system up with a new flavor, and I can be coaxed to the table. Dinosaurs in Cretaceous Rails? Bag-building in Lightning Train? A fresh spin goes a long way for non-train gamers like me.

Space Rails

Enter Stellar Ventures, a spacefaring economic game from newcomer designer Pontus Nilsson. At a glance, you might think you’ve sat down at Gaia Project, but look closer: this is an investment-and-network puzzle that tests your galactic bookkeeping.

[caption id="attachment_327002" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Stellar Ventures at PAX Unplugged.[/caption]

Crack open the Corporate Handbook and you’re greeted with midcentury-style product ads hyping expansion, investment, and tech development. Then comes the twist—aliens.…

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Opening the Dossier

The year is 1960. Well, no, it’s 2025, but play with me in this space. Spies and secret agents are gathering intelligence on heads of state, technology, military operations, and anything else of value. However, as is the case with most spy stories, the risk of intel leaks runs high, and all one agency needs to get a leg up is the right piece of information. This sets the stage for Shadow Network, a 1-5 player worker placement game from the team at Talon Strikes Studios. Each player will take turns deploying their workers around the world to various sites to collect intel pieces, which can be combined to create cases against high-profile targets and earn influence. It’s all dripping in sexy spy novel pastiche, which makes for an alluring theme.

On your turn, you will send one of your four agents to a location where you do not already have an agent. You’ll have your choice between your two on-call agents, who must be deployed each round, and two optional agents who can be deployed, but can also be saved for end-of-round bonuses. Then, your agents will collect any data at the location where they’ve been deployed. Every time an agent moves to a location…

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